How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Science Studies

This is a response to TTTB's post entitled For a Cognitive Something Something.

It is because of what I think is a fairly similar dilemma to yours, Dr. TB, that I have been getting so much out of science studies recently (by which I basically mean the cast of characters in the David Cayley series How to Think About Science), particularly Richard Lewontin, Bruno Latour, and Steven Shapin.  

My dilemma was something like this: the quotidian anthropology of clinical medicine, which I doubt I need to rehearse my impression of to any of you, is basically neurosymbological.  (I should pause briefly to clarify exactly what I mean when I use this wonderfully concise if rather inaccessible term: when I talk about neurosymbology, I mean "discourse which uses the implicit authority and rhetoric of science to obscure and/or legitimate the operations of ideology," and I mean ideology in the fairly strict Althusserian sense of "cultural formations which function to maintain the relations of production in their present configuration.")  Right: so my dilemma was that the anthropology offered by clinical medicine is neurosymbological, but the alternatives (e.g. postmodern medical humanism, phenomenological re-imaginings of the mind-body dichotomy, etc.) are often equally bankrupt in that they tend to imply, as you put it, a "radical divorcing of thought form any grounding in humans as a biological species."

The two sides of the aporia appear to me to be summarizable as follows:
Culture is infinitely plastic and unconstrained, and all biological explanations are " politically creepy as well as empirically misguided" :: Human consciousness is strictly determined by biology (read: genetics), and all appeals to cultural determination are wish-fulfillment fantasy.

What I've come to believe is the two positions are essentially congruent with the two sides of Latour's "Modern Constitution," in that they represent "purifications" which are both always inadequate to reality.  Latour in We Have Never Been Modern puts in an extremely concise form what I think is essentially the animating proposition of "science studies" generally, which is that any separation of the "natural/material/scientific/empirical" and the "cultural/psychic/humanities/philosophical" is sufficiently artefactual as to have only instrumental utility.

What abandoning the possibility of a distinction between, say, Science and Society means to me is that a non-ideological study of the mind, or of a culture (I'm know I'm mixing methodologies here but I hope this is still coherent) is prima facie impossible.  There is no conceivable vantage from which you could conduct anthropology, or neuroscience, or any related inquiry without simultaneously practicing and elaborating ideology.

But this isn't paralyzing to me in the way that I used to think of the postmodern agon as being; my understanding of Foucault's call to "make the intelligible appear against a background of emptiness, and deny its necessity," (which, incidentally, I have on the inside cover of my copy of the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine) is not quite what you're arguing against, (and, I admit, not quite what the text appears actually to say).  I think of the undefined work of freedom as a project of extending my own literacy in whatever I can convince myself is an accurate determination of the character of the various discourses that structure my life and that I continually interact with and/or strive to liberate myself from.  A case in point would be my ongoing engagment with neurosymbology specifically, where I am attempting to get to grips with the operations and interpellative strategies of a specific, scientifically enacted narrative about the constituents of the human mind which I think has a more or less clear set of nefarious subterranean commitments. 

I think this is something like what you're saying when you write that "there is no fundamental discontinuity between the part that is culturally constructed and the part that has some sort of intrinsic, significant difference," but it helps me to say it from a of view which explicitly isn't invested in either side of the Modern Constitution (not that I'm saying yours necessarily is).

It should be plain that none of this excludes the possibility of studying the mind scientifically (so long as science is understood to be a social activity, and scientific truth a thoroughly cultural product), nor am I so cynical as to presume that all conceivable studies of the mind will be, at bottom, rehprehensible in their narrative underpinnings and the messages the bring back from the fMRI room.