Theory & Event

William E. Connolly’s Neuropolitics is the first effort to bring recent advances in neuroscience to bear on political theory in a sustained and systematic way. Others have alluded to the suggestive implications that these advances might have, especially with respect to the role that emotion plays in political judgment, but no one has gone as far as Connolly to make these implications explicit. As usual, he is on the cutting edge of things. The book demonstrates his fearlessness and his virtuosity as a theorist, and it fruitfully challenges prevailing views within political theory about the nature of thinking, the meaning of culture, and the conditions of self-cultivation. It also inevitably raises questions about Connolly’s own view of the nature and scope of democratic politics and the normative grounds of judgment and action.

The argument of the book emerges in three parts. The first offers an account of thinking that shows in careful detail the feedback loops that connect bodies, brains, and culture and demonstrates the complex relationship within thinking between affective and cognitive modes of consciousness. Too many political theorists, Connolly says, reduce thinking to cognition, or situate it in a wide band of transcendental regulations that curtail its inventiveness, or contract it into a bland intellectualism that neglects its affective sources (1). Empirical studies in neuroscience and neuropsychology by researchers such as Antonio Damasio, R.V. Ramanchandran, and Joseph LeDoux have shown instead the constitutive role of affect in thought and judgment (9). Their findings indicate that action-oriented decision-making is always framed by affect-imbued, preliminary orientations to perception and judgment, which serve to scale down the material factored into cost-benefit analysis, principled judgments, and reflective experiments (35). These preliminary orientations, or isomatic markers, make decisions easier and faster for human beings whose chamber of consciousness is slow in pace and limited in capacity (35). Moreover, studies of persons in whom the brain regions associated with affect have been impaired show that in the absence of affect human beings are unable to reason their way to practical conclusions. To decide on a course of action, it turns out, it is not enough to know the advantages and disadvantages of various alternatives, we must also care about some of them more than others. Practical thinking transpires on the terrain of affectively constituted dispositions, desires, and concerns. To illustrate the ways in which affect and cognition interact within thinking and judgment, Connolly draws extensively on cinema, for films communicate affective energies to us, some of which pass below intellectual attention while still influencing emotions, judgments, and actions (13). Reflecting on our thoughts about a film can help to illuminate the ways in which the engagement of affective sensibilities shapes our thinking. More on the role of film in a moment.

Connolly’s description of thinking addresses what he sees as the inadequacy of rational choice theory and deliberative democracy, both of which he regards as excessively ‘intellectualist’ in their conceptions of practical reason (17, 21, 82, 85). He also means to correct contemporary cultural theory, which he criticizes for its inattention (or incorrect attention) to biology. Many cultural theorists today could profit from a layered image of thinking that is not located above biology, or shaped by a reductionist reading of biocultural relations (59). The affective concerns and desires that figure in thinking reflect the full interpenetration of nature and culture. Indeed, part of Connolly’s objective is to challenge the classical distinctions between culture and nature and to replace them with interacting layers of biocultural complexity (61f).

Given this account of thinking, the nature of ethical life and the political practices that support it are bound to look significantly different from how they are often construed by political theorists today. This is the second part of Connolly’s argument. Political theorists too often act as if ethics and politics do, could, or should consist of deliberation alone (17). They mistakenly believe that affective modes of consciousness can be “overcome in a rational or deliberative...