Abstract
Building from recent attempts in the humanities and social sciences to conceive of creative, entangled ways of doing interdisciplinary work, I turn to Braidotti’s ‘nomadic ontology’ to (re)vision the human body without a brain. Her exploration of the body as a ‘threshold of transformations’ is put into conversation with Deleuze’s comments on neurobiology to consider what a brainless body might do, or undo, in neuroscientific practice. I ground discussion in a case study, detailing the practices of brain decoding or ‘mind reading,’ re-interpreting Rose’s account. Therein, I argue that the technical-social configurations of brain decoding are unlikely to usher in a radically new ontology, as Rose suggests. To better match Rose’s vision and align with new ontologies in cultural theory, I argue that neuroscience must become nomadic and embrace a body without a brain. I then conclude with six recommendations towards a nomadic neuroscience.
Deleuze once said, ‘the brain is the screen’ (see McMuhan, 1998: 48). Interpreting this as an attempt to undermine humanism’s self-guided, agentive Man through foregrounding neurobiological processes, Rose argues for transformative potential in relating ‘mental states, feelings, and intentions’ to brain activity (Rose, 2016: 159). The discussion fits within Rose’s broader account of brain decoding or ‘mind reading’, as detailed in a previous issue of this journal wherein he suggests that neuroscience intuits ‘a new ontology’, which may now be ‘emerging out of the shadows’ (Rose, 2016: 158). Although the exact shape of this new ontology is left cautiously open, the reader is offered a final insight about conviviality between technoscience and ontological belief: ‘the most durable philosophies of the human have always had a very close relation to contemporary medical and scientific practices’ (Rose, 2016: 158). I agree with Rose on this point but do so from the recognition that the relation runs in both directions – with new medical/scientific practices sometimes aligning with the trajectory of philosophies and, conversely, with new philosophies sometimes aligning with the trajectory of medical/scientific practices.
The latter preoccupies Rose (2016) throughout much of his in-depth discussion of how the ‘human brain became legible’ through new brain-reading technologies (Rose, 2016: 140), but herein I emphasize the former. I aim to rethink neuroscience practices through a nomadic ontology. For Braidotti (2006a, 2006b, 2011), a nomadic ontology entails relentless movement. Things are sets of material complexes in an instantaneous occurrence, and the body is ‘a threshold of transformations’, a collection of the interrelated, best understood as ongoing traces or forms of material memory, mirrored in our own practice of self-narrative and fetishistic representation (Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012: 33). A nomadic ontology is an ontology of relations with the body positioned as ‘a transformer of flows and energies, affects, desires, and imaginings’ (Braidotti, 2011: 25). A ‘nomadic vision’ cultivates a ‘disloyalty’ to the Thing and thinks of the body as ‘a point of overlapping between the physical, symbolic and sociological’ (Braidotti, 2011: 25). I ask: what would the contemporary neurosciences look like were this ontology presumed?
In this line of inquiry, I do not aim to reassert the constructed self or enact a performative gesture meant merely to inspire cognitive neuroscientists to think more creatively. What I offer is a (re)visioning of the human body without a brain that remains a living body open to investigation. Another way of saying this would be: de-privileging the brain to imagine the body as a ‘threshold of transformations’ brings forward a vision of the body in Deleuze’s writings that Rose overlooks amid his enthusiasm for the capacities of neuroscience. A body without a brain focuses on the body as a set of contradictory occurrences and overlapping principles, not on the waves of oxygen crashing against the neuronal beach. 1 A cognitive neuroscience study of the brain is often characterized as an examination of when and how human action is realized in particular neuronal cells (Philips, 2006: 1), but a nomadic ontology directs attention to a constant middle point for neurons engaged in differing sets of interactions. This is an ontology that poses potential upheaval for modern science and humanism’s self-made Man.
The idea of not having a brain might simply seem nonsensical. Interesting proposals such as Clark’s (2003, 2008) ‘extended cognition’ (EC), where brain-body-world function together, appear immediately more feasible because neuroreductionism is complexified, but the brain remains. That gets to the point: Clark (re)introduces a normalized way of looking at bodies, even if he asks us to see more. Pens and laptops become ‘resources to which biological brains, as they learn and grow, will dovetail their own activities’ (2003: 32, italics in original). The way that the brain is discussed there and elsewhere offers a self-guided and mechanistic brain, even while EC tries to establish co-development with environments. The biological and technological are imagined as interlocked to create systems inside and outside the body, which often work together (Clark, 2008: xii–xvi). The result is that EC’s potentially more radical relational challenges and implications for bodily investigations are undercut by normalizing the brain through the language of ‘platforms’, ‘systems’ and ‘machinery’ (Clark, 2008: 206–7). Getting beyond the habit of thinking entwined Being to think what it might mean to see more thoroughly the intimacy of Being-as-Becoming requires a move away from a collective, an extension, or a partnership between Things. Being-as-Becoming envisions entities only within a slippery defeat of binaries and an eradication of strict reproducing. A nomadic ontology investigates constantness as generativity (Braidotti, 2006a: para. 23) such that we grasp a ‘non-unitary understanding of the subject’ within a transversal materiality which is always of movement, always in process of being made (Braidotti, 2006a: para. 30). Brain-body-world as a set of preconceived delineations already misses the point.
Challenging the field-specific conceptualizations of an object of study in any field – much less one as regimented as neuroscience – is a formidable task. However, if cultural theory is to give more shape to a new ontology ‘emerging out of the shadows’ (Rose, 2016), then those who try to paint must sometimes risk muddying the image – ‘a slice of tomato stuck onto the sky’ said one critic of Monet’s sunset (Cotter, 1999: para. 19). At the risk of muddying a nomadic ontology of the body by interfacing with neuroscience, I offer a revised set of experimental practices for neuroscientific investigation as a speculative proposal.
More so, I join Rose in the attempt to push past a now commonplace, and perhaps vague, ‘vitalist’ view in cultural theory (Rose, 2013: 14), wherein individuals are radical relationalities, that is, said to be ‘thresholds’ (Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012: 33) or to ‘emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating’ (Barad, 2007: ix). The acknowledgement that science has difficulty working with broad ideas about being, doing and knowing animates a search for pragmatic connections to laboratory practices. In brief, I participate in the intellectual journey beyond representational and rationalist accounts of human life, proposing that one important next step is to think outside the brain, that is, to question the central object of popular attraction, and to undermine the brain-organ’s socio-cultural dominance as the prime causality of our world – what I here call The Brain. Alternative, untamed and untested neuroscientific practices might better complement the rise of New Materialist philosophies stressing complex relations and extended agencies across many human and non-human Things (see Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2006a, 2011; Coole and Frost, 2010).
My proposal recalls ‘permeable bodies’ (Bosworth, 2016) and entangled bodies in Becoming (Barad, 2007; Blackman, 2012). These concepts stress the difficulty of aligning bodies with representations, and show that bodies with environmental exposures escape rigid social or biological determinations. However, doing more, a question of ‘what now?’ finds little traction within a general call to think the body as a radical, wild or indeterminate space. Waterton and Yusoff (2017) say as much in the introduction to their special issue on ‘indeterminate bodies’, noting that the term risks ‘under-specification’ and the challenge is ‘how to think that which is not (and perhaps will never quite be) a thing, a body’ (Waterton and Yusoff, 2017: 4). Their special issue thus encourages attention to the queerness of bodies in particular contexts in order to contest normative prescriptions (Morgensen, 2016) and poses questions about ‘the apparatus through which a body comes to be known’ in order to generate alternative political possibilities (Waterton, 2017: 121). The issue also advances the idea that scholars can map ‘economies of indeterminancy’ for bodies, foregrounding ‘the porousness of identity formation’ and tracing out the ‘effects of toxicity’ (Yusoff, 2017: 89). Overall, then, the answer to the question of how to account for a changeable and illusive body is multiple: to be a witness to misalignment, to promote interdisciplinarity, and to advocate for varied considerations of embodied realities. Such moves are undoubtedly positive. Yet transforming volatile matters of existence into a revised science requires, I believe, a step into experimental domains. Thus I risk imagining what neuroscience could do and Become when infusing the generative into the discipline.
If the structures of thought that guide scientific work are philosophical, such that knowing what it would look like for a brain to think is inherently ‘a philosophical question, not a scientific one’, as Bennett and colleagues say when mulling words like ‘reasoning’ (Bennett et al., 2009: 19), then philosophical proposals for new neuroscientific practices should be a common occurrence. Likewise, if the brain is still locked in a Descartian dual structure of dumb bodies and smart brains, even while neuroscience is declared to be in a nascent phase equivalent to ‘babies in diapers taking our first toddling steps’ (Cahill, 2013) at the same time as studies of bodily systems show increasing influence over mental states (Allen et al., 2017; Fenster and Eisen, 2017), then new philosophical proposals should risk being profoundly disruptive. They should be radically anti-Descartian and intent on illuminating the co-dependencies of any disarticulated organ.
The present need for alternative viewpoints is put into some focus when Damasio (1995; 2018) says that Descartes was ‘in error’ by ignoring feelings even while Damasio himself defines feelings strictly as ‘mental expressions of homoestasis’ (2018: 6, italics added). Damasio reassigns feelings to ‘the brain regions that integrate signals related to body structure’ such that ‘the body is a yard stick’ for the brain (1995: xvi). His new inclusion of ‘facts behind the machinery of feeling and consciousness’ gives greater import to a body as a set of signals (Damasio, 2018: 8), yet recognition of strange attunements and murky soups of biological foundations seem to circle back continually to the circuits of mental governance – to reassert a philosophy dedicated to The Brain and its representations. For Damasio, the body is ‘an indifferent mental flow’ when not ‘grabbing’ the brain’s attention (Damasio, 2018: 3–4); the body is a collection of non-intervening, involuntary states overseen by a brain that uses its ‘surveillance system’ to ‘act on the body’ whenever we ‘want to walk or run or pick up a cup of coffee’ (Damasio, 2018: 57). In brief, if Damasio is a case in point, then neuroscience remains disconnected, on a basic level, from the more radical and deep-seated ecological revolutions latent in performative posthuman philosophies. Only in deciding what it can look like for a bacterium to think, for a body to feel, for a thought to be outside a body, for the structure of thought to have an ostensible relation thinking, and for a body to live without a brain will neuroscience ever functionally suture the somatic-mind split opened by Descartes.
In moving forward, my initial approach relies, somewhat predictably, on Gilles Deleuze. He is, after all, the philosophical champion of those already compensating for the semiotic obsessions of post-structuralism by asserting the crucial role of materiality (see Connolly, 2002; Fuller, 2007; Massumi, 2002; Thrift, 2008), yet I hope to wield his work anew. I aim, first, to reconcile his odd assertion that ‘the brain is the screen’ with his other work, including a second, famous Deleuzian (Deleuze and Guattari, 2002: 156) saying, namely, ‘make oneself a Body without Organs’. The result, I argue, is an image of a nomadic body not self-contained and roaming through an environment, but transactional, being the present, if not materially resilient effect of a ‘process ontology’ (Braidotti, 2006b: 199). I then apply this (de)ontology to the same case study that Rose reads as the rise of the brain. Yet I conclude the opposite.
In examining the laboratory practices of ‘brain decoding’, I propose the total erasure of the organ in the study of molecular processes codified in fMRI machines and computer algorithms designed to ‘read the mind’. My purpose is not to oppose Rose – as he correctly identifies the immense impact of neuroscience on social life – but to embrace his aim of contributing to the sciences and seeing interdisciplinary work as the best means by which to rethink the ontology of the human (Rose, 2013: 21). Indeed, I hope not to make too strong a point about Rose’s (2016) conclusions about brain decoding in particular, but rather to pursue a concept of brainlessness, or the body’s full braininess in the positive version. I also confirm Rose’s (2016: 159) basic thesis about an elusive ontology lurking in the shadows; however, I see any new ontology as one much more ecological, imaginative and extended than what is presently available in the contemporary neurosciences. An applied nomadic ontology is one effort at coaxing this alternative ontology out into the open.
Before going further: a concept of a body without a brain may be ‘an extension of posthuman critical theory’, applying ‘a new vision of subjectivity to both the practice and public perception of the scientist’ (Veronese, 2016: 96), but it does not operate under the assumption that the embrace of the technological Other or animal Other – following the multiplicities of Deleuze and Guattari (2002) or Haraway (1991), for example – will effectively dismantle institutional, totalitarian orders. A body without a brain is not a human conceptualized as completely separate from scientific investigation nor stirring in some kind of interconnected bliss with a permeable world, even if the concept foregrounds motions with/in environments. Rather, pointing to an organless body already present in neuroscientific practice aims to draw out a ‘black-boxed’ relationality, a non-unitary brain, or dispersed braininess.
Likewise, it is briefly worth noting that Braidotti’s nomadic ontology risks being read as a kind of romanticized ‘tourist’s gaze’ of nomadism. Any latent colonialism or sentimentalization of nomadic life lurking within the concept, however, can likely be put to rest by Braidotti’s own articulation. For her, a nomadic ontology proposes a ‘literal-ness’ of relations such that the nomadic is ‘territorially-bound’ and ‘externally oriented,’ not some free-floating Western hippie spiritism made into an ideal for material life (Braidotti, 2006a: para. 19). Nomadism recognizes that a subject is ‘composed of external forces’ and foregrounds ‘symbiotic interdependence’ at a place and time, in no way romantic (Braidotti, 2006a: para. 23). In fact, it would be easier to argue that it presents an image of cancerous co-dependence in being bound to storms, insects, minerals, viruses, air particles, species loss and dying trees in today’s landscape, which seems ever more apocalyptic. This is precisely why her emphasis on ethical relations and entwined Becoming deserves to be the heart of the focus, and the ‘surprisingly generative’ world, as she says, shocks the old analogies and invigorates a fresh approach to the mediated tasks of science.
Attempting to follow Braidotti’s trajectory, the conclusion accordingly offers concrete recommendations for a revised form of neuroscience research that undermines the brain’s epistemological and ontological honoration to the benefit of the field in terms of describing interactions. But the recommendations also work towards aligning neuroscience with social theory dedicated to the permanence of change amid increasing ecological degradation, techno-material integration and political turmoil. An alternative practice emphasizes relations and disturbs the The Brain as a ‘fetishistic representation’ of the human (Braidotti, 1994: 6). Opening the margins of the brain-organ pushes a new neuroscience to become a study of material persuasions down long trails of interactions. Engaging these ‘trails’, I argue, does not have to be intractable in scientific investigation.
The body in a nomadic ontology is many sets of competing and compatible convergences, a contingent and in-situ expression. This body has no brain in the same way that lungs have no alveoli without air, just as the neuroscientific practice of ‘reading minds’ reads nothing without eyeballs and images to set in juxtaposition. As I suggest in the conclusion, discovering a nomadic neuroscience in practice may be the one act that brings about real, profound change to ontological structures. A new ontology does not emerge from a concretized and normalized human – privileging the organ of representation and reifying Man – but the more radical development is a body as human without a brain and, so, without The Brain of Power and Might in the socio-cultural imagination. The question, then, is whether neuroscience can adapt and abandon the object orientation sitting at the center of its name.
‘The Brain Is the Screen’ Is Another ‘BwO’
The neural-centric interpretation of Deleuze and Guattari’s (2002) statement, ‘the brain is the screen’ situates The Brain as figurative expression of the human with neuroscience providing the definitive representation of the self and the organ serving as ‘the ultimate cause of personality’ (Johnson Thornton, 2011: 91). In some ways, foregrounding rote biological processes might overturn a Western socio-cultural obsession with the self-made, agentive, dominating human, that is, Man. Equally, and paradoxically, putting the emphasis on the brain runs the risk of reifying Man.
As many in the social studies of science have noted, the contemporary neurosciences are informed by, or guided by, present social and economic conditions (Choudhury et al., 2009; Johnson, 2011; Priest, 2016), entangled in cultural conceptions of gender (Fine, 2010, 2013; Schmitz and Höppner, 2014), reproducing different contemporary categories within the making of brain science (Campbell, 2010; Jack, 2011; Jordan-Young, 2010). Not surprisingly, then, Coulter is able to argue that neuroscience confuses its own study with socially salient ‘metaphorical constructions’ that are ‘radically misleading’ (Coulter, 2008: 20). As he says, ‘Brains do not receive, transform and process “information,” they form no “representations” and they do not “store”’ (Coulter, 2008: 20). There are too many ‘purely conjectural attributions to brains’ built from cognitivist theorizing while ‘linguistic and social’ components are extracted (Coulter, 2008: 21). Similarly, van Ommen and van Deventer (2016) are able to note that ‘the neurochemical self’ or the ceaseless self-monitoring of the body (Rose, 2003), displays a striking ‘similarity to the neoliberal subject’ – precisely because economics and neuroscience are not swirling in separate spheres (van Ommen and van Deventer, 2016: 573). Put simply, neuroscience more often cooperates with than negates discourses promising self-understanding, control over the body, prosperity and personal empowerment, and traditional social and psychological stability. 2
The question arises, in reference to Rose’s (2016) imaginings, as to whether neuroscience could ever present a new, alternative ontology. If to escape the grip of this current reigning ontology humans must be undetermined, not predestined, entwined with living environments, and reverential as to possible futures, then the contemporary brain sciences dedicated to universal knowledge based on computational factors, linear processes, mechanistic descriptions and genetic development overwhelming phenomenological differences may not be made compatible quickly. 3 A neuroscientific turn or biological turn, 4 without turning away from current organizing principles and being willing to revise laboratory practices, stands little chance of undoing old rational-ideological formulas to promote a new divergent ontology.
Deleuze seems aware of the limits of neurobiological insights. His writings situate the brain’s processes as inspirational for a philosophy about molecular entanglements, but neuroscience as a literal investigative practice is not Deleuze’s route for undoing representational thinking or re-imaging the self. ‘The brain is the screen’, as case in point, sits in a conversation about the cinema; therein Deleuze (2000) ties neurobiological structures explicitly to social ones, saying, ‘The circuits and linkages of the brain don’t preexist the stimuli, corpuscles, and particles’, stating that good stories fit the fast speed of cinema and produce an inseparability from the image (Deleuze, 2000: 366–7). That is to say, Deleuze is interested in how things mesh or come together; he does not point towards neuroscience as savior nor does he flag an epistemological problem of being a human with a brain while relying on that brain to understand one’s self as human. Deleuze, rather, seems to call attention to the difficulty in differentiating between Things – anything at all, including brains – amid complex material-social co-construction. Although Delueze may be making a statement about taking matter into account – crafting, perhaps, another contrast to theorists such as Derrida (see Coole and Frost, 2010: 89) – the notion of the brain and screen as collectively co-constructed when watching (and making) cinema radically rejects the neurocentric, scientific privilege in the idea that neurobiology alone produces worlds for us.
Flaxman (2000) interprets Deleuze as initiating a broader attempt to ‘deterritorialize the cognito, the rigid “image of thought” that in one form or another has dominated Western philosophy’, such that Deleuze ‘compels us to return to the cinema, to see its images in light of our own captivity to the rituals of representation’ (Flaxman, 2000: 3). If Flaxman correctly identifies Deleuze’s ambition to ‘hijack’ circumscribed thinking with intentionally ambiguous statements like ‘the brain is the screen’ (Flaxman, 2000: 3), then ‘the brain is the screen’ is not a call to discover a new ontology through neuroscience; doing so risks reifying representational thinking by celebrating brain representations as direct illuminations of concretized human Being. Rather, Deleuze offers a call to ‘supersede representational categories’ (Flaxman, 2000: 4).
However, after years of Deleuzian-inspired cultural theory across numerous field areas, Rose (2013, 2016) retains good reason to reference Deleuze while bemoaning the sweeping, ambiguous analyses that aims to reject representational thinking through creative artistry but ‘usually conclude merely with the general claim that human bodies are simultaneously biological and social’ (Rose, 2013: 13). Rose, rather, prefers that humanists embrace science and perform ‘genuinely transdisciplinary’ work that shoves past vague ‘vitalism’ (Rose, 2013: 17). As Rose puts it: Who needs vitalism when the complexity of living systems can be broken down into describable interactions between specific kinds of parts, their living processes can be reverse engineered, the parts and their properties can be freed from their origins in any specific organism, and reassembled, first in thought, then in reality, to produce whatever outcome you can dream up. (Rose, 2013: 21)
Of course, some scholars may resist reimagining Braidotti’s ‘nomadic ontologies’ as alternative scientific practices. Resistance to representational thinking and totalitarian orders inherent in nomadic ontologies loses, seemingly, some of its punch. The ruthless inessentiality of the nomadic life presumably cannot be subject to the strict discipline of neuroscience. But the goal of a nomadic ontology is not to abandon order but to reorient a relationship to ordering and to expand potentials. Deleuze surely intends the force of his own statement about ‘the screen’ to inspire action that can unravel the screen as an icon of representational practice. Likewise, dislodging the stability of ‘The Brain’ expands the intervention. Further, if Rose is correct in noting that ‘vitalism’ has reached the end of what it can say about bodies and environments being entwined absent direct, specific mechanisms and scientific engagement, then applying a nomadic ontology to the processes of neuroscience seeks new grounds for engagement. The effort to describe a (nomadic) body without a brain suggests practical shifts, putting the onus on the sciences to look outside ‘the organ’, seeking alternative ways to interweave biology and sociality; to keep out of scientific practice is to cordon off nomadic ontologies, which would be the narrow, self-disciplining move.
Realizing what neuroscience might one day become means inventing new ideas, and this is where the phrase ‘the brain is the screen’ is useful, especially when explored in context of Deleuze’s other writings. Namely, living material processes highlighted in Deleuze’s works attempt to dissolve artificial distinctions between inside and outside, a movement visioned as a way of doing. The Fold (Deleuze, 1993) provides a good example. There, Deleuze imagines art as a series of ‘wrappings and unwrappings’, wherein a sculpture might extend into its base and then into the room and then across the city, becoming an ecological art favoring the blurring of distinctions, folding the people and the buzz of the city into itself (Deleuze, 1993: 123–4). Ecological art so conceived is a comment on the artist’s practices as much as on any defined form. With this bold vision, Deleuze suggests that Western philosophy, likewise, must embrace the idea that human behavior cannot be divided from the environment (Deleuze, 1993: xiv). This basic ontological reorientation towards ‘a continuous variation of matter’ (Deleuze, 1993: 19) repeats itself in Deleuze’s call to become ‘a body without organs’ (Deleuze, 2002: 158).
Although Deleuze’s ‘body without organs’ (BwO) is a ‘common currency of today’s academia’ and outright over-deployed (Zizek, 2012: xxi), setting this unique – and, again, intentionally ambiguous – phrase in conjunction with ‘the brain is the screen’ gestures towards a rejection of the sense-making of techno-scientific processes dead set on segmenting the body to determine the body-as-body, including the body-as-a-brained-body. For Deleuze, a BwO is a ‘plane of consistency’ that cannot be ‘tied together’ with all the other BwOs. A BwO is a freedom from ‘a great abstract machine’ pretending that it can order the multiple (Deleuze, 2002: 158). Thus, Deleuze speaks against ‘the organization of the organs called the organism’ (Deleuze, 2002: 158). The BwO is merely where ‘the alluviations, sedimentations, coagulations, foldings, and recoilings that compose an organism – and also signification and the subject – occur’ (Deleuze, 2002: 159). The body as a BwO ‘unfurls’, and if it has organs at all, then they are not ‘a subject of enunciation’ because the body opposes ‘disarticulation’ for examination (Deleuze, 2002: 159–60).
When considering Deleuze’s other works and his intervention in the history of Western philosophy, the ‘brain is the screen’ looks more like a statement about the illusion of stability than about privileging biological processes. Material interchange becomes so exceedingly complex, Deleuze seems to say, that the brain and the stomach fold, the stomach and the meat fold, the cow and the grass fold, the grass and the sun fold, the sun and gravity…Everything swims in the middle of a milieu upholding existence (or we might say an existence).
In Deleuzian terms, if ‘the brain is the screen’, then there is no brain. The ‘more profound’ is not the overturning of Man in favor of The Brain of the contemporary neurosciences, for this is the same old representational image enunciated and disarticulated. Instead, an ontology now governing The Brain looming large in our collective imagination shifts to ‘something more profound’ (Rose, 2016: 159) only when the brain as organ disappears from view and we refuse to adopt The Brain as ultimate signification for the subject. Yet, as Rose (2013) notes, the way forward is less likely to be creative theoretical performance and more likely to be a mutual, interdisciplinary engagement that reorients concrete disciplinary practices. Fitzgerald and Callard make a similar statement: ‘What if social scientists and humanists moved away from conceiving the domains of the neuroscientific and experimental as the unchallenged province of the brains sciences?…[Can we] think some more creative and entangled ways of exploring?’ (Fitzgerald and Callard, 2015: 5). We can.
Losing the Brain in Neuroscientific Practice
Following Rose’s (2016) review of innovative work on ‘mind reading’, I look to journal articles produced by Dr Jack Gallant’s University of California Berkeley cognitive neuroscience laboratory as an official record of activity documenting the processes by which minds might be ‘read’ and ‘translated’ in the neurosciences. 5 Treating these texts as a case study in the formation of neuroscience practice demonstrates how there is no brain.
The claim extends Sampson’s (2017) argument that the brain is a human/non-human ‘assemblage’ emerging through ‘access to material and expressive resources’ in an ecology (Sampson, 2017: 137). Sampson places his focus on ‘a sometimes puzzling set of interactions’ that set ‘components of sense-making into relation with each other’ (Sampson, 2017: 122). Although Sampson pushes beyond a unitary and supervening brain, he focuses on an image of ‘subjectivity in the making’ without necessarily reimagining scientific practices (Sampson, 2017: 146). For him, neuroimaging can ‘open up’ the organ even if it will never succeed in finding the self (Sampson, 2017: 195). Amid a compelling discussion of ‘radical relationality’, Sampson’s project is primarily about de-ontologizing the self and not about undermining the domineering object of The Brain or a re-realization of neuroscientific ways of doing or seeing (Sampson, 2016: 39).
In fact, Sampson’s (2016) ‘assemblage brain’, with its strong focus on theoretical terms, risks recalling Rose’s exhaustion with ‘vitality’, highlighting how a project of freeing The Self has, at least since Deleuze and Guattari (2002), turned to a philosophy of ‘radical relationality’ (Sampson, 2016: 39); yet still neuroscientific practice churns onward in neural-centric modes and discourses. Demonstrating how brain decoding already expresses the ‘radical relationality’ that Sampson and other theorists now propose – without the scientists necessarily recognizing it as such – seeks engagement from a slightly different angle. Realizing neuroscience as cobbling together a unitary brain from diverse relations poses a basic question: how do the practices of neuroscience contribute to making its object of study something brainy?
If the practices of neuroscience write a living material organ as a brain(y) organ through a confluence of material expression, human social cooperation and technological intervention, then de-ontological dispositions already latent in neuroscience may hold potential for new arrangements and ecologically oriented reinventions. To be clear: the argument is not that a material Thing called ‘the brain’ is not participatory in human behavior but that processes of decoding this brain undercut the concept of a disconnected brain-organ that generates thinking of its own power; showing humans and machines arranged in specific ways to define the brain’s braininess enables a second discussion of how the neurosciences might rearrange practices to discard remnant Enlightenment rigidity and undo The Brain as a synechdoche for the human and, eventually, rethink the object orientation of its study and expand its purview.
Decoding the Brain
In the cognitive neurosciences, so-called ‘mind reading’ is the practice of decoding visual imagery from brain activity (Huth et al., 2016). In Gallant’s early studies, neuroscientists aim to design mathematical/computational models for reconstructing static images being viewed by participants lying in functional magnetic resonance imaging machines (fMRI); the models are, essentially, algorithms that comb fMRI data and then predict which image the participants saw among a set of images (Kay et al., 2008; Naselaris et al., 2009). Other studies from Gallant’s laboratory focus on reconstructing short film clips in an effort to understand the visual system’s capacity for movement in a setting presumably closer to everyday action; in these cases, areas of the brain responsible for movement, depth, etc. are correlated through predictive algorithms to guess at images appearing in the film clips (Huth et al., 2016; Nishimoto et al., 2011).
To do this work, neuroscientists must craft configurations across at least six components of practice: (1) the fMRI scanning machine, (2) the participant, (3) the images used in the study, (4) the computer algorithms categorizing the images based upon various distinctive image qualities, (5) the mathematical formulas for reducing noise and choosing the parameters of measurement and (6) the statistical algorithms for correlating all of the fMRI data with the image data in order to determine success rates. Thus, to construct scientific knowledge about the visual system, a six-step process must be enacted before arguing for predictive success, ranging between 40% and 80% (Naselaris et al., 2009). First, neuroscientists must choose an image set. Second, neuroscientists must feed the pre-designated set of images into ‘a “pattern classifier,” which is a computer algorithm that learns the visual patterns associated with each picture or concept’ (Smith, 2013: para. 10). Third, neuroscientists must run a ‘maximization optimization algorithm’ enabling the computer to choose only a few images or a few film clips with a high probability to evoke responses in pre-identified brain regions; the algorithm uses past neuroscience data to predict the voxels that will fire. (Note here that a voxel is spatial term relating to the fMRI machine’s measurement of a tiny brain space containing between a hundred thousand and a million brain cells [Yuhan, 2012].) Such algorithms – and there may be more than one – are connected to structural features (like darkness and contrast) and/or semantic features (like human versus animal) likely to excite specific brain areas. A resulting structural-semantic model can then predict which areas of the brain will fire. As Naselaris et al. (2009: 906) explain, the ‘semantic model reflects the probability that a voxel “likes,” “doesn’t like,” or “doesn’t care about”’ a particular category previously deemed present in an image. Fourth, neuroscientists must find suitable research participants, usually five to ten right-handed individuals in their twenties or thirties with no neurological disorders, perfect vision and willing to lie completely still in a brain scanner while cleansing themselves of any overblown emotional reactions (see Cuzzocreo et al., 2009; Mather et al., 2013). Fifth, neuroscientists must ‘reduce noise’ within the model by limiting the number of voxels included, deciding on how much neuronal response time should be taken into account, ranging between 5 and 15 s; this step is needed as an fMRI machine detects the movement of oxygen through the brain, a process delayed from the firing of neurons. The neuroscientists must also then ‘smooth’ the data to bring out certain probabilities and reduce noise from the fMRI machine (Huth et al., 2016: 6). Finally, neuroscientists must develop statistical algorithmic methods, combining fMRI brain scans with the structural and semantic models to determine success, deciding on levels of significance and reporting on different levels for the various possible methods of analysis.
The steps outlined above are not detailed to enhance skepticism about neuroscientific processes but to foreground the complexity of those processes. One way to see this work, of course, is as an elaborate technical apparatus mapping the brain; the other way is as an ‘epistemic apparatus’ (Knorr-Cetina, 1999) composing socially validated knowledge about the brain, touching materiality but thoroughly forged through socio-cultural expectations about scientific practice. The former, grounded in scientific realism, derives methods that can unearth universal knowledge; the latter, grounded in post-structuralism, derives methods that are difficult to overturn because they have explanatory power or fit within the expectations and discursive trends of the social field. The third way – forwarded with New Materialisms – positions ‘materialization as a complex, pluralistic, relatively open process’ wherein matter shows resilience within certain conglomerations of many different interacting agencies (Coole and Frost, 2010: 7). Given this kind of compromise position, neuroscience does not compose a brain out of social and linguistic air alone but, rather, foregrounds the braininesss of the brain in tandem with its expressions as manifest through practices conducted inside of social arenas where there can exist agreement about what is happening; yet, still, the brain gets all the credit in the documentation of these expressions.
The disarticulated organ lives, and the machines, algorithms, formulas, scientists (and their background negotiations and assumptions), as well as the participants’ eyeballs, nerves and gastroenterology, as well as the light streaming through the windows and the smell of warm bread lingering in the room, are all ‘black-boxed’ or, as Latour (1987: 3) says, the investigators ignore anything that is ‘too complex’ in the interests of making science. ‘No matter how controversial their [blackboxes’] history, how complex their inner workings, how large the commercial and academic networks that hold them in place, only their input and output count’ (Latour, 1987: 3). In this case, oxygen molecules in the brain serve as the output and the shadows on the visual stimuli serve as the input; what stirs amid them is too uncertain for algorithmic accounting.
Of course, the goal of neuroscience is, as the name implies, to study the nervous system in an experimental way, and thus a supremely focused and disciplined way. Yet, in naming its object, neuroscience risks limiting its view. Current practices are organized to preserve the specificity, measurability and replicability required. For this very reason, ironically, the neuroscientists conducting brain decoding forge ornate sets of practices that enable them to argue for mathematical correlations among shades of black in an image versus the measurements of machines detecting oxygen molecules in blood vessels. That is to say, they look quite narrowly and specifically at their data and tangentially at neuronal activity. The brain’s agentive power – what makes it brainy – is a disciplined conceptual-material conglomeration theorized from compilations of practices that make data that can then be argued as reasonably relevant to a person’s reported mental phenomena (see Logothetis, 2008). And it seems to work, most of the time. However, once brain decoding is understood in this way – as a set of scanners, functions, rules, probabilities and observations – the brain’s exclusive claim to braininess begins to fade. Or, from whence braininess arrives and what else can be measured and argued as intimate to mental projections of, say, images, proves enticing.
A material Thing called ‘the brain’ stirs in the cranium, of course, but its scope is expanded or restricted and it is endowed with more or less agency through what else comes into appearance in arrangements of practice. Like Mol’s (2002) diseased body with multiple realities that come into visibility differently depending on the doctor’s practices, braininess is also a set of relations tied to attributions of the ‘mental’, configured in the neuroscience laboratory. To re-see neuroscience in this practice-based way – not as a field about transparently exposing an organ – is to open up possibilities of seeing braininess as compositions of many bodies performing actions, or seeing bodies and technological environments as participating in braininess. Although the braininess of the brain may, arguably, appear more ‘brainy’ than the rest of the body, braininess congeals as a concept in isolation when it continually turns back to the brain-organ in self-defining loops, dominated in its definition by measured neuronal activity. A revised view of neuroscience – as an investigation of ‘nomadic’ transformations of relations – cannot but call into question the meaning of braininess itself.
If the age of Man is, as Rose (2016) argues, to be undercut and recomposed by the neurosciences, then the brain-organ must explode, and The Brain of cultural Power and Might must, as Nietzsche says of God, die. Indeed, if Nietzsche (1986) argues that rejecting Plato’s metaphysical division between the light of truth and human shadows results in a situation where ‘nothing more remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself’ (Heidegger, 1977: 61), then nothing more remains. Another way of saying this is that The Brain upon the throne of science and culture fails to learn the old lesson of Narcissus who, in looking at himself and falling in love, dies by ignoring his intimate reliance upon everything else in his environment.
The ‘binding power’ that Nietzsche proclaims as resolutely dead seems endlessly to rise again to assert new values and ideals as the arbitrators of fact, limiting possibilities for meaning (Heidegger, 1977: 61–2). As Ehrmantraut (2016) notes in a discussion of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche: ‘modernity does not bring an absence of belief or faith but rather a change in the objects of belief’, a new line of authority (Ehrmantraut, 2016: 766). To avoid a continual return of the same through the contemporary neurosciences, the task, for now at least, involves peering beyond the endless resuscitation of a ‘binding power’. For today’s world, a nomadic ontology valuing the constant flux inherent in life should rattle the absolute authority of The Brain, motivating a new circumference.
Of course, neuroscientists studying visual image reconstruction will continue to find success. They will one day ‘directly picture subjective mental phenomena such as visual imagery or dreams’ (Naselaris et al., 2009: 911). To get there, they will need ‘advances in brain signal measurement, the development of more sophisticated encoding models, and a better understanding of the structure of natural images’ (Naselaris et al., 2009: 911). However, unpacking the technical apparatus illuminates the crucial role of choosing comparisons, of excluding everything from the neurotransmitters streaming up from the gut to the color tones of the lights used in the laboratory, while devising algorithmic predications that, in turn, provide data that compose the extents and limits of braininess. Instead of a brain, what could tumble into view are many computational machines, mathematical formulas and disciplined discourses intervening at one point in a single moment of living. When neuroscientists study the brain to decode the mind, they predict what a million neurons will do and have some success, but any organ, any unitary Thing, as Deleuze and Guattari (2002: 157) remind us, is an ‘immanence’ unable to be disarticulated.
Neuroscience after The Brain
Neuroscience may well continue with the organ in the tradition of Man. However, the more profound change is the rejection in practice of the disarticulated organ and the attendant socio-cultural privilege of The Brain. Seeking change is, always, undoubtedly, a long process; yet, six speculative proposals for experimental investigation stretch towards making neuroscience a (more) nomadic discipline (Braidotti, 2006b, 2011). These recommendations may do nothing in the end to revise an ontology entrenched in the image of humanistic Man. Then again, they might generate reaction or compel some rethinking of what comes to be made brainy, imagining what neuroscience can do for and within social realms with respect to exposing bodily relations and environmental dependencies.
First, in a nomadic neuroscience, the organ would be experimentally situated as structurally and functionally dependent on those exterior bodies that instigate its expressions and enable its life. Examining a non-unitary brain requires experiments not artificially cut off at the neuronal level, not evaluating an output at the edge of a black box, but a study of the interactivities of neurons, chemicals, lights, bacteria, sound waves, etc. Dedication to a non-unitary brain requires speculation about a new neuroscience that remains operative only outside its current conception as the science of the brain – always simultaneously inside and outside a brain-organ – configured within measurements of multiple sets of bodies in action. The single study may well track movements of oxygen molecules but only in terms of ecologies. The methodological procedure must be relentlessly multiple – of the body, its blood, the bread, reassembled for salvation from Descartes’ realm where divided and self-guided Man rules over earth. The goal would be to make brains visibly contingent in practice.
Second, inductive experimental protocols wherein the measured neuronal response is presumed as directly related to the experimental stimulus would be ruthlessly stretched at the edges. Shifting the arrangements and intensities of variables offers opportunities for falsification and reinterpretation. Looking to brain decoding as a case study, the current rules for the selection of images and participants limit possibilities for unexpected findings, much more for expanding claims to lived experience in a sensory-rich world. The recycling or sharing of data within a laboratory where the approaches and assumptions may be quite similar further complicates reimagining the brain-organ to see how it operates as a middle ground of complex relationality (see Uttal, 2013: 74–6). Testing the extent of the reliability or rigidity of neuronal pathways requires shock and surprise. In brain decoding methodologies, for instance, algorithmic models are considered successful when correctly predicting which voxels fire in response to images containing structural features (like darkness and contrast) and specific semantic features (like human versus animal), obtaining this success from repetition of exposure to sets of pre-selected images/stimuli with those precise features. Testing the edges, in this case, could mean introducing deformity and surprising intermingling (shades of grey and chimeras), publicizing as a matter of professional obligation when models no longer work, exploring as a matter of crucial complexity the environmental variables (orange and blue disco lighting on the image) that push models into uselessness and unsustainability. The idea is to play with/in the presumed correlation made between the object (say a set of neurons) and the stimulus (say a set of images) by allowing the arrangement to entertain a pre-consigned outside.
Third, to reorient neuroscience towards the nomadic vision, the so-called ‘typical brain’ or ‘normal brain’ enabling data comparisons would be seen, at least in some cases, as an impediment, not a necessary point of entry. Examining the ‘normal brain’ of the right-aged, right-gendered, right-handed, right-emotionally-minded participants is the brain that is being made brainy. This collective informs neuroscientific interpretation such that answering a question of what it means, say, for an artist to have ‘disgust centers light up’ when meditating on her own death in an fMRI scanner even though she does not herself sense disgust 6 is an interpretation seeking to align her with other studies (see Prophet, 2015). Disgust – as one example – proves a term of pattern and of convenience. What the artist feels is a complex mix of time, place and task, that is, the affectabilities of meditation practices, musical associations, cafeteria lunch digestion, smells of cleaning fluid and the cold temperature in the room, all during a set of experimental guidelines promoting ways of looking that see through precedent. Nobody doubts that those same areas of the brain lit up in ‘normal’ test participants who previously smelled a strong cheese and called it disgusting, but the interpretation risks putting a brain made brainy in front of the brain of the artist at the moment. Of course, defining ‘normality’ functions to provide useful comparisons, to establish the parameters of the abnormal, and to indicate when medical intervention may be needed; but it also builds an image, as Herbrechter (2013: 6) argues, of ‘what it means to be human’ predicated upon social psychological inscriptions and medicalizations across ‘gender, race, class, culture, etc.’ Welcoming the risk that the introduction of a multiplicity of bodies brings to neuroscience makes an attempt to follow Braidotti (2006c: 186–7) when she argues that Deleuze positions the ‘value of sexual difference’ precisely in it being a ‘negotiable, transversal, affective space’ full of potentiality. Decisions about who or what appears neurologically out of the norm may, likewise, be a negotiation that responds to the inclusion of lived environments and whole body experiences, understood as harboring potentiality for both the person and the science.
In saying this, it should be noted that recognition of a vast and complex spectrum of brain structures and functions already increases in the neurosciences, as does stress on the usefulness, even efficacy, of comparisons between so-called ‘normal brains’ (Dumit, 2011; Klein et al., 2015; Sidtis, 2007). Cognitive neuroscientists Fillard et al. (2007: 639) prefigure this basic disciplinary shift when they note how very different brain structures can be ‘even among normal subjects’. Studies comparing multiple sets of varied participants may also better align with social theory affirming ‘conceptual creativity’ and desiring fantastical re-embodiment as resistance to political and cultural control, regulation, and systematization (Herbrechter, 2013: 3–4). Finding ways to complicate the normality versus abnormality paradigm positions neuroscience to shift from locating a common nature of brains – an enterprise that builds-in the internalized organ orientation towards the human and the regulation of behavior – to the particularities that arise within lived dynamics and affecting complexes. Moreover, learning how or why specific delineations of normality shift over time offers another means of reflectiveness about the discipline’s own technological, cultural, material co-developments.
Fourth, scientific studies claiming to perform reproducibility of bodily exchanges might choose to situate repetition as illusory and foster devotion to active experimental moments. A nomadic neuroscience could never find another precise experimental staging. Experiments in what Bennett (2009: 13) calls a ‘vibrant’ material environment would presume hidden divergences. Attention to experimental and bodily difference is already, of course, a value of the sciences but one easily backgrounded amid an effort to establish a point of fact and build ‘fixed structured systems of meaning’, as Bazerman (1988: 5) puts it. Scientific studies clearly value contingent claims based on the experimental protocols; however, not pursuing closedness of matter in experimental confirmations and, instead, writing matter as always in-contingency resituates the body, ontologically, as replete with ranges. Bodily permeabilities to momentary interactions replace, as a matter of interest, soldiered efforts to produce exacting replication.
The broader ‘we’ of publics can live with this. In fact, many scientists recognize that if there is a replication crisis in the sciences, then it is not only, nor even predominantly, about bias or error or the need to fulfill the terms of a grant project; rather, the crisis is generated by the timing of a research project, the social and political climate, the drift of a scanner, the wording of a survey that eliminates participants, the affective intensities of different dogs in two images of barking dogs used as comparable stimuli. To resolve the so-called ‘crisis’, then, requires foregrounding a nomadic territory and configuring a more appropriate relational dedication to what it might mean in practice to set out to replicate. 7
Fifth, a focus on particularities in attempts at replication raises the issue of animal studies and how they might best support studies on humans. Bracken (2009: 120) argues that animal studies serve as a common foundation for hypotheses but ‘often do not translate into replications in human trials’. Reasons include the way that animals are observed, the differences in laboratory techniques, and, as Bracken (2009: 120) argues, the significant lack of systematic reviews of animal studies compared to human studies. But more to the point is a wide range of animal species and their variable relations to environments. Keifer and Summers (2016: 1–2) recognize ‘the diversity of adaptive neural solutions that organisms have evolved to overcome environmental challenges’, suggesting that ‘neuroscience research utilizing a rich diversity of animal model systems rather than just a few established ones [namely, lab-raised mice] significantly enhances our ability to discover fundamental molecular and physiological principles’. Looking across animals seems likely to provide benefits, but disentangling the environmental co-development of different species in order to compare them and their behaviors in a way that enables the derivation of overarching principles applicable to humans and their behaviors proves a complex task. Implicit recognition of this occurs when Keifer and Summers consider the turtle and the bat in relation to the mouse and then conclude that naturalistic settings probably need to be designed to expand understanding of neurobiology, that is, environmental co-development must be taken seriously in relating brain structure to function (Keifer and Summers, 2014: 2–4). Yet determining the ‘naturalistic’ requires some rhetorical and experimental staging that can impede the overarching goal of observing natural environments. Watching film clips while lying down in an fMRI scanner, as Gallant’s brain decoding lab proposes, for instance, may be more ‘naturalistic’ but not at all ‘natural’ (Huth et al., 2016). A nomadic neuroscience, in step with posthuman theorizing, would play within and critically tease out ideas of the ‘naturalistic’ – those presumed conceptual ties being made between behavior and environment. Further, because many animals’ lives, unlike humans’, must truly change to support experimental interventions and can literally rest in the hands of a project group that may have an ambiguous view of what value studying an animal in X setting might hold, then the experimentation itself would consider animal susceptibilities and changes, applying the same ‘critical analysis of nuance’ of animals’ behaviors to the researchers and their behaviors (Keifer and Summers, 2016: 4). That is, if appeals to ‘naturalistic settings’ support going forward to do animal research, then a nomadic neuroscience asks what kind of ‘naturalism’ current designs and technologies sustain, and whether the study, in turn, supports the potential value and reasoning for doing it.
Sixth, a nomadic neuroscience would enact performative interpretations of data in discussion sections of articles outlining what this all means. Injecting a self-aware mistrust of the representational enterprise serves as ‘contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies than they deserve’ (Barad, 2007: 133). In the context of neuroscience articles, this could take any number of forms. Composing overtly speculative sections relating neural systems to theoretical ideas about the body, or astrophysics, or deep sea life, presents opportunities for comprehending, in new and previously incomprehensible ways, the actions of neurons and the stunning, seemingly sudden, attentiveness of mind. As Epstein (2016: para. 21) argues, we need new ways of talking about the brain and new stories to tell to guide the research, to ‘account for behavior without reference to any aspect of the IP [information processing] metaphor’. Neuroscience must find its own ways, but becoming much more literary in its expressions does not necessarily undercut its rigor.
Each suggestion, a kind of speculative, creative-critical proposal, generated from the entailments of a process ontology, privileges fluidity over stagnation and configuration over segmentation. A neuroscience of the future, one released from the need for strict Modernist regulation to generate viable claims, will dive into the middle and expunge neurobiology as the end point of a processual chain, rejecting neuronal pathways as ‘the binding adherence’ (Heidegger, 1977: 118). As a taken-for-granted, what comes to constitute science-as-such in a nomadic vision is an orientation towards experiments of change. Finding ways to reimagine scientific practice in small turns that congeal with a contemporary ethos of relationality and mutuality while remaining dedicated to human betterment on a basis of bringing materiality into appearance is a task that can establish the character of the enterprise.
Folding the interior into the exterior that precedes and enables neurobiological processes invites the sensual relations of contemporary cultural theory – which hope to coax out into open view another ontology – to participate in composing factual determinations of neurobiology, making fluid exchanges part of the process of interdisciplinary ‘entanglement’ (Fitzgerald and Callard, 2015). Gutting the neural-centric conception to reaffirm a body that lives only both inside and outside at the same time – a kind of Schrödinger’s cat of a body – reimagines neuroscience as the nomad, a disloyal interrogator of a disloyal materialist encounter bound in practice, forever in-situ, open to the world. Culturally, then, the nomadic neuroscience is a project of abandoning the stultifying narrative of The Brain to Become another neuroscience studying another body replete with other kinds of yet unseen braininess(es).
Embracing ‘the more profound’ (Rose, 2016: 159) is to embrace Nietzsche and proclaim The Brain is dead. De-ontology taste-tests combative and compatible relations across many living bodies with/in environments. Only from a fluid conception of the body can Deleuze ever be so bold as to say, ‘The brain is the screen’ at the same time as asserting that we are, or should strive to be, ‘a body without organs’. A brain-organ cannot be an organ, cannot be any longer an artifact embodying the illusion of Man’s agentive power, but must now be a pivot point of manipulability in no way independent. Only with this in mind can neuroscience study ‘us’.