THE SOCIAL BRAIN AND CORPOREAL POLITICS 11its unpredictable or probabilistic capacities. Affect theorists cite neuro-
scientific accounts of preconscious cognition and emotion to address the
ability of the body to transmit information or feeling without need of repre-
sentation.^22 They use neuroscientific work on emotions, which treats them
not as propositional attitudes but rather bodily states, to ground an idea
of affect as prepersonal, occurring before or below consciousness. Some
also cite the neuroscientific literature on mirror neurons to suggest that
social attunements or awareness of others can work at an automatic bodily
register, rather than through intellectualist deliberation.^23 Neurocognitive
processes may allow bodies to act outside of or before the medium of ratio-
nality and subjectivity. Some argue these mechanisms also allow power to
work through the modification of bodies rather than the transformation of
ideas and identities.^24 Preconscious, automatic cognitive capacities are also
the focus of sociologists of the body, such as those who seek to empirically
explain habitus as the effect of bodily practices and habits rather than dis-
cursive norms.^25 Here the neurobiological body is understood as a site for
the generation of intersubjective awareness, the medium of perception and
understanding of others, and a conduit of intercorporeality.
These efforts suggest that the neurobiological body can be a rich site
of social and biosocial theorizing, but they are very divisive. Critics of the
neuroscientific turn accuse scholars of appealing to the brain sciences to
authorize their work while ignoring incompatibilities (e.g., Blackman 2012;
Hemmings 2005; Leys 2011). Proponents dismiss these reproaches as anti-
materialist, ignorant about biology, or simply wrong about the current state
of the sciences.^26 I do not review these debates at length here, but my own
position is that a material- semiotic view is essential to more fully grasp
bodily reality. However, materialism does not absolve the need to critically
access neuroscientific knowledge and practice. Neurobiology is both a le-
gitimate ontological problem and also an epistemological one; what’s more,
these problems are interrelated.
It is not only possible but also necessary to question epistemic claims
and at the same time invest in materiality.^27 Since they are not value- free or
extricable from their objects of study, the neurosciences cannot be taken as
a neutral lens through which to see the brain and nervous systems. It is not
merely that there are epistemological biases to be eradicated; it is also that
scientific practices enact their objects of investigation and have material