NOTES TO INTRODUCTION 133neuroscience with epistemological and methodological reflexivity, see scientific
observations as contingent and relational, and improve on simplistic, bifurcated
categorizations of research subjects (Roy 2004). These efforts sometimes envi-
sion a “successor” science (Harding 1986), one that is less likely to do harm, is
more helpful in bettering lives, and is put to the interests of social justice.
28 While uncritical empiricism reifies brain facts as unmediated reflections of re-
ality, Bruno Latour laments that critique is too often limited to describing the
conditions under which the facts of biology are known or generated. As such,
it is only negative. Neither approach does enough to address the stakes of brain
knowledge. Siebers (2008) embraces a critical realism; I take up Barad’s notion
of agential realism in chapter 1.
29 Biology’s ongoing multiplicity — its refusal to be isomorphic or self-
identical — need not be understood as emanating from exclusively cultural influ-
ences, nor treated as evidence for human exceptionalism. Rather, it may reflect
the ontological heterogeneity and diversity of nature (Grosz 2004; Hird 2009;
Kirby 2008; Oyama 2016), the promiscuity and multiplicity of natural kinds
(Rouse 1998), the probabilistic rather than predictable character of causalities
(Rouse 1998), and the generally “complex, messy and richly various” character of
biological life (Medawar 1969, 1, quoted in Einstein 2012). Yet how to address the
neurobiology’s specific malleability and its imbrications in experience is a daunt-
ing challenge.
30 For a discussion of the brain as performative, see Dussauge and Kaiser (2012a,
2012b) and Kaiser (in press, 2016). I address the distinction between discursively
and materially performative conceptions of the brain in chapter 1.
31 Given my use of disability studies to conceptualize cognitive difference, I want
to clarify how my argument relates to, and differs from, arguments for neuro-
diversity. Neurodiversity describes the view, often associated with the Autism
Pride movement, that genetic variations create different kinds of brains and
neurocognitive styles (Ortega 2009). Echoing the social model of disability, ad-
vocates for neurodiversity argue for the positive contributions of diverse cogni-
tive styles and reject their pathologization and stigmatization (Armstrong 2010).
They claim that the disadvantages of these variances, as manifest in autism and
other conditions, are primarily rooted in social norms and barriers to partici-
pation created by “neurotypicals,” rather than in disabilities that are inherent to
diagnosable conditions. The movement highlights the need for greater regard for
and sensitivity to neurocognitive variation. It also sheds a critical light on the use
of autism as a model for almost everything, it seems, that could go wrong with
cognition or emotion. (To cite just one example, Malcolm Gladwell [2005] uses
the phrase temporarily autistic to explain theory of mind failures.) However, my
argument for embodied multiplicity is not reducible to neural difference, but en-
compasses the broader notion of complex and situated embodiment. I argue that
cognitive and affective dissonance can be related to social stratifications such as
race, class, gender, and disability, as well as physiological variation and differen-