Social Science and Neuroscience beyond Interdisciplinarity: Experimental Entanglements

Critique ⁶

Arguably the most common way of positioning the social sciences and humanities in relation to cognitive neuroscience is to interpret their task as the critique of neurobiological chauvinism. This mode uses the tools of historical, social and cultural analysis as external methods to either: (1) uncover unconscious or hidden biases within the new brain sciences, and to locate nefarious social, political, economic and epistemic agendas within them (e.g. Ortega and Vidal, 2007; Choudhury et al., 2009); or (2) deflate particular neuroscientific trends or claims that have found favour within the humanities or social sciences (e.g. Ashton, 2011; Kramnick, 2011). ⁷

These engagements commonly lean on longstanding claims concerning the fundamentally sociocultural nature of scientific (including neuroscientific) knowledge (Pickering, 1992). The most compelling articulations of this critique come from a trio of scholars and groups who have argued, trenchantly, for the fundamentally sociocultural basis of the neuro-reductionist urge (Martin, 2004, 2013), the political ill-effects of this urge on our senses of self (Ortega and Vidal, 2007; Vidal, 2009), and the need for the new brain sciences to be radically re-imagined (Choudhury et al., 2009; Slaby and Choudhury, 2012). Emily Martin was perhaps the first to identify the emergence of a cultural figure whose levels ‘begin with molecules, but go no farther than the central nervous system’ (2000: 574). Thus, Martin argues, ‘all of what anthropologists call culture has drained through the hole and dissolved in the realm of neural networks’ (2000: 576). Martin locates the cultural and institutional desire for the ‘restraining force’ of this ‘ahistorical concrete body’ in manifestly social developments: for example, in the need for a reaction to the mania and wildness of fin de siècle capitalism (2000: 576, 581), in psychiatric-expert attempts to ‘snare’ the ‘criteria of rationality’ and the ‘meaning of language’ (2004: 194) and in ‘contempt for anything that limits the kind of commensurability that our markets and systems of governance demand’ (2013: s157).

But there is a deeper point embedded here, and this is Martin’s argument for the ontological primacy of the sociocultural over the neurobiological, in order to ‘detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements’ (Latour, 2004: 227). Fernando Vidal, similarly, has argued that attempts to locate some organic and naturalized account of the self in fact long precede the emergence of the new brain sciences – that this is an ideology on to which neurobiology is mapped post hoc: ‘the idea that “we are our brains” is not a corollary of neuroscientific advances, but a prerequisite of neuroscientific investigation’ (2009: 7). A related argument has been made by the exponents of ‘critical neuroscience’ (Choudhury et al., 2009; Choudhury and Slaby, 2012). The essence of this account, which is inspired by the Frankfurt School, ⁸ is not to tear down neuroscience but to inculcate among neuroscientists:

self-critical practices, which aim to achieve reflective awareness of the standpoint-specific biases and constraints that enter into the production, interpretive framing and subsequent application of neuroscientific knowledge. (Choudhury et al., 2009: 65)

Such critiques are salutary reminders of the need to devote analytical attention to the ‘logic of the neuroindustry’ – and there are resonances between our proposal and some of the more pragmatic steps proposed by scholars in this tradition (Slaby and Choudhury, 2012). But the stance of critique tends too readily to wield the master term ‘reductionistic’ to characterize both neuroscience’s own knowledges and its effect on other disciplines (e.g. Kirmayer and Gold, 2012). In fact, an insistence on ‘reduction’ renders much of what is most analytically interesting about neuroscience – including its relationship to other domains, and how those relationships might be re-imagined – invisible. One central example comprises the fascinating and novels ways in which ‘culture’ and ‘neurobiology’ are drawn together, and how bodies and cultures have become experimentally legible in one another (e.g. Lende and Downey, 2012: 23). In fact, relations between metabolic brain processes, sociocultural environments and ‘mental processes’ are being repeatedly experimentally re-adjudicated in cognitive neuroscience. And this is just one instance of the uneven and creative ways in which the dynamic relationship ‘between’ – though that is not quite the right adjective – the ‘neurobiological’ and the ‘cultural’ is kept in play (Callard and Margulies, 2011).

Where we most significantly depart from colleagues in the critical tradition is in our refusal to cede ontological primacy to the sociocultural within this terrain, certainly in light of the far-reaching theoretical challenges that have been launched at such a premise (Whitehead, 1964; Haraway, 1991; Braidotti, 2006). Interestingly, the critical literature often perfectly well sees, but then usually scotomizes, the complexity and subtlety of the new brain sciences – missing, in particular, how they think through, and work on, the tangled imbrication of bodies, brains, minds, subjectivities, lives and machines. Kelly Joyce, for example, draws on a powerful image from Elizabeth Grosz (1994) to suggest that MRI images ‘“etch together” local decisions and priorities, technology, and aspects of the physical body to produce what is perceived as cutting-edge, authoritative knowledge’ (Joyce, 2008: 70). But what gets missed in Joyce’s desire to show that ‘there is nothing natural or inevitable’ about MRI is precisely the intellectual force of a science that can ‘etch together’ local politics, de-oxygenated blood, sick bodies, nuclear physics, and the clinical gaze to produce what for many is a convincing image of a person, and a body (2008: 20).

Ebullience

If much neuro-critique is built on a presumption of the ontological primacy of ‘culture’, then the ‘ebullient’ mode tends to take experimental results and theoretical statements from the neurosciences as more-or-less true – with little contest or context, and in the absence of a sense of the wider, often fierce, epistemological and ontological debates within those sciences. As Papoulias and Callard (2010) have argued, the emergence of what is commonly now known as ‘affect theory’ within cultural studies has often been the ground for such enthusiasm. Here, many social and cultural theorists rest accounts of the dynamic inter-relations between cultural theory and neuroscientific fact via skilled and lengthy attention to the former – and surprisingly thin, often naïve, summaries of the latter.

Strikingly, many ebullient engagements with the neurosciences from humanists and social scientists barely stray further than scientists’ ‘crossover’ publications for lay audiences (here, Damasio’s volumes (2000, 2004, 2006) are highly favoured) – evidence of the strangely credulous and limited reading practices of those who accrue intellectual capital precisely for the acuity and breadth of their reading. The philosopher Catherine Malabou, for example, has provided one of the most provocative and renowned accounts of how current research in the life sciences (and particularly the neurosciences) pushes beyond post-Husserlian conceptualizations of subjectivity in Continental philosophy (2008, 2012; Johnston and Malabou, 2013). Central to Malabou’s argument is her conviction that current neurobiology effects wide-ranging transformations in understandings of affect, producing a more radical challenge to conceptualizations of subjectivity than those articulated by deconstruction and psychoanalysis: ‘Current neurobiology is engaged in a deep redefinition of emotional life’, Malabou argues:

The brain, far from being a nonsensuous organ, devoted solely to logical and cognitive processes, now appears … to be the center of a new libidinal economy .… A new conception of affects is undoubtedly emerging. (Johnston and Malabou, 2013: 3)

Or consider Brian Massumi’s influential essay, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, which aimed to provincialize a reliance on signification and language in cultural theory by drawing attention to the ‘dynamism’ of the neurological sciences (1996: 100). As we have ourselves become more intimately involved with experimental spaces, it strikes us that the neuroscience that emerges through Massumi’s account is, in contrast, not at all dynamic, or flexible, or even very interesting. Neuroscience is in fact figured by Massumi as lumpen, univocal, and tediously certain. Moreover, the science on which Massumi’s theoretical claims rests makes startlingly brief appearances – accurately characterized by Ruth Leys as a ‘strategic’ and ‘fleeting’ service for Massumi’s ‘rather opaque philosophical-speculative reflections’ (Leys, 2011).

‘The manner in which “science” is often invoked in cultural theory texts’, Papoulias and Callard point out, ‘testifies to a desire for a certain kind of revelation that science will be able to satisfy’ (2010: 36–7; see also Barnett, 2008). Authors in the ebullient tradition, in their desire to designate generative spaces for the mingling of biology and culture, unintentionally foreclose the space for a dynamic and mutually constitutive traffic across them; they are much too willing to assign to the natural and experimental sciences the task of generating the findings that will confirm, verify and/or reveal the theoretical insights of cultural and social theory. If this mode of engagement with neuroscience is characterized by ebullience towards its desired objects and partners, it tends to remain demurely secluded from the hubbub of experimentation itself.

Interaction

A relatively small group of scholars has, in recent years, begun to undertake the rather thankless task of locating a conceptual space between the social sciences and the neurosciences – while resisting the attention-grabbing rhetorics of critique or ebullience. What we term the ‘interactive mode’ is characterized neither by a desire to provincialize the pretensions of the neurosciences nor by an uncritical acceptance of insights from those spaces. Instead, scholars focus on research on humans’ neurological propensities but, crucially, they also maintain an epistemic parity between this research and the traditions and paradigms of the interpretative and social sciences. These works grant the same kind of sustained and critical attention to neurology and neurobiology as they do to the interpretative social sciences. They read, in the neurosciences, a complementary desire for mutuality, and a willingness to allow insights from sociocultural theory to fold back onto neuroscientific research; in so doing they strive for a neurobiology that might help to develop different kinds of theories about the contemporary figure of the human as such.

In Neuro, for example, Nikolas Rose and Joelle Abi-Rached argue that new styles of thought emergent in neuroscience:

offer the possibilities of a more positive role for the human and social sciences, an opportunity to seize on the new openness provided by conceptions of the neuromolecular, plastic, and social brain, and to move beyond critique and find some rapprochement. (2013: 24)

Another sustained attempt to re-calibrate relations between the neural and the sociocultural has been made by Elizabeth Wilson (1998, 2004a, 2004b, 2010, 2011), whose broad project works the neurological into feminist accounts of the body, and to feminist theory more generally. In tandem with other accounts that have mobilized scientific literatures to explore and conceptualize affective relationality (Sedgwick, 2003; Blackman, 2008), Wilson’s cultural-theoretical project pursues a mingling with neurology in terms of the ‘potential in the neurosciences for reinvention and transformation’ (2004a: 13). She argues that, between psychology and neurology, ‘forces of influence and determination are more mutually entangled than the critics of neurological determinism have hitherto acknowledged’ (2004a: 16). In the circuit of body, psyche, and environment, we do not find a relationship of simple causation but rather ‘a system of mutual constitution from which no particular element emerges as the originary, predetermining term’ (2004a: 19). Thus: ‘neurological material is more confident, flexible, resilient, and assertive than many critics have yet acknowledged’ (2004a: 22). This, on Wilson’s account, is what socio-critique prevents us from seeing: ‘by disconnecting biology from its constitutive relations with other ontological systems’, she argues, ‘biology becomes isolated and destitute’ (2004a: 70).

Our project of experimental entanglement is indebted to this stance. Following Rose, we are in pursuit of ‘an affirmative relationship’ with an emerging ‘new and non-reductive biology of human beings and other organisms in their milieu, … which can thus be brought into conversation with … the social and human sciences’ (2013: 24). With Wilson, we seek a neuroscience that ‘may … be a resource for theoretical endeavour, rather than the dangerous and inert substance against which criticism launches itself’ (Wilson, 2004a: 29; cf. Stafford in Turnbull, 2007: 347). The work that remains, then, is to think about how such insights can be realized in empirical projects, or how they can be more concretely situated within a more expansive research practice. While we are hardly the first to pursue this question, our experience is that when similar programmes are moved onto a more empirical terrain, the core insights of the interactionist mode have been hard to maintain. Too frequently, soft boundaries between social and neural are maintained through a model of disciplinary partnership (e.g. Lende and Downey, 2012); the biosocial nexus starts to look distinctly bio-centric (e.g. Chiao, 2009); the empirical project distances itself from (and thus struggles to move) the core concerns of sociocultural knowledge (e.g. Roepstorff and Frith, 2012); or the disciplinary ‘role’ that each intellectual party plays in the programme becomes solidified, such that the possibilities for folding insights across epistemological domains are reduced (e.g. Sambo et al., 2010). We see a gap, then, in which the final step is not yet enacted in practice or where there tends to be a limited working-through of the dynamic complexity of the ontological and epistemological reshufflings that might be enacted through such practice. It might, indeed, be such an absence that has allowed the more critical and ebullient voices to dominate the debate within the social sciences.

Experiment: Entangled

At least since Ian Hacking’s Representing and Intervening (1983), scholars have addressed experiment and experimentation as complex, knowledge-producing phenomena in their own right, rather than simple accomplices of scientific theory (cf. Galison, 1987; Gooding et al., 1989; Davies, 2010). Some of the most compelling research in the history of science has indicated that if we want to understand, or, indeed, help foment, the formation of new knowledge-practices, we should not – as much discourse under the ‘regime of the inter’ does – focus our gaze at the scale of disciplines or paradigms. Rather, we should, as the historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger has demonstrated in his work on modern experimental systems, be alert to:

the digressions and transgressions of smaller research units below the level of disciplines, in which knowledge has not yet become labeled and classified, and in which new forms of knowledge can take shape at any time … novelties generated in one system can quickly spread and create effects at other places. (2011: 315)

This account of excess underpins our argument for turning to experiment in cognitive neuroscience. One of the distinguishing characteristics of the contemporary neurosciences is that, because of the still-recent emergence of novel methods and sub-disciplines affiliated to this area, as well as their ongoing shuffling and realignment, core methods and assumptions have still not been entirely ossified (Abi-Rached, 2008). Certainly, this is subject to change, and some procedures and constructs – for example the relation between the BOLD (Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent) signal, which fMRI picks up, and brain activity – have over time been ‘black-boxed’ in a Latourian (1999) sense. But our collaborations with neuroscientists have consistently thrown up instances in which our collaborators were already deeply preoccupied with which of many methods to employ, how best to instruct research subjects, how to understand the relation between subject and researcher, how to operationalize constructs (e.g. Filevich et al., 2013), and so on. Cognitive neuroscience is thus a field in which many experimental systems are (still) in motion (e.g. Le Bihan et al., 2001, Neurocritic, 2012; Callard and Margulies, 2011). It is not a desire for control that undergirds our positive turn to experiment. Quite the opposite: we are compelled by the promise of digressions, transgressions, mistakes and the subterranean existence of not-as-yet-played-out narratives.

A core goal of ‘experimental entanglements’ is to intensify the energies already within these experimental systems by seeding research projects and centres with researchers carrying heterogeneous modes of practice from the social sciences and humanities. We wish to do so because we want to magnify the productive untidiness, and temporal out-of-jointedness of those systems. An expansion in styles of taking measurements, using instruments, engaging with research subjects and tinkering with protocols might just help both to render and expose new biosocial stories (Rheinberger, 2010: 218–19). Of course we are not naïve about how unevenly epistemic and institutional authority is likely to be distributed across such entanglements, and we do not elide the unequal dynamics of power and prestige here. Nor do we pretend that the desire to rethink paradigms, and to tinker with protocols, is likely to be as strong for neuroscientists en masse as it might well be for collaborating social scientists. We have no fantasy of parity here – nor do we assume that the most congenial and democratic spaces are always the most interesting or productive (Fitzgerald et al., 2014). We remain sanguine – we have no choice to act otherwise – about the likelihood of an experimental entanglement resulting in entropy, frustration, or failure.

‘Experimental entanglements’ are modest, often awkward, typically unequal encounters that work to mobilize specific and often serendipitous moments of potential novelty in and outside the laboratory. These moments might reside in the methods chosen, the conduct of the experiment itself, the theoretical armature that surrounds it – or the roles that researchers play within the experiment, its analysis, and in its dissemination. ‘Experimental entanglements’ refuse preliminary decisions about the shape or outcome of such an interaction: they denote an ad hoc process of shuffling histories, methods, and assumptions from the social sciences and humanities through such partial moments, and of picking through the scraps of knowledge and thought produced by the subsequent torsion. Our ‘entanglements’ are thus never not temporary, local assemblages of motivation, interest, people and machinery – in which we, and our collaborators, are able momentarily to think something exterior to both the conventions of experimental practice, and the taken-for-granted dynamics of epistemic power that underwrite its conduct. This vision of being entangled is something very different from calls for neuroscientists to develop ‘second-order observations of laboratory conditions, communities of scientists, and historical and cultural contingencies’ (Slaby and Choudhury, 2012: 42). Our model, through its attention to untidiness, excess and chance, strives to avoid such pre-determined demands for reflexive practice from either side. Instead, we seek the entanglement of researchers, instruments, writing practices, discourses, observations, archives, bodies, topologies, and, in general, accounts of what that opaque object of neuroscientific research, around which all of these circle, just might be (Figure 1). OPEN IN VIEWER

On such a model, our own knowledge practices will also, of course, be bound up with specific entanglements of context, thought and affect. Attending to experiment demands attending to how the bodies, gestures and feelings of individual researchers are registers and generators of positive knowledge. Natasha Myers, in her ethnography of experimental manoeuvres within molecular biology, has described how scientists’ bodily contortions can help to ‘render’ the objects of research; using the body, she argues, ‘can generate both new forms of knowing, and the things known’ (Myers, 2012: 172, 161; cf. Fitzgerald, 2013). We draw particular attention to this quality because one of the most potentially fertile attributes of many cognitive neuroscientific experiments is the dynamism enabled by the fact that there are commonly at least two minds and bodies – that of the experimenter and that of the experimental subject – built into the experimental assemblage. What we might call ‘the inter-subjective’ is always already instantiated in both the practice and the data of cognitive neuroscience – although this is rarely explicitly recognized in canonical texts (see e.g. Frackowiak et al., 2004; cf. Schilbach et al., 2013). Such entanglements pose multiple trajectories for novel inquiry: who or what is the instrument? Who or what probes whom or what? Who or what yields data? How are relations of influence and connection between experimenter and experimental subject imagined, materialized, felt, and traced out? Such combinatorial possibilities offer germs through which new forms of knowledge might emerge.

Entanglement: Experimentalized

We have argued that it is increasingly difficult for the social sciences to maintain a potent hold on the expansive category of ‘human life’ while remaining indifferent to the complex neurogenetic textures of human capability. But while there is good reason, then, to cease the hygienic practices of many of the mainstream ‘social’ sciences (Goodman, 2013), no new epistemic model has yet emerged to express this possibility. In promoting a return to experiment, we contend that the laboratory spaces of the new brain sciences offer hitherto under-used fora to draw out the tangled biological and sociocultural processes of human life. We situate the cognitive neuroscientific experiment – understood as a tumbling and uncertain mode of knowledge-production – as one possible space in which both to register and to interpret these processes.

We draw inspiration from the work of feminist philosopher Karen Barad (2007) and her insight that sustainable and more-or-less bounded ways of producing knowledge might in fact come after – and not before – awkward mixtures of knowledge and material. Two features of Barad’s recent work give energy to our proposal. First, her account of an ‘agential realism’ attempts to think a constitutive relationship between the mess and ambiguity of entanglement, and the confounding possibility of distinction or singularity – with the latter coming after entanglement, and not before. Thus Barad’s approach:

does not take separateness to be an inherent feature of how the world is. But neither does it denigrate separateness as mere illusion … relations do not follow relata, but the other way around. (2007: 136–7)

Second, Barad refuses to separate the practice of science from the practice of studying science from the outside: ‘the tradition in science studies’, she points out, ‘is to position oneself at some remove, to reflect on the nature of scientific practice as a spectator’ (2007: 247). Barad invites us instead to think about the ways in which insights about the so-called ‘social context’ of science might also be intrinsic to the scientific practices in question (2007: 247). She posits a mode of engagement in which an ‘understanding of the entangled co-emergence of “social” and “natural” (and other important co-constituted) factors might best come from ‘engaging in practices we call “science studies” together with practices we call “science”’ (2011: 446).

With these two interventions, Barad proposes a radically different programme for sociocultural attention to, and ‘engagement with’, the natural sciences. In particular, she departs from modes of interdisciplinary engagement, which, as with all modes governed by the ‘regime of the inter-’, are premised on a recognition of the solidity of disciplinary borderlands (however deeply either envisages trade and exchange across those boundaries; see Galison, 1997; Thompson Klein, 2010). Our ‘experimental entanglements’ follow Barad in their insistence that neurobiological knowledge is a product of, and not a precursor to, disciplinary transaction – that the complex intersections of social and biological agencies come prior to, for example, the kind of agential cut that critical neuroscience insists on maintaining. Indeed, in a formal sense, introducing ‘critique’ and ‘context’ really does pollute the neuroscientific experiment – but precisely because this insistence reduces entangled complexity to a series of distinctive and competing perspectives.

There are costs to taking this position seriously – as we do. In particular, because Barad’s conception of entanglement insists on the ontological priority of intersection, it becomes methodologically fruitless, in the kinds of experiment we envisage, to delineate distinct tasks, inputs and divisions of labour for ‘social scientists’ and ‘neuroscientists’ in advance. It is not a commitment to obscurantism that makes us resistant to clearly setting out, for example, ‘who’ might do ‘what’ within an ‘experimental entanglement’. Rather, we maintain that ideas about ‘who’ and ‘what’ must remain in play when we proceed on the assumption that entanglements – of bodies, epistemologies, apparatuses, elements of experimental systems, operationalizations of terms – might produce something new in the world, even as the forms that that newness might take are undecided, and undecidable, prior to the moment of experimentation (for example, see Figure 2). OPEN IN VIEWER

We are insistent that this suggestion is not opposed to the ethic and ethos of experiment as such (e.g. see Donna Haraway’s (1997) ‘modest’ modes of engaging experimental spaces). Roepstorff and Frith, for example, in their reflections on neuroanthropology, direct attention to the experimental itself, as a productive object to think with: experimentalism, they point out, is ‘a complicated practice, a bricolage tinkering with the possible elements (Pickering, 1995) to make things work’ (2012: 103). Thus, experiments do not – and are not supposed to – settle matters: an experiment in neuroimaging, no less than the much-analysed space of anthropological fieldwork, is variously intimate, awkward, lonely and boring; the generation of facts from data, in the neuroscientific laboratory, has never not been painful, messy, unsatisfying, and contingent. With this in mind, Roepstorff and Frith encourage us to regard the ‘experiment’ not as a nitty-gritty, world-testing, fact-producing machine, but as a performance – and thus potentially as a risky, more avant-garde space. They describe this as an ‘aesthetics of research practice’, a mode of engagement in which the neuroimaging experiment becomes something akin to ‘trying out new ways of writing, new ways of being in the field, or novel forms of intervention’ (2012: 105). And they suggest that it is a form of aesthetic attention that allows the social scientist to take some kind of experimental rubric into her fieldwork. We linger on this description because we, too, are committed to using the experimental mode to rethink the ways in which relations across the social sciences and neurosciences are imagined and materialized. Our aesthetics of experiment fixes attention on the capacity of experimental intervention to unfold, to ally itself with, and then to elaborate upon, the determinedly entangled nature of human subjectivity.