20 CHAPTER ONE
temic mediation, but it is philosophically unsatisfying. This is because it
contradicts the most striking insight highlighted in her account of neural
plasticity: to think something changes the thing that thinks it. The strict di-
visions between knowledge and essence, representation and being, break
down in the contemporary plastic brain. On the flip side, treating plasticity
as a social construct allows one to grasp how representations of plasticity
are productive in and of themselves, and recognizes power/knowledge at
work in descriptions of the brain. But it stops short of acknowledging how
meanings are materialized in matter, how they literally modify brains and
body- subjects, and, conversely, how they are touched by what they repre-
sent. To dismiss plasticity as a mere trope, one that has only a representa-
tional reality, foreshortens a grasp of its deeply biopolitical character. Bio-
politics “has crossed the epistemic threshold” (Vatter 2009, n.p.); it involves
not just the description but also the governance of biological life (Foucault
2009).
One does not necessarily have to choose between these positions. Diana
Coole and Samantha Frost claim that one can “accept social construction-
ist arguments while also insisting that the material realm is irreducible to
culture or discourse and that cultural artifacts are not arbitrary vis- à- vis
nature” (2010, 27). With respect to plasticity, this means acknowledging
that even though there is only mediated access to brain properties, the
properties themselves must be addressed nonetheless. If discourses change
body- subjects, they can only do so because bodies are amenable to being
changed. Both epistemology and ontology matter; what’s more, it is their
relation that matters most with respect to the plastic brain. I argue that
plasticity demands such an onto- epistemological approach, one that takes
questions of being and knowing as inseparable. Karen Barad’s theory of
agential realism (2007), for example, argues for seeing scientific objects
and their measurements together as comprising phenomena, which are
both real and actively shaped. In this chapter I think of plasticity as such
a phenomenon. It is a set of materialities that demands interpretation; in
other words, it has ontological import, but also bears the imprints of its
observation.