an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 14, Summer
2017, ISSN 1552-5112
Neuroscience and the Conditions of Critique[1]
Introduction : critique and neuroscience
At its most
basic level critique entails a triangle: critique posits itself at a remove
from two other points. Just consider the typical phrase: “on the one
hand… and at the other hand”. Critique and critical thinking thus
always assumes some kind of (Archimedean) point of view overlooking a binarized
terrain.
However, has
this kind of critique, typical of the humanities, not precisely become outdated
by the neuro-turn itself? The neurosciences themselves offer a firm critique,
laying bare the illusions involved not only in love or altruism, but also in
thinking and rationality and hence of critique as such. Hence, it could be
argued that, as the neurosciences (potentially) fully disclose the material
base of rationality, they actually deconstruct the illusory Archimedean
position silently underpinning the humanities and their traditional forms of
critique.
But of
course, against this one can immediately respond that this meta-neuro-critique
cannot but itself remobilize the scheme of the critical triangle: positing a
point from which a critical gaze is launched at two other points. Consider for
example a paper on aesthetics of neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese
stating that, I quote:
(…)
cognitive neuroscience can surrender us from the forced choice between the
totalizing relativism of social constructivism, which doesn’t leave any
room to the constitutive role of the brain-body in cognition, and the
deterministic scientism of some quarters of evolutionary psychology, which aims
at explaining art exclusively in terms of adaptation and modularity (Gallese, 2015).
Or, if I am
allowed to schematize: cognitive neuroscience is positioned by Gallese in this case as a third point and a mediator
between those strands within human sciences opposing the determinism of some
kinds of psychology. Gallese’s move is moreover
interesting because it separates what often is considered a monolithic issue:
the neuro-scientific and the psychological. Gallese’s
neuroscientific aesthetics wants to deconstruct
(Gallese uses this specific term), on the one hand,
intersubjectivity and hermeneutics (the domain of the traditional humanities
according to Gallese), and on the other, the
experience we have of the world (the domain of evolutionary psychology).
Now, taking
neuroscience as critique allows us to scrutinize the conditions of possibility
of neuro-critique. As well known, critique always solicits a meta-critique,
evaluating the very possibility of evaluating something. A question hence could
be: what are the limits of neuroscientific deconstruction, at what point does
it produce, to use Bruno Latour’s phrasing, fact-objects that fill up the erstwhile deconstructed and
emptied-out space? As such it is clear, neuroscience denounces illusions of
fullness, empties them out, but at the same time it engenders the fact-objects
of the brain, the connectome, the synapse… And here a second question
arises, if these are the fact-objects, what is then the stuff of which these
natural objects-apparitions are made? And here I already come to the crux of my
argument, for, isn’t it precisely here, in the alleged bare facts, that
the old humanist and psychological assumptions come back to haunt what was
meant to replace them? That is, one can argue that the deconstructive machine
of the neurosciences necessarily has to start from humanist and psychological theories. In brief: to argue that X is
understandable in neuro-terms requires certain humanist/psychological
conceptions of X. Eventually, what is put under the scanner is not a body, it
is even not the psychological features one wants to find the neural
underpinning for: what is put under the scanner is, I argue, a psychological theory. Crucial for neuroscientific
research on, for example, aggression is the psychological
theory that makes aggression operative, it’s from here that the
stimuli (images, videos or other scenarios) offered to the subjects in the
MRI-tube are designed. Here, the choice between a cognitive behavioral
theoretical framework or psychoanalysis, for example, is, obviously, decisive.
To this we must add that, not only do neuroscientific experiments start from
psychological theory, they also end up with psychology. That is, eventually a
typical neuroscientific experiment concludes, after having discussed brain
areas, neurotransmitters, and so on, with a theoretical-psychological
speculation on the observed. Eventually, it’s psychology which is mapped
onto the brain, psychology which provides the pencils to color the brain (De Vos, 2016a). Consequently, given this dependency, it
becomes questionable whether the neurosciences can deliver an unproblematic,
non-Archimedean perspective to launch a neuro-critique from: for they
unwittingly have to scaffold their critical position with a silent partner,
psychology. This issue of psychologization is where
the critical triangle of neuroscience as critique threatens to collapse.
So perhaps we
should consider another, more classic, triangle, one which still puts
philosophy or, for that matter, the human sciences, in motion. This one would
involve, on the one hand, the spontaneous, everyday folk-psychology of the
human and, on the other, the objectified, scientific assessments of the human.
Philosophy in this scheme claims the critical point of view to deal with both
perspectives. The question of course will be whether this assigning of
psychology to the layperson will suffice to keep the specter of psychologization at bay and keep the critical triangle
stable enough. To explore this, I’ll engage with Ray Brassier’s
project of merging Wilfrid Sellars’ critical
realism with Thomas Metzinger’s
neuro-philosophical approach to the Self in order to re-mount a philosophical
critique attempting to be compatible with today’s neurosciences.
The myth of
folk-psychology
Let me start
with Sellars: for Sellars
there are two images of man-in-the-the-world: “the manifest image of
man” concerning our everyday, folk-psychological[2] way of
dealing with ourselves, the others and the world; and “the scientific
image”, concerning how science looks at humanity and the world. The
manifest image is the level of conceptual interpretation (“giving and
asking for reasons”) and the scientific image concerns ontological
descriptions and explanations. The philosophical task, then, for Sellars, is to achieve a properly stereoscopic integration
of the manifest and scientific images, such that the language of the first
would enrich scientific theory, and to allow the latter to be directly wedded
to human purposes (Brassier, 2007, p. 6).
Here we have
again the triangle of critique, so what are, then, the different corners? To
begin with: the manifest image is for Sellars the
framework in terms of which man comes to be aware of himself as
man-in-the-world: “man couldn't be man until he encountered
himself” he writes (Sellars, 1963, p. 6). While the manifest image took shape
“in the mists of pre-history”, the scientific image is relatively
young (Sellars, 1963, p. 5). The main difference is that the manifest
image concerns concrete, experiential things (“persons, animals, lower
forms of life and ‘merely material’ things”) (Sellars, 1963, p. 9) while science involves the postulation of
imperceptible entities to explain the behavior of perceptible things (Sellars, 1963, p. 7). Philosophy, then, has the task of
establishing a stereoscopic view, encompassing, “in one view the two
images of man-in-the-world” (Sellars, 1963, p. 6).
Importantly, Sellars does not privilege the manifest image over the
scientific one, nor the other way around. For Sellars
the two images are not fully reducible to each other. He even argues that to
the extent that the manifest image would not survive in the synoptic view, man
himself would not survive. It would hence be “folly to replace [the
manifest image] piecemeal by fragments of the scientific image” (Sellars, 1963, p. 15). However, what makes it the case that the
manifest image has a surplus which escapes the scientific grasp is not
precisely clear. He does provide some hints: we do not get our
folk-psychological outlook on life from a supposed direct and intimate contact
with our own psychological states; rather, this is from the very start a matter
of language and intersubjectivity (related to family, community and society).
As this intersubjective manifest image is the basis for our self-understanding,
it remains for Sellars out of the purview of science.[3]
But does this
not still raise the question: why does the manifest image defy scientification? For, in the end, is Sellars
“giving and asking for reasons”, determined by language and
intersubjectivity, really a zone out of reach for science? Are not precisely
today’s neurosciences, ranging from neuropsychology to neuro-aesthetics
to neuropolitics, claiming jurisdiction here?
However, whether this claim is legitimate or not might not be of central
importance. The central issue, rather, is to understand why the irreducibility
of the manifest image is crucial not only for the Sellarsian
theoretical construction but also for
what we here sweepingly might call the neuro-turn within the (human) sciences.
The point of
entry here might be the predominance of the scopic
element with Sellars (using terms as images, stereoscopy, synoptic view…),
which he does not justify or elaborate on. Sellars
posits “man-in-the-world” as endowed with a naïve gaze, embedded in history and
intersubjectivity. This first gaze results in the manifest image. This gaze,
then is redoubled in the scientific gaze, constituting thus a man, scientific man, I would argue, not in but outside the world, looking from this Archimedean position at sublunar man. Here we could already ask if Sellars’ first, perhaps all too easily advanced
“man-in-the-world” is
indeed not above all an image, that
is, a fiction, only seeing light through the scientific gaze itself? Or, put
differently, it’s the scientific gaze which calls into life a world out there
in which it posits a naïve, reflective “man-in-the world”. Sellars, moreover, supplements these two gazes with a third
one, the “synoptic view” of philosophy. Hence, can we not argue
that Sellars needs
the manifest image, the “man-in-the-world”, to be irreducible to science? Not only does this irreducibility
constitute an object for the sciences (it creates the necessary outside for the
sciences), it also calls for a third player, that is, philosophy. For, only because
science eventually “fails to provide a point of view outside the manifest
image” (Sellars, 1963, p. 28), philosophy can be called upon to deliver a
stereoscopic view. The Sellarsian critical triangle
thus stands or falls with the alleged irreducibility of the manifest image. The
basis assumption of Sellars is thus that there is
something like a folk psychological man who testifies to some pre-scientific or
extra-scientific realm that is only truly assessable from the philosophical,
critical vantage point.
Contra this
scheme, my critique is that this manifest image, this pre- or extra-scientific
or folk-psychological man is only an effect or an invention of modernity. Modern philosophy and psychology seem to be
based on the construction of the image of a naïve, common human with his
folk psychological ways of dealing with himself, others and the world. And this
is still central to the neuro-turn in the human sciences: the idea of
folk-psychology and the irreducible manifest image is the necessary
counterpart, to be explained - but not to be explained away, as that would cut
the ground out from under the neurosciences. Against this myth, we can argue
that since modernity our being in the world, which arguably collides with our
reflection on it, passes fully over the scientific
gaze. Hence is not the idea of a pre-scientific naïve presence in the
world eventually false? Everything we do, from cooking, eating, sleeping,
having sex, raising children, up and to gardening, I would claim, is informed
by, embedded in, structured by science. For, do we not all know what the
academic experts say about how to cook, eat, sleep, have sex, raise our
children and do the gardening? Our life-world, our habitat is Academia.
The advent of
science can thus be said to have resulted in a fundamental shift of
subjectivity in modernity. Science, as Edmund Husserl argued, “abstracts
from everything subjective” (Husserl, 1970, p. 6). The modern sciences with their enormous
capacity for objectification engendered not a so-called proto-scientific
subject, but, rather, a full-blown subject
of the sciences, looking at itself, others and the world, as a scientist. So contra Sellars’ preservation of an irreducibility to the manifest image, and contra
Husserl’s refuge into the life-world, one could argue that both the
folk-psychological man-in-the-world and the life-world itself are emptied out:
we have all joined the ranks of the scientific community. Or, what Sellars calls our “giving and asking for
reasons” passes through scientific discourse. The modern subject is hence
not pre-scientific and even not proto-scientific: science does not merely color
or influence our image of ourselves:
science is our self-image. This is how we can understand Jacques Lacan
saying that the subject of psychoanalysis is the subject of science (Lacan, 1966): this subject of science is the modern
subject as such. Hence if Sellars writes that to the
extent that the manifest image would not survive in the synoptic view, man
himself would not survive, perhaps what he refrains from considering is the
possibility that man indeed has not survived the advent of science: has the old
“man” not died, only, without knowing it, only to live on like a
zombie? At the least, here also Sellars’
critical triangle collapses.
Arguably,
this is not the conclusion Ray Brassier makes when he engages with Sellars in his paper “The View from Nowhere” (2011). His attempts instead to reground the
critical triangle and safeguard the vantage point of philosophy, precisely by
claiming that, although the manifest image is not reducible to the scientific
one, this irreducibility itself is not inaccessible to science. As we will see,
Brassier, leaning on Thomas Metzinger, will claim
that the neurosciences actually reveal a “point of view from
nowhere,” one that plays a role in the (illusionary) constitution of a
Self.
There is no no point of view
from nowhere
Brassier
makes his point in a discussion with Habermas. Habermas clearly wants to
preserve an irreducible, interpersonally constituted first-person fully
disjoined from the scientific image and its third-person perspective. Here
Habermas can be said to be on the same track of Sellars’
putting forward the irreducibility of the “manifest image”. But
while Sellars is committed to the priority of the
scientific image, Habermas is not. Brassier writes:
Thus,
according to Habermas, attempts to explain agency naturalistically fail because
“the social constitution of the human mind which unfolds within
interpersonal relationships can be made accessible only from the perspective of
participants and cannot be captured from the perspective of an observer who
objectivates everything into an event in the world.” (Brassier, 2011, p. 10).
For Habermas
self-objectification would irrevocably estrange us from ourselves: persons
describing themselves in such a way “cannot recognize themselves as
persons anymore” (Habermas quoted in: Brassier, 2011, p. 11). Here one could already remark that Habermas
misses that this alienation perhaps is always already part, if not the core, of
modern subjectivity as such. But what is most important is, as Brassier shows,
that Habermas here evokes a point of view
from nowhere, in order to immediately dismiss it. Habermas contends that
“the gaze of a purportedly absolute observer” is always tied to the
subject and its position in the community.
It is
precisely this point of view from nowhere
that Brassier wants to re-establish, precisely by grounding it in biology. That
there is “a constitutive link between subjectivity and
rationality”, Brassier writes, “is not to preclude the possibility
of rationally investigating the biological roots of subjectivity” (Brassier, 2011, p. 9). Here Brassier turns to Thomas Metzinger’s “phenomenal self-model,”
which attempts to account for how the first-person subjective perspective
arises out of subpersonal representational mechanisms
at the neurobiological level (Brassier, 2011, p. 13). Metzinger’s
“phenomenal self-model” starts from a representational model to
explain consciousness: “Conscious experience (…) consists in the
activation of a coherent and transparent world model within a window of
presence” (Metzinger cited in: Brassier, 2011, p. 13). Self-consciousness is about the representing
of the system’s own states to itself. And here the notion of transparency
is crucial: the Self is its own appearance only insofar as it does not perceive
itself as a model. That is, only insofar as it is transparent to itself, is the
self phenomenologically constituted. Or, as Metzinger
puts it, you can see through your self-representations, they are transparent,
and that is why they are cognitively impenetrable and not accessible for the
system itself. This unavailability of the representational character of the
contents of conscious experience is for Metzinger the
very base for our experience of having a self.
It is here
that Brassier wants to ground the point of view from nowhere, by imagining,
together with Metzinger, the possibility of a
“selfless experience”. That is, Metzinger
contemplates the possibility of a system whose representational models would not be transparent but fully opaque.
While in the case of transparency there is an introspective unavailability of
all the earlier processing stages which have produced the Self, a system presented
with opacity would “continuously recognize [the earlier processing stages] as a
representational construct, as an internally generated internal structure”
(Metzinger cited in: Brassier, 2011, p. 18). Such a system would not have a self, only a
system-model.[4] Such a
system would be, according to Metzinger, “nemocentric”: it would be functionally egocentric,
while remaining phenomenologically selfless. Brassier argues that this nemocentric perspective is a strong argument for the
neurocomputational processing underlying objectifying representation: it
foregrounds the objective processes through which objectivity is partly
produced. And this is where, Brassier argues, one might find the view from nowhere rejected by
Habermas:
The nemocentric subject of a hypothetically completed
neuroscience in which all the possible neural correlates of representational
states have been identified would provide an empirically situated and
biologically embodied locus for the exhaustively objective “view from
nowhere,” which Habermas denounced as a conceptual impossibility (Brassier, 2011, p. 18).
So when for
Habermas there is no escape from the subjective, first-person perspective
– even the absolute observer is tainted by it — Brassier in
contrast argues that precisely within that first-person perspective this
objective point of view from nowhere
is potentially to be found.[5] Rejecting
on this ground Habermas’ irreducibility of the subjective and the
normative, Brassier wants to ground Sellars’
synoptic view as one that integrates the subjective and the objective, reasons
and causes (Brassier, 2011, p. 19). Situating the point of view from nowhere
primordially in the sub-personal dimension of the manifest image of man-in-the-world
itself, Brassier arguably consolidates the critical triangle of Sellars.
To be clear,
I value Brassier’s quest for a point of view
from nowhere, but let my formulate where I need to disagree. Brassier
rightfully rejects the first-person perspective discourses à la Habermas
and other phenomenological, hermeneutical approaches as he, leaning on Metzinger, attempts to, as it were, radically empty out the
self. However, does Metzinger, and with him Brassier,
in the end not refrain from completely emptying the self out? That is, Metzinger clearly bases his phenomenal self-model on the
presupposed phenomenological everyday experience of oneself as a self. However is this
(pop)psychological image of a self not the construction of a straw man in order
to then perform the deconstruction? For is not, in contrast, the basic
primordial modern experience precisely one of the loss of the self, of selflessness or even un-selfness? This is
where one should replace Metzinger’s very
starting point –the, illusory, pre-reflexive experience of being
someone— with the basic lesson of psychoanalysis: namely that the self,
or better, the subject, only exists in relation to its non-being, its being
split, its lack. This basic alienation is always already operative at the very
phenomenological level: it is the inextricable shadow of any experience of
being a self. In this sense, Brassier’s phrase
“PSM is all we are” —speaking about a “full
immersion” as he echoes Metzinger’s terms
“total simulation” (Brassier, 2011, p. 17) — is not unproblematic. I’d argue
against this: to be immersed in the world requires a spot, a symptom, a doubt:
is this real or is it a dream? This minimal doubt, that this self is not all
(that it could be different, could be more…), that minimal alienation,
and hence minimal distance is constitutive, as it opens a vantage point and a
perspective for engaging with oneself, others and the world. Here both Metzinger and Brassier are unwittingly swimming in
psychologizing waters. Consider the concepts used by both Metzinger
and Brassier in relation to PSM such as “exhibiting behavior”
“self-regulation”, “agency” “information
processing”… These are by no means objective categories founded in
biology: they refer to the specific psychological theories (which one could
refute or deconstruct from other psychological theories) that inadvertently
underlie the PSM model.
Here, against
Metzinger’s self
and Sellars’ manifest image of man, which apparently took shape “in the
mists of pre-history”, I oppose the Lacanian barred subject and connect this to the, as already mentioned,
modern subject as the “subject of science”: the subject that, since
the advent of the modern sciences, came to look upon itself from an external
scientific point of view. Hence, the manifest self-understanding of modern man
is not only scientifically informed (or proto-theoretical as Sellars has it), it
is as such structured as a scientific discourse. Does this not mean, and
this is my main argument, that modern subjectivity is centered around the
scientific, objectifying point of view from nowhere? Hence, the view from
nowhere rejected by Habermas and sought for by Brassier in the realm of the
sub-personal neurobiological genesis of the Self, is only understandable by the
advent of scientific discourse itself! From here follows that the alleged
outside of science – that is, the particular, the normative, the
hermeneutic— by no means is an independent terrain that the “human
sciences” such as psychology, sociology –or for that matter,
philosophy— could straightforwardly overlook and access. Giving weight
and flesh to this outside of science requires the construction of a myth, the
construction of a straw man, the resurrection of the humanistic subject. While Sellars’ manifest image ultimately nods at this
artificial homo folk-psychologicus, the question is
if in the end Brassier too is not in its grip. This is missed in the, in my
opinion, misconstrued differentiation between “weak-phenomenological
notions” of “what it is to be a self” and stronger theories
of what a self is. To be clear, my point is not only that the manifest image of
“man-in-the-world” is theory-laden, but, above all, that the
manifest image, folk-psychology, or, for that matter, the alleged naïve-empirical
notion of the everyday experience of being a self, only emerged with the gaze
of the modern sciences.
From here we
should radically think the modern subject from its zero level of subjectivity; as that which structures, even at
the basic phenomenological level, its being with itself, others and the world.
The origin of this zero level of
subjectivity is in the first instance to be situated within the
objectivations of science: the sciences empty out the life-world of meaning,
engender a process of un-signifying, eventually leading to the void of
subjectivity. The resulting non-sense subject (as opposed to Sellars’ idea of man “giving and asking for
reasons”) is hence both the product of the modern sciences, and the very
basis for the disinterested, emptied-out point of view from nowhere that makes
modern science possible! Hence the “stain” in objectivity is not
the subject as it is viewed in classical critiques (such as Habermas’)
– a full humanistic subject.
It is instead the point of view from nowhere itself, it is the fact that
objectivity cannot but be framed and formulated in terms of the zero-level of subjectivity. In
short, the problem of objectivity is not the subject, it is the zero-level of
subjectivity.
This is why
we should subvert the classic understanding of the view from nowhere. Thomas
Nagel’s well-known book The View
from Nowhere (Nagel, 1989) claims that there are two viewpoints to view
the world from: the subjective and objective viewpoint. The subjective
viewpoint is the allegedly obvious immediate and pre-reflective perspective,
which, as Nagel points out, is precisely becoming visible by stepping further
and further outside of oneself into an objective perspective. But for Nagel
there are limits to this movement. One cannot fully transcend the initial
starting point: eventually the “view from nowhere” remains an
impossibility. Now if in contrast Brassier does claim a “point of view
from nowhere”, I would give this a further twist and put forward: there
is no no
view from nowhere. That is, I argue that the “manifest image of
man” and so called “folk psychology” are but myths of
science: one cannot but look upon oneself, others, and the world starting from
a point of view from nowhere. And since modernity this point of view from
nowhere is connected to the objectifications of science. But to be clear, this
gaze is precisely launched from the impossibility nested within (and eventually
grounding) objectivity, that is, from a zero-level of subjectivity which
constitutes the modern subject as the subject of science. This means that in
the end the true impossibility is not the impossibility of the objective view,
as Nagel had it, but, rather, this impossibility is primordially situated at
the level of the subjective view. There is no subjective view, there is no
first-person perspective, there is no folk psychology, there is no manifest
image. The subjective view is the point
from nowhere.
Conclusions: cause
and object of critique
What then can
be the critique of the neurosciences? Critique of course is inevitably defined
by a “darkness from which it works”. The blind spot in the first
critical triangle I’ve sketched – Gallese’s
positing of neuroscience as a critique vis-à-vis both the humanities and
psychology— can, as argued, be found in the neurosciences’
structural, but also occluded reliance on psychology. The blind spot of the
second critical triangle, putting philosophy in gear vis-à-vis both the
(neuro)sciences and folk-psychology, is eventually the denial of a zero-level
of subjectivity, leading to the erroneous fleshing out of a
(folk-)psychological subject allegedly irreducible to the scientific image.
Now, to explore
the possibility of elevating this zero-level of subjectivity to the very
principle of critique, let us use the so-called logic of representation as
developed by Slavoj Žižek.
Following Alain Badiou, Žižek
differentiates between, on the one hand, “anti-philosophy” as the
assertion of pure presence, irreducible and excessive with regard to the
network of representations (Žižek, 2012, p. 841), and, on the other hand, the Hegelian
position of positing nothing beyond phenomenality or beyond the field of
representation (Žižek, 1989, p. 232). Hence, transposed to our
discussion, the first, anti-philosophical option is to understand subjectivity
as that which remains or withstands the storms of the sciences and their
objectifications. Thus, what I am, what my true subjective core is, is
conceived as that which remains after all the biological, neurological, and
psychological reductions. Here we have a too
much, an excess at the site of subjectivity. This is where Habermas can be
situated and his argument that the first-person perspective is not reducible to
the scientific image and its third-person perspective. This is also where the
neurosciences are for example criticized for their being unwittingly embedded
in cultural, political and economic contexts. But of course the neurosciences
could counter-argue that this cultural realm is by no means out of the reach of
science itself: it can be criticized, deconstructed and incorporated by the
neurosciences. This is where Gallese and eventually
also Brassier can be situated, who both put the neurosciences in the position
of being able to fully grasp, potentially at least, the domain of
(inter)subjectivity without anything left over. To be clear, even if one can
object that besides Gallese, also Metzinger
and Brassier unwittingly rely on psychologistic and
humanistic notions, there is some truth in their neuroscientific-inspired
deconstructive critique of the humanities. At the least it lays bare that the
humanistic critique itself lacks a final ground for its critique. Put
differently, the neuro-turn does not effect
a crisis in the humanities, it only brings in the open the old longstanding
crisis of the humanities.
And here we
can return to the second option in the logic of representation, which argues
for a too much on the side of
objectivity. The ‘garb of science’, so to speak,[6] is too big
for the world it wants to cover. This means not that there is too much subject for science, but, rather, that there is too much science for (or of) the
subject. The modern subject is precisely nothing other than this too much; the subject is the excess, the surplus resulting
from the sciences. This is the situation of the colourful
brain scan engendering an “oh-my-god-is-this-what-I-am” subject:
science creates a new subject, contemplating itself, others, and the world from
the scientific perspective. Hence, Hegel’s idea that philosophers cannot
transcend their social and historical context (Hegel, 1991[1821]) perhaps should be properly dialecticized: the modern subject as such is always already
in its very kernel outside the social and the historical. Being the subject of
science, I always already transcend the social and the historical, as I
participate in the detached and objectifying scientific outlook on the human
and the world. Here, perhaps, the zero-level of subjectivity can be elevated to
the driving principle of critique. That is, the critique of the neurosciences
should not be a critique of objectivity (a critique wanting to lay bare the
underlying cultural/political biases), but rather it should be a critique of
subjectivity: addressing how modern subjectivity is linked to a vantage point
(albeit a virtual and empty one) beyond culture, politics and history. A
critique of the neurosciences should thus explore the conditions of (im)possibility of the modern academic subject and from
there explore how both the neurosciences and the human sciences more often than
not miss that the human being has since long left the human zoo and joined the
other side of the bars, that is, the ranks of the scholars.
In this
respect Ray Brassier’s claim “Nature is
not our or anyone’s ‘home’” has sense only if we couple
it to Lacan, who wrote that the discourse of science leaves no place whatsoever
for man (Lacan, 1991, p. 171). Or, as science objectifies, it inevitably
empties out subjectivity. The subject is nowhere at home, neither in thinking,
nor in nature – the latter being after all but the double of science.
This homeless subject, this barred
subject to use the Lacanian parlance, is what critique now more than ever
should be about: the blind spot as cause and object of critique.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 14, Summer
2017, ISSN 1552-5112
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Notes