THE SOCIAL BRAIN AND CORPOREAL POLITICS 7essary to challenge both the naïve empiricism in public culture, as well as
the less naïve, but nonetheless uncritical, empiricism in much research and
scholarship.
In other respects, however, these critiques are no longer fully adequate
to the task. Asserting the importance of nurture over nature, culture over
biology, or representation over materiality has lost its critical purchase. See-
ing biology as irrelevant for understanding the social, for example, under-
estimates the effects of experience on biological bodies, as well as bodies’
own material agency. A view of subjects as cultural rather than biological
or even neuronal, as some have argued, preserves the separate spheres of
mind and brain, the physical body and the experiential one. The idea of
culture as primarily symbolic and transmitted through communication
(Geertz 1973) can obscure the role of bodies in generating and maintain-
ing social structures and meanings. The claim that biology is constructed
through scientific representation can conceal the ways matter acts and even
participates in its own measure (Barad 2007). Ultimately, divisions of dis-
course and materiality, culture and nature can misjudge the stakes, which
are not solely representational. As I put it elsewhere: “brain knowledge is
not simply shaping what we think brains are, but is informing practices that
literally, materially shape them” (Pitts-^ Taylor 2012a).^11
There’s more. The biological sciences are changing considerably, render-
ing many of the critiques of the late twentieth century less effective. Har-
away (1997) writes that science tells many stories, biological determinism
being only one of them. Her point is more and more evident. At the risk
of overstating the case: In the postgenomic era, the sciences have enacted
paradigm shifts that treat the social world as formative for the biological,
see organisms as reflecting the diversity of their environments, and under-
stand history and biology as coconstituted.^12 The idea of organisms as fixed,
static, and determined by natural selection is being challenged in many
realms. Rather than unfolding from genetic blueprints, organisms are being
understood as participating in their own self- organization. Rather than sin-
gular and universal, they are being described as physiologically and mor-
phologically varied through epigenetic and plastic processes. Rather than
working in isolation, organisms are being situated in their environments
and understood as part of dynamic systems. In some instances there is only
a tinkering with biologically determinist and reductionist ideas. In others,