This is the first in a four-part report from the workshop, ‘The Future of the History of the Human Sciences,’ which was held at the University of York, 7-8 April 2016 (see a storify form the workshop here). The workshop was jointly hosted by HHS and Chris Renwick (History, York), and was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and the University of York. Here, David Saunders (postgraduate student at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, Manchester) reports on one of the workshop’s core problematics: The Problem of The Human.

“We very much hope that this is an event where we can all be provocative and disagree with each other,” notes Felicity Callard (editor-in-chief of History of the Human Sciences) in her opening address to the attendees of the ‘Future of the History of the Human Sciences’ conference. The event’s first session, ‘The Problem of the Human’, sought to address the human sciences’ most central, and yet most frustratingly illusive, subject of inquiry – the human itself. The death of the human as a philosophical and scientific category has been endlessly prophesised and postponed over the years, from Michel Foucault’s oft-repeated prediction of man ‘erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea’ (Foucault, 1966) to more recent concerns regarding the supposed overthrow of ‘selfhood’ by ‘brainhood’ facilitated by the emergent neurosciences (Vidal, 2009). Discussions among historians and human scientists about the uncertain ontological status of the human clearly continue to foster the kind of passionate and provocative disagreement that the event’s organisers had hoped for.

In the first paper, ‘Resisting Neurosciences and Sustaining History’, Roger Smith (Emiritus Reader in the History of Science, Lancaster) expresses his scepticism regarding the supposed novelty and radical impact of the neurosciences on conventional ideas of the human. Rather, Smith argues, materialist explanations for sentience have been present since the nineteenth-century and have had a very limited impact on the daily lives of ordinary people. Instead of neuroscientific colonisation, Smith sees the persistence of non-neuro understandings of the human, drawn from diverse sources such as folk knowledge, religious belief, and the social sciences. For Smith, any claim that these bodies of knowledge will all become subservient to the neurosciences is extremely questionable. Thus, rather than the replacement of one body of knowledge by another, Smith wishes to focus on the relationships between ways of knowing and being.

Such an approach structures Smith’s current research on the history of kinaesthesia. For Smith, movement provides a privileged entry point into engagements between the neurosciences, literary and cultural studies, and historical research, brought into contact via a shared interest in embodied knowledge and experience (e.g. Berthoz and Petit, 2008). This interest in touch and movement is not a recent development, Smith argues, but instead has formed a central preoccupation for philosophical inquiries since the time of Aristotle. Ultimately, Smith proposes, this recognition of the complex historical ontology underpinning modern concepts of the senses reminds us that all psychological categories of human experience are ‘up for grabs’ in future historical studies.

Steve Fuller’s (Sociology, Warwick University) following paper, ‘Kuhn’s Curse and the Crisis of the Human’, directly critiques Smith’s conceptualisation of the human. Fuller begins his paper with two pervasive influences in the history of the human sciences: Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault. Fuller argues that the one of the key tenets of Kuhn’s approach to history is frequently overlooked: his belief that historical studies can only be conducted on issues that have long since been resolved. Thus, writing histories of the human necessarily requires a Foucauldian perspective in which the human has ‘come and gone’ as a distinct category of being. However, Fuller argues that this perspective has been lost through the work of Ian Hacking, which he proposes has distorted Foucauldian thinking in a way that protects the special ontological status of the human and phenomena such as free will and autonomy (Hacking, 2002). The ensuing philosophical confusion, Fuller contends, has fuelled transhumanist debates.

Transhumanism, Fuller argues, is ‘not ashamed’ to talk about human issues of free will and autonomy, but rather questions whether the biological body, as bequeathed by evolutionary processes, is the only platform from which one can hold such discussions. Instead, Fuller suggests that a greater embrace of technology and cyborg forms of living is required. What emerges from this, he argues, is an ‘anti-Foucauldian’ view of the human in which ‘the human is not dead; it is going to be resurrected’. The role of history in this process, Fuller posits, is to recover alternative and long-forgotten paths in medicine and science that will legitimate and provide past precedents for the technological breakthroughs of future generations. Thus, historians’ attempts to reveal the contingent nature of current scientific orthodoxy, and to look again at paths not taken, has more than academic value; it provides a glimpse of the histories that future generations will use to make sense of their own understandings of human nature.

Jonna Brenninkmeijer’s (Behavioural and Social Sciences, University of Groningen) paper, ‘The Case of Neuromarketing’, provides an empirical perspective on these conceptual visions of the human. Utilising observations from fieldwork in a neuromarketing company, Brenninkmeijer outlines how neuro-practitioners in marketing have constructed a vision of the human as overly-complex, self-deceiving, and ultimately unreliable. These practitioners have thus turned to the brain to provide more straightforward, and thus commercially profitable, answers. For Brenninkmeijer, neuromarketing research ‘dehumanises’ consumers, removing the uncertainty and contradiction of human experience in order to gain reliable, quantitative results. Thus, the use of neuroscientific technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) provides opportunities to map out emotional and subjective responses and standardise and predict consumer reactions.

Ultimately, Brenninkmeijer contends that neuromarketing research fuels a conceptual dichotomy in which humans and brains are equated with deception and truth respectively. This also creates tension between experimenters and participants, with the former frequently frustrated by the difficulty and complexity of managing human subjects in a research environment. Brenninkmeijer concludes that this tension between human and brain cannot be resolved by these neuro-practitioners; even when brains give uniform and commercially useful ‘answers’, the free will, autonomy, and resistance of human subjects will continue to frustrate their agendas.

In many ways, it seems to me that the human that emerges from both Smith and Brenninkmeijer’s papers demonstrates notable similarities. In both accounts, the human is irreducible to a single conceptual category or body of knowledge, retaining its ability to confuse, surprise, and frustrate historian and human scientist alike. However, Fuller departs from this vision of the body, downplaying the current biological form of the human as merely one phase through which humanity will eventually pass. Divisions between these competing visions of the human continued to surface throughout the conference without any clear resolution. Yet to return to Callard’s initial call for disagreement, and indeed the new editors’ introduction for the History of the Human Sciences at this new juncture, these ongoing debates need not be a source of disciplinary anxiety, but might instead provide ground upon which innovative engagements with the problem of the human can grow and flourish in the years to come.

David Saunders is a postgraduate student at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine (University of Manchester). His forthcoming doctoral research at the Centre for the History of the Emotions (Queen Mary University of London) focuses on the rise of the neurosciences in British post-war epilepsy research as part of the Wellcome Trust Collaborative Research Project ‘Living with Feeling‘