Introduction: Brain Cultures

Why does SubStance begin the landmark calendar year 2000 with articles clustered around the theme of “Brain Cultures,” when surely the brain as such is a topic more fittingly found in science or even philosophy journals? The simplest answer is that the brain has become a privileged site for locating the nature of the human being. Indeed, in a “post-human” age, the brain may be the last outpost of, if not a human essence, a distinctly human character. If literary and critical theory in the 1970s and ’80s questioned “the subject” as a ground for thought, then cognitive and neuroscience in the 1990s–officially hailed by George Bush senior as “the decade of the brain”–began to map the neurobiological substrates and underpinnings of thinking. And if initial forays into medical/anatomical research into brain functioning marked the last years of the nineteenth century as “the golden age of neuroscience,” then the last years of the twentieth century constituted another golden age in which, many scientists claim, we learned more about the brain than we had known up to that point. In the wake of this massive surge of research and burgeoning popular interest in the topic, it is important to sound out the implications of work on the brain, to take stock of where we stand as a species in light of it, and to chart out some of the paths down which this focal point of research will lead us.