1. Going Large! Foucault, Experiénce and Neuro-science David Flanagan

2. Mind the Gap A theory of experience is not itself experience My presentation is not about the truth of experience, it is about a theory of experience In Foucault’s terms, it is both truth and fiction

3. What is experience? ‘the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life...’(William James, 1892) the contents of consciousness (Wilhelm Wundt, 1897) to encounter or to feel something (OED, 2011) etymologically, to try or experiment

4. Foucault’s Experiénce an event dangerous emotive, visceral dynamic and unstable it has a history, a present and a future

5. What does neuroscience tell us about experience? free will blindsight

6. Free Will? Libet’s (1984, 1985) experiments

9. 2 scenarios: 1) Conscious self:

10. 2) Embodied experience:

11. Conclusion? Even when we believe we are choosing consciously we may not be One further example

12. Blindsight Patients with damaged primary visual cortex V1 Presented with stimuli and asked to identify it Better than chance success rate and improves with training Patient’s have some visual processing without conscious awareness of visual stimuli

13. non-conscious perception is continuous experience is embodied experience is embedded It exceeds the limits of our conscious awareness Conclusions?

14. Foucault’s oeuvre demonstrates that our embodied experience of our worldly context pre-disposes our feelings, thoughts and behaviours

15. Case study: Madness

16. Foucault’s Big Question: Does our concept ‘madness’ correspond to its object?

18. Mental illness is:

19. an event – it only exists in societies

20. emotive – fear, shame, guilt

21. active - its boundaries are porous and socially produced

23. If mental illness corresponds to its object (madness) why is this man….

25. More likely than this man…

27. …to be diagnosed with schizophrenia? And why is this woman…

29. …more likely than this woman

31. …to be diagnosed with anxiety disorders or hysteria?

32. ‘Sanity or psychosis is tested by the degree of conjunction or disjunction between two persons where the one is sane by common consent’ (Laing, 1960: p.36).

33. Conclusions? If madness corresponds to its object, why the differential diagnoses? Do we need a theory of racism, or a more useful theory of experience? As a society, our experiments in existence pre-dispose our behaviours, thoughts and feelings If I tell you what you should do, rationally, it simply isn’t enough Research has to challenge your experience – to transform how you experience your existence That was Foucault’s project

34. What should we do? Produce research that challenges our experience of ourselves Resist the temptation to ‘psychologise’ human experience Expand rather than reduce the horizons of social research Take seriously the notion that experience is something we do, not something we discover