THE SOCIAL BRAIN AND CORPOREAL POLITICS 3strict division between biology, as that which is given by nature, and poli-
tics, as that which is amenable to social contest and transformation.
All of these assumptions are being challenged. The mind is now widely
defined as equivalent to, or as emerging from, the brain. This neuroscien-
tific turn began with biological psychiatry, which transformed the view of
mental illness into the study of neurochemical disorder. Then, in the 1980s,
a new model of cognition, called connectionism, allowed cognitive science
to become relevant to the study of the organic brain. Over the next two
decades, the field’s boundaries with neuroscience eroded. The brain sci-
ences have since made deep inroads into philosophy and other disciplines
interested in the mind. Emboldened by paradigm shifts, new experimen-
tal methods, and the advent of functional brain imaging technologies, the
brain sciences also have spawned subfields such as social neuroscience and
cultural neuroscience. These aim to study not only the individual mind/
brain but also intersubjectivity, social relations, and cultural differences
through neuroscientific methods. Massive financial investments are but-
tressing these efforts to explore human experience via neurons, neurotrans-
mitters, neural networks, and brain regions.^3
The brain sciences also inform contemporary understandings of the self.
Nikolas Rose and Joelle Abi- Rached (2013) argue that in the twenty- first
century, neuroscientific and neurobiological concepts play a prominent
role in identity. Rose (2006) depicts the contemporary “neuromolecular”
style of thought as an extension of the somaticization of the individual
that began in the late twentieth century. Somaticization brings the physical
body and health to bear on conceptions of the self, personal identity, and
citizenship.^4 Neuroscience is opening up that management of the self to
new brain- based practices of care, enhancement, and optimization, includ-
ing pharmaceutical interventions. But far from individualizing the human
and reducing her to neurons or brain chemistry, the neurosciences are em-
bracing a fundamentally social conception of the brain. Thus, Rose and
Abi- Rached argue, the ascendance of neuroscience is not “a fundamental
threat to the human and social sciences,” but rather an “opportunity for
collaboration across the two cultures” (142).^5
These reassurances notwithstanding, the prospect of neuroreduction-
ism remains deeply worrying for many critics, as I discuss below. But while
the mind has been materialized, understood as equivalent to or emerging