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Neurologisation and its Discontents
Jan De Vos
Neurologisation and its Discontents
Jan De Vos
The Metamorphoses
of the Brain –
Neurologisation and
its Discontents
Jan De Vos
Philosophy and Moral Sciences
Ghent University
Ghent, Belgium
ISBN 978-1-137-50556-9 ISBN 978-1-137-50557-6 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50557-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016936399
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprint-ing, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physi-cal way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
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the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made.
Cover illustration: © bilwissedition Ltd
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London
For Vera, “as wave is driven by wave” (Ovid, Metamorphoses).
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the following people for their valuable and thoughtful
suggestions: Boris Demarest for commenting on Chap. 2 and Chap. 5, Karin
Lesnik-Oberstein for commenting on Chap. 6, David Pavón Cuéllar for
commenting on Chap. 7, and Ed Pluth for commenting on Chap. 3. Special
thanks to Chris Higgins for his meticulous and wonderful language editing.
Some parts of this book are based on previously published journal arti-
cles. Chapter 2 is partly based on (1) “The death and the resurrection of
(psy)critique. The case of neuroeducation”, Foundations of Science, online
first, October 17, 2014, Springer Science + Business Media Dordrecht. All
rights reserved. © Jan De Vos, and (2) “Deneurologizing education? From
psychologisation to neurologisation and back”, Studies in Philosophy and
Education, 34(3), 2015, pp. 279–295, Springer Science + Business Media
Dordrecht. All rights reserved. © Jan De Vos. Chapter 3 is partly based
on “Which materialism? Questioning the matrix of psychology, neurology,
psychoanalysis and ideology critique”, Theory & Psychology, 24(1), 2014,
pp. 76–93, Sage. All rights reserved. © Jan De Vos. Chapter 4 is partly
based on “The iconographic brain: A critical philosophical inquiry into (the
resistance of) the image”, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8, 15 May 2014,
Frontiers. All rights reserved. © Jan De Vos. And, finally, Chap. 7 is partly
based on “Interpassivity and the political invention of the brain: Connolly’s
neuropolitics versus Libet’s veto-right”, Theory & Event, 16(2), 2013, The
Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights reserved. © Jan De Vos.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: The Metamorphoses of the Brain 1
2 The Educated Brain: A Critique of Neuroeducation 13
3 The Material Brain: A Plea for the Uselessness

of Psychoanalysis 53
4 The Iconographic Brain: An Inquiry into the Culture of

Brain Imaging 91
5 The Sexual Brain: Against Neuro-Plasticity 129
6 The Celebrated Brain: The Role of the Brain in the

Society of the Spectacle 169
7 The Political Brain: The Brain as a Political Invention 203
Index 243
ix
1
Introduction: The Metamorphoses
of the Brain
Upon waking one morning in the twenty-first century from the most
unsettling of dreams, we somehow came to find ourselves transformed
into a brain. How can we begin to understand this metamorphosis?
How did we get to this point? Did it involve a pharmakon, like in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses where the jealous Circe uses potions to deal with both
the men who reject her love as well as her female rivals? Are we somehow
being punished for our humanistic hubris, like Arachne who was turned
into a spider after claiming to have superior weaving skills to Athena?
Or are we simply taking on a different form as a means of defence as
we flee from something, like Thetis morphing into different forms to
escape Peleus who is attempting to make her his wife? As one can see, the
dictum “You are your brain” raises several questions: not only pertaining
to why we so readily accept it and, indeed, even embrace it so eagerly at
times, but also concerning why this dictum must be stated so firmly, so
coercively (make no mistake), as if we were being addressed by some final
sovereignty or god, that amounted to the ultimate super-ego command.
These questions—among others, for example, how the transformation
took place, what produced it exactly and for what ends—coupled with
the equally difficult if not altogether more problematic and Kafkaesque
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

J. De Vos, The Metamorphoses of the Brain – Neurologisation and its
Discontents, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50557-6_1
2 The Metamorphoses of the Brain – Neurologisation and its Discontents
ordeal of remembering what exactly we were before, might best be

approached by probing further into the results of the transformation:
what are we exactly, when we are said to be our brain? Henceforth, in this
book I set out to provide a cartography of the manifold forms that we
take when we become or are said to be brain-creatures.
The task of discerning the different metamorphoses of the brain and
trying to understand them is an urgent one. This is because the momen-
tous period in which we are living, what I am designating as the transition
from having a brain to being a brain, might represent the last window of
opportunity to say something about the shifting conditions of our exis-
tence. Having a brain meant that one could contemplate it as an object,
look at it and attempt to grasp it in language. However, given that we are
now increasingly enjoined to coincide with the brain itself, are we not
in danger of losing our capacity to speak about that very thing which
itself claims to define our conditions of possibility? Simply put, are we
becoming mute? Indeed, today there appears little space left from which
to respond to the hegemonic dictum you are your brain: we are, first and
foremost, urged to recognise ourselves in and identify with what is a rel-
atively minimalistic if not one-dimensional depiction of our existence.
That is, the way in which the brain-human is conceptualised and imag-
ined within this neuroscientific paradigm is anything but Romanesque
or complex; in fact, one is tempted to say it is grey or dull inasmuch as
it reduces human beings to cognitions, a limited range of affects and
some unconscious processes, all of which are framed by hormonal driven
instinctual impulses. One could see such a conceptualisation as the bitter,
deconstructive and material truth, a truth that leaves us befuddled and
bereft of any solid ground from which to formulate a strong riposte. You
are your brain, in other words, represents a clear and definitive full stop,
one which robs us of any humanistic hubris as well as tearing away the
remaining vestiges of any illusions we still had of being conscious agents
who possess free will—remember Arachne, in this regard. What remains is
our complete and utter awe and fascination with the brain that, although
highly complex in comparison to our one-dimensional and simplified
make-up, nevertheless often serves to silence us. Resultantly, when the
notion of having a brain is superseded by the idea of being our brain, we
become deprived of a minimal distance and lose our voice in the process.
Introduction: The Metamorphoses of the Brain 3
This is reminiscent of Gregor Samsa from Kafka’s novella The

Metamorphosis, of course, who, upon being turned into a “monstrous
verminous bug”, finds out that he has become speechless: he attempts
to speak to his sister as well as his parents but comes to realise that his
voice has changed in such a way that no-one understands him any longer.
Equally, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the hunter Actaeon, having seen Diana
naked and turned into a stag, is rendered speechless:
In a stream he longed to say, “O miser-

Able me!” but had no words, nothing but
Animal cries while tears ran down his changed,
Bewildered face.
(Ovidius 1958, p. 69)
Perhaps, having been turned into a brain, we similarly now have no words.
Consider the archetypal brain image of the isolated brain: the brain in
profile, the brain without eyes, nose, mouth or tongue. This brain is, ulti-
mately, blind and mute. We are blinded, but yet told to walk without fear
or hesitation: follow your synapses, we are told, and if anything were to
go wrong psychotropic interventions will reset our neural paths accord-
ingly. We are mute inasmuch as the brain underneath the scanner only
lights up at particular stimuli provided externally by the person in a lab
coat. Just as Io who, as one will remember, was transformed into a cow
because her lover Jupiter wanted to hide her from his wife, and was only
able to trace letters in the dust, the mute brain can only trace signs onto
the scanner—voxels either light up or they do not. In neural times, then,
the letters in the dust have become digitalised; where once Io was—if one
will allow me this this pun—I-0 has now taken her place. If we can be
said to communicate with the brain, it is on the basis of this rudimentary
digitalised sign language. But how can we absolutely be certain that we
understand the digitised brain correctly? That is to say, how can we be
positive that we are asking the brain the right questions in the first place,
or that we are presenting it with the relevant stimuli whilst under the
scanner?
One is tempted here to reject this digitalisation, to cling tightly onto
the analogue, that is, to hold on to the idea that I, my Ego, my subject,
or whatever other terms one chooses to posit it, still has something to
say beyond or apart from the digital traces left behind by the electric or
chemical activity in the organ of the brain. Within such a project, one
could try to undo the metamorphosis and free the subject of the neu-
rosciences from the reductionism of the scanner—where it must lie still
and say nothing—and give it back its body and its voice. But in such an
instance, where we would approach the subject through recourse to the
usual phenomenological methods, get an understanding of the whole
situation by taking into consideration the socio-anthropological con-
text, and conduct in-depth interviews as part of a qualitative approach
to research, do we not run the risk of falling back on retrograde illu-
sions and even older myths from a bygone era? That is to say, would
the voice and the body we are seeking to re-establish not equally be
pre-formatted and, hence, equally non-emancipatory? That is, despite
our good intentions, we might end up doing nothing more than put-
ting the subject back in its old prison outfit and handing it old lines
to read from past scripts. Moreover, the common argument that the
neurosciences research an artificial subject in an artificial situation risks
overlooking how the subject under the scanner, watching a screen, han-
dling a joystick or a keyboard and responding to cues and clues, may,
in actual fact, be an accurate description of the contemporary head-
phoned, wired and connected subject who moves through highly digi-
talised and controlled environments where its personal and social lives
increasingly takes place.
At the very least, then, we can say that harking back to previous
epistèmes does not hold much promise of liberation. In the same way,
one could even go as far as to argue that we have merely traded one
highly scripted and controlled environment (analogue and embedded in
socio-psychological discourses) for another one (digital and grounded in
neuro-discourses). Should we thus adopt the stance that brain-discourse
represents nothing new but is merely the latest in a long line of myths
and, as such, is just yet another overarching and hegemonic cultural nar-
rative with which subjects must engage and negotiate? Such a position
would suggest that we are not, in fact, losing our voice but, rather, our
voice is simply mutating and morphing as we transition into a different
age. However, we should perhaps reject this idea that the subject will
always be resilient enough to adapt to new epistèmes, on the grounds that

it harbours a false and all too easy optimism; above all, such a view testi-
fies to how much in this day and age we all too readily rely on the option
of pressing the Ctrl + z key at any point. That is to say, within our digital
environments we are free to continually experiment with chunks of text
and image, altering them and subjecting them to numerous operations,
safe in the knowledge that we can always go back to where we started from
(only to find ourselves at a loss when in real, concrete life, for example,
a vase falls and thinking Ctrl + z turns out to be of no help whatsoever).
Hence, in this book I want to argue that we should seriously consider
the possibility that the neuro-turn signals a fundamental and structural
break qua subjectivity and sociality. Simply put, we might not be merely
trading old myths for new ones as I suggested earlier. The saying nihil
nove sub sole (there is nothing new under the sun) has a long-standing
tradition of being used by those who wish to remain blind towards the
new—or, for that matter, those who want others to remain blind towards
the new. For, it might be the case that, when faced with the dictum you
are your brain we, as aforesaid, lose our voice (as we ourselves are not con-
sidered to have any access to our own truth) and that this in an altogether
unprecedented way curtails any subjective leeway, thus amounting to a
structural and decisive break with subjective positions from former eras.
While in disciplinary, religious or psychological discourses, for exam-
ple, the subject had to mobilise a desire, invest in a discourse and engage
in some kind of activity—albeit we might call these forms of pseudo-
activity or “interpassivity” whereby desire, discourse and activity are out-
sourced to the o(O)ther (Pfaller, 2000; Žižek, 1997)1—we might need
to consider the possibility that the new brain discourses, in contrast,
condemn each of us to a kind of locked-in-syndrome where desire, dis-
course and activity lose all meaning as such. Ovid’s Metamorphoses are
replete with irreversible transformations of humans and nymphs into
trees, stones, mountains or rivers, into which their personages are irre-
versibly trapped, and through which they forever lose their access to the
world. Do we not have to consider the possibility that brain-discourse
1
E.g., it is my unconsciousness, not I, who has all these weird thoughts, or so it goes in pseudo-
psychoanalytic parlance.
prepares us for a similar metamorphosis, by virtue of the fact that the

dictum you are your brain invalidates us as interlocutors, as answerable
partners and hermetically seals us in our brains? For example, in educa-
tion today the expert advice is no longer, talk with your teenagers but,
rather, talk with your kids about their brains, as is literally stated at one
point (Jensen & Nutt, 2014). One can imagine that it doesn’t take long
before one also talks to youngsters about their brains’ shortcomings.
This is where the only options open to teens is to listen, or at best ask
questions for clarification. One could readily dismiss this, of course, as
simply media neuro-junk, but I do think that this is symptomatic of a
problem in regular and serious neuroscience itself. Or phrased otherwise,
the aberrations which reveal themselves when neuroscience comes into
the open, that is, into the popular realm might, in actual fact, represent
a magnification of neuroscience’s hidden flaws. Moreover, one should
not underestimate the ways in which this generalised neuro-turn might
thoroughly affect our life-world, if not utterly reshape it altogether. At
the very least we should ask the question, what will become of subjectiv-
ity and society once we have raised whole generations under the rubric
of “we are our brain”?
Hence, as aforesaid, the guiding question of this book concerns what
we have actually transformed into. What are we exactly, when we are said
to be our brain? If, as argued, the metamorphosis of the brain entails
the transfiguration of an analogue, psychological subject into a digital,
neuronal subject, then the popular image of the brain-in-a-vat might be
expedient as a preliminary means through which to grasp what this trans-
formation actually entails. This well-known thought experiment features
a stand-alone brain severed from its body, artificially kept alive and con-
nected to a computer which induces a virtual reality to the brain. The
standard debate then concerns how we ourselves can know for sure that
we have a real body and a real life to live, and thus are not, in actual
fact, in this brain-in-a-vat position (see, e.g., Putnam, 1981). Does this
specific example not constitute the quintessential depiction of the fact
that fully becoming our brain entails a particular kind of locked-in syn-
drome? However, as is always the case with thought-experiments, the
most interesting aspect here is the non-thought (or should we say the un-
thought), that is, the unspoken assumptions that can be said to structure
the construction.2 For instance, would the principal issue with this set-up
not concern the choice of scenarios or scripts that were used by the com-
puter in order to simulate the so-called real world? Would the traditional,
pre-neurological human sciences, and particularly the psy-sciences, not
play a major part in constructing a more or less plausible experience situ-
ated in time and space? In other words, I claim, the ways in which this
staged brain-person relates to its virtual self, virtual others and the virtual
world would ultimately be given form by algorithms based on pre-exist-
ing theories of (social) psychology.
To elaborate on this point a bit further, so as to demonstrate its impor-
tance, let us consider a similar thought experiment, one that is said to be
more realistic by people like Ray Kurzweil, who argues that it will soon
be possible to upload the brain to a supercomputer (Kurzweil, 2000,
2005). At the very least, one can discern a recurring tendency within neu-
roscience to not only adhere to a classical mind-body dualism, but also
to conceptualise the physical brain as something that exceeds the body
and thus something that can be immaterialised and hosted in a virtual
reality: it can be regarded as software, as programmatic codes which can
potentially surpass and survive their bodily container. Again, the non-
and un-thought of this thought experiment are manifold: is it not evi-
dent, for instance, that if one were in fact able to successfully upload a
person or a subject, then surely the latter would not remain as it were for
very much longer? Indeed, if one were to connect this virtual personal-
ity to the internet, would it not become megalomaniacal and absorb all
the available knowledge? Would it not expand in uncontrollable ways
or infinitely metamorphosise, become all the things in the world, if not,
for that matter, become the world itself? As such, there is little guarantee
that subjectivity would survive, at least not as we know it. But besides
these relatively speculative ruminations of mine—perhaps not that dis-
similar to thought-experimentation itself—one could also ask, supposing
that subjectivity was in fact uploadable, what exactly would we upload
and how would we go about doing it? Is it not precisely here that, in
2
Thought experiments, to put it bluntly, are designed to make us not think, or at the very least, they
are devised to cover up and stow away basic problematic issues in one’s thinking: the
un-thoughts.
a homologous fashion to the brain-in-a-vat issue, psychological theories

would return to the fold? If in the example of the brain-in-a-vat experi-
ment it is the issue of successfully reconstructing the world which neces-
sitates the mobilisation of the old socio-psychological models, in the
thought-experiment of the uploaded brain it is the digital transformation
and reconstruction of the subject that would be the main issue. And here,
in this very act of digital translation, I claim, is where the old psycho-
logical models would have to be put into action yet again. For in devis-
ing the very algorithms through which one would be uploaded, would
there not also be the choice of which psychology (Freudian, Pavlovian,
etc.) you would prefer to be uploaded? Interestingly, when I once made
this very point in a psychology class, a student without any hesitation
exclaimed: “Oh, definitively not a Freudian one!”, which in itself is a
beautiful example of classical resistance against psychoanalysis, and fur-
ther evidence that psychoanalysis is still the Other (to be rejected) within
current mainstream neuropsy-discourses. At the very least, the question
would be: which psychology should we use for the brain, which psychol-
ogy should we choose for this newest metamorphosis of the human? As
such, we perhaps already here find some kind of intermediary, or, as I said
earlier, a pharmakon: in the metamorphoses of the human being into the
brain the transformation requires a good dose of psychology.
This is the argument I will return to again and again throughout this
book: although at first glance we appear to be dealing with a metamor-
phosis of the psychological into the neurological, one where the former
appears to be irretrievably lost (we appear unable to even imagine what
the psyche was at times), closer inspection reveals that psychology is still
the silent partner of the neurosciences. Just think of how, in order to
do an imaging study on aggression, for example, one must start from a
psychological theory of aggression. Consequently, it is only by rummag-
ing in psychology that neuroscience is able to design its experiments and
devise the stimuli offered to the subjects in the scanner. The wager of this
book is that, from this starting point, psychology in actual fact haunts
the entire edifice of the neurosciences, which in Freudian terms we can
designate as the return of the repressed.
This, at the bare minimum, means that, if the neuro-turn entails a
process of neurologisation that affects contemporary forms of subjectivity
and sociality—with neurologisation here being understood as the sub-

ject adopting neuro-discourses in order to understand (and to be with)
itself, others and the world—then we must look at its antecedent: psy-
chologisation. The first consequence that derives from this lineage that I
aim to make clear in this book is that, in much the same way that psy-
chologisation is not an ancillary effect but part and parcel of psychology
itself, neurologisation must also be viewed as something definitive and
inherent to the most fundamental level of the neurosciences itself. At the
very least this means that, if one places psychology in the position of the
pharmakon of the metamorphosis to the brain, the true question is not,
what is lost in translation? Or phrased otherwise, the issue is not to look
beyond neurologisation—or, for that matter, beyond psychologisation—
to reconnect with the ostensibly real human being. Rather, the central
question of this book is: what is this surplus, this Real qua residual excess
which emerges through the metamorphosis of the human and its former
psychology into a brain? This leads to the eventual upshot of my argu-
ment in which I will ask: what are we exactly, when we are said to have
become our brain, which is not to say, what are we really but, rather, what
have we really become?
Following in this vein, this book will, somewhat paradoxically, argue
the following: while brain science invariably claims analytical jurisdiction
over what we are, it is precisely by virtue of its claim to lay bare the real
that brain science is in danger of veiling and covering up what it is to be
human. In other words, it is the naked brain itself, the alleged cerebral
nudity that should be considered as the latest in a long line of disguises.
The brain represents a way of telling the truth in order to lie3; we dress up
in the nude, as it were. The brain can thus be said to be a metamorphosis,
which serves a similar goal that the changing of forms did for the afore-
mentioned Thetis, that is, to escape from something: in this case the goal
is to escape from the unbearable surplus of being human. Our epochal
memento mori, you are nothing but a brain, the endlessly repeated super-
egoic command that manifests itself through all kinds of channels (the
3
In this respect, it is instructive to remember Slavoj Žižek’s point: “there is a way in which one can
lie in the guise of (telling the) truth, that is, in which the full and candid admission of one’s guilt is
the ultimate deception, the way to preserve one’s subjective position intact, free from guilt” (Žižek,
2001, p. 46).
contemporary version of you are nothing but a sack of dung4), thus serves
to obfuscate the Real, that is, it operates to cover up the skandalon of us
no longer knowing what it means to be human.
But in this very act of concealing our face with a mask depicting
our brain, do we not unwittingly expose that which we want to hide?
Consider, in this respect, Socrates, who in the story of Apuleius, had
fallen on hard times in a strange town and, ashamed of his impoverish-
ment, tried to conceal his embarrassment: “he covered his face, which
had long since begun to redden from shame, with his patched cloak,
baring the rest of his body from his navel to his loins” (Apuleius, 1989,
p. 15). So if, indeed, the brain represents the final, naturalised meta-
morphosis of the human being, then we must discern which cloaks are
patched for this paradoxical ‘de-nuding’ of the human being. We need
to, then, address the manifold faces and facets of the brain. We have to
read it as a palimpsest, conducting an exegetical reading in the hopes of
deciphering the relatively obscene message that shines through the glar-
ing digital imprint of the brain scan, all in an attempt to understand what
exactly it is that we have become.
Henceforth, in this book I will trace the brain through a few of its
many avatars and metamorphoses. Chapter 2 addresses the educated
brain (the brain as something to be educated), Chap. 3 discusses the
material brain, Chap. 4 considers the iconographic brain (the brain as
image), Chap. 5 attends to the sexual brain, Chap. 6 deals with the
celebrated brain (the brain as something to be worshipped and glori-
fied) and whilst there is a political theme interwoven throughout all the
chapters, it is in Chap. 7 that I directly address the political brain. I am
cognisant of the fact that this enumeration might not mean much to
the reader at this stage, but hopefully he or she will be able to discern
in the progression of the chapters the aforementioned genealogical and
explanatory thread, which should allow us to discern the neuro-turn
and its variegated consequences for both subjectivity and society, that is,
neurologisation’s antecedent: psychologisation. Here, one might recall
4
As St Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) wrote: “Man is nothing else than fetid sperm, a sack of
dung, the food of worms” (cited in Cohen, 1973, p. 24).
Proteus’ advice to Peleus after the latter expressed his desire to conquer
Thetis:
And heard him say. “O son of Aecus, go make

A net to trap your sleeping bride; her dreams transform her,
But if you bind her you may lie upon her.”
As Titan-Phoebus swung his chariot down
To ride the Western sea, Thetis came home,
Undressed herself for sleep. Scarcely had Peleus
Mounted her, she changed, or tried to change,
Yet she was open to him, limbs bound fast.
At last she moaned, “Some god made you undo me.”
Then she gave way and Peleus held his Thetis,
And got his son on her, the great Achilles
(Ovidius, 1958, p. 306)
Unlike in the passage above, the nets with which we tie down the brain
do not have to be cast from a God; on the contrary, these nets are to be
found in the brain itself, more precisely yet still, they have been woven
into the brain from the very beginning. Although dense, the brain qua
tissue, neurons, synapses and neural networks is actually empty; neuro-
science attempts to fill it, to stuff it with forms and regions, to give it
different colourings, that is, to dress it up by weaving different, more or
less fitting cloaks for it. The principal aim of this book is not to do away
with the weavings altogether, so as to replace them with the Real of the
brain and/or of the Real of the human—which would amount to claim-
ing a god-like Archimedean perspective—but, rather, to discern the real
or the excess of the human being which is spun out through the contours
of these very weavings.
References
Apuleius. (1989). Metamorphoses (J. A. Hanson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Cohen, K. (1973). Metamorphosis of a death symbol: The Transi Tomb in the late
Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Jensen, F. E., & Nutt, A. E. (2014). The teenage brain: A neuroscientist’s survival
guide to raising adolescents and young adults. New York: Harper Collins.
Kurzweil, R. (2000). Live forever—Uploading the human brain … closer than
you think. Psychology Today. Retrieved from http://www.psychologytoday.
com/articles/200001/live-forever
Kurzweil, R. (2005). The singularity is near: When humans transcend biology.
New York: Viking.
Ovidius, N. P. (1958). The metamorphoses (H. Gregory, Trans.). New York: The
Viking Press.
Pfaller, R. (2000). Interpassivität: Studien über delegiertes genießen. Wien/New
York: Springer.
Putnam, H. (1981). Reason, truth and history. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Žižek, S. (1997). The plague of fantasies. New York: Verso.
Žižek, S. (2001). The fragile absolute: Or, why is the Christian legacy worth fighting
for? London: Verso.
2
The Educated Brain: A Critique of
Neuroeducation
Introduction
It would appear that the century-long dominion of the psychological
has come to an end. Today, we are no longer instructed to take care of
ourselves, to become more in-tune with our emotions, or to enhance our
communication skills. Instead we are increasingly enjoined to look after
our brains: to engage in brain exercises, eat the right kinds of food and,
if required, take medication to restore the cerebral chemical balance. As a
consequence of this, we no longer think of ourselves exclusively in terms
of having psyches but, rather, in terms of having, if not actually being,
a brain. Or, as Nikolas Rose contends:
We are increasingly coming to relate to ourselves as “somatic” individuals,

that is to say, as beings whose individuality is, in part at least, grounded
within our fleshly, corporeal existence, and who experience, articulate,
judge, and act upon ourselves in part in the language of biomedicine.
(Rose, 2006, pp. 26–27)
What Rose is suggesting here is that, in terms of analysis and explana-

tion it is the brain which can now be said to constitute the only game in
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 13

J. De Vos, The Metamorphoses of the Brain – Neurologisation and its
Discontents, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-50557-6_2
town, providing a narrative, in the words of Ovid, “to tell the shifting
story of the world from its beginning to the present hour” (Ovidius,
1958, p. 31).
However, the first point I wish to stress here is that, quite remark-
ably, this epistemic shift has not rendered psychologists obsolete, and left
out in the cold looking in; quite the contrary, in fact, many psycholo-
gists have performed a volte-face and become the primary advocates of
the neuro. Today, ADHD, love, being happy, bulimia, etc., all have their
derivation in the brain, or at least that is what we are told by those for-
mer advocates of a psychological perspective on the world. Thus, whereas
cashiers in supermarkets who prompt customers to use self-service check-
outs are, albeit unwittingly, contributing to the end of their profession,
psychologists who grant complete jurisdiction to neuroscientists remark-
ably survive their symbolic death. Consider here how the psy positions
itself in relation to the problem of ADHD:
Medication is highly effective for treating ADHD. But it can’t teach you
skills for living successfully with the disorder. … That’s where psycho-
therapy comes in. [Psychotherapy] helps you better understand your
ADHD and improve all areas of your life, including home, work and
relationships.1
As one can discern in the above quote, it is the role of psychologists to

educate subjects, to teach you about certain things so that you can under-
stand your brain condition. In this respect, they not only educate patients
or their families, but also the general public: it is commonly believed, in
other words, that society at large should be taught the latest findings of
neuroscience. Simply put, the brain must be educated and this, I argue,
is one way how psychologists seemingly stay in business.
But, before we question in more detail this issue of neuro-education,
we must first ask what it means precisely to have become “somatic”
individuals? When we acknowledge the dictum “we are our brain”,2
1
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2013/02/23/how-to-pick-an-adhd-therapist-whos-
right-for-you/
2
What might at first glance appear to be an overly simplified phrase from popular neuroscience—
see Dick Swaab’s book (2014)—can in actual fact be attributed back to two Nobel prize winners:
The Educated Brain: A Critique of Neuroeducation 15
do we truly believe this? Might we say that this utterance is, in fact,
always over-determined by minimal doubt or at least a minimal distance?
What we might refer to as a form of disavowal: I know very well that
I am my brain, but …. In such instances, a certain surplus arises: we
suspect that there is more to it, that, in fact, there is something to being
human which is not only about the brain. It is illustrative to cite a couple
of examples here. Firstly, due to extensive media coverage we all know
that the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual) is a mere contingent clas-
sification of mental disorders, because it is based on conventions and
agreements which, as such, are always contestable. Secondly, we are all
perfectly aware that the general acceptance of ADHD being brain-based
is, in actual fact, not supported by any conclusive empirical evidence. Yet
despite knowing this, I would argue, we nevertheless continue to act as if
both acronyms (DSM and ADHD) possess strong validity and are useful
for apprehending reality. The point I am making here is that, yes, we are
“somatic” individuals, but we also know the manifold caveats.
Perhaps this is nothing more than a simple case of suspending one’s dis-
belief. As is well known, a novel or a movie can only really be absorbing
and experienced as real insofar as we ignore the obvious inconsistencies
and the visible technical constructions of the illusion. Is something anal-
ogous to this taking place within neuro-discourses? But maybe, upon
reflection, it would be more appropriate to speak of a suspension of
belief apropos neuro-discourses. That is, of course we all acknowledge
that, in a sense, we are our brain: I do not doubt for one second that
if my brain stopped working at this very moment, then not one single
letter would subsequently appear on the screen in front of me. What
I am arguing is that, it is precisely this belief which is suspended in the
educational component of the neuro-turn taken up by psychologists.
For, if psychologists claim to be able to help you “better understand your
ADHD, and improve all areas of your life, including home, work and
relationships”, then are they not also presupposing not only a potential
minimal gap between you and your brain, but also a minimal space
and momentum beyond the brain? That is to say, I know very well that
Eric Kandel said “you are your brain” and Francis Crick wrote “You are nothing but a bunch of
neurons” (cited in S. Rose, 2011, p. 57).
I am my brain, but …. Apparently, something in your brain can set

itself apart from the other (malfunctioning) parts. It is this very split,
I contend, which assures that, even with the dawning of the neuro-
paradigm, psychologists are not simply superseded; rather, it is this
very minimal distance between you and your brain that brings the
educational paradigm onto the scene.
At the very least, at the level of the subjective experience, the
neuro-turn is no simple, one-dimensional phenomenon: it evokes
aporias, unsolved paradoxes and non-resolved questions (e.g., what
is materiality? what is the human, etc.?). Moreover, not only is neu-
roscience itself far from a unified field, there is also a large dispar-
ity between those manifold discourses and practices which adopt the
neuro-signifier (e.g., differences in terms of how they use and choose
to incorporate the neuro-factor). However, this is not to say that in
this very dispersion there is not also some form of unity. For, it is
precisely through a generalised neuro-education, educating the whole
of society under the banner of “you are your brain”, that the neuro
is able to establish a vast and hegemonic grip over both subjectivity
and society. Indeed, neuro-education is responsible for the manage-
ment and exploitation of the aforementioned suspension of (dis)belief
which is necessarily evoked by the neuro-turn. Throughout the media,
governmental institutions and corporations one can clearly discern
an emerging neuro-bloc, which, almost as if it were an ideological
apparatus, establishes a generalised neuro-scene, an all-encompassing
neuro-culture. Hence, there is a kind of unity within the neuro-
disparity: the unifying force of the neuro-turn is neuro-education,
whilst the common denominator is neurologisation and the way in
which it enjoins people to see oneself, others and the world through
the lens of the neuro-discourse.
It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that neuro-discourses are deeply
embedded within education itself: from parenting courses to school-
ing, there are persistent appeals to incorporate knowledge on the brain.
One should not overlook the ways in which in the transformation of the
human being into a somatic brain-individual is interwoven with, or even
built upon for that matter, the traditional metamorphosis envisioned
in education, that of the child developing into a human being. Hence,
in order to understand neuroeducation3 one must first get a handle on

the traditional transformation envisioned in education. Resisting the
temptation to cite the altogether tedious metaphor of the “larva child”
who becomes a butterfly through the “chrysalis of education”,4 I want
to turn instead to Immanuel Kant’s well-known phrase that “the human
being can only become human through education” (Kant, 2007, p. 439).
The difference between Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s educational
project is crucial for our purposes here. While for Rousseau there is no
doubt as to what man’s destiny is, namely nature, for Kant the ultimate
goal of education is far more abstract and aims at something which is
only asymptotically reachable: that is, for Kant man’s destiny is nothing
else than humanity itself (Kant, 2007, p. 438). Here, as Boris Demarest
(2016) succinctly remarks, Kant trades Rousseau’s “man’s place in nature”
with man’s “vocation”.5 Hence, for both Kant and Rousseau education is
future-oriented; but whereas for Rousseau the aims can be clearly stated
(the purpose of education is to return to a natural state), for Kant there
can be no such certainties in this respect: “one can never know how far
[our] natural dispositions reach” (Kant, 2007, p. 439).6 Kant specifically
relies, above all, on cultural heritage and the historical past: “one genera-
tion educates the next” (Kant, 2007, p. 437), in contrast to Rousseau
for whom the past which orients the future of education is very much a
natural past.
Turning our attention towards contemporary education, then, one
could argue that the latter strongly focuses on the present. Not only
does history tend to disappear from the curricula altogether (Billiet,
2002), but in the West there is also no longer any direct reference to a
future-oriented grand societal project. If the reader will forgive me what
3
I use the word “neuroeducation” in its unhyphenated form to designate education based on brain
research, whether in schools or in the realm of parental support, whilst “neuro-education” in its
hyphenated form designates the more general practice of teaching the so-called layperson the
theories and findings of neuroscience.
4
See here for the use of that metaphor: http://muralconservancy.org/murals/metamorphosis-
education-0
5
Rousseau writes: “Remain in the place which nature assigns to you in the chain of being”
(Rousseau, 1979, p. 83).
6
Boris Demarest remarks: “The limits are assumed to be there, but we can never make determinate
claims about them, such that Kant’s humanism is peculiar for its omission of commitment on the
nature of humanity” (Demarest, 2016, p. 111).
is a rather sweeping observation: contemporary education focuses, above

all else I would argue, on the present of the individual, the individual
with his or her psycho-neurological make-up and his or her undeveloped
potential capabilities and skills. This latter aspect, the targeting of growth
and expansion, is the only reference to the future that remains in contem-
porary educational discourse.
It is for precisely this reason, I suggest, that it is enlightening to take a
closer look at the field of neuroeducation,7 for while at first it may seem
in accordance with the Rousseauian naturalist project, it can neverthe-
less be said to eventually transcend the latter as, ultimately, the goal of
neuroeducation is not simply to reach or regain the natural state but to
go beyond it. Is neuroeducation thus Kantian? Indeed, it does clearly
envision a future enhancement of the brain beyond its natural coordi-
nates. But one should not overlook the crucial shift here. The envisioned
growth and surplus are not on the side of humanity, as in the Kantian
perspective, but on the side of the brain (more synapses, more plasticity,
etc.), a paradoxical natural surplus gained at the expense of nature. So,
after the nature versus nurture or culture discussion, we “trade up” to the
nature versus brain discussion. Here the brain itself has become the very
target of educational transformation: even though we do still encounter
educational programmes claiming that exercising your brain is, for exam-
ple, crucial for building social skills, more and more, I argue, this argu-
ment is becoming inverted, such as in the following title: “How social
relationships help build (and rehabilitate) our brains”.8
Neuro-education—note the hyphen—which educates us in neuro-
scientific theories, represents the way in which this aforesaid surplus of
“I know perfectly well that I am my brain but …” is put to work in order
to realise a surplus of the brain. If, as has been argued, the neuro-turn has
7
As aforesaid, this concerns education based on scientific brain research. For an overview of this
burgeoning field see Elena Pasquinelli’s plea for a “good marriage” between education and the
science of the mind-brain-behaviour, as well as her warning about some of the treacherous terrain
facing research and practitioners in this endeavour (Pasquinelli, 2013). In this chapter, however,
I contend that these aforementioned slippery slopes are not merely avoidable pitfalls or simple
misunderstandings; rather, they are structurally unavoidable deadlocks that undermine the entire
field of neuroeducation.
8
So went the title of a seminar, http://research.vtc.vt.edu/videos/2014/mar/31/how-social-
relationships-help-build-and-rehabilita/
a direct linkage with post-Fordist production and modes of consumption

within capitalism (see e.g., Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007), then the ratio-
nale of neuro-education can be said to provide the operative paradigm:
it is the educated brain itself which constitutes the surplus most readily
extracted by the contemporary market. Scrutinising neuroeducation, in
its unhyphenated form, which designates the manifold ways in which
neuroscience has embedded itself within education and parenting specifi-
cally, is crucial for our attempts to understand the issue I flagged up in
Chap. 1 of this book: if we successfully convince an entire generation of
children and youngsters via a generalised neuro(-)education to identify
with the brain (despite or, as we will see, precisely because of a minimal
distance from it), then what kind of subjectivities/socialities will this pro-
duce? Let me begin to address this question by providing some additional
remarks on the issue of surplus within (neuro) education; in so doing we
will open up some space, which, of course, is a prerequisite for critique.
The Question of the Surplus

In response to the popular claim that neuroscience has the potential to
revolutionise education and parenting, Bas Levering rightfully asks, as
summarised by Ramaekers and Suissa: what exactly is it that we now
claim to know which we did not know before and what exactly is it that
would follow from this knowledge (Ramaekers & Suissa, 2012, p. 21)? In
other words, what or where is the surplus? Of course, the question of the
surplus has always itself been a major issue within education. Either edu-
cation is concerned with instilling something in a subject, or it involves
decanting something extra out of you, as per the motto: plus est en vous
(there is more in you)—the personal motto of Lodewijk van Gruuthuse,
a fifteenth-century nobleman from Bruges. In the first instance, the sub-
ject is either a blank slate, or an entity with its own (developing) sub-
stance onto which something new, something extra is grafted.
With regards to the entrance of the neuro within education, one
particular surplus (constituting a major difference to the previous psy-
approaches) stands out: psychotropic medication, used to remediate a
shortage of chemical substances (whether of stimulants or inhibitors) in
Another random document with
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It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast
away at such an age. It is wonderful to me that, even after my
descent into the poor little drudge I had been since we came to
London, no one had compassion on me—a child of singular
abilities, quick, eager, delicate, and soon hurt bodily or mentally
—to suggest that something might have been spared, as
certainly it might have been, to place me at any common school.
Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No one made any sign. My
father and mother were quite satisfied. They could hardly have
been more so if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at
a Grammar School, and going to Cambridge.
Terrible words those: the more terrible for being, after long
repression, uttered so judicially.
And again:
I suppose my lodging was paid for by my father: I certainly

did not pay it myself, and I certainly had no other assistance
whatever—the making of my clothes, I think, excepted—from
Monday morning until Saturday night. No advice, no counsel, no
encouragement, no consolation, no support, from anyone that I
can call to mind, so help me God!
Nor did his parents’ neglect end with starving his heart’s affection,
his brain’s activity. It starved the weak little body into spasms through
malnutrition. He had a boy friend in the warehouse, one Bob Fagin.
Dickens writes of this time:
Bob Fagin was very good to me on the occasion of a bad

attack of my old disorder. I suffered such excruciating pain that
they made a temporary bed of straw in my old recess in the
counting-house, and I rolled about on the floor, and Bob filled
empty blacking-bottles with hot water, and applied relays of them
to my side half the day. I got better and quite easy towards
evening; but Bob (who was much bigger and older than I) did not
like the idea of my going home alone, and took me under his
protection. I was too proud to let him know about the prison; and
after making several efforts to get rid of him, to all of which Bob
Fagin in his goodness was deaf, shook hands with him on the
steps of a house near Southwark Bridge on the Surrey side,
making believe that I lived there. As a finishing piece of reality, in
case of his looking back, I knocked at the door, I recollect, and
asked, when the woman opened it, was that Mr. Robert Fagin’s
house?
O caeca pectora! Dickens had hard streaks in him, and I confess to

a curious wonderment how, afterwards, he could have used that
name of Fagin—how he could have used it as he did—in Oliver
Twist.
But I end by repeating my question—Is it any wonder that this
street-boy of genius, coming to his own, invoked out of the theatre a
new world, to redress the balance of his old?
Of that new world I propose to say something, Gentlemen, a
fortnight hence.
DICKENS (IV)
PREFACE
I THINK it meet, Gentlemen, that before we resume our subject to-day,
a word should be said on a loss that has befallen English letters in
general and our sister-University in particular, since I last addressed
you.
Walter Raleigh was an authentic son of Cambridge: and although
he spent the most of his life teaching in other places the better
understanding of a literature—our own literature—which in his
undergraduate days had not found adequate recognition here, yet
Cambridge had been his pasture, and he carried everywhere the
mettle of that pasture: yes, and unmistakably, and although by the gay
sincerity of his nature he would win men to like him, wherever he went.
Personal affection may count for too much in my faith that he will
some day be recognised, not only for a true son of Cambridge, but for
a great one in his generation. I put, however, that reckoning on one
side. He did, very gaily and manfully and well, all the work that fell to
his hand; and his end was in this wise. He had, in the first and second
weeks of August, 1914, been eye-witness at Oxford of one of two
amazing scenes—the other simultaneously passing here—when in
these precincts, in these courts of unconscious preparation, by these
two sacred streams, all on a sudden the spirit of youth was a host
incorporate.
Χρυσῷ δ’ ἄρα Δῆλος ἅπασα

ἤνθησ’, ὡς ὅτε τε ῥίον οὔρεος ἄνθεσιν ὕλης.
“Then Delos broke in gold, as a mountain spur is canopied in
season with the flowering bush.”
“The mettle of your pasture” ... “Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of

decision” ... and the host, so suddenly gathered, as suddenly in
motion, gone, for their country’s sake challenging the scythe. Raleigh
saw that with his eyes, and could not forget.
* * * * *
The Dean of St. Paul’s returned, the other day, to a rightly
respectful Cambridge, to deliver a Rede Lecture to us on The Victorian
Age. Now he is a fool who denies or doubts Dean Inge to be a great
man of our time—though he may now and then be a little too apt to
regard himself as the only widow of another. Dean Inge, at any rate,
felt himself strong enough to tell you he had no doubt that, to the
historian of the future, the Elizabethan and Victorian Ages will appear
as “the twin peaks in which English civilisation culminated.”
Now I have been talking to you—already through three lectures—
upon the best-beloved writer of that Victorian Age—its most
representative writer, perhaps—and preaching his eminence. But I
should be nervous of claiming quite all that! It seems to me, if I may
put it so without offence, a somewhat complacent view for us to take of
an Age in which we were born—he, to unseal the vials of prophecy, I,
just to happen along with the compensation of a more sanguine
temperament. He admits that he has “no wish to offer an unmeasured
panegyric on an age which after all cannot be divested of the
responsibility for making our own inevitable.” He admits that “the
twentieth century will doubtless be full of interest, and may even
develop some elements of greatness.” But as regards this country, “the
signs are that our work on a grand scale, with the whole world as our
stage, is probably nearing its end.” Well, I dare to say that such talk
from a man of the Dean’s age or mine is more than unhopeful; is
ungrateful:
Difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti....
Would he but go back in memory to the tempus actum of August,
1914, it may dawn upon him that “fears may be liars” and the likelier
for that some hopes were not dupes: that some men less gifted, less
eloquent, than he, in those August days of 1914 saw this vision as of a
farther Pacific:
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Raleigh at any rate saw it: I would not use extravagant language,
but I verily believe Raleigh, from that hour, saw the assembled chivalry
of those boys of 1914 as a meadow of cloth-of-gold spreading past all
known or prophetical horizons—a prairie, the scent over which was a
scent of sacrifice, at once holy and intolerable. Let me repeat—for one
does not ring changes on the loss of a friend—the mourning bell
strikes once and repeats itself—let me repeat some words written, the
other night, under durance on returning from his funeral:
In his last few years, under an invincible inward compulsion,

he turned from his life’s trade, in which he had vindicated himself
as one of the best few, to become a child again and learn to be a
valiant soldier. The sacrifice of the young in 1914–18, about which
so many talk so easily, was a torture to him: it cut to the bone, the
marrow. It was matter for indignation that he should survive these
many boys.... Some of us, who noted, almost from the first, the
operation of the War upon Raleigh’s soul, foreboded that in some
way or other it would cut short his span, or, at least, that it
menaced him. His converse again and again would wander away
from the old writers, once his heart-fellows, to machinery, air-
fights, anything.... When I last talked with him he was full of his
History of the Air Service in the War, the first volume of which is in
the press, I believe. For the second he went out to survey, from
the air, the fields of campaign in Mesopotamia, took typhoid in
Baghdad, and came home just in time to die.
It is a purely simple story: of a great teacher who saw his pupils go

from him on a call more instant than his teaching, and followed their
shades with no thought of
So were I equall’d with them in renown
but the thought only to overtake them in service.
* * * * *
Forgive the length of my discourse, Gentlemen. It is right, I think,
that our sister-Universities should feel one for the other’s pride, one for
the other’s wound.
I
To take up our tale—
It has already been objected against these lectures on Dickens—or
against such parts of them as the newspapers honour me by quoting—
that they treat Dickens as a genius of the first class. That term has little
meaning for me who seldom or never think—can hardly bring myself to
think—of great men in class-lists, in terms of a Tripos. (I reserve that
somewhat crude method of criticism to practise it upon those who are
going to be great men; and even so—if you will credit me—derive
scant enjoyment from it.) But I foresaw the objection, and forestalled it
by quoting a famous saying of Tasso, and I take my stand on that: as I
take not the smallest interest in weighing Chaucer against Pope,
Shakespeare against Milton, Scott against Burns, or Dickens against
Thackeray. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens—their other
qualities apart—are grand creators, lords of literature all, by this
specific virtue; and, were there sense in challenging, with this quadriga
alone we could securely challenge any literature in any living tongue.
Note you, moreover: it is to this creative power that other artists less
creative, but great and therefore generous, instinctively pay homage:
Dryden, for instance, or Byron:
’Tis to create, and in creating live

A being more intense that we endow
With form our fancy, gaining as we give
The life we image, even as I do now.
What am I? Nothing: but not so art thou,
Soul of my thought!...
(Childe Harold, iii. 6.)
Or again:
The mind can make

Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh....
(The Dream, st. 1.)
Note you particularly, if you will, the words “planets of its own....” We
talk too often, perhaps (I have talked in this fashion myself
unheedingly), as if these men had been makers of picture-galleries,
lining their walls with lively characters, brilliant portraits. But in truth
neither Chaucer’s Prologue nor Shakespeare’s succession of women,
neither Redgauntlet nor David Copperfield, is a gallery of characters;
but a planet rather, with its own atmosphere which the characters
breathe; in which as proper inhabitants they move easily and have
their natural being: while for us all great literature is a catholic hostelry,
in which we seat ourselves at the board with Falstaff, Dugald Dalgetty,
Sam Weller, the Wife of Bath, Mrs. Gamp and Mrs. Quickly, and
wonder how soon Don Quixote, My Uncle Toby, or The Three
Musketeers will knock in to share the good meat and the wine.
II
So, between a discussion of Dickens’ plots—which we examined a
fortnight ago and found wanting—at once stagey and ill-knit and, at
that, repetitive, poor in invention; and of his characters, which teemed
from his brain in a procession closed only by their author’s death, so
inexhaustibly various and withal so individual, vivid and distinct, that
the critic can scarcely help telling himself, “Here, and only here, must
lie the secret of the man’s genius”; I shall interpose to-day a few words
upon this world of Dickens, with its atmosphere.
For it is a strange world, with an atmosphere of its own, as strange
as itself.
I have already noted some things of that world of his—that it was a
crowded world: a world of the city, of the streets; that his novels, when
they visit the country, take us at a violent rate in post-chaises to find,
with Shenstone,
The warmest welcome at an inn.
For one moment, at the term of Little Nell’s wanderings, in the quiet of
the old schoolmaster’s garden, we almost touch a sense of country
rest and repose. But of real country, of solid growth in rest, of sport, of
gardens, of farms and tenantry, of harvests, of generations rooted,
corroborated in old grudges, old charities; of all that England stood for
in Dickens’ day and, of its sap, fed what Cobbett had already called the
“Great Wen” of London, our author had about as much sense as Mr.
Winkle of a horse, or a snipe.
Now I wish to be rather particularly scrupulous just here: for we are
dealing with a peculiarly, an unmistakably genuine, English writer; who,
himself a child of the streets, acquainted, by eyesight and daily wont,
with an industrial England into which the old agricultural England—
what with railway and factory, gas, and everything extractible from coal
—was rapidly converting itself; did yet by instinct seize on the ancient
virtues. Take away the hospitality, the punch and mistletoe, from
Dingley Dell, and what sort of a country house is left? Why, the
Handley Cross series, for which Messrs. Chapman and Hall intended
Pickwick as a stale challenge, could give Pickwick ten and a beating
from the first. As the season comes round you play cricket at Dingley
Dell, or you skate, or you mix the bowl and turn the toe. But the
stubble-fields are not there, nor the partridges; nor the turnips, nor the
gallops to hounds, nor the tillage and reaping, nor the drowsed
evenings with tired dogs a-stretch by the hearth. Of all this side of
England Dickens knew, of acquaintance, nothing. I am not speaking,
you will understand, of any Wordsworthian intimacy with natural
scenery tender or sublime, of anything imparted or suggested to the
imagination by a primrose or in the “sounding cataract” haunting it “like
a passion.” I am speaking rather of human life as lived in rural England
in Dickens’ time and in some corners yet surviving the week-end habit.
Of these Sabine virtues, of these Sabine amenities and hardships, of
the countryman’s eye on the weather-glass for “snow and vapours,
wind and storm, fulfilling His word,” Dickens (I repeat) had no sense,
having no tradition, of field life, of that neighbourliness which existed in
quiet places and persisted around ancient houses:
The summer air of this green hill

’Va-heaved in bosoms now all still,
And all their hopes and all their tears
Be unknown things of other years....
So, if ’twere mine, I’d let alone
The great old House of mossy stone.
Dickens loved the old stage-coaches and travel by them. What he

thought of the new railways and their effect upon landscape, you may
read in Dombey and Son. He lived, moreover, to undergo the
chastening experience of a railway collision. But his actual sense of
the country you may translate for yourself from the account, in Bleak
House, of the country life of Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock. It is worse
than stupid: it is vapid: or, rather, it is not there at all. Will you conceive
Dickens, closing one of those Adelphi-Dedlock chapters and running
his head suddenly into Mr. Wilfrid Blunt’s ballad of The Old Squire?
I like the hunting of the hare

Better than that of the fox;
The new world still is all less fair
Than the old world it mocks....
I leave my neighbours to their thought;

My choice it is, and pride,
On my own lands to find my sport,
In my own fields to ride....
Nor has the world a better thing
Though one should search it round,
Than thus to live, one’s own sole king
Upon one’s own sole ground.
I like the hunting of the hare;

It brings me, day by day,
The memory of old days as fair
With dead men past away.
To these, as homeward still I ply

And pass the churchyard gate
Where all are laid as I must lie,
I stop and raise my hat.
I like the hunting of the hare;

New sports I hold in scorn.
I like to be as my fathers were
In the days e’er I was born.
For a figure like that—hopelessly conservative, if you will, but

conceived of truth, Dickens could only substitute a week-ender (as we
should say nowadays) and make him a pompous ass. By one touch or
two, of understanding what “the stately homes of England” really stood
for—their virtue along with their stupidity—by one touch of Jane
Austen’s wit, shall we say?—Dickens might have made some sort of a
fist of it. As it is, when he wanders anywhere into the country, he is a
lost child, mooning incuriously along the hedgerows with an
impercipience rivalling that of a famous Master of Trinity who once
confessed that his ignorance of botany was conterminous with all
Solomon’s knowledge, since it ranged from the cedar of Lebanon to
the hyssop that grows in the wall. Dickens’ favourite flower (we have it
on record) was a scarlet geranium!
Still, I would be fair, and must mention a fact which I have
experimentally discovered for myself and tested of late in the slow
process of compiling a Book of English Prose (an “Oxford Book,” if you
will forgive me), that, while our poetry from the very first—from “Sumer
is icumen in; Lhude sing cuccu!”—positively riots in country scenes,
sounds, scents, country delights:
—all foison, all abundance,
and soothes us with the deep joy of it, with music and “the herb called
heart’s-ease,” of all such joy, even of all such perception, our prose,
until we come to the middle of the last century, is correspondently
barren. Consider what a unique thing, and unique for generations, was
The Compleat Angler! Try of your memory to match it. An Essay of
Temple’s? a few pages of Bunyan, of Evelyn? The Sir Roger de
Coverly papers?—charming; but of the town, surely, and with
something of Saturday-to-Monday patronage not only in pose but in
raison d’être? Fielding understood the country better—witness his
Squire Allworthy. But on the whole, and in fairness, if Dickens’ pages
exhibit—and they do—a thin theatrical picture of rural England, without
core or atmosphere, against his childhood’s disinheritance—against
the mean streets and the Marshalsea—we must balance (if I may use
a paradoxical term) the weight of traditional vacuity.
III
But I fear we have a great deal more to empty out of this world of
his.
To begin with, we must jettison religion; or at any rate all religion
that gets near to definition by words in a Credo. Religious formulae I
think we may say that he hated; and equally that he had little use for
ministers of religion. I can recall but one sympathetic portrait of an
Anglican parson—the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle, Minor Canon of
Cloisterham—and that in his last book, and with scarcely a shadow of
a quality impinged upon it by his vocation, by Holy Orders: Crisparkle,
Minor Canon and muscular Christian, well visualised, is a good fellow
just as Tartar in the same story is a good fellow: nothing more. George
Eliot and Charlotte Brontë, who disliked ecclesiastics, have to give
them understanding, even sympathy, in some degree. Dickens merely
neglects them. Unaccredited missionaries of the Gospel are humbugs
all, in Dickens; uneducated Pharisees, Stiggins’s, Chadbands;
devourers of widows’ (and widowers’) houses; spongers on the
kindness and credulity of poor folk just a little more ignorant than they,
while far more innocent. As for sacred edifices—cathedrals, churches
—Dickens uses them as picturesque, romantic, mouldy, just as suits
his convenience—a last harbourage for Little Nell or an object with a
steeple suggesting to Mr. Wemmick—“Hullo! here’s a church!... let’s
get married!” If Dickens ever conceives of a church as a tabernacle of
any faith, I have yet to find the passage.
You must remember that, while Dickens wrote, Tractarian
Movements, Unitarian Movements, Positivist Movements—Wiseman’s
claim, Newman’s secession, the Gorham judgment, Bishop Colenso’s
heresies—Darwin’s hypothesis, Huxley’s agnostic rejection of doctrine,
and so on—that all these were agitating men’s thoughts as with a
succession of shocks of earthquake. But all these passed Dickens by,
as little observed as felt by him: simply disregarded.
IV
Of political thought, again, his world is almost as empty. He was, in
his way, an early-Victorian Radical. When he saw a legal or political
hardship which hurt or depressed the poor, conventions injurious to the
Commonwealth—the Poor Laws, Debtors’ Prisons, the Court of
Chancery, the Patent (or Circumlocution) Office and so forth, with the
people who batten on such conventions, taking them for granted as
immutable—Dickens struck hard and often effectively. But he struck at
what he saw under his own eyes. Beyond this immediate indignation
he had no reasoned principles of political or social reform. I have to
hand, at this moment, no evidence to confirm a guess which I will
nevertheless hazard, that he hated Jeremy Bentham and all his works.
Certainly the professional, bullying, committee-working philanthropists
—Mrs. Jellaby and Mr. Honeythunder, whose successors pullulate in
this age—were the very devil to him. His simple formula ever was—in
an age when Parliament carried a strong tradition of respect—“Yes, my
Lords and Gentlemen, look on this waif, this corpse, this broken life.
Lost, broken, dead, my Lords and Gentlemen, and all through your
acquiescence, your misfeasance, your neglect!” To the immediate
reader his message ran simply, “Take into your heart God’s most
excellent gift of Charity: by which I mean let Charity begin at home, in
that kingdom of God which is within you, let it operate in your own daily
work; let it but extend to your own neighbours who need your help; and
so—and only so—will the city of God be established on earth.”
V
I perceive, Gentlemen, that in my hurry I have let slip a great part
of the secret, and so will add but this in hasty summary, catching up,
before retreat, my cloak of advocatus diaboli:
(1) In the first place, Dickens’ world was not a world of ideas at all,
but a city “full of folk.” Compared with the world as Carlyle saw it, or
Clough, or Martineau, or Newman, or Arnold, it is void of ideas, if not
entirely unintellectual.
(2) Moreover, and secondly, it is a vivid hurrying world; but the
characters in it—until you come to Pip, say, in Great Expectations—are
all quite curiously static; and, as the exception proves the rule, I am not
afraid to back this assertion against Martin Chuzzlewit, for example, in
which young Martin is, of set purpose, to be converted out of the family
selfishness. Things happen to Mr. Pecksniff, to Little Nell, to Mr.
Micawber, to Mr. Dombey, to Bradley Headstone and Eugene
Wraybourne, to Sally Brass and her brother: but, as the rule, these
things do not happen within them, as such things happen in the soul of
any protagonist in a novel by Tolstoy or Dostoievsky, or as they are
intended and traced as happening (say) in Romola. Dombey’s
conversion is a mere stage-trick; and, for Micawber’s apotheosis as a
prosperous colonist, let him believe it who will.
VI
Further—and to conclude on this point—over and beyond its
infertility of thought, Dickens’ is a world in which technical or
professional skill never comes into play to promote anything on earth.
We have spoken of his clergy. His innumerous lawyers, from the Lord
Chancellor to Messrs. Dodson and Fogg (assisted by his own personal
experience in the Law’s service), draw their money for exculpating the
guilty or slowly killing the righteous through hope deferred:
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office—
Equally with lawyers (readers of epitaphs and of David Copperfield will

take the allusion) “physicians are in vain.” It would be interesting [I do
not suggest it as a subject of research for a Ph.D. degree] to count the
number of births in Dickens’ novels and discover an accoucheur who
did not contrive to lose either the mother or the child, or both.
VII
What remains, then, of a world thus emptied of religion, thought,
science?
I reserve the answer for a minute or two.
But I start my approach to it thus: Be the world of Dickens what
you will, he had the first demiurgic gift, of entirely believing in what he
created. The belief may be as frantic as you will: for any true artist it is
the first condition. Well, this remains: nobody has ever doubted that, in
the preface to David Copperfield, he wrote the strict truth:
It would concern the reader little, perhaps, to know how

sorrowfully the pen is laid down at the end of a two-years’
imaginative task; or how an Author feels as if he were dismissing
some portion of himself into the shadowy world, when a crowd of
all the creatures of his brain are going from him forever. Yet I had
nothing else to tell, unless indeed I were to confess (which might
be of less moment still) that no one can ever believe this Narrative
in the reading more than I believed it in the writing.
Well, there, Gentlemen—just there, and so simply—you have the first

condition of a work of art—its own creator is so possessed that he
thoroughly believes in it. As Henry James once said to me (I recall the
words as nearly as I can), “Ah, yes, how jollily the little figures dance
under the circle of the lamp, until Good-bye, and off they go, to take
their chance of the dark!”
VIII
Having that, you have artistic sincerity: of which I wonder, as
experience enlarges, how many faults it cannot excuse—or indeed
what is the fault it cannot excuse.
All that remains of the merely artistic secret has been summarised
by Mr. Saintsbury:
It cannot have taken many people of any competence in

criticism very long to discover where, at least in a general way, the
secret of this “new world” of Dickens lies. It lies, of course, in the
combination of the strictest realism of detail with a fairy-tale
unrealism of general atmosphere. The note of one or the other or
both, is sometimes forced and then there is a jar: in the later books
this is frequently the case. But in Pickwick it hardly ever occurs;
and therefore, to all happily fit persons, the “suspension of
disbelief,” to adopt and shift Coleridge’s great dictum from verse to
prose fiction, is, except in the case of some of the short inset
stories, never rudely broken. Never, probably, was there a writer
who knew or cared less about Aristotle than Dickens did. If he had
spoken of the father of criticism, he would probably have talked—
one is not certain that he has not sometimes come near to talking
—some of his worst stuff. But certainly, when he did master it
(which was often) nobody ever mastered better than Dickens, in
practice, the Aristotelian doctrine of the impossibility rendered
probable or not improbable.
Well, there you have the artistic secret of Dickens’ world accurately
given, and not by me. It lies in the combination of the strictest realism
of detail with a fairy-tale unrealism of general atmosphere.
Let me give you, to illustrate this, a single instance out of many. In
his Christmas story, The Perils of Certain English Prisoners—an
adventurous story of the sort that Stevenson loved and some of you
make the mistake of despising—a handful of a British garrison with
their women and children in a stockaded fort in South America tensely
await an attack of pirates hopelessly outnumbering them. Now listen to
one paragraph:
(It is a corporal of Marines who tells it.)
“Close up here, men, and gentlemen all!” said the sergeant. “A

place too many in the line.”
The pirates were so close upon us at this time that the
foremost of them were already before the gate. More and more
came up with a great noise, and shouting loudly. When we
believed from the sound that they were all there, we gave three
English cheers. The poor little children joined, and were so fully
convinced of our being at play, that they enjoyed the noise, and
were heard clapping their hands in the silence that followed.
Defoe within his limits does that sort of thing to perfection: but then
Defoe’s world observes the limits of the “real” (as we absurdly call
everything that is not spiritual), has little emotion, scintillates scarce a
glimmer of humour. Dickens handles it in a phantasmagoric world,
charged even to excess with emotion, and is not in the least afraid to
employ it—I quote Mr. Saintsbury again:
Of invading those confines of nonsense which Hazlitt proudly

and wisely claimed as the appanage and province of every
Englishman.
I need but to instance a writer whose acquaintance Hazlitt had not
the joy to make, nor Lamb—woe upon these divisions of time!—Lewis
Carroll, in whom both would have revelled for his insane logicality of
detail—or, if you prefer it, I will fall back upon Lear’s Nonsense Books
or even upon A Midsummer-Night’s Dream—to convince you that, as a
nation, we have this appanage: and if it bewilder a foreigner, or he
deride it, why then we will give him a look, and pass.
IX
Yes, but there is something else.
What else—no mere artistic secret—ties this phantasmagoric
world to ours and makes it universal with ours, conterminous, and so
real?
It is no dodge or trick of artistry that can work so incredible a feat—
that can open our hearts to such beings as Dick Swiveller and Mrs.
Gamp (whom in private life you or I would avoid like the plague)—to
enjoy their company, to hang on every word they utter. It must be some
very simple catholic gift, thus to unite the unreal with the real, thus to
make brothers and sisters of all men and women, high or low.
It is: nor shall I delay you by elaborate pretence to search for it. For
I know; and you know, or will recognise it as soon as I utter the word. It
is Charity; the inestimable gift of Charity that Dickens flings over all
things as his magic mantle: so that, whether there be prophecies, they
shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be
knowledge, it shall vanish away; and whether there be little critics
tormented about Dickens’ style, in the folds of that mantle they shall be
folded and hushed:
That it may please Thee to preserve all that travel by land or

by water, all women labouring of child, sick persons, and young
children; and to shew Thy pity upon all prisoners and captives.
That it may please Thee to defend, and provide for, the
fatherless children, and widows, and all that are desolate and
oppressed.
That is the last secret of Dickens: and that is what George Santayana
means when he writes:
If Christendom should lose everything that is now in the

melting-pot, human life would still remain amiable and quite
adequately human. I draw this comforting assurance from the
pages of Dickens.
DICKENS (V)
I
“I REMEMBER,” says Henry James in a wise little Essay on The Art
of Fiction—
I remember an English novelist, a woman of genius, telling

me that she was much commended for the impression she had
managed to give in one of her tales of the nature and way of life
of the French Protestant youth. She had been asked where she
learned so much about this recondite being, she had been
congratulated on her peculiar opportunities. These opportunities
consisted in her having, once, in Paris, as she ascended a
staircase, passed an open door where, in the household of a
pasteur, some of the young Protestants were seated at table
round a finished meal. The glimpse made a picture; it lasted only
a moment, but that moment was experience.
I wish I could make you promise, Gentlemen, to bear this little

story in mind whenever some solemn fellow assures you that a man
rustically born and bred could not have written Hamlet or The
Tempest; “he would never have seen this, learned or experienced
that” and so on: the simple answer being that under such
disadvantage they would never have written Hamlet or The Tempest.
They are, in fact, not even Shakespeares to the extent of
understanding how an artist creates, how the imaginative mind
operates.
Henry James, who was an artist and understood that operation,
simply comments on his anecdote that the lady had caught her direct
personal impression and it was enough:
She knew what youth was, and what Protestantism: she also
had the advantage of having seen what it was to be French, so
that she converted these ideas into a concrete image and
produced a reality.
Above all, however, she was blessed with the faculty which
when you give it an inch takes an ell, and which for the artist is a
much greater source of strength than any accident of residence
or of place in the social scale. The power to guess the unseen
from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the
whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general
so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any
particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to
constitute experience, and they occur in country and in town,
and in the most different stages of education.
Yes, Mr. James, for the purpose of your immediate argument

“this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.” But
for our argument it does, and accurately, constitute imaginative
genius. It is the gift that taught Xenophanes, watching the stars, to
catch the whole piece from the pattern and cry out “All is one—” the
gift that suddenly hitches the particular upon the universal and gives
us a Falstaff, a Don Quixote, a Tartuffe, My Uncle Toby, the Vicar of
Wakefield—
Forms more real than living man.
You know—you must know—that none of these is a
photographic portrait of a living person—of a certain eccentric lodger
whom Dickens had studied in Goswell Street, of a certain bibulous
nurse resident in Kingsgate Street, High Holborn, “at a bird-fancier’s,
next door but one to the celebrated mutton-pie shop”—but children
of imagination begotten upon it by some such observant moment as
was vital to Mr. James’s lady novelist. What, in fact, was the genesis
of Mr. Pickwick? Dickens, you recall, was to write the letterpress
accompaniment to a series of humorous sporting sketches by
Seymour. The publisher Mr. Chapman, of Chapman and Hall, has
left this uncontradicted record:

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The Metamorphoses of the Brain –

Neurologisation and its Discontents 1st

The New Turkey and its discontents 1st Edition Caliskan

The Function of Public International Law 1st Edition

Liberal Education and Its Discontents The Crisis in the

Ottoman Puritanism and Its Discontents: Ahmad al-

Filial Obsessions: Chinese Patriliny and Its

Socialism Across the Iron Curtain Jan De Graaf

The Risk Management of Contingent Convertible CoCo

Proof Complexity Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its

ISBN 978-1-137-50556-9 ISBN 978-1-137-50557-6 (eBook)

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© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Cover illustration: © bilwissedition Ltd

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Introduction: The Metamorphoses of the Brain 1

2 The Educated Brain: A Critique of Neuroeducation 13

3 The Material Brain: A Plea for the Uselessness

4 The Iconographic Brain: An Inquiry into the Culture of

5 The Sexual Brain: Against Neuro-Plasticity 129

6 The Celebrated Brain: The Role of the Brain in the

7 The Political Brain: The Brain as a Political Invention 203

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

ordeal of remembering what exactly we were before, might best be

This is reminiscent of Gregor Samsa from Kafka’s novella The

In a stream he longed to say, “O miser-

always be resilient enough to adapt to new epistèmes, on the grounds that

prepares us for a similar metamorphosis, by virtue of the fact that the

a homologous fashion to the brain-in-a-vat issue, psychological theories

and sociality—with neurologisation here being understood as the sub-

And heard him say. “O son of Aecus, go make

We are increasingly coming to relate to ourselves as “somatic” individuals,

What Rose is suggesting here is that, in terms of analysis and explana-

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 13

As one can discern in the above quote, it is the role of psychologists to

I am my brain, but …. Apparently, something in your brain can set

in order to understand neuroeducation3 one must first get a handle on

is a rather sweeping observation: contemporary education focuses, above

a direct linkage with post-Fordist production and modes of consumption

The Question of the Surplus

I suppose my lodging was paid for by my father: I certainly

Bob Fagin was very good to me on the occasion of a bad

O caeca pectora! Dickens had hard streaks in him, and I confess to

Χρυσῷ δ’ ἄρα Δῆλος ἅπασα

“The mettle of your pasture” ... “Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of

In his last few years, under an invincible inward compulsion,

It is a purely simple story: of a great teacher who saw his pupils go

’Tis to create, and in creating live

The mind can make

The summer air of this green hill

Dickens loved the old stage-coaches and travel by them. What he

I like the hunting of the hare

I leave my neighbours to their thought;

I like the hunting of the hare;

To these, as homeward still I ply

I like the hunting of the hare;

For a figure like that—hopelessly conservative, if you will, but