Negotiating neuroscience: LeDoux's "dramatic ensemble". (October 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: van Ommen, Clifford; van Deventer, Vasi
• Other Names: Lux Vanessa guest-editor.; van Ommen Clifford guest-editor.
• Is Part Of: Theory & psychology. Volume 26:Number 5(2016:Oct.)
• Page Start: 572
• Page End: 590
• Publication Date: 2016-10
• Subjects: critical neuroscience -- différance -- neoliberal subjectivity -- neural subjectivity -- neuroculture; Psychology -- Periodicals; 150.1
• DOI: 10.1177/0959354316659555
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0959-3543

Abstract

Some argue we now live in a "brain society" in which our subjectivity is increasingly mediated through neurological discourses. Unless we are to surrender neuroscience to neoliberal colonisation, we need to articulate effective forms of engagement with this discipline. One route is to read mainstream neuroscience texts for resistances they offer to the homo economicus . Instead of a terrain that inevitably leads to neoliberal conclusions, we find a materiality in excess of dubious ideological circumscriptions. In this article we engage with Joseph LeDoux's notion of the self as a "dramatic ensemble, " where the self is a vulnerable, constantly reiterated achievement marked by the partial and passing play of dominances. Simultaneously, however, LeDoux undermines this account by evoking a traditional notion of the self. This play of tensions is articulated and an argument is made to privilege a subjectivity which both resists LeDoux's flight from his own implications and neoliberal assumptions of subjectivity.