Technoscience,Neuroscience, and the Subject of Politics

Although narrative models have been employed for quite some time in historiography, in sociology, and in certain psychoanalytic theories, the tendency towards narrativization has also become more dominant in reference to the positive sciences. This article presents two postmodern versions of the narrative dissolution of certain modern scientific-metaphysical concepts in the wake of the establishment of technoscience and neuroscience: Vattimo's Heideggerian account of technoscience as immanent pluralization of worlds, and Dennett's cognitivist account of the emergence of the plural self. Both claim not only that former central agencies like the Cartesian cogito can be dismissed as metaphysical but that narrative pluralization entails an (at least implicit) endorsement of liberal democracy as the only viable political model today. Employing arguments put forth by ?i?ek and Malabou, some of the deficiencies of this affirmative short circuit of technoscience/neuroscience with liberal-democratic politics will be examined.