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Sex, cash and neuromodels of desire

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Abstract

In the twenty-first century’s biological culture, pleasure and desire seem to be widely reconceptualized as processes of the brain. The neurosciences of sex and money are two fields of crucial interest in this cerebralization of desire. On the basis of a cross-reading of neuroimaging studies of sexuality and of neuroeconomics, I analyze the specific notions of desire/pleasure at work in the neuroimaging experiments. What is lost, and what is claimed to be found, in the neurosciences of desire for sex and cash? With particular attention to notions of rewards, I argue that transfers of metaphors from neuroeconomics naturalize economized notions of sexual desire. Moreover, I argue that neuroeconomics and the neuroscience of sex essentialize desire as the drive of our behavior, and that this, in turn, relates to the neurosciences’ re-invention of the social in the terms of a late capitalist society.

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Notes

  1. Brain activity is not measured with such functional neuroimaging methods. Rather, these methods track changes in the magnetic properties of the blood (in fMRI) or the site of cellular consumption of radioactively marked metabolites (in PET) and assume that these changes are related to changes in brain activity. Historically and in terms of experimental psychology, such methods for functional neuroimaging also owe to the use of electroencephalography earlier in the twentieth century. For the sake of textual smoothness, I sometimes use phrasings such as “brain activity” or “brain activation data” as shortcuts, with the expectation that readers keep in mind their literal inexactitude.

  2. This point has been made, among others, and in more specific terms, by historians of biology and feminist science scholars, for instance Fox Keller (1995, 2000, 2002) and Haraway (1989) (cf. also Fujimura, 2005, p. 208).

  3. The caveat is that most brain regions are involved in many different kinds of reactions and behaviors, and therefore they cannot be attributed with an unambiguously defined function. Psychologist Fine (2010) explains that the practice of “reverse inference”, that is, making claims about pscyhological processes on the basis of attributing functions to brain areas is a no-no of neuroscience (pp. 151–153).

  4. This latter view has also been subjected to critique within neuroeconomics (see, for example, Ainslie and Monterosso, 2004; Schüll and Zaloom, 2011).

  5. This consumption-centered description of human behavior is, of course, only one specific economic account of human life. There are many alternative – and consumption-critical – definitions and descriptions of what economic behaviors consist of, for instance emphasizing instead production and exchange. Thanks to Alexandra Waluszewski for pointing this out.

  6. To appreciate the contemporary intellectual history of the notion of rewards in the scientific description of human behavior would demand the unpacking of a deep multidisciplinary history of key concepts in psychology, sexology, economics and the neurobiology of addiction. There we would have to pay special attention to the interactions and translations between these fields, and between them and non-scientific contexts, in the twentieth century. We would probably want to follow the linkings and unlinkings between concepts such as need, drive, desire, motivation, but also want, will, like, pleasure, satiety and satisfaction. This is, of course, a project of a whole other focus and scope than the inquiry undertaken in this article. To the best of my knowledge, the history of the notion of rewards in psychology is yet unwritten. The ‘reward circuitry’ of the brain was first written about in the 1950s by biological psychologists Olds and Milner (1954), and became important to the then nascent psychobiology of motivation (cf. Thompson and Zola, 2003). But as a concept, rewards was also playing a role in, among others, behaviorism and theories of learning (Leahey, 2003), and behaviorist and psychoanalytical theories of emotion in turn resonating with different cultural and ethical-religious contexts (Mandler, 2003).About metaphors in the history of psychology, see Leary (1990b) and especially Leary (1990a). About economic metaphors in biology, see, for example, Worster (1987).

  7. This echoes, although with a different argument, the “libidinal economies” explored by Vrecko (2011).

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Acknowledgements

I want to thank my colleagues for their response on earlier versions of this article presented at the following meetings: “Neurosociety … What is it with the brain these days?” (Oxford, 2010), the workshops “Broar och brott mellan det biologiska och det sociala” (Ystad, 2011), “The Moral Economy of Life Science” (Vadstena, 2011), and “Bio-Objects for Europe?” (Vienna, 2011), the Queer Seminar at Stockholm University, and the seminar “Visualizing the Brain: Re-conceptualizing Selfhood, Desire and Sexuality through Neuroimaging” (Lund, 2012). Special thanks to the editors and anonymous referees, as well as Janne Bromseth, C.-F. Helgesson, Anelis Kaiser, Cynthia Kraus, Tora Holmberg, Petra Jonvallen, Francis Lee, Anna Morvall, Shai Mulinari, Kerstin Sandell, Steve Woolgar, my colleagues from the neuroGenderings network and from Tema T, Linköping University for helpful discussions and comments. This article is based on research funded by the Swedish Research Council, Vetenskapsrådet, for a project originally developed together with Ingeborg Svensson at the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, with support from the Vetenskapsrådet Excellence Program GenNa and the Body/Embodiment working group.

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Dussauge, I. Sex, cash and neuromodels of desire. BioSocieties 10, 444–464 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2014.23

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