Critical Neuroscience

A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience

Suparna Choudhury, Jan Slaby, Suparna Choudhury, Jan Slaby

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781119237891, 9781444333282
• eBook ISBN: 9781444343335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience brings together multi-disciplinary scholars from around the world to explore key social, historical and philosophical studies of neuroscience, and to analyze the socio-cultural implications of recent advances in the field. This text's original, interdisciplinary approach explores the creative potential for engaging experimental neuroscience with social studies of neuroscience while furthering the dialogue between neuroscience and the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. Critical Neuroscience transcends traditional skepticism, introducing novel ideas about 'how to be critical' in and about science.

Part I

Motivations and Foundations

1

Proposal for a Critical Neuroscience

Jan Slaby and Suparna Choudhury

The label “critical neuroscience” captures an important—and, we believe, productive—tension. This tension represents the need to respond to the impressive and at times troublesome surge of the neurosciences, without either celebrating it uncritically or condemning it wholesale. “Critical” alludes, on the one hand, to the notion of “crisis,” understood—in the classical Greek, predominantly medical sense of the term—as an important juncture and point of intervention, and, relatedly, to a task similar to that proposed by Kant (1992) in The Conflict of the Faculties (rather than in his more famous “Critiques”), where he defends a space of unconstrained inquiry into the continual pressures put on scientific knowing by the vagaries of the political sphere. This opens up a space for inquiry that is itself inherently and self-consciously political. On the other hand, the concept of “critique” raises important associations with Frankfurt School critical theory. While critical neuroscience does not directly follow a Frankfurt School program, nor the reduction of science to positivism espoused by early critical theory, it does share with it a spirit of historico-political mission; that is, the persuasion that scientific inquiry into human reality tends to mobilize specific values and often works in the service of interests that can easily shape construals of nature or naturalness. These notions of nature or of what counts as natural, whether referring to constructs of gender, mental disorder, or normal brain development, require unpacking. Without critical reflection, they appear as inevitable givens, universal and below history, and are often seen as a form of “normative facticity,” making specific claims upon us in everyday life (see Hartmann, this volume).

In this chapter, we will spell out how our proposal for a critical neuroscience is not motivated by the aim to undermine the epistemological validity of neuroscience or debunk its motives, nor is it simply an opportunity to establish yet another neuro-prefixed discipline. Situated between neuroscience and the human sciences, our notion of critical neuroscience uses a historical sensibility to analyze the claim that we are in the throes of a “neurorevolution” since the beginning of the Decade of the Brain in 1990. It investigates sociologically the motivations and the implications of the turn to the neuro in disciplines and practices ranging from psychiatry and anthropology to educational policy, and it examines ethnographically the operationalization of various categories in the laboratory. Investigating the historical and cultural contingencies of these neuroscientific categories, critical neuroscience analyzes the ways in which, and conditions through which, behaviors and categories of people are naturalized. It also traces how these “brain facts” are appropriated in various domains in society, starting with medicalized contexts of the West, but also using cross-national comparative methodology to understand the production and circulation of neuroscientific knowledge globally. Maintaining close engagement with neuroscience is, on the one hand, crucial for building accurately informed analyses of the societal implications of neuroscience, whilst, on the other hand, providing a connection, a reflexive interface, through which historical, anthropological, philosophical, and sociological analysis can feed back and provide creative potential for experimental research in the laboratory.

In attempting to build up a picture of what critique might look like for this project, we avail ourselves of a number of disciplines and sensibilities that can contribute as resources for critique. Our goal is to render critique amenable to a number of diverse disciplines—we propose that this versatile set of tools can contribute to reviving a critical spirit while also broadening the neuroscientist’s gaze. That being said, we certainly do not intend to outline a fully-fledged, scholarly program or recipe for critique. Instead, we will try to sketch some building blocks for a mode of engagement, an ethos, that aims to raise awareness of the factors that come together to stabilize scientific worldviews that create the impression of their inevitability. Furthermore, critical engagement in neuroscience can increase the complexity of behavioral phenomena (for example, emotions, interaction, decision making, mental disorders), and motivate scholars to enrich conceptual vocabularies of behavior and mental illness, keeping debates from being foreclosed by the belief that the ontologically most fundamental level of explanation is by default the most appropriate one (see Mitchell, 2009).¹

To bear relevance outside the narrow scholarly sphere, such an endeavor requires a self-reflexive hermeneutics that is necessarily multi-dimensional (or “undisciplined”). The result, we envisage, will not so much be an unpacking of the black boxes of the neurosciences as an assemblage of resources that ultimately widens the ontological landscape of a behavioral phenomenon under study. It is the plurality—reflecting the complexity of behavior as well as the many contingencies of neuroscience—of elements of this landscape that gives rise to the solidity of a claim, the “realness” of a fact. Contextualizing neuroscientific objects of inquiry—whether the “neural basis” of addiction, depression, sociality, lying, or adolescent behaviors—can, in this way, demonstrate how such findings, whilst capturing an aspect of behavior in the world, are also held in place by a number of factors, co-produced by a collection of circumstances, social interests, and institutions (Hacking, 1999; Young, 1995). These circumstances and interests are often quite systematically ignored in neurodiscourse (see, for example, Heinemann & Heinemann, 2010).

However, we propose that critical neuroscience should not stop at description and complexification. Indeed, we share a sense of uneasiness, recently voiced within the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) in particular (Anderson, 2009; Cooter, 2007; Cooter & Stein, 2010; Forman, 2010) about depoliticalization of scholarship in the face of the increasing commercialization of academia. In line with a broader cultural tendency favoring voluntarist conceptions of the “entrepreneurial self,” centered around ideas of “resources” and personal “capital” (social, emotional, “mental”), we sense an implicit correspondence between scholarly discourse and economic imperatives and normative schemas.² Certainly, these are preliminary intuitions, and we will not impose ready-made answers. However, we share the conviction that a more radical and openly political positioning is needed in face of these trends. In the first instance, it is important to reinvigorate a sense of the impact that larger social, political, and economic dynamics have on the very shape of academic and scientific culture. We return to this below.

Assemblage: The Thickening of Brain-Based Phenomena

Bruno Latour, in his animated essay about critique and its effect of weakening scientific facts, appeals to his critically-oriented readers to “suspend the blow of the [critical] hammer” and calls for a renewal of a realist attitude oriented to matters of concern, rather than matters of fact (Latour, 2004). Matters of concern are those around which the human world revolves: they enthrall us, involve us, and challenge us to embrace or oppose them—they will be the focal point in practices, discourses, disputes. Critical neuroscience shares this constructive spirit, the “stubbornly realist attitude” and the focus on what matters in relation to scientific practices (Rouse, 2002). Importantly, critical neuroscience embraces the added dimension that enters the scene with the focus on matters of concern: values, conflicting moral outlooks and evaluative perspectives, changes in the attribution of relevance pertaining to a given phenomenon or scientific result, often contested among affected parties. Critical neuroscience thus emphasizes the politics implicit in scientific practices (see Rouse, 1987, 1996).

However, while Latour is helpfully non-dogmatic and quasi-democratic in giving a voice to participants in practices—both human and non-human—in the process of assembling their collectives (instead of silencing the actors behind grand-scale theoretical assumptions), in the end, he relinquishes too much—by sidelining entirely any non-local invocation of the social, the economic, or the political. By contrast, our proposal for critical neuroscience calls for a less detached attitude on the part of the critical investigator, a more active engagement, and, at times, a more confrontational response in cases of violation of scientific standards (Fine, 2010), strategies of ignorance (McGoey, 2009), imperialistic export of Western assumptions to Non-Western contexts (Watters, 2010), or the political use of preliminary data (Choudhury, Gold, & Kirmayer, 2010; Raz, this volume). Such responses need to be supported by attempts to identify and render explicit more subtle biases and frames of evaluation: the specific organization of public attention, patterns of distribution of affective energies, collectively sustained valuations and schemes of judgment that are instituted in subtle but pervasive ways in both scientific and popular discourses, in representations of scientific results, but also in spheres of public understanding at some distance from the practice of research. Notions such as the neural basis of adolescent risk taking, hard-wired sex differences, molecularized understandings of mental illnesses, or narratives about behavioral and emotive tendencies universally present in humans and set in stone by evolution are cases in point. Some of these narrative patterns solidify to form what Judith Butler has called “frames”—powerful but often unnoticed ways in which perception, knowledge, and normative judgment are preorganized so that some conceptualizations and evaluations are made likely while others are ruled out a priori (Butler, 2009). Critique here has the task of working against engrained habits of perception, thought, and judgment in order to enable alternative framings of matters of concern.

What we envisage as the practice of critique, therefore, starts with the activity of assembling (Latour, 2004, p. 246; Slaby, 2010). “Assembling” refers to the collection of material from multiple sources and perspectives to enrich scientific conceptualization as well as the broader intellectual horizon in which problems and issues are framed for empirical investigation and interpretation. Objects of neuroscientific investigation can, as a result, be situated in the full fabric of meaningful relations—while this very fabric is itself placed under scrutiny and has to be kept open for contestation. The social situatedness, cultural meanings, and various interests of affected groups all package the ontological landscape of neurocognitive phenomena. This view holds that what we see in the brain is at any time held in place by a rich web of factors within the epistemic culture (Knorr-Cetina, 1999; Young, 1995), and in the ambient society, which in turn mobilizes these findings beyond the laboratory. Insights from multiple disciplines can bring to light the internalized scientific ideals, or “epistemic virtues” (Daston & Galison, 2007) that direct the formulation of neuroscientific findings—the filtering of information, the criteria for, and goal of, objectivity, and the operationalization of chosen aspects of the lifeworld (Cooter, 2010).

To illustrate this, let us take the example of addiction. Addiction is increasingly understood as a disease of the brain, in which addictive substances cause malfunction of the frontal regulation of the limbic system, thus “hijack[ing] the brain’s reward system” (Leshner, 2001) and potentially even altering gene expression (Kuhar, 2010). The goal of these brain-centered approaches to addiction is to locate candidate molecular mechanisms that can lead to effective new treatments (Hyman & Malenka, 2001). While these studies have yielded some notable findings, addiction is far more than (and different from) a mere change in brain chemistry. “Addiction” denotes a family of conditions that are inextricably tied up with social environments, drug markets, and cultural triggers (Campbell, 2010), and depend on collectively developed and sustained habits (Garner & Hardcastle, 2004) and also upon institutional practices that emerge in response, as a feedback, to the original phenomenon—through classificatory looping as described by Ian Hacking (Hacking, 1995, 1999, 2007; see also Raikhel, this volume).

Approaching addiction using an ecological systems view, through multiple epistemic cultures, would mean to re-inscribe and integrate these multiple causal factors. Such an approach would examine the linkages across levels of description using various methodologies and would include recording the cultural phenomenology of addictive behaviors. It would additionally attend to the political economy of addiction and the effects of industry on concepts of addiction (Rasmussen, 2010). Taken together, this integrative approach will yield an explanandum much richer than any of the single construals developed exclusively from a single scientific or medical perspective.³ Clearly both registers—social and biological—are necessary to assemble a richer understanding of addiction. The more relevant questions for a critical neuroscience to work out will be how to overcome the gap between social and neural, how to develop conceptual vocabularies and frameworks that overcome this stark distinction, and how to empirically study phenomena like addiction with a view of the situated brain and nervous system. This goal would take as a premise that the brain and nervous system are nested in the body and environment from the outset and that their functions can only be understood in terms of the social and cultural environment (Choudhury & Gold, in press).⁴

How Does the Social Get Under the Skin?

Ethnographic work by Margaret Lock has provided powerful evidence for the need to collapse conventional dichotomies between the “inside” and “outside” of the human body. Her seminal study of the experience and physiological characteristics of menopause among Japanese and American women led her to the concept of “local biologies,” a useful way to denote her finding that social context and culture can refashion human biology ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Credits
• List of Illustrations
• About the Editors
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I: Motivations and Foundations
• Part II: Histories of the Brain
• Part III: Neuroscience in Context
• Part IV: Situating the brain
• Part V: Beyond neural correlates
• Plates
• Index