120 CONCLUSION
The latter strategy is important because it has become clear that reveal-
ing the bias of scientific representations is not, in the end, enough.^ If cri-
tique is limited to addressing the historicity of scientific claims or unveiling
their normative character, the biological materialities themselves are left
by the wayside, to be picked up by those who do not feel queasy about
finding truths in nature. The problem is not merely that truth claims are
being made — that, in their hubris, scientists forget Thomas Kuhn’s lessons
in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) and treat their findings
as unadulterated facts. The issue is also that brains and bodies and lives
will be changed, partly in relation to how brain knowledge is enacted. For
example, neuroscientific practices that address attachment will affect the
clinical management of reproduction and could also produce oxytocin as
a prosocial drug. Particular enactments of biosocial plasticity may inform
educational policies that literally target brain regions, and populations,
for modification. It would do little good to dismiss hormones, or brain
plasticity, as immaterial constructs, or as representations that matter only
because they are symbolically meaningful. An adequate response to these
phenomena must not only recognize the power of scientific knowledges to
create objects or to produce normative models for body- subjects — for ex-
ample, good students and citizens, ideal mothers, or reproductive families.
It must also acknowledge the material specificity of bodies, their ability to
change and be changed, which is entangled with (but not reducible to) how
they are understood. The stakes, then, are onto- epistemological. They in-
volve how neurobiological bodies are known as well as what they are, what
they can be, and what they can do.
The inadequacy of exclusively representational thinking is revealed when
one is forced to attend seriously to a particular body. One can say (to use a
stark example) that neurological accounts of Phineas Gage’s brain injuries
underwent revisions as the theory of localization waxed and waned. With
the benefit of historical perspective, it is easy for scientists and clinicians to
admit, “our ideas about the function of the frontal lobe have had a torturous
and ambiguous history and are still far from clear” (Sacks 1995).^ Indisput-
ably, though, Gage had an iron rod thrust through his skull. So, while it
is necessary to address the varied ways neurologists understood his brain
injury, it is not reasonable to say that they had no business thinking about