Victoria Pitts-Taylor. The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal PoliticsTobias Rees. Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic TermsFernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega. Being Brains: Making the Cerebral Subject

Abstract

What do we want our brains to be? This question forms the central contemplation of these books. It also forms the nexus of a crisis in neuro culture – a social movement that ascribes with unrelenting scientism fundamental human characteristics, practices, and histories as solely derived of brain states and processes. The books jointly under review here offer an answer: For philosopher Victoria Pitts-Taylor our brains naturalize human differences. Her construction of the brain invites us towards new theories of governance grounded in the truths of a brain science. For anthropologist Tobias Rees the brain emerges as an historical artefact located in scientific struggles where doubt challenges dogma and science abhors orthodoxy. For historians Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega, meanwhile, ‘what do we want our brains to be’ is even called into question. They answer irreverently that probably none of us should want our brains to be anything. All of these authors contend with history; all contribute to critical theory. They have read each other. They appear to have poured over the same source material. They expect much from their readers – confidence with all matters of neuroscience, familiarity with the theoretical background of the human sciences, and an awareness that the brain occupies a special place in the dialectics of modernity. The authors lean against their own inclinations. Rees tries to be objective, but he is rapidly seduced by his twin subjects: the enigmatic Parisian scientist Alain Prochiantz and then the problem of knowledge itself. Pitts-Taylor is for pragmatic certainty; the brain’s plasticity becomes her theodicy. But then she falls on occasion into a closeted determinism. Vidal and Ortega position themselves as unrelenting, trenchant critics of neuro culture. But they cannot help but end up making neuroscience and brain talk fascinating.