Target America: Visual Culture, Neuroimaging, and the ‘Hijacked Brain’ Theory of Addiction

Extract

The historical study of drugs and addiction has always been a broadly interdisciplinary venture. Conferences and edited volumes on intoxicants and intoxication frequently include contributions from medical researchers and addiction treatment professionals alongside the usual give and take between historians, literary critics, and social scientists. The exchange is rewarding but the interface can be difficult, particularly since the mid-1990s as new theories of addiction and their rhetorical means of dissemination have become all but paradigmatic in the neurosciences. This new ‘brain science’ argues that neurological function, in this case addiction, can be pictured, mapped, and studied in real time, inside the skull of a living subject. The case has been argued in fascinating presentations based upon vividly detailed brain scans—visual images produced by the latest and most advanced digital imaging technologies. Seeing seems to be believing, and humanists and social scientists, most of whom understand addiction to be at least partly a socially constructed rather than an empirical or strictly physiological condition, have found themselves on the defensive. ² After all, if we now know what addiction really is , then studies of its past construction lose much of their critical edge. Relegated to the status of antiquarian amusement, historical studies threaten to become mere illustrations along a teleological pathway that winds toward the final triumph of science over superstition. Just as remarkable is that this reaction to a set of pictures comes from people who are sensitive to and often have expertise in reading visual images.