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In this article, I contrast humanist and cognitivist discourses, and argue that when humanists distance themselves from metanarratives, cognitivists will effectively commandeer the terrain and claim that one cannot contest cognitivist discourse at all. Since cognitivist science has eclipsed and undermined the humanities in terms of cultural capital and funding, it is important to examine how humanists- in this case, an emblematic critical theorist, Slavoj Žižek, and a novelist, Richard Powers-have responded to its implications. The recurring question is whether philosophy or science has become dominant not just epistemologically, but ontologically; one of Žižek's primary tenets is that "the human being reduced to an object of technological manipulation is no longer properly human" (Žižek, Event 29). But Žižek also a priori concludes material factors cannot wholly account for human behavior, communication or identity. Žižek attempts to bolster the relevance and import of the humanities by asserting its priority and, sometimes oddly, its conservative credentials: "philosophy is in a way more critical, more cautious even, than science. Philosophy asks even more elementary questions" (Žižek, Conversations 25). Even as he decries the effects that scientific manipulation, alteration and deterministic discourses have on human identity, however, Žižek insists that we already are fragmented, "artificial," and determined, but by inherent ontological limitations rather than by pure materialism. Žižek exhorts "philosophers, when we hear that modern science and technology pose a threat to our human identity . . . [to ask] which notion of "human"[?] . . . [As Heidegger suggests], humanist protests against the reign of technology are ultimately futile" (Žižek, Disparities 28). In other words, for Žižek, humanist objections to the way cognitivism and technology dehumanize us, and turn us into determinate and inhuman subjects, erroneously presume that we begin as fully self-integrated humans, and try to preserve some totality we lack as a constitutive feature of our being.
In the second part of the essay, I assess the confluence between Žižek's Lacanian and Richard Powers' humanist narratives regarding science. Both writers view cognitivist sciences as transcendental-for Žižek via the transcendentalism of German idealism and for Powers via the transcendentalism of the American Renaissance- and yet inadequate because, in effect, they are too successful. Žižek and Powers pit the humanist metanarrative against the cognitivist one, and both start...