Des Fitzgerald: “my research life”

We outlined a few questions for Des, and here is what he said, a sort of narrative personal story:

BB: How did you come across your field of study?

DF: I have to admit, I came to an interest in the neurosciences through a fairly circuitous route. Actually, my real intellectual interest, up to quite recently, was in the practice of psychiatry. And I was interested in psychiatry because I was interested, broadly, in the encounters between things like knowledge, and experience, and personhood; and it struck me, as a would-be anthropologist, that mental disorder (specifically: major psychosis) often mediated and conjoined these categories in odd and interesting ways (Foucault was among the obvious influences here). Unfortunately for me, this thought had also occurred to a whole other generation of scholars – many of them, I’m sorry to say, quite good – and, as I began to really think about my research, I wasn’t at all sure that there was a great deal left to say on the topic.

BB: So you found some new inspiration?

DF: Yes, this changed when I really started to delve into the psychiatric research journals. Because the more I read first-hand around the field, the more I started to think that twenty-first century ‘psychiatry’ was not entirely– to misuse a term – a thing in itself; that it increasingly deferred to a background object upon whose authority the legitimacy of its knowledge was founded. And it became apparent that this object wasn’t the mind, and it wasn’t behaviour, and it certainly wasn’t subjective feeling – though these all remained important. Instead, that object was now the brain – that innocuous, fleshy lump inside your head – and it was the brain, or an idea of it at least, that seemed to provide, for an increasingly influential body of people, some sort of meeting-point between the conditions of knowledge, the foundations of experience, and the status of the human. I’ve taken up the (‘social’) study of the neurosciences, then, because I’m increasingly convinced that if mental disorder can still, today, translate between both the knowledge and the category of the human, it can only do so because it speaks, so fluently, the language of the brain; but also that it can only speak, in this mode, of a particular kind of disorder-in-the-brain – one that’s constantly shifting and moving, that is both ideal and material, and that has the capacity to ricochet, and translate, between people and experiences, heads and machines, images and scientists (here, I must also acknowledge the influence of Bruno Latour [1993, 2005] , and other works that fall under the broad rubric of what has come to be called ‘Actor Network Theory’) .

BB: What specifically would you like to research now at BIOS and the LSE?

DF: Thus, I’m turning my attention to diagnostic brain imaging which, I think, is a site from which, via the study of disorder, very concrete, and very authoritative, ideas about the attributes of contemporary personhood – and the relationships those attributes have to knowledge, experience and the social – are emerging. Right now, I’m trying to think about what might be some of the specific transactions that occur between psychopathology and brain imaging. In particular, I’m currently considering (1) what sort of subject it is that is exchanged in such transactions (which very much raises the questions of identity and self-identity. One of the ironies of diagnostic brain imaging, I’m increasingly thinking, is that it partly reconstitutes the space for some sort of autonomous, moral subject), (2) what sort of disorder it is that’s transmitted between these sites (because I’m genuinely struggling to see an ontological equivalence between, say, an inability to attribute mental states to others, and dysfunction in the orbito-frontal cortex, and I’d like to trace the movements between some influential imaging studies and the nosological systems used by diagnosticians), and, finally, (3) what these exchanges say about what we might call ‘the social’ (because, of course, these studies don’t just have efficacy at the level of the individual; they speak, too, of the individual’s capacity, or tendency, for sociality, communication, empathy, and so on – indeed, for their status as a sociological ‘subject’ in the first place).

BB: How would you sum up your research goals?

DF: So, at this very early stage, my general goal is start mapping some of the effects of the new brain sciences, particularly as they emerge from an engagement with mental disorder, and to use some of the above issues as points from which to orient myself as I set about it. Eventually, I hope to have something interesting to say about the relationship of diagnostic imaging to contemporary ideas of self- and person-hood, or something akin to what Joseph Dumit (2003) calls ‘objective self-fashioning.’ But we’ll have to wait and see how that turns out.