12 INTRODUCTION
effects on the bodies they study. I argue that we need to look more closely
at knowledge of plasticity, sociality, and embodiment to see what kinds of
brains and bodies are being enacted, erased, and transformed in neuro-
scientific thought and practice. But the aim cannot be merely to debunk
facts or perform negative critique that would disallow any kind of realism
at all (Latour 2004).^28 The stakes, by many of the accounts discussed here,
are not only symbolic but involve the way “problems are framed, bodies are
shaped, and lives are pushed and pulled into one shape or another” (Mol
2002, viii). Thus in addition to thinking about representation, we also need
to try to say something about ontological realities, about corporealities.
In chapter 1 I take up Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism as one
mode of grasping ontology and epistemology together. My broader strat-
egy is to highlight the multiplicity of neuroscientific phenomena, includ-
ing neuroplasticity, mirror neurons, the oxytocin system, and other objects
of neuroscientific study. Keeping in sight their multiplicity — the different
ways they are known and enacted in neuroscientific practice — can help to
correct their generic treatment in social thought. It can also help to clarify
their social and political implications. For example, in principle, neural
plasticity allows us to describe the brain as becoming, always in process,
never fixed or final.^29 But plasticity is not best understood as a generic prin-
ciple. Rather, its specific enactment in neuroscientific research yields mul-
tiple definitions and dimensions of plasticity. I show that neuroscientific
research distributes plasticity unevenly across brain regions, developmental
timescales, and neurocognitive systems. One effect of this differential dis-
tribution, I argue, is that it allows the calculation of certain bodies- at- risk
in ways that can both reflect and reinforce social stratifications such as
class and race. This isn’t only an epistemic issue; it also concerns how social
institutions are governing — literally shaping — neurobiology. In research
on experience- dependent plasticity and in other neuroscientific research
programs, I explore how corporeal politics appear, both as forces that affect
brains and neurobiological bodies, and as frames that make them visible
in particular ways.