I'm sitting here working on another major project for another class this evening and thinking that the writer I am studying would have a lot to say about our debate, but he would, were he not dead, have a very unique way of approaching the problem to define it.
Michel Foucault is one of those philosophers that many of you who are in the sciences will never have to read; we of the humanities are probably divided into those who roll their eyes when they here Michel's name, and those who are rabid, avid fans of his entire oeuvre. I fit neatly into no category of which I can think, but I do admire the direction of Foucault's work - and since he is fresh on my mind, I would like to lean on him a bit for this post.
Foucault would offer up, in my opinion, some sort of history of the relationship between our bodies and the power that is exerted over our bodies; power exerted by the political, the medical, the psychological, the social - all of the forces which, in one way or another, exert an influence upon and create the body. Pinker, our Harvard professor with an endowed chair (endowed by whom? The Johnstone family. - who the hell are they?), instructs us that he has answers for us, and that most of what we thought we knew was wrong - as an author and, therefore, an authority, as a "legitimate scientist" (soft science, granted) speaking from the very heart of American legitimacy (do you doubt Harvard's authority or legitimacy in our iconography?), Pinker is power.
The web of legitimacy and authority, the center of which M. Pinker occupies, need not distract us for long at this point - but the dude has credibility. The relationship between Pinker, a symbol of power - scientific, political, others? - is what must concern us here; Pinker tells us that we are much less blank at birth than all previous science has argued. That Pinker mocks us all by involving himself in questions of constitutional law, democracies and human nature - speaking as he does in polemical diatribes - is for me the sign that I may now discount much of what he has to say, because he could not possibly be an expert in all of it. He is, for all intents and purposes, a well educated talking head who likes to make news.
Foucault would then take a nice hard look at our neuroscientists; he would probably do a Robin-style exegesis on the GSR (galvanic skin response) contraption and reprise for us all of the horrible and questionable uses to which it has been put. Foucault might then go on to discuss ways in which the very processes of our bodies are used as evidence to prove the ideas and ideologies of power - political and scientific (the two can never be separated - where does science get the majority of its money?) and other social sites of power. The relationships between Brang, et al, and Pinker, to we, the non-authorities, are relationships of power. We are, collectively, society; each of us separately, however, are a body (our OWN body, literally) - and we are being told by power how our bodies work. We are being told with authority and legitimacy, by the credible and the author, by the elect and the elite, "this is what you are - there is no need to look beyond this point, we've got it all under control. Just send us some more money for some awesome research - we'll tell you what is and we'll tell you what is not." Does this sound at ALL familiar, people? Pay no attention that man behind the curtain!
To accept Pinker, you must accept his words that a belief in an afterlife, "necessarily devalues life on Earth" (7), and that "every moment of consciousness is a precious gift" (7). These are moral matters and questions of personal choice, what have they to do with psychology and expert authority? Is this the message we (or the Johnstone family) are paying for? And Brang, et al, argue that their finding that three times as many apotemnophiliacs want their left limb cut off instead of their right, combined with a GSR-study of dubious fundamentals and some anecdotal comparisons drawn from patients suffering from brain trauma, is a perfectly wonderful justification for some (probably government sponsored) major funding money to be sent their way for a ten (fifteen? twenty?) year study to be conducted.
My point is that the power and the science are never far apart - in fact, Foucault, in "Discipline and Punish" says:
We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. (27) [emphasis added]
How does this all tie back to our class debate, you ask? For me, we live in a time when all of our relations to each other have become based upon material and financial relations of power. You can not cut off your own leg without requiring a lot of medical attention ($$). You can not have your leg cut off professionally without an ethical problem for the practitioner ($$ - and lawsuit). You can not have an amputation prescribed by your psychiatrist ($$, lawsuit, and loss of license). Nor can you convince a dedicated/obstinate/incurable/incorrigible (or disordered, via lobular deformity) apotemnophiliac that, seriously, keeping it is better than losing it. None of these things can be achieved without relations of power grinding against each other; additionally, the gringing is neither unidirectional nor is it of comprised of consistent frequency, on the contrary, the grinding is dialectical and multi-faceted.
Every scientific "advance" we make will open new questions of power and ownership and body (and ownership of the body). Thank God we have classes like ours to stop, breathe, ask. We can not decide, but if nobody asks, we will not have to wonder about "Brave New World", we will be living it.
Yay us.
Hm. "If nobody asks." I agree with you that asking in these scenarios is completely necessary. This also makes me think about another question that has come into my head repeatedly since this class started: "Why ask?" or really more like "Is the asking helping?"
ReplyDeleteIt seems that the sort of power being held over people as you describe, by research that is venerated by institutions, is also a result of asking questions. Is our desire to quantify and get to the bottom of human nature serving us? To that end, I am really further agreeing with you, by agreeing that we should be careful how much power (and which powers) we give to science.
On an anecdotal note, a few years ago I spent some time traveling in India and spent about two weeks of it at an ashram. In addition to hours a day doing yoga, eating on the floor with our hands in silence, and hanging out by the Ganges, we also had an hour or two of lecture each day, during which time the Swami of the Ashram, Mata-ji, would tell us about Hinduism, the traditions of that particular ashram and the stories of the Ramayana, etc.
I don't know if you are familiar with any of these stories, but they include things like a monkey man bringing a peak of the Himalayas back to help a friend who needed some herbs, the story of a goddess whose husband replaces their child's head with an elephant after accidentally chopping it off, that sort of thing. Most of us were from places dominantly Christian, and therefore had heard stories that aren't entirely "logical" before. Nonetheless we got this sense that Mata-ji really took them at face valoue in a way we couldn't grasp. So we would try to tease out a sense of whether she meant things more metaphorically, whether the monkey man was a symbolic monkey man, or some nod to evolution or...and how could he *really* bring a whole mountain back for Sita. For the most part she looked at us a little exasperatedly. Looking at us like "Why would you bother to ask that?" It wasn't important to worry about how it happened, but to find the meaning elsewhere in the stories.
I became aware by the end of the two weeks how incredibly strong this impusle for it all to make SENSE--logical, scientific sense was for the us westerners. We just couldn't stop ourselves from going in that direction, whereas she seemed more easily be in a space of accepting the story and living from the story, entirely apart from a need for physical logic. We kept having these sort of "come on, now, really? it's the two-thousands" reactions. She was working from a different sense of reality and human experience. (I don't know, did she cultivate that or was it a cultural thing?)
I'm not trying to go the direction of saying that evolution doesn't exist or that the world is only 10,000 years old, or that there is no need for science, just acknowledging that maybe our need for scientific proof can get a little . . .religious.
Hi Julie,
ReplyDeleteI think my point was very much about not believing what we are told because of who tells it. Indeed, I might be much more accepting of a monkey-man story on the banks of the Ganges because a wise man tells me than I would accept a talking-head from Harvard whose only wisdom comes from his authority. I'm a spiritual person without a religion, and I believe those persons who are sharing something instead of grinding an ax.
I love the way you write - very convincing and incisive. Thanks for the thought provoking comments.
Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI will say I was more convinced by the power of the Ganges than the power of any of the individual swamis we met there. It was a magical place.