The Political without guarantees: Contagious police shootings, neuroscientific cultural imaginaries, and neuroscientific futures

Abstract

This chapter explores the aspirational applications of neuroscience to society and argues that such efforts bring with them a distinctive political program that seeks to reduce social, cultural, and political conditions to neurological and thus naturalistic phenomenon, where humans are situated as objects rather than subjects. Rather than critiquing the faulty inferences and base assumptions of recent neuro-rhetoric, this chapter instead addresses the reification of those qua neurological languages into governing practices. Doing so reveals the ways that two broad motifs, transcendence and determinism, contribute to the formation of this political program and how both motifs may well also reveal prospective futures for governing through the brain. In so doing, Casper seeks to demonstrate more generally that the assumptions and excessive enthusiasms that have mediated the expansion of somatic and mechanistic concepts into the cultural imaginary are already beginning artificially to harden scientific findings into governing inferences. That is, theories and ideas broadly understood to be under constant negotiation among scientists and clinicians are increasingly being resurrected in the form of absolute truth statements about human conduct and nature.