Constituting neurologic subjects: Neuroscience, subjectivity and the mundane significance of the brain

Abstract

What are the links between neuroscience and personhood? This article explores this question empirically through the lens of ‘neurologic subjectivity’. Drawing on focus group research, we examine how individuals draw on both neuroscience and the neurological to articulate subjectivity. Our participants’ talk demonstrates the importance of ideas about the brain for understanding their selves and others. However, reference to the brain was not a thoroughly dominant discourse; rather, neurologic ideas may be accepted, played with, and resisted. Thus, the brain is an object of ‘mundane significance’, often distant from everyday experience. We argue that individuals can best be understood as bricoleurs, piecing together diverse knowledges pertaining to soma, psyche and society: neuroscientific concepts compete with, integrate into, and only occasionally fully supplant, pre-existing notions of subjectivity. It might therefore be argued that it is, in part, through the sociological gaze itself that neurologic subjectivity is constituted.