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Abstract
The circulation of scientific brain images in popular discourses is part of a more general shift in contemporary conceptions of the relationship between biology and society. The present arrangement of biology and society is biosocial, characterized by a merging of biological and social categories. This arrangement has significant consequences for the production and constitution of individual and collective identities. In this project, I trace the discursive shifts in ways of talking about the self, science and society that accompany the development of imaging technologies that allow us to visualize the brain. Through a rhetorical analysis of self-help books, popular media coverage of babies brains, and public policy speeches about early childhood education, I argue that science is being transformed into a social discourse at the same time that society is increasingly understood in biological vocabularies. This double movement results in a host of material and social consequences, ranging from the breakdown of institutional boundaries demarcating schools, hospitals and families, to the increasing ingestion of psychopharmaceuticals for the control of mood and behavior. This rearrangement of social and biological categories of thought poses both risk and opportunity for ethical subjects. As these shifts challenge the efficacy of traditional modes of political action, new opportunities for rearticulating subjects and societies emerge.