Plastic Brain

September 22, 2026
|In #9 The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part Three (2017)
|By Dimitris Papapoulos

I. Recombination and plasticity

Every epoch has its brain. And every epoch fantasizes a better brain than the one it has. Today, one can see early signs of a shift from a research field dominated for decades by a cognition-oriented and centralized conception of the brain towards an extended, connected—and most importantly—embodied understanding of the brain, of the brain-body. In neuroscience, developmental science and psychology the concept of embodiment is used to express the idea that mental and brain processes are embedded in a material body and in a structured environment. In social science, cultural and social theory, embodiment is employed to address questions of difference by foregrounding the socio-cultural construction of the body and experience.

In all of these often very disparate disciplines, embodiment is presented as an answer to the shortcomings of the sciences of the brain that have treated the brain as a self-contained, decontextualized entity. Additionally, embodiment is viewed as an answer to the shortcomings of genocentric deterministic approaches that have neglected the role of the environment. And finally, embodiment appears as an answer to the short-comings of various essentialist conceptualizations of difference, primarily gender and race, and the untenable foundationalism of related political movements. The concept of embodiment appears to exercise an almost therapeutic function: it promises to heal the deep discontent within ‘Western thought’ (cf. Lakoff & Johnson, 1999).1

This piece explores the connections and mutations of these various usages of the concept of the embodied brain in relation to the shifting cultural and political imaginaries of societies in the Global North. I argue that these shifts pertain to a new master narrative of a changing brain-body. This master narrative thrives on the techno-scientific ambition to monitor, control and transform processes of life on the very level of their material composition. “Today we are learning the language in which God created life,” declared President Clinton in his announcement on the decoding of the human genome on Monday, June 26, 2000.2 As I could not but recall Wittgenstein’s (1958) canon at that moment—that language exists only when it is actively used—a daunting vision appeared to me: practicing the language of creation.3 Secular creationism. The vision that we will master neuro-physiological processes to the extent that we will be able to recombine brain-body matter in order to produce new forms of existence.

The underlying presupposition of conceiving brain-body matter as amenable to recombination is that it is characterized by plasticity. But plasticity is not a new concept as such; it has a long history in neuro-scientific research and traditional brain research. The question is what kind of plasticity is assumed here. Today’s plasticity starts where the gene stops: the specificity of the individual organism. Plasticity appears when epigenetics is at work. That is, the worldly making and remaking of the totality of an organism in the process of its development. Rather than just the relative malleability of brain matter, plasticity now refers to the possibility of recombining brain-body matter. Not as an abstract and general process of neuronal regeneration but as a process that takes place epigenetically, that is, according to the specific and contingent realities of each particular organism.

For example, “Genes and genius: Does everyone have the potential to be a genius? Epigenetics offers hope for us all” is the title of a review of David Shenk’s (2010) popularization of epigenetics in the New Scientist (March 27, 2010, 51).4 This understanding of plasticity sneaks in to the cultural imaginary of the body and brain of the Global North as a promise. And as a practice: As Horstman and Scientific American argue, in the near future we will be able to create new neurons “at will, where and when you need them” (Horstman & Scientific American, 2010, 5).5 Neuroplasticity as neuro-genesis projected as accessible ad hoc to everyone.

In this piece I collect various materials that can furnish a historical reconstruction of conceptualizations of the brain-body from the vantage point of its understanding as plastic and amenable to recombination. This is a speculative story in which previous conceptualizations and visions of the brain-body are read through the prism of recombinant plasticity. The latter is a term I have modified from its original understanding. This is in order to link the enormous creativity resulting from the inherent plasticity of the brain with our capacity to recombine the molecular structure of the brain and to create configurations that would not otherwise be found in humans. Such a story has of course many limitations—its linearity seems to be the most apparent one—but at the end it is nothing more than an experiment. If every epoch has its brain and if the recombinant plastic brain is the brain of the future then the aim of this piece is to tell a partial story of the recombinant plastic brain’s history through its own eyes.

The next section discusses various existing cultural imaginaries of the brain-body, exploring how the embodied brain modifies them and becomes the prevalent vision of the brain-body today. The sections that follow trace the links between these imaginaries and the epistemic genealogy of the embodiment of recombinant plasticity. Section III discusses the move from behaviorism to cognitivism and then to connectionism. Connectionism was crucial for preparing the ascent of theories of embodiment. Section IV focuses on different approaches to the embodiment of the brain and its relation to experience. Section V investigates the relation of embodiment to the culture and polity of contemporary societies. In the same way that cognitivism and connectionism prepared the way for the emergence of embodied approaches, section VI argues that embodiment opens the view towards an understanding of the brain and body as recombinant and plastic. Section VII reviews epigenetics and ecomorphs as two manifestations of the developmental and ecological plasticity of the brain-body. The concluding section of the paper raises the possible political implications of the imaginary of recombinant plasticity.

II. The cultural ordering of the embodied brain

How is the embodied brain-body situated in relation to other existing brain-body cultural topoi? The topos is a conventional place, it refers to common topics of reference; but the topos is not just about the common themes and motifs of argumentation that we deploy. It also refers to the idea of place as a concrete socio-material space where materialization processes take place (Barad, 1998).6 The topos refers equally to symbolic commonality (shared meaning) and to material space (lived place). The topos is the place where we physically convene to partake in dealing with common concerns.

In this sense, each different brain-body topos constitutes a specific semiotic and material arrangement that is historically and culturally limited. Each one operates as a space of interaction, conflict and negotiation over the making and remaking of our brain-body.

In particular, theories of embodiment enter the arena of other topoi (cf. also Bordo, 1990; Frank, 1991; s. Scott F. Gilbert, 1997; Haraway, 1991; Martin, 1992), engage with them, challenge them, and participate in the creation of new social and material realities and imaginaries than those that preceded them.7

Probably the most powerful of these cultural imaginaries of the brain-body is the topos of the cerebral body: the body that exists as the carrier of the intellect, as the site of cognition. In this formulation, the question of the materiality of the cerebral body is a question of secondary importance. Its logic is based on taming, suppressing, and canalizing brain energies and bodily feelings. Flesh has to be controlled because it is the ‘source of epistemological error, moral error, and mortality’ (Csordas, 1994a, p. 8; s. also Leder, 1990).8

The cerebral body celebrates the exuberant production of knowledge and deploys it to control the complex processes of its own physicality and materiality. The cerebral body pretends to be universalist, normative, expansive, gender-free and culture-free. It searches for brain modules (Fodor, 1983; Scholl & Leslie, 1999), for deterministic procedures, for fixed algorithms in order to identify the normal and ideal brain/body.9 The cerebral body is the flesh which has use value, the able body—as opposed to the non-productive and disabled body, whose corporeality has to be continually corrected (cf. Breckenridge, 2001).10 Ultimately, it is the value producing body which under contemporary conditions becomes driven by the brain: cerebral value production, cognitive capitalism (De Boever & Neidich, 2013; Neidich, 2014).11

A parallel body topos focuses on a different type of control: the immune body is obsessed with protection, with the creation and maintenance of boundaries. The topos of the immune body is concerned with the prediction of possible damage and contamination; it concentrates on the techniques of repair, normalization and segregation. In the topos of the immune body, research aims to demarcate the limits of the body, its durability, its widths of tolerance. The immune body “is a body that separates us from the other bodies that inhabit the globe and that prohibits our fusing with other entities. The immune body is that which determines our Hobbesian selfness and is in potential conflict with every body” (Scott F. Gilbert, 1997, p. 38).12

The immune body is primarily concerned with the production of knowledge that conserves and defends, opposes weakness, and anticipates what is essential for protection and preservation of the body’s processes. As Robert S. Mueller III, Director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation stated after the New York events of 9/11: “What we need to do better is be predictive. We have to be proactive. We have to develop the capability to anticipate attacks. We have to develop the capability of looking around corners. And that is the change. That is the shift in focus particularly at headquarters.” (Mueller III, 2002).13

The immune body is obsessed with the threat of sudden death. But death here is not considered as a natural phenomenon, but rather is a process that can be forced from outside and designates the breakdown of the body’s boundaries. Death can be anticipated, prevented, and the immune body’s main task is to pre-empt death. The temporal register of the immune body is the future. The future is open to vulnerabilities; the future is the reservoir of possible threats that can trigger the body’s implosion, dissolution and death. For example, when HIV erupted in Western gay communities in the mid 1980s, it initially triggered a moral panic. This was not over the actual deaths it caused, but over what it suggested about the vulnerability of the body and of the body politic (Martin, 1990).14 HIV became a signifier of how gay men subverted the masculinist fantasy of the intact body underpinning the heterosexual matrix (Crimp, 1988; Weeks, 1995).15 A fantasy that assumed that masculine bodies are immune, protected, impenetrable (Irigaray, 1985; Roberts, Kippax, Spongberg, & Crawford, 1996) in the same way that nation states are assumed to be controlled and sovereign territories.16 The topos of the immune body is less about the negation of this vulnerability and more about anticipating how to avoid potential infection, disease and death. The immune body is plagued by fear.

The only antidote to fear is to exit the materiality of the body altogether. It is the topos of the discarnate body that provides the exit, relief from the vulnerability of the flesh. The discarnate body introduces the fantasy of the pure self, incorporeal, fleshless, liberated from the passions, habits, and weakness of its facticity. The discarnate body is the home of pure ideas, clean thoughts, and uncontested intellectuality. Against the topoi of the immune and cerebral body, which concentrates on the production of different types of knowledge, the discarnate body cultivates sanctity. Rather than producing knowledge to tame the body or to protect it, the discarnate body is the site of faith. The discarnate body is less about exploring and experimenting with its immanent functions, origins and boundaries, and more about a confidence in some transcendent order and purpose of the body. The discarnate body is orientated towards a temporality that is outside of lived time. Its powerfulness lies with the potent effect this infinite temporality has on everyday practical commitments.

In the topos of the discarnate body time is infinite, while the universal cerebral flesh is a place without time, out of time. The topos of the immune body is defined by the synchronic affections between different bodies. The diachronic axis, the evolutionary history of flesh, is captured in the topos of the hereditary body: the search for genetic algorithms, for the ultimate code of development (Dennett, 1995).17 The hereditary body is the body that is the result of gene expression; it purports to tell the objective natural history of the flesh. The hereditary body is the body which marks and categorizes origins: it is the topos in which gender is constructed as sex, it is the topos in which the radicalization of peoples of color and migrants unfolds, it is the topos which cultivates the saga of deep belongings (nation, language) through supposed common body architectures. The hereditary body is concerned with time past, it sees the future as a continuation of its given evolutionary roots. It attempts to diminish the synchronic pressures on the brain and the body and to minimize uncertainty.

What is common to all these temporal registers is that the flow of time is external to the body. It constitutes the background against which each of these different body imaginaries occur. In all these temporal orders time is pre-existent, it is a neutral trajectory that runs as if it was seemingly objective and uniformly independent of the actually changing brain-bodies. But if we think of time as a creative force, as an intensive element in the brain-body’s metamorphoses, not as just a neutral trajectory, then a different cultural vision of the brain-body appears: the topos of emergence. If we ‘temporalize time’ itself (Sandbothe, 1998), the brain-body becomes simultaneously the subject and object of its own regeneration.18 The emergent brain-body responds on the one hand to life formations that evolve as the time of life flows, creating new, unpredictable and novel configurations of existence. This real lived time is the time of development: the emergent body exists in the realm of its own developmental trajectory and actuality (Scott F. Gilbert & Epel, 2009; Gottlieb, 1997).19 On the other hand it is emergent because the creation of new forms is always limited by the actually existing contingent conditions of existence (Cooper, 2008; and Chapters 8 and 9 in Papadopoulos, Stephenson, & Tsianos, 2008).20

The emergent and embodied brain-body is unthinkable, indeed impossible as a notion of existence, outside of the formative dimension of ontogenesis, the totality of developmental processes both biological and cultural. If the hereditary body conjugates the notion of predisposition in different versions (cf. Gould, 1977), the emergent body refers to how lived ecologies shape the brain-body itself.21The imaginary of the emergent brain-body has a strong resemblance to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) understanding of nomadism as a body’s state of openness to its construction as obtained through its own movements, rather than through an externally imposed form of organization.22

III. From cognitivism to connectionism

These different cultural imaginaries of the brain-body are tightly interwoven with the brain-body’s existing epistemic languages and practices. While every epoch has its brain, not every epoch considers the brain as the seat of thinking and consciousness. In ancient Greece the higher parts of the soul resided in the heart; similarly, traditional Chinese medicine sees the heart as the house of the mind; and Descartes considered the pineal gland as the seat of thinking.

With the rise of medicine during the middle to end of the 19th century, the brain became a systematic object of study. But even then the brain was far from being the seat of thinking and consciousness. Until the 1950s the brain’s functions and psychology were black boxed and rendered opaque, through the dominance of behaviorism. With the dispute over the ultra positivistic Skinnerian program the behaviorist mechanistic Stimulus-Response (S-R) model gradually came under attack. The main task is to rehabilitate the very idea of ‘thinking’ in psychological and brain research. There have been many chapters in this endeavor23 (e.g. Woodworth, 1921, 1938) since behaviorism’s expulsion of thinking from psychology at the beginning of the 20th century (J. B. Watson, 1913).24 Dewey’s (see also Baldwin, 1897; Dewey, 1999) vision of the mind as a social process contested the behaviorist view of mind and thinking.25 In the first decades of the 20th century pragmatism presented a viable and lively alternative to the obliteration of thinking, consciousness and experience in dominant academic discourses. Despite this, it could not challenge the dominance of the behaviorist model. It is only much later that pragmatism’s approach informed research on the brain-body through its influence on certain strands of connectionism and embodiment. However, at the time, none of these endeavors precipitated the fundamental turn in research into mind and consciousness that would later take place with the advent of cognitivism in the 1950s.

E.C. Tolman (1954) was among those who first formulated the basic outlines for this upcoming trend in research on thinking a few decades before the emergence of the cognitivist movement.26 He introduced the idea of ‘intervening variables,’ an attempt to dissect the entire phenomenon of behavior, in order to achieve a new homogeneous synthesis. A response is no longer seen as a direct linear correlate of the stimulus that takes place after a certain time lag. Rather it is a function of the stimulus that depends on the environment it is embedded in as well as the elaborate need system and the belief-value matrix of the individual. The stimulus-response is mediated by this function and this mediation lies within the individual. It is the internal plane of human consciousness that now becomes the core center for the regulation of behavior.

Emphasizing the idea of thinking as a dedicated function highlights a key moment in the emergence of cognitivism. For example, Jerome Bruner, one of the protagonists of the cognitive turn, saw a possibility for derailing behaviorist dominance through the insertion of a new middle link in the S-R pattern that would allow the investigation of this internal plane of thinking. This link was the ‘sign-mediated-thought’(Bruner, 1967).27 Thinking is elucidated as an organon (that is as an instrument and device regulated by a set of rules) with specific functions. The ‘output’ of a certain ‘input’ is no longer immediately predictable, but is now primarily a function of thinking. However, with the suspension of prediction, the scientific presuppositions required to assert the natural scientific character of research seemed to vanish. In the mid-fifties28 (Gardner, 1987, p. 28) Bruner, Goodnow and Austin (1956) published A Study of Thinking. Through their combined efforts they asserted that rule-based learning, categorization, and processes of abstraction constituted the main functions of thinking.29 Thinking is not only about representing but also primarily about problem solving, it is a function. The quest then becomes how can we visualize the ‘invisible’ domain of these functions? The answer to this was the idea of computationalism: cognitive processes constitute a standard set of procedures which can be reduced to pre-defined lower level processes (Churchland, 1986).30 Cognition emerges in “patterns of data and in relations of logic that are independent of the physical medium that carries them” (Pinker, 1997, p. 24).31

Even if cognitivism is still the dominant paradigm of research in the field of psychology and neuroscience, there is an increasing focus on producing systematic knowledge of somato-cognitive processes. Such processes, that transverse both body and the mind’s cognitive abilities, can be generalized without relapsing into the universalism and essentialism of computationalism. One could read experimental neuroscience’s obsession with mapping psychological functions and subjectivity onto the brain32 (Beaulieu, 2003; Dumit, 2004; Joyce, 2005) as another step in the long history of localizationism (Star, 1989) that attempted to uncover how the relation between mind and brain was constituted.33

The brain mapping of subjectivity through new visualization technologies that correlate psychological functions with brain areas seems to perpetuate a traditional, abstract view of the brain as a fully formed, static modular structure (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992; Littlefield, 2009).34 But it also reveals an attempt to go beyond the use of embodiment as a figural or metaphoric concept even if this usage is both fruitful and inexorable, as I will argue later. This is in order to sketch direct relations between the material workings (i.e. brain activity and neurobiological processes) of the body and experiential processes and intersubjectivity (cf. Cromby, 2007; Franks, 2010; Scott, 2001).35

In the unfolding of this story connectionism represents the next important step in the exodus from cognitivism towards an understanding of the embodied brain. Connectionism promised the possibility of unraveling the structural relations between perception, cognition, action and affect by conceiving all these dimensions as linked directly upon the neuronal infrastructure of the brain. Connectionist research in experimental neuroscience (e.g. Liben, 1999; Thelen & Smith, 1994; Wilson, 1998) visualizes the embodiment of the brain on the material-neurobiological level.36 Neuronal networks depict complex assemblies of interconnected nerve cells where certain synapses constitute central nodes in the network, while others occupy more peripheral positions. The process of ontogenetic development envisions the birth, change and decline in neural efficiencies and the apoptosis of many such connectionist nets materialized as webs of sculpted neurons (Changeux, 1997; Edelman, 1989; Edelman & Tononi, 2000).37

A crucial change that connectionist modeling introduces is the questioning of ‘representational nativism’that is prevalent in cognitivist approaches. In this, cortical development depends on genetically driven microcircuitry that accounts for the organization of brain functions. Mental representations in cognitivism are the result of innate neurophysiological processes that are context independent and universal in the human brain. Thinking has a universal algorithmic structure and resides in fixed neuronal architectures. Against all this “[I]n a connectionist network, representations are patterns of activations across a pool of neuron-like processing units. The form of these activation patterns is determined by the nature of the connections between the units. Thus, innate representational knowledge […] would take the form of pre-specified weights on the inter-unit connections” (Elman et al., 1996, 25).38 What is crucial in connectionism is that the weighting of the nodes is not given but emerges through learning. This is the moment when the idea of a malleable brain matter that its characterized by its emergent qualities and its dependence on the surrounding environment comes into being. While computationalism presupposes innate neuronal structures, connectionism presupposes semi-open, nonlinear architectures that unfold during the very process of ontogenetic development. Brain matter is simultaneously the actor and the result of its own activity. Brain matter becomes formed as it becomes active, but it is active only because this activity shapes the brain into specific forms. Connectionism is a crucial move away from the essentialism and universalism of cognitivism. In connectionism the formation of brain matter is emergent and contextual: it depends on the intra-organismic and extra-organismic ecosystems. This move prepares a conceptualization of brain matter as embodied.

IV. Experience and embodiment

The embodied approach adds a significant dimension to connectionist modeling of the brain. Embodiment is not only about the syntactic structures of meaning. It also aims to encompass the semantics of experience—the production of meaning—and the pragmatics of experience, that is, context-dependent and culture-dependent aspects of meaning. Context and experience merge into the workings of brain matter. It is not a coincidence that social, cultural and critical psychological theories of embodiment engage with the study of the brain-body relation. These include, existentialism and phenomenology (Heidegger, 1993; Merleau-Ponty, 1966), social constructionism (Cromby, 2004) and cultural-historical psychological accounts (see also Papadopoulos, 2010c; Vygotsky, 1987; Wygotski, 1987).39 The embodiment of brain matter means that mental functions are not formal procedures. So, cognition is not independent of its implementation; mind and experience is always instantiated in concrete material structures. This might be in a body40 (Damasio, 2004; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991), in an environment41 (Clark, 1997; Edelman, 1992; Lewontin, 2000; S. Rose, 1998), in a social context42 (Csordas, 1994b; Harré, 1996; Overton, 1998; Sampson, 1996), or in cultural-political constellations43 (Bourdieu, 1987; Braidotti, 2002; Fausto-Sterling, 2000). From the perspective of embodiment there is no such thing as the brain as a fully separate organ. We can think of the brain not as such but as part of, as embedded in, as being in relation to other functions and systems of the body. This is the reason I use the term ‘brain-body’ when I talk about the body or the brain in theories of embodiment.

Conceptualizations of the embodied brain-body vary immensely in content and scope though (Ziemke, 2001).44 In its weak form embodiment simply means that cognitive functions take place within a physical substratum. More elaborate versions understand the brain-body as a multilayered, multifunctional, self-organizing system that consists of interacting subsystems. This version is very common: cognition, perception, emotion, action are not separate but interact continuously and shape our understanding of the self and of the world. Another approach to the embodied brain-body emphasizes its phenomenological dimensions as the existential ground of thinking. Our bodily movements, orientations are, literally, the ground on which our mental concepts and abstractions build. As Johnson states: “No matter how sophisticated our abstractions become, if they are to be meaningful to us, they must retain their intimate ties to our embodied modes of conceptualization and reasoning. We can only experience what our embodiment allows us to experience. We can only conceptualize using conceptual systems grounded in our bodily experience” (Johnson, 1999, p. 81).45 Another widespread version of the concept of embodiment emphasizes the brain-body as an active agent absorbing, modifying and transforming social, cultural and symbolic forces. The brain-body in all these senses is the human body. Many extend this approach to include the artificial, organismoid or humanoid body and its relations to the human body: embodiment in these accounts refers to hybrid machines which are able to act in real-time and real-space environments, and not to machines which act in virtual space or in protected, experimental environments (cf. Brooks, 2001; Chrisley & Ziemke, 2002).46

All these divergent approaches and countless descendant theories of embodiment propose that our conceptual and experiential systems are inextricably linked to the sensorimotor and affective functions of the brain-body, both of which receive and respond to sensory stimulus. Experience starts with the affective-perceptual sensing of the environment and locomotion within it. Experience is realized in the brain-body, through the brain-body, on the neuronal connections that are formed by the continuous interaction of the different bodily subsystems and the environment. From an intra-organismic perspective, the embodied brain is the steadily transforming brain in a process of constantly monitoring and interacting with the totality of the body and the brain itself. The self we have, the experiences that make us cannot exist without a brain that represents its own state and the state of the body in which it is embedded (Damasio, 1999; LeDoux, 2002).47

Epistemologically, the perspective of the embodied brain constitutes a direct challenge to genetic reductionism, nativism and a decontextualized and abstract understanding of the brain. But it does more than that. Developmental Systems Theory—which was an important agent in challenging genetic reductionism by advocating a holistic approach to the evolution of the embodied brain (Gottlieb, 1992; Lewontin, 2000; Oyama, 2000)—has shown that embodiment is not just about decentring the brain into the organism’s body, but primarily about decentring the whole organism itself.48 Rather than reducing the unit of analysis to the organism itself Developmental Systems Theory proclaims that embodiment is always dependent on intra- and inter-organismic relations. There is no embodiment if there are no other bodies around. The embodiment of the brain is the becoming embodied with other bodies and through other bodies. It is about symbiosis rather than the perseverance of single organisms, as Margulis and Sagan (2003) put it.49 Embodiment means relationality and co-construction.

The brain of today’s epoch seems to be characterized by its relational architectures in an ongoing formation of brain-body matter. That every epoch has its brain means that the brain it enacts also becomes the actor of its own existential conditions. In this sense, theories of embodiment are not just abstract immaterial representations of somato-material processes. Rather they are active forces in the transformation of existing social and material realities; they even transform the very existential conditions of the brain-body itself.

Hence, the embodied approach to the brain is literally embodied—it is not only monitoring reality or specific neurobiological, developmental or social processes. Rather, it is the process itself: it recombines pre-existing material and creates new ways of being and new ‘forms of life’ (see also Papadopoulos, 2011; Winner, 1986).50 Theories of embodiment induce new modes of existence and foster combinations on all the different levels of organization, those genetic, neural, organismic, and environmental/social combinations that were not present before.

V. The politics of embodiment: Emancipation and control

The epistemic and cultural construction of the embodied brain-body—discussed in the previous sections—corresponds to the body politics of emancipation movements that initially arose after the 1970s and 1980s. Foucault (1995) made a substantial contribution to placing the brain-body in the centre of academic debates in the humanities and social sciences.51 However, it is feminist and queer politics52 (e.g. Alaimo & Hekman, 2008; Clarke & Olesen, 1998; De Lauretis, 1987), critical studies of science, technology and medicine53 (e.g. Bauchspies & Puig de la Bellacasa, 2009; Clarke, Mamo, Fosket, Fishman, & Shim, 2010; Haraway, 1991; Latimer & Schillmeier, 2009; Myers, 2008; Rapp, 2000), critiques of disembodied information systems and representational information technologies54 (Hayles, 1999; Lilley, Lightfoot, & Amaral, 2004) and various indigenous and antiracist movements that released the idea of the body as a political potentiality (Turner, 1984, p. 247).55 The topos of the embodied and emergent brain-body becomes an open field where essentialist and formulaic understandings of its workings are rewritten and reconfigured under the guise of their social and political significance. ‘Body politics’ (Blanche, Bhavnani, & Hook, 1999) directly correspond with the deployment of the concept of embodiment and emergence in neuroscience, developmental science and psychology.56 It is impossible to establish a feasible theoretical approach to the brain-body without challenging the deterministic understanding of its material workings. Making the brain-body permeable to the pressures of the emancipation movements was coextensive with contesting the impermeability and universality of the biological brain-body. In fact, the emancipation discourses of the emergent brain-body infuse the realm of science with social antagonisms.

However, emancipation movements manifested in brain-body politics constitute only one of the ways embodiment and emergence figure in social practices and the cultural imaginary. At the same moment, along with emancipation discourses, the emergent and embodied brain-body captures the desire for a regenerating brain-body in the fatigued North-Atlantic societies. This is a brain-body that tries to overcome discourses of intrusion, death and origins by viewing itself as the all-in-one solution: it is source, site, and target of its own regenerative practices. Thus, even if the topos of the emergent brain-body privileges contextuality and specificity, its logic is precisely based on an idea of neutralizing the notion of limit and context as imposed by other brain-body discourses. The emergent brain-body represents a particularly vicious form of cultural universalism. It promises healing not in terms of correction (cerebral body), protection (immune body), or the ideology of a fixed origin (hereditary body) but in terms of its very own open reconstruction and recombination.

Embodiment promises to engage with the lived pains of the body, the tamed flesh, the tortured flesh, and the oppressed flesh (Duden, 2002; Scarry, 1985).57 But at the same time this promise is very localized in its scope: it hinges on the belief in a recombinant individual agent. This is a belief and practice that interrupts and simultaneously invigorates the political dictum of neoliberal societies of the Global North. That is, a dictum of sole individuals localized in power grids of the market that are never discernible as political networks as such. The ambivalence of the topos of the embodied and emergent brain-body is that it arose as a powerful critical practice. This questioned the prevalent, de-contextualized, and out-oftime individualism circulating in everyday culture, as well as in neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and psychology/develop- mental science in the societies of the Global North. But this thrust towards undoing the individual agent was gradually appropriated by the discourse of the flexible individual that comes to replace previous ideas about the abstract rational autonomous agent (Papadopoulos, 2003).58 The flexible individual concentrates on self-modification in order to achieve success in the present by neglecting the broader future consequences of its actions (Schüll & Zaloom, 2011).59 Social, subjective, neuronal flexibility is not just the target or the modus operandi of self- relationality. Rather, it is the very condition of embodied liberal individualism in the Global North. Control is embodied, it is exercised through a constant process of modifying our very own material existences (and the editorial in Cromby, Newton, & Williams, 2011; see Pitts-Taylor, 2010).60 Individuals are in a permanent process of self-maintenance; one could almost believe that we never die or live, that we are just perpetually maintaining our brains and bodies (Martin, 2010).61 Contemporary political governance encounters the individual as an assemblage of ideas, limbs, hi-tech devices, chemical substances and environmental factors that are continuously creating and re-creating the self, striving to achieve a specific position in a social nexus which could never be identifiable as a whole (Martin, 2002; Papadopoulos, 2008).62

The ambivalence of the embodied brain-body is its double, simultaneous affiliation with both emancipation and control. On the one hand, it constitutes the movement towards embodiment as initiated by the pressures of critical social movements and social activism—particularly feminist, gay and antiracist movements—countering the techno-scientific knowledge grid that researches the brain and the body. On the other hand, the liberating brain-body worlds that these emancipatory movements have enunciated are gradually being appropriated in the neoliberal geoculture emergent after the 1980s. This could be understood as a failure of these emancipatory movements but this would mean that there are clean, pure, everlasting liberatory answers and this is not the case. In actuality, this appropriation of emancipatory thinking and activism testifies to the importance and centrality of its critique of social life and its capacity to change the conditions of existence (Papadopoulos et al., 2008).63 In contrast to those positions that see critical thinking and activism as a marginal and marginalizing discourse64 (e.g. Latour, 2004), the history and practice of the embodied brain-body supports a different perspective. Emancipatory movements have opened a space for performing the brain-body as embodied, a space that did not exist before, a space that came before control and had the capacity to create new liberating conditions. The existence of new liberatory forms of existence forced control to change and reorganize itself in order to be able to respond to and finally appropriate these movements. So, the idea of the embodied brain-body was gradually assimilated into the discourse that sees the brain-body regenerating itself through its own recombination.

VI. From embodiment and emergence to plasticity and autogeneric brain-bodies

The quest for recombination is not just an abstract ideal reverberating through the parallel discourses of social emancipation and social control. It is also firmly located in the sociotechnical materialities of existence. Embodiment and emergence have, for example, a crucial impact on the rearrangement of the fields of artificial intelligence and artificial machines by instigat- ing a radical practical critique of cognitivist models in robotics (Balsamo, 1995; Hayles, 1999; Varela et al., 1991).65 One of the core assumptions of these models is that it is potentially possible to duplicate the functions of the human mind and to create an artificial quasi-human brain. This quasi-brain is accredited with the capacity to execute control over the sensorimotor subsystems and to act as a controlling device responsible for autonomous problem solving. In this view, cognition again dominates the circuits of action, affect and perception. However, this perspective has been proven untenable in the field of robotics, especially in relation to humanoid robots (Brooks, 1991; Hayles, 1999).66 It is not only that we are far from duplicating the human brain or from creating quasi-brains adequate to the task of steering humanoid systems. Research on vision and motion has also made considerable advances that question the possibility of constructing such a quasi-brain. Theories of embodiment attempt to overcome this inconsistency of cognitivist approaches. They link cognition directly to motion and perception circuits—also increasingly to the affective realm—and question the necessity of the very existence of a quasi-brain (Brooks, 2002).67 Hence, embodiment is the key strategy for creating new emerging non-human actors from a situated perspective.

The new humanoid robots dispense with the necessity of having consciousness implanted in their artificial brain-body by a human hand. All they need are simple cognitive architectures, sophisticated sensorimotor subsystems, fast hardware and a sufficient repertoire of social-emotional skills. Inspired by animal behavior and movement, embodied approaches to robotics use semi-open connectionist nets to link together different brain-body subsystems of humanoid machines and create new social actors. These new machines possess agency and are genuinely emergent (Sonigo, 2005): simple perceptions trigger bodily movements, bodily movements elicit cognitive procedures, and in turn these organize perception.68 Errors within this sequence of actions produce new affective states, affects intensify bodily movements and new communication scripts, which require faster responses and new, more complicated cognitive procedures, and so on. In the realm of situated robotics complexity is not a gift from the humans to the machines. In fact all that humans can do is to reduce complexity and simplify brain processes and body architectures. What these new machines do is far more sophisticated than what humans can produce: they increase complexity through recombining situated and embodied processes in animal-human-machine hybrids (Adam, 1998; Clark, 1998; Kember, 2003; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2009; Steels & Brooks, 1995; Suchman, 2007).69

Here recombination points towards something that is more than the reconfiguration of existing embodied architectures. Rather, it evokes biotic machines that will be ultimately capable of reproducing themselves independent of human intervention. It is probably this particular dimension of self-organized reproduction that is central to the imaginary of plasticity that has begun circulating in neuroscience and popular culture, as Pitts-Taylor argues.70 If every epoch has its brain—and as I argued today’s epoch gravitates around the embodied brain-body—then every epoch fantasizes about having a better brain-body. Embodiment and emergence open a window to the plastic brain. Recombinant plasticity is the promise that theories of embodiment and emergence bring with them but cannot fully realize. What is crucial here are not only the emergent and embodied brain-body but also that it can also change itself. For example, The Brain That Changes Itself is the title of Norman Doidge’s (2008) New York Times bestseller.71 What counts is not embodiment per se but the auto-generic possibilities, the capacity for ‘self-generation,’ which the recombinant plastic brain-body releases. Recombinant plasticity points towards a different model for understanding brain-body matter. This is one that ultimately harbors a greater fascination for self-reproducing organic bodies than the distributive networks, self-organized systems and body-environment interactions that dominate theories of embodiment.

Here plasticity primarily refers to the ecological-developmental plasticity of the brain-body and neuronal plasticity. Environmental influences72 (Gottlieb, Wahlsten, & Lickliter, 1998) and intrinsic processes of interaction and ecological symbiosis with other bodies73 (Margulis, 1998) define the range of potential phenotypes that can be actualized (Scott F. Gilbert & Epel, 2009).74 The plastic brain-body is present to itself, ‘self-generating’ but also creating new forms through the incessant interactions and reconfigurations of the different participating levels of organization. And at the same time it is constrained by the contingent limitations which exist in itself and in its ecology (Robert, 2004).75 It is the interplay between plasticity and specificity, as Steven Rose (1998) puts it, that describes the condition for inserting real life time and real life contexts in the body and the brain.76 The recombinant plastic brain-body is marked by events as they occur in the multiple interactions between the genetic, neural, organismic and ecological levels of existence (Gottlieb, 1992).77 It only exists in real-time and real-world ecologies, thus it can only be understood from an ecological-developmental perspective (Muller, 2007; Sultan, 2007).78 West-Eberhard’s (2003) theory of developmental plasticity79 and Wexler’s (2006) theory of neuroplasticity across the life-span80 provide solid accounts of how phenotypic variation occurs as a diversified process dependent on a multitude of environmental factors, social and cultural conditions and the genetic material shaping brain-body matter in different ways (see also Scott F. Gilbert & Epel, 2009; Huttenlocher, 2002; Jablonka & Lamb, 2005).81

VII. Recombinant plasticity put to work: epigenesis and ecomorphs

What are the concrete manifestations of the plastic brain-body? If intra-somatic and extra-somatic factors in their totality affect the development and making of the brain, then which particular factors are important in the formation of brain-body matter and which are not? In order to answer this question one has to investigate the specific environmentally induced variations that affect brain-body development. This necessitates a turn to epigenetics (Gottlieb, 2007; Robert, 2004; van Speybroeck, van de Vijver, & de Waele, 2002).82 Gilbert & Epel write that: ‘Epigenetics is defined here as those genetic mechanisms that create phenotypic variation without altering the base-pair nucleotide sequence of the genes’ (Scott F. Gilbert & Epel, 2009, p. 12).83 Epigenetic factors are increasingly considered as important for conceiving how genes are (or are not) expressed in development processes and how environmentally induced changes to the organism can be transmitted to the offspring (Calvanese, Lara, Kahn, & Fraga, 2009; Scott F. Gilbert & Epel, 2009; Robert, 2004).84 Epigenetic explanations of human development attempt to grasp the multi-factorial complexity involved in extra-genetic micro-organismic processes and cellular transformation as well as in organism-environment interactions (Gottlieb et al., 1998).85

The study and standardization of epigenetic factors has become one of the key innovations driving basic research and applications from an evolutionary-developmental perspective (Lamb, 1994; Masterpasqua, 2009).86 Consider for example research on fetal development87 (Kiefer, 2007), on gene expression through exposure to different nutritional substances88 (Landecker, 2011), the prevalence of specific types of degenerative processes associated with later life89 (Bandyopadhyay & Medrano, 2003) or the impact of social experiences on phenotypic variation (Champagne, 2010).90 Epigenesis opens up the field of research on the embodied brain-body to different scales of gene-environment assemblages. There are enormous variations regarding these scales and this is considered as the main challenge for further research. Different approaches deliver different answers to how each specific level interacts with all others, varying from the relation between the DNA and proteins, cells, the organism and their environment (Scott F. Gilbert, 2002; Mitchell, Jeppesen, Nicol, Morrison, & Kipling, 1996).91 But what is common to all of them is that the brain-body is a plastic system shaped through the interplay of epigenetic factors and our genes.

The announcement of the human genome project, which was mentioned in the beginning of this paper, was probably one of the last instances of the celebration of genetic reductionism. To the words of President Clinton that “we are learning the language in which God created life” we should probably add: “Let the race for epigenetics begin!” After the celebrations for the decoding of the human genome faded and gave way to skepticism, Time magazine rushed to announce a new decoding: the decoding of the human epigenome as a new major scientific discovery (Time, December 8, 2009).92 Fifty or even forty years earlier the gene was an absent reference in the widespread scientific fantasies and popular imagination of the brain-body. As retired inspector Tracy Waterhouse says in Kate Atkinson’s novel Started Early, Took My Dog (2010, 251) “if you said ‘gene’ in the seventies people thought Levi’s or Wranglers.”93 But very quickly it became the floating signifier in the genocentric imaginary that dominated the end of the previous century. There is another turn now. What only a few years earlier would have been formulated as “Why your DNA is your destiny” or “Your genes, your choices”94 (Baker & American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1997) today reads: “Why your DNA isn’t your destiny” (Time, January 6, 2010).95 Now the task is to codify epigenetic factors, sort out substances and environmental conditions that inhibit or promote specific gene expressions and standardize the mechanics of the environment-organism interplay and the ecology-development-gene interplay.

The outcome of this interplay is phenotypic variation: ecomorphs. These are different phenotypes which are dependent on the influence of the contingent ecological and relational factors within which an organism is embedded (Wainwright & Reilly, 1994).96 I use the term here in an extended way: Ecomorphs are standardizations of the effects that epigenetic developmental factors (be it intra-organismic or extra-organismic) have on a recombinant plastic organism. Ecomorphs are here understood as stable configurations of ecological-developmental influences and the genetic code. The term is deployed in this context to describe the outcome of research on epigenetics that can be standardized, classified and catalogued with the use of bio-informatics and subsequently made available to the public (or become a marketized commodity). Ecomorphs are consequently systematizations of what Hannah Landecker (Hannah Landecker, 2011) describes as the constitution of the environment and the social as a biologically meaningful signal in epigenetic research.97 Reducing and classifying the environment to a mere signal that induces drastic changes in genetic function is the crucial step in developing classifications of causal relations between the environment and the gene. Ecomorphs can be considered then as classifications of the causal coupling between certain environmental situations and a specific expression of genes. Ecomorphs are in this sense the smallest knowledge unit that has bio-value in epigenetic research and can be used for further basic research or other applications. Maps of ecomorphs are the product of epigenetics in the same way a map of genes in the human genome database was the product of DNA sequencing. However, the number of ecomorphs will probably be far more than the approximately 25,000 human genes. Ecomorphs will materialize the vision of truly learning how to create life and efficiently remake the brain-body.

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  28. For instance there were significant publications in the history of cognitivism (by Chomsky, Newell, and Simon) and important events (such as the MIT Symposium on Information Theory) took place. See: H. Gardner, The Mind’s New Science: A History of Cognitive Revolution (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1987), 28.
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  49. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Acquiring Genomes. A Theory of the Origins of Species (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2003).
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  52. For theoretical instances see: S. Alaimo and S.J. Hekman (eds.), Material Feminisms (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008); A. Clarke and V. L. Olesen, Revisioning Women, Health, and Healing: Feminist, Cultural, and Technoscience Perspectives (New York, NY: Routledge, 1998); T. De Lauretis, Technologies of gender: Essays on theory, film, and fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987).
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  54. For these critiques see: N.K. Hayles, How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999); S. Lilley, G. Lightfoot, and P. Amaral, Representing Organization: Knowledge, Management, and the Information Age (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004).
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  56. M.T. Blanche, K. Bhavnani, and D. Hook (eds.), Body Politics: Power, Knowledge and the Body in Social Sciences (Johannesburg: Histories of the Present Press, 1999).
  57. Barbara Duden, Die Gene im Kopf – der Fötus im Bauch: Historisches zum Frauenkörper (Hannover: Offizin, 2002); Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (NewYork, NY: Oxford University Press, 1985).
  58. Dimitris Papadopoulos, “The Ordinary Superstition of Subjectivity. Liberalism and Technostructural Violence,” Theory and Psychology 13, 1 (February 2003), 73–93.
  59. Natasha D. Schüll and Caitlin Zaloom,“The Short Sighted Brain: Neuroeconomics and the Governance of Choice in Time,” Social Studies of Science 41, 4 (2011).
  60. See the editorial in J. Cromby, T. Newton and S. Williams, Special Issue: “Neuroscience and Subjectivity,” Subjectivity 4, 3 (September 2011); Also: V. Pitts-Taylor, “The Plastic Brain: Neoliberalism and the Neuronal Self,” Health: Interdisciplinary Studies in Health, Illness and Medicine 14, 6 (2010), 635–652.
  61. Emily Martin, “Self-making and the brain,” Subjectivity 3, 4 (December 2010).
  62. See: Emily Martin, “Flexible Körper. Wissenschaft und Industrie im Zeitalter des flexiblen Kapitalismus,” in B. Duden & D. Noeres (eds.), Auf den Spuren des Körpers in einer technogenen Welt (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 2002), 29–54; D. Papadopoulos, “In the ruins of representation: Identity, individuality, subjectification,” British Journal of Social Psychology 47, 1 (2008), 139–165.
  63. Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century, op. cit.
  64. See: Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, 2 (Winter 2004), 225–248.
  65. See: Anne Balsamo, “Forms of technological embodiment: Reading the body in contemporary culture,” in M. Featherstone and R. Burrows (eds.), Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment (London: Sage, 1995), 215–237.
  66. As explored in: R.A. Brooks, “Intelligence without representation,” Artificial Intelligence 47 (1991), 139–159; N.K. Hayles, How we Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
  67. For instance: R.A. Brooks, Flesh and Machines: How Robots will Change Us (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 2002).
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