40 CHAPTER ONE
The attempted modification of the prefrontal cortex as a goal of early
education, the privileging of this brain system in configuring pedagogy,
and the framing of these projects as responses to social problems (such
as reducing high rates of psychiatric medicalization and incarceration in
poor communities of color, reducing taxpayer costs, or training a twenty-
first- century workforce) reflect not just bioethical concerns. They are also
strategies of what can be called preemptive neurogovernance (Cunningham
2012).
Since its earliest modern elaboration, in fact, plasticity has been envi-
sioned and enacted through the modification and preemptive governance
of individuals and groups. James (1890) argued in Principles of Psychology
that we should work with the plasticity of the nervous system for human
improvement. “The great thing, then, in all education,” he wrote, “is to
make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and
capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund.
For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many
useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are
likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague”^
(122).^25
Conclusion
At the start of this chapter I raised two concerns with respect to brain
plasticity that I see as intimately related. First, the brain that is recognized
as plastic, or constantly capable of transformation, raises all sorts of pos-
sibilities for agency, human and otherwise. Among these possibilities, I
juxtaposed the idea of the plastic brain as a becoming, which recognizes
a nonhuman agency in matter that precedes or resists discourse, with the
notion that the plastic brain is a work of culture, an imprint of collective hu-
man effort. Each view can be supported by neuroscientific research. Some
research programs encourage a sense of plasticity as more or less intrinsic,
others as extremely dynamic; some accounts allow the suggestion that it
is potentially infinite, others finite and stratified. This does not mean that
plasticity is a mere construct with no material reality. Rather, it suggests
that plasticity is materially and discursively specific; it also refers to mul-