Abstract
In order to delve into the powerful interpellative allure of brain-imaging, I set out from Althusser’s concept of interpellation to understand how subjectivity is produced, and pose the question of where resistance is to be found? Therefore, I examine the status of the image within scientific culture. Drawing on Baudrillard, I probe the dimension of virtuality opened up by brain image culture. This raises the question of whether the digital brain is resisted by the old analogue psyche? After answering in the negative, I examine how the brain image is constructed from a data-gaze, which, in conjunction with an engagement with theories of iconology, culminates in the somewhat unexpected claim that the sought-after resistance lies in the very status of the image itself.
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Notes
- 1.
See also my remark in the previous chapter regarding how Adrian Johnston wants to reserve a place for Darwinist phylogenetics in his transcendental materialism.
- 2.
See, in this regard, the logic of representation, which I address in Chap. 6.
- 3.
One could object that neuroscience does not necessarily deal with subjectivity per se; some branches are restricted to investigating the general principles of the neural system. One could also put forward the counter-argument that not all neuroscience research results in or aims at the production of brain imaging. However, clearly even the most basic of neurological research cannot but impinge upon the dimensions of subjectivity and the psychological. After all, the locus or terminus of neural tissue is the brain, and the latter is, arguably, the very organ of subjectivity, regardless of how the latter is conceptualized. Moreover, this so-called basic neurological research undoubtedly also produces scientific data which is then subsequently used in brain imaging. At the bare minimum, then, questioning the function of the image within the broader brain sciences might be of value to those branches not directly involved with the psy-factor or with imaging as such.
- 4.
“The stepping out of (what we experience as) ideology is the very form of our enslavement to it” (Žižek, 1994).
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
For an assessment of these kinds of resistance against neuroimaging see, for example, Whiteley (2012).
- 9.
Consider, here, the Greek concept of “exphrasis” which originally concerned not only visually describing art, but language in the broadest sense. As Hermogenes, a second-century ce Greek rhetorician, argued in relation to the literary description of a landscape or a person: it “brings before the eyes the sight which is to be shown” (Mitchell, 2005, p. 3).
- 10.
One could connect this to Actaeon, who after seeing what no mortal should see (Diana’s nudity) and being turned into a stag, is also in the grip of the absent presence. As he is attacked by his own dogs and fails to convey to them that it is him, Actaeon, as Philip Hardie writes (as already cited in Chap. 2), “would like to be absent, but he is present, and he would like to see, not feel as well, the fierce actions of his dogs” (Hardie, 2002, p. 169). In a similar vein, commenting on the metamorphosis of Myrrha, Hardie succinctly writes: “the product of every metamorphosis is an absent presence” (Hardie, 2002, p. 82).
- 11.
- 12.
See, for example, the website “Visual recognition”, a spin-off of the ISLA laboratory of the University of Amsterdam: http://www.visual-recognition.nl/. Although, of course, this could very easily be criticised on the basis of it being an overly artificial assessment of emotions, in which they are divided into a limited array of fixed categories.
- 13.
See Eugene Thacker’s claim that biology is always already digital (Thacker, 2004).
- 14.
- 15.
- 16.
E.g., the BRAIN initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJuxLDRsSQc
- 17.
- 18.
- 19.
Buck-Morss argues that while, on the one hand, Christianity took over much of Roman iconography, on the other hand, once the Roman Empire was Christianised, the connection allowed a transcendent claim for sovereignty (Buck-Morss, 2007).
- 20.
This religious lineage perhaps goes some way to explaining why a number of authors have discerned a religious component to neuroscientific imaging. Slaby, for example, points to the ritualistic and quasi-religious connotations of the fMRI-procedure, in which the operators take on the role of priest-esque figures (Slaby, 2013b).
- 21.
In this respect, De Rijcke and Beaulieu stress that brain imaging is about relating individual data to brain atlases and their data-sets: it is not a process of comparing, they argue; rather, individual scan-data are processed in relation to the “average brain” (De Rijcke & Beaulieu, 2014, p. 136). Or, phrased otherwise, an individual brain is not compared with a standard brain, but is actually constructed as an image starting from the brain atlas. From here, De Rijcke and Beaulieu point to the “normative potential of brain scans” (De Rijcke & Beaulieu, 2014, p. 133).
- 22.
I rely here on Marc De Kesel’s etymological remark on the origin of the word subject; subjectum in Latin, or hypokeimenon in Greek, meaning platform, ground, carrier etc. (De Kesel, 2009, p. 22).
- 23.
This is strikingly similar to Hardie’s aforementioned understanding of the metamorphoses in Ovid as constituting an “absent presence”.
- 24.
Mitchell also stresses the need to distinguish between the image and the picture (Mitchell, 2005).
- 25.
Of course this is still image based language.
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De Vos, J. (2016). The Iconographic Brain: An Inquiry into the Culture of Brain Imaging. In: The Metamorphoses of the Brain – Neurologisation and its Discontents. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50557-6_4
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