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On the Emergence of TechnoSociety by Way of Neuroculturality, for Example

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TechnoScienceSociety

Part of the book series: Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook ((SOSC,volume 30))

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Abstract

In this chapter, Sabine Maasen inquires into the ways in which the neurosciences and neurotechnologies become entangled with selves and socialities. Equipped with new tools and technologies for investigating the brain and the wider neural system, scientists and engineers are currently increasing their understanding of the brain and produce new opportunities for treating disease and damage, as well as applications for use outside the medical domain. This includes devices that interface for machines and computer technologies. TechnoScienceSociality both emerges from, and is acted upon, manifold interactions between various natural and technological, human and non-human fields. Ontologically speaking, the resulting neuro-techno-political ecology accounts for a “mediated posthumanism” (Sharon). Epistemologically speaking, it calls for acknowledging and coping with the primacy of thoroughly entangled knowledges, practices, and values.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For the idea of culturality as designating difference, see Wimmer (2004), for the case of philosophy.

  2. 2.

    “Brains are displayed, pictured, scanned, analysed and treated thus transforming them by scientific industry into academic papers, media spectacles of discovery, education and information, healthier citizens, more compliant workers and consumers – all to enhance national prowess, prosperity, security and so on. A multitude of spaces, aesthetic predilections, protocols, technologies and tools supports and enables this range of practices. There is, so to speak, a political economy of brains, by which the brain becomes invested with a level of hope and expectation that has usually exceeded the ability of science to make sense or use of it” (Kwint and Wingate 2012: 20)

  3. 3.

    “… the converging technologies promise/threaten to reverse the relationship between the natural and the artificial”. Whether by genetic modification, metabolic pathway engineering, Biobricks, the addition of electronic implants, nanotechnological or neurotechnological engineering of organic life. Natural selection, which human culture has already completed with breeding, “is increasingly becoming an unnatural selection of artificial elements. As a consequence, trans- and posthuman life will increasingly be ‘natural by artifice’ (Mul 2014: 471).

  4. 4.

    In this regard, I share Tamoar Sharon’s view of technological mediation in that (bio-)technologies are “active mediators that help shape the relationship between humans and the world“– in a transformative, yet not deterministic way (Sharon 2014: 13). Such a mediated posthumanist perspective makes it possible to account for the mediated character of human existence and its originary technicity, and for the ambiguity of the emerging biotechnologies.

  5. 5.

    A research program on this hypothesis is in preparation.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), Technical University Munich, Munich, Bavaria, Germany

    Sabine Maasen

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  1. Sabine Maasen
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Correspondence to Sabine Maasen .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS), Technical University Munich, Munich, Bavaria, Germany

    Sabine Maasen

  2. Institute of Sociology, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Mainz, Germany

    Sascha Dickel

  3. Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Christoph Schneider

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Maasen, S. (2020). On the Emergence of TechnoSociety by Way of Neuroculturality, for Example. In: Maasen, S., Dickel, S., Schneider, C. (eds) TechnoScienceSociety. Sociology of the Sciences Yearbook, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43965-1_5

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