THE PHENOMENON OF BRAIN PLASTICITY 35Kirby 2008, 2011; E. Wilson 2010). But understood in material and not just
discursive terms, performativity addresses matter’s constitution through
intra- action in the world, its inherent relationality, and its dual ability to be
transformed by and to affect events (Barad 2007). A materialist- discursive
version of performativity can be used to conceptualize the plastic, biosocial
brain as situated, contextual, and contingent.
In her materialist formulation of performativity, Barad (2007) argues
that, correctly interpreted, performativity is not best understood as the
discursive inscription of the body. Rather, performativity “shifts the focus
from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality (e.g.,
do they mirror nature or culture?) to matters of practices/doings/actions”
(133). In Barad’s reading performativity does not represent or refer to, but
rather is, what it names. There isn’t a separate cultural sphere to which
the disciplined, socialized, or gendered body refers; rather, the body/world
is enacted in and through the practices of embodied being and “world-
ing.” Bodies “are constituted along with the world, or rather, as ‘part’ of the
world” (160). Similarly, technoscientific practices do not merely represent
objects nor “reveal what is already there” (361). Instead, technoscientific
practices are material- discursive meetings of various entities (knowledge
systems, tools, researchers, research subjects, bodies, institutions) that call
forth specific material becomings. To put it another way, they are assem-
blages of matter and meaning. A plastic brain, on this view, does not repre-
sent either nature or culture; rather, it is a specific configuration of matter
and meaning that achieves itself in entanglement with the world.
An adequate theory of performativity must insist not only on the dy-
namism of matter — its unremitting capacity to make and remake itself,
with or without human effort — but also on the specificity of its becoming,
including within scientific practices. To grasp materiality not in spite of, but
rather, in relation to, its epistemic mediation, Barad proposes to address
the measurement as part and parcel of matter’s specificity, its particular
realizations in the world. Knowledge about matter, Barad says, involves
a differential attentiveness to what matters. Thus, instead of speaking of
scientific objects, she addresses phenomena. A phenomenon includes the
entities under investigation, the scientific tools and practices that touch
them, the knowledges that inform them, and the material changes that
measures make. Neural plasticity can be understood this way. To make