You’re
unlikely to have missed Alissa Quart’s op-ed piece ‘Neuroscience– Under Attack’ the other week in the New York Times.
Indeed it has caused, or so it appears, some considerable stir in and
beyond the tiny (one assumes) sub-universe of the social-media-sphere
peddling in ‘neuro-doubt’; appreciations in the more visible
online formats – including Psychology Today, The New
Yorker, or NPR - were quick to celebrate the news that,
apparently, ‘neuro-criticism’ now must have ‘hit the
mainstream’. The ‘backlash has begun!’
The
impression, of course, that the era of untrammeled neuro-fandom is
somewhat beyond its peak is probably quite correct - whether or not
the New York Times is in fact a good indicator of things
becoming ‘mainstream’ (given the flurry of reposts etc
in the case at hand, it might be a better indicator of the
intellectual universe traversed by the more neuro-minded people);
and whether or not things becoming ‘mainstream’ is necessarily a
good thing (as a cultural snob might doubt). At any rate, perusing
what Quart’s recent intervention seems to have precipitated in
terms of ‘backlash’ is, on the whole, somewhat disheartening:
almost invariably commentators chose to pick up on the term ‘brain
porn’ only, (mis)interpreting the piece as merely condemning as
a bad and risible Thing ‘pop
neuroscience, coarsened for mass audiences’ and more broadly, the
‘popular press’ and ‘simplified pop’ produced by
sensation-mongering and, well, ignorant and unscientific science
writers. The Real Neuroscientists here, busy unearthing their
unsettling Truths about Human Nature; the public mob there, incapable
of understanding and thus poised to distort.
It’s
a reassuring and conveniently naive construction, of course - if one
that would seem to fall short of everything one might be able to
learn about the presumably more intricate mechanisms of knowledge
production, neoliberal and otherwise (but especially neoliberal).
It’s thinking, one might paraphrase it, as ‘sloppy’ as Naomi
Wolf’s. Incapable, it seems, of entertaining even a slightly more
complex narrative than there being some problem with the merchants of
‘brain porn’ – which, it’s worth pointing out, include some
Big university presses (rather than, as tends to be intimidated, a
lot of shoddy ‘science writers’) - much of the recent and rather
blinkered ‘backlash’ indeed more properly is labelled
damage-control (of course, ‘if we want to understand our minds,
from which all of human nature springs, we must come to grips with
the brain’s biology’). Quart’s piece admittedly didn’t help
it by prominently featuring, and slightly misrepresenting, a Neuron
survey from earlier this year as concluding that, apropos those
regular-distortions-by-the-media, ‘logically irrelevant
neuroscience information imbues an argument with authoritative,
scientific credibility.’ The latter proposition was due to McCabe
and Castel’s much belaboured ‘Seeing is believing’ (2008); said
Neuron
authors – without a hint of doubt that indeed neuroscience has
‘profound social and policy implications’ - for their part simply
assumed that ‘brain research is now a powerful rhetorical tool’
(plausibly enough), while venturing, for instance, (in a more
content-oriented mode of analysis) that a ‘particularly noticeable
feature’ in all those popular ‘assimilations’ of neuroscience
was ‘the focus on brain optimization’ (something unlikely the
fault, one assumes, simply of either short-hand: the ‘media’ or
‘neuroscience’).
Either
way, and rather tellingly, the story of popular distortions featured
quite prominently in the Quart-aftermath, still further incensed by
yet another recent study on the ‘seductive allure’ of fMRI -
albeit one geared towards questioning the inherent seductiveness of
such visual devices (i.e., ‘The seductive allure of the ‘seductive
allure’’). The
very prominence of such a somewhat scholastic debate in a putative
‘backlash’ might make it seem trivial enough - and, to be sure, not
particularly rising above the popular, common sense (An
image is worth a thousand words)
or what’s been intuitively grasped, somehow, by every Jesuit
counter-reformer and propaganda ministry (Ars
Magna Lucis et Umbrae etc).
More to the point: though largely immaterial, it might tell you just how mainstream the putative
‘mainstream’ really is: Framing things as matters of ‘distortion’ or some psychology of ‘persuasion’ first, and then reducing them
to a clever experimental design, would seem to
be a strategy squarely in line with the very naturalistic,
biologizing tendencies the enemies of ‘brain porn addiction’
allegedly take issue with (the pathology-infused wording itself is
revealing in this connection). It certainly would seem to tell you very little
indeed about ‘brain porn’; and even less about the cultural and
intellectual climate within which it thrives.
But then again, perhaps
small wonder: that ‘larger
cultural tendency’ which Quart also gestured at, one ‘in which
neuroscientific explanations eclipse historical, political, economic,
literary and journalistic interpretations of experience’, barely
has been registered by any kind of ‘mainstream’, let alone
pondered in ways worthy of the name ‘critique’; it certainly
didn’t figure much in the ‘backlash’ of late, and neither did
those ‘humanities
scholars who question the way that neuroscience has seeped into their
disciplines’, as Quart put it. That, of course, might not be a topic of potential mainstream interest; but even for that to become productive, a little
more will be required than some ‘pop-neuroscience’ witch-hunt.
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