Since the early 1800s, mainstream Western discourses that entwined racializing and ableizing discourses have involved, among other things, particular notions of temporality and ways of privileging scopic regimes that presume surface-depth relations mediated by a theory of time and materiality. In this essay, Bernadette Baker analyzes the link between the production of visual surface-depth relations, the theorization of time, and the conception of matter in a high profile movement that today has been discredited. She takes as her case an instance of the first neuroturn (nineteenth century), specifically the physiognomy and phrenology in a textbook-style volume written by F. J. Gall. Translated and published in 1835, Gall's treatise discusses morality and the brain in relation to the shape of the head. The reconstitution of entitlement emerges through Gall's treatise via unexpected epistemological alliances that mark a shift in the architecture of medical perception and that build a bridge from the spirit to the flesh. While relatively humble in tone, Gall's content draws upon empirical and metaphysical reference points that have, in turn, become major legacies for the second neuroturn, education, and other social sciences to deal with. This essay thus examines pivotal horizons in the Gallian approach that, while discredited now as a pseudoscientific fad, raise many difficult questions that expose the link between seemingly oppositional political and intellectual commitments.

Introduction

One of the fastest traveling contemporary discourses in education today is educational neuroscience. Coined in the early 2000s, it refers to a broad interdisciplinary field that is rapidly redefining teaching, learning, memory, and wellness. Born of an interplay between psychology (especially cognitive and developmental) and subdisciplines of neuroscience, the new field entails a range of approaches, including brain-based assessments involving EEG, PET, MRI and fMRI scans; eye tracking; cortisol studies of teacher's saliva; self-reports of stress in students; mindfulness studies; neurolinguistic programming; and brain gyms.¹ The emergence of such a field is part of what has been referred to as a broader neuro turn, neuroturn, or neuromania.² The neuroturn of the twenty-first century that educational neuroscience participates in has been considered the second of its kind, marking innovations that were not apparent in the first neuroturn of the nineteenth century.³

This essay analyzes the systems of reasoning that helped to usher in and mark the first neuroturn in ways that show it is related to but somewhat different from the movements occurring now. While any new movement seems to provoke reaction, the first neuroturn generated polarizing responses overtly steeped in religious sentiments. The second neuroturn has also produced volatile reactions within and beyond educational research but these are rarely debated in terms that are named as religious. Rather, the emergence of educational neuroscience has divided opinion between celebratory versus skeptical accounts, along the lines of scientific materialist organology versus appeals to context and structuralism, as well as along the lines of how to use the research and how to resist being used by it.⁴ Key flashpoints in today's reactions revolve around disciplinary differences especially and include such issues as what questions neuroscience is fit to answer, the strategies used to produce truth claims, definitions of evidence and data, and the a priori value systems within which knowledge production occurs in different fields.⁵

The sections that follow lay out some conditions of possibility that enabled the first neuroturn to become available, or to “make sense” to a limited audience in its day and that inspired strong responses somewhat different from those of today. Rather than adjudicating polarizing reactions, I trace the systems of reasoning within which the first neuroturn generally and Western versions of mind–brain specifically could take hold, a new “running together” (that is, mind–brain) that set the stage for much of the twenty-first-century research. The technologies of self and histories and cultures of human dissection that enabled the braining of mind within “neural romanticism” have already been examined elsewhere.⁶ Here, some broader intersecting horizons for the first neuroturn, as well as how “vision” and “temporality” were invoked in the production of beliefs about human ontology are explored.

In doing so, awkward insights and as-yet irresolvable issues arise that both celebratory and skeptical accounts of educational neuroscience do not typically take up. This includes consideration of the logics that endure and overlap in oppositional accounts. Particular systems of reasoning regarding the role of the empirical and the material, for instance, are ongoing regardless of whether a “for” or “against” position is mobilized around head-based ontologies or educational neuroscience. Today, as a case in point, new materialisms, postpositivism, brain-based learning, social justice discourses, and hands-on child-centered education have something in common — the fundamental belief that if you can see it (or in some other way “sense” it), it is real. It is important to excavate the organizing presumptions that link superficially oppositional movements and orientations because sometimes critiques of new movements like educational neuroscience embody the same organizing presumptions as the movements that critique them.

Undervalued in historical accounts and conditions of possibility for such presumptions is the work that preceded and then became labeled as phrenology amid the first neuroturn. Phrenology has rightly been dismissed as fad, as offensive, and as pseudoscience. More subtly and beyond its own concerns, however, it built a bridge that saw an upswing in “the visible” as the key principle and condition of proof in “empirical science.” This requirement operated not just in medical studies of dissection or public demonstrations of head-squeezing but also in future theories of behaviorism, in phenomenological claims to experience, and in social justice documentation of inequalities. The presumption of the visible as optics, as visuality, of a subject/object split where the subject-as-voyeur operates to confirm evidence in contemporary settings (such as reading an fMRI, making brain atlases, or demonstrating localization of functions) endured well beyond phrenology's eruption as a fad. Phrenology did not instantiate or secure this broader shift on its own, but it did play a pivotal role in changing the terms of the debate and in offering a new kind of scopic regime on which to base educational activities.

In light of this role, I examine here how Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), the father of phrenology, explains and challenges both the role attributed to the senses and the place this leaves for education. This includes how such movements facilitated the intersection of “vision-as-visuality” and “temporal” discourses (that Gall reduces to before and after) whose effects of power were always uneven. It also entails unpacking how phrenological reasonings facilitated the alignment of discourses of race and dis/ability as a key confluence of distinguishers, the role of materiality in this confluence, and how a particular form of determinism was posited as the basis of ontology.

The ontological claims made in phrenological reasonings are especially related both to what could count as education and to the rationales for education's enactment in specific forms. In particular, education-as-instruction becomes an integral — and restrictive — point of appeal for building arguments over how and why perceived differences between humans and between humans and other species become available to theorization and are made to matter.

Given the vastness of the Gallian oeuvre, I examine only a subset his works. This analysis not only builds upon the critiques of cranium-squeezing that have already been leveled (“bumpology,” as it was satirically called), but exposes some broader logics it has left an educational field to deal with.⁷ To this end, I draw inspiration from Hannah Tavares's “postfoundationalist, multi-theoretic and cross-disciplinary” work that, in analyzing scopic regimes, image production, identity construction, and much more, recognizes the importance of reapproaching abjected sources and technologies of mediation with philosophical gravity. Such sources “can serve as catalysts for hearing the remainder of what authoritative histories of education have neglected, teaching the contingencies around truth-making, retrieving the politics by which social identities and locations are ascribed, lived, contested or embraced.”⁸ The analysis here concludes not with a resounding checklist for solving the issue of mind–brain relations in definitions of human ontology, but more modestly with rethinking the relationship of the first neuroturn to the second, including the impact of defining education-as-instruction along with some salient methodological issues that have ensued in the educational field since the nineteenth century.

Phrenology's Theory of Difference: Assumptions of an “Inner Disposition,” the Observation of “Shape, Skin, and Behavior,” and the Mediating Role of Organs in Claims about “the Innate”

Given that educational neuroscience was born of a combination of psychology and the neuro, it can “make sense” or become seductive in some locations more than others. Thus far, its major regions of practice and coming-into-being have been tied to Europe and the United States, with diffusion emanating from such historical sites of production. During the nineteenth century, in both Europe and the U.S. the fledgling field of psychology was one of the first to split from philosophy and generate its own professorships, chairs, associations, and journals. Since then, psychology has had uneven relations with the field of education in different national contexts, sometimes symbiotic and sometimes antagonistic. In the educational field of the United States, for instance, psychology has been reified while it has been relegated in the educational fields of Australia and South Africa. The possibilities for reception of educational neuroscience remain quite varied and unsettled. It is, therefore, important to unpack the provincialisms in the onto-theo-philosophies that have enabled uptake, diffusion, or distancing.

As the opening paragraphs underscore and allude to, this task is not straightforward because embodied in the effort are the very things up for question. The difficulty with deconstructing vision, temporality, or other modifiers (for example, timespace) from within Western philosophies is that presumptions about the content operate “a priori,” shaping recognition of the form. We have an idea of what the term vision refers to. We have an idea of what the temporal and/or time refers to. Even when attempting to suspend, decenter, or sideline such vague notions, they furtively operate in the grammar of here and there, before and after, past and present tense, difference and similarity between points, and so on. Jacques Derrida posited this play, in 1968, via the nonconcept of la différance, as “the problem of our era,” simultaneously contesting the our, contesting era, and contesting how a “thing” arises for notice let alone becomes labeled as a problem; still, the mundane a priori recognition and operation continues, unable in English to move beyond the very thing being studied.⁹

The following sections do not offer a “way out” or transcendence of the mundane. Rather, they explicate the deep points to which it has been driven in generating apparent castes of educability in Western biophilosophies — a viewpoint that has become implicit in much mainstream educational theory and that remains both damaging and dangerous in contemporary contexts. In particular, Gallian texts illustrate the deeper deployments and how they rely upon specific conceptions of matter that house discourses of vision and temporality in unique ways that reinforced and reanimated belief in educational castes. F. J. Gall's work on physiognomy, referred to against his wishes as phrenology, is a particularly relevant site for such an analysis of Tavares's abjected sources: while eventually dismissed as fad, phrenology has been underestimated in education for the systems of reasoning it bequeathed. Even though critiques of phrenology in regard to mental measurement movements and eugenics have been available to education for some time, there are other aspects of phrenology's organizing presumptions that have been less visited.¹⁰ One of those is not whether phrenology participated in spirit-versus-matter debates as a question of origin regarding things coded as morality, talents, and dispositions, but how:

Are all men endowed, to the same degree, with the qualities essential to their nature, or, are the differences observed in this respect, due to the influence of accidental causes posterior to birth? Are these differences, on the contrary, determined in the womb of the mother? And if they are innate, how are we to cultivate, to perfect them, to repress or to direct them, according to the demand of individual or general good?¹¹

Gall generates this list of questions after an overview of philosophical thought on the nature of what he calls Man. The questions, which could still summarize debate in many fields today, operate as a prompt and frame for the argument to come and the documentation drawn upon here. His position in the main is that dispositions that might manifest at a later period are inborn and not the sole product of impresses made upon the senses after birth. Dispositions that are coded as inner, innate, and inborn (Gall uses all three terms) are thought to invariably make their mark on a surface, and that surface — whether the cranium, a dissected corpse, or a behavior — is available to the observer and really the only data “we” have to analyze or justify a conclusion. The complexities, nuances, and leaps made in Gall's position — and that any précis cannot do justice to — are crucial to understanding when a visibility criterion (vision-as-visuality) is retracted and invoked and when the temporal joins forces within the caste-making process. Before unpacking that confluence, which eventually results in the delimitation of education to instruction, some broader horizons of debate that Gall participated in are important to elaborate as part of the first neuroturn.

Body as Extension Endowed with Properties? The Location and Nature of “I”

Is it allowable that philosophers, while boasting to penetrate into the essence of the soul, should treat of man by piecemeal, and confine themselves to making long treatises on the soul, as an insulated being? Exercising its functions by itself, making use of the body, at most, as a means of communication between itself and the world; when, from the moment of conception to the last sigh, every thing indicates that in this world, the soul is in dependence on the material organs? (FB, 88)

Longstanding debates in Western philosophies have drawn lines differently around terms like soul, mind, body, matter, the subject, properties, and their analogues in multiple languages. For example, is there a distinction between prime matter and secondary matter (an “origin” or first principle that allocates qualities in objects like breadth, depth, and length?). Gall's On the Origin of the Moral and Intellectual Faculties of Man, and the Conditions of Their Manifestation selectively overviews debates regarding such topics including the role of sensation, similarities and differences between species, and the origins of talents within species. Appeals to scholars such as Philo, Locke, and Hume pepper the argument, but Gall does not touch on the differences between a Plato and an Aristotle, for instance, regarding the very nature of “matter” or “extension.” While this book is only one volume in a set, and it does not stand in for the entire oeuvre where engagement with philosophers, natural scientists, and theologians is common, it is important to recognize that it is the first volume in the set and thus the theme of morality opens the discussion of why one should study the brain. The confluence that still inheres in social science today — the extent to which moral and intellectual engineering is possible and ought to be engaged in — reflects a consistent theme across the oeuvre and suggests why it is considered related to educational discourse.

On the Origin of the Moral and Intellectual Faculties of Man (henceforth Volume 1) was translated as part of On the Functions of the Brain and of Each of Its Parts: With Observations on the Possibility of Determining the Instincts, Propensities, and Talents, or the Moral and Intellectual Dispositions of Men and Animals, by the Configuration of the Brain and Head. Together the six volumes of this collection arguably represent a “crossover” moment in which concerns for morality especially become appended to the “intellectual” (in this case quite literally via the “and” placed between the terms moral and intellectual in the title). This appending, in turn, becomes attached to debates over matter and the hierarchy of properties and essences. While some philosophical tracts, like John Locke's, posit extension (length, breadth, and so on) as more significant and fundamental than weight or color, Gall's elevation of the brain and of head-based ontology implicitly fuses appeals to shape (such as length and breadth) and to color (such as references to skin or nation) within the analytical lens, coding such observations as data — something not entirely common within the older philosophical debates.¹² While much canonical Western thought has posited education as inherently concerned with moral development or its analogues, the conjuncture in Gall of this longstanding imperative with a particular version of “the intellectual” begins to suggest a crossover point where it is through the intellectual that the morality objectives or purposes can be secured and viewed.

The six-volume publication and translation put Gall at the forefront of commentary on the nature of Man and in the firing line of critics. While often mocked, his work was also thought to require a response rather than to remain ignored. In Volume 1, he responds to some of this mocking. He makes appeal to terms that today have much cache, such as facts, evidence, and dissection; he offers an extended analysis of how others have misconstrued the role of the senses; and he overtly uses the term data. To unpack how such vocabularies could operate as points of appeal in the English translation, it is important to attend to the debates that made them available to scholarship in the nineteenth century and how they were reoriented in this version of the first neuroturn.

One broad horizon of debate was the location and the nature of the human “I,” which was discussed variously in relation to terms such as soul, mind, body, and self. In basic and reduced terms, the debates over the “I” — or ego, as it was sometimes called — during the late 1700s, especially in the northern trans-Atlantic region, turned on whether “I” ought to be conceived as “spiritual” or “material.”¹³ The former entailed conceiving of the “I” as one's higher self and as divinely ordained, an existence beyond body and beyond a conception of “extension” or “property,” allied instead with the immortal or eternal. Here, “mind” was aligned with and sometimes synonymous with the term “soul” and was not considered to go necessarily through a material organ except in the everyday perception of objects. In the counterarguments, which were sometimes depicted as atheistic, the “I” was considered material, meaning that in this deployment it could not reside or exist outside of the flesh as an independent entity. Here, conceiving of one's self as contained was required and mind was not necessarily allied to or equated with soul. Mind was considered to go completely through the agency of an organ defined as material.¹⁴ Gall's position was more complex than this binary, albeit informed by it:

[W]ithout doubt, these faculties are real: but they are only abstractions and generalities; they are not applicable to the detailed study of a species, or an individual. Every man, except an idiot, enjoys all these faculties. Yet all men have not the same intellectual or moral character. We need faculties, the different distribution of which shall determine the different species of animals, and their different proportions of which explain the difference in individuals. All bodies have weight, all have extension, all are impenetrable in a philosophical sense but all bodies are not gold or copper, such a plant, or such an animal. Of what use to a naturalist the abstract and general notions of weight, extent, impenetrability? By confining ourselves to these abstractions, we should always remain in ignorance of all branches of physics, and natural history. (FB, 88–89)

Through the exceptionality and liminality attributed to “an idiot” in the above, the “I” of humans is posited as a priori, in need of a material organ or organs for expression, and while creation was potentially designed by a Creator, this realization should not prevent one from understanding the operation of organs. Such organs are considered by Gall to house and display (by way of shape) the different talents and propensities with which we are born and which we take as our self. To this end, Gall concedes in multiple instances throughout the text the existence of a Creator, Author of nature, or “spiritual being” as that which is potentially involved in design. Such references invariably arise, however, as a sideways and/or defensive attribution. He does not write as the religious zealots of his day, defending a superintendent “I,” nor is he able to distantiate his position completely from the idea that a supernatural “something” lies behind creation that we observe in terms of material organization and behind the ultimate distinction between humans and animals. The key shift, then, was that for educational acts to be considered appropriate, the operation of organs, such as the organs that comprise the brain, need to be understood — a position underlying both the first and second neuroturns in education.

Comparing Humans, Animals, and Plants

I often institute comparisons between men and animals: Is this comparison appropriate; is it even necessary? I am going to answer these two questions.… The knowledge of man, supposes the knowledge of the elements of which he is composed, as the knowledge of the mechanism of a clock supposes that of the wheels, levers, spring, weights, balance, movement, &c. The organ of animal life, the brain of man, is an assemblage of particular organs, many of which are found in animals. The animals of inferior classes have, by the fact of their inferiority to others on the score of intelligence, fewer cerebral organs; they have only the first rudiments of the human brain, and they are, consequently, easier to decipher than those animals which are provided with a more complex brain, and a more complicate animal life, or with more numerous instincts and talents. It naturally follows, that in order to attain the knowledge of man in all the parts which constitute his brain, all his propensities and talents, it is necessary to study the animals one after another, following the gradual march which nature has observed, in the succession of their cerebral organs, and faculties. This study opens to the philosophical observer, a field infinitely more vast than is supposed. (FB, 91–92)

This points to a second broad horizon of debate: the relationship of humans to plants and animals, especially the latter in Volume 1. While some of his contemporaries drew a sharp line between human and animal qualities, Gall was far more open to an overlap, blur, and then to an eventual higher form of distinction between human and animal. While not of the ilk of later Darwinian insights, which converted a succession of analysis into a sequencing within evolutionary time, Gall nonetheless was at pains to indicate how, if his contemporaries were to consider such comparison at all undignified, ignorance of the commonalities would be worse:¹⁵

Should it be thought that this comparison degrades man, I should answer with Pascal, that if it be dangerous to show man too much, in how many respects he resembles the brutes, without pointing out his greatness, or, to let him see his greatness too much without his baseness, it is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both. We shall not recognize the less, in this work, the distinguished place which the Author of nature has assigned to man; his real advantages are sufficiently conspicuous to establish, of themselves, his superiority, without having recourse to distinctions which experience and natural history disavow. The real detractors of the human species are those, who think they must deny the intelligence of animals, to maintain the dignity of man. (FB, 93–94)

His defense entails illustrating human–animal similarities with long tracts describing different kinds of animals and birds, including attributing to some animals a sense of property. The point that he allies to such similarities, however, is the difference: while animals with hands and animals with brains like humans still shiver, they do not invent a fire to stay warm, write beautiful literature to entertain each other, or construct magnificent architecture like cathedrals. For Gall, this was a key distinguisher, and it turned on one thing — a superior factor and a higher quality — the mind–brain in humans. The import of this for education-related discourse was that while similarities may be observed, there is something unique that humans could do to and with others that opened the space for education to be seen as a “higher order” practice and quality of “civilization.”

Dissection and the Entwining and Disconnect between Conditions of Proof

It is these dispositions [the “different instincts, mechanical aptitudes, inclinations, sentiments, and talents of man and animals”], these qualities, and these faculties, which form the total of the fundamental forces of the soul, the special functions of the brain; it is these forces which I hold to be innate in man, and, in part, in animals, and the manifestation of which is subordinate to organization; it is these qualities, and these faculties, the history of whose discovery I shall exhibit, together with their natural history, their modifications in a sound state, and in the state of alienation, the seat of their organ in the brain, and its external appearance on the head or skull, &c. (FB, 90)

The quality of the mind–brain (which he blurs with the “fundamental forces of the soul”) in humans was argued in Volume 1 more in relation to the dissection and observations Gall had conducted elsewhere. It pertained to the third broad horizon upon which phrenological scholarship garnered attention in its day — the unprecedented detail with which Gall and his student, Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, drew the interiority of corpses, based on the new techniques they brought to providing views of the spinal cord and brain especially.¹⁶ In continental Europe, the ban on human dissection by the Church was lifted in the 1200s. As a variety of historians have noted, however, the early human dissections did not illustrate anything “new” for at least two hundred years.¹⁷ In the aftermath of the ban being lifted, dissection culture entailed a network of practices, social structures, and rituals surrounding the production of fragmented bodies that sat uneasily alongside an image of the European Renaissance as the age of a unified sense of selfhood.¹⁸ In retrospect, it took quite some time to move from simply illustrating what was already believed about a God or Creator's brilliant anatomical designs to asking questions about how things were so arranged. By the time of Gall, human dissection had lost some of its more transgressive and repulsive associations and moved into closer alignment with the forensic and medical. This shift takes place incredibly unevenly over a four-hundred-year period, reflected in changing vocabularies.

Fifty years after the lifting of the ban on human dissection, for instance, the term evidence enters into English languages. Today, in Indo-European root languages and especially in the second neuroturn and evidence-based education movements, evidence, empirical, fact and data are often conflated even though they emerged at different times, within different value systems and subsets of meaning. These four terms (see Table), appearing in this chronological order, are self-reinforcing in their Oxford English Dictionary listings, occupying each other's definitions. There are important entwinings and disconnects in their journeys, however, that give character to the debates in which Gall participated.

Table . Key definitions of terms related to conceptions of proof that informed the first neuroturn's vocabulary. Adapted from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Evidence (vidēre — to see) 1290 — 17 senses — same decade as country, flat, sugar

Quality or condition of being evident, clearness (actually present, prominent, conspicuous, display).
That which manifests (an appearance from which inferences may be drawn).
Legal uses of: information, whether in the form of personal testimony, the language of documents, or the production of material objects, that is given in a legal investigation, to establish the fact or point in question.

Fact (factus, facere — to make, do) 1487 — 28 senses — same decade as industrial, scene

Senses relating to action: deed, action, event, occurrence, achievement, misdeed, real happening, result of doing, something done, course of conduct, effect.
Senses relating to truth: sum of circumstances or incidents, information usable as evidence, that which is known or firmly believed to be real or true.

Empirical (empiricus — remedy or medicine) 1569 — 10 senses — same decade as control, potato, rocket

School of medical thought based on observation and experiment rather than theoretical principles; folk or traditional medicine that is based on experience of outcomes in previous cases, not on laboratory investigation or formal clinical trials, and in which treatment prescribed by a practitioner without formal academic training.
Depreciative — of a person: lacking knowledge or understanding, ignorant and unlearned, pretends expertise, charlatan. Depreciative — of a behavior: lacking a sound basis in knowledge, characterized by presumptuous ignorance or incompetence.
That pursues knowledge by means of direct observation, investigation, or experiment (as distinct from deductive reasoning, abstract theorizing, or speculation); that relates to or derives from this method of pursuing knowledge.
Guided by or derived from previous experience or unsystematic observation, without a basis in formal learning or an understanding of underlying principles; influenced by specific events or situations, rather than conforming to general rules, policies, etc.; dependent on trial and error.
Philosophy — of an object or thing: knowable or known through experience (esp. as opposed to a priori). Philosophy — of a concept, idea, etc.: originating in sense experience. Philosophy — of a statement, etc.: justified, or requiring justification, by reference to sense experience.

Datum (dare — that which is given, present) 1630 (data 1645) — 6 senses — same decade as bust, granny, programme

An item of information typically collected for reference, analysis, or computation.
Something given or granted; something known or assumed as fact, and made the basis of reasoning; an assumption or premise from which inferences are drawn (philosophy: anything immediately apprehended by or presented to the mind or senses).
A line, point, etc., forming a basis for measurement; a baseline, benchmark, or reference point (surveying).

In terms of entwinings, for example, the term evidence, from the Latin videre, references that which is not hidden but rather is clear, manifest, conspicuous, and so on. While theoretically it is unclear with which “sense” clarity is delivered, the funneling effect of appeals to evidence amid acts of human dissection eventually restricts the range and reinforces the sensorial hierarchy toward organs of sight. The latest of the four terms to emerge, data, as that which is given, present, and especially given or present in a particular form, suits this requirement, eventually entwining with conceptions of evidence. In terms of disconnects, on the other hand, the disconnect between the terms fact and empirical is telling about the changing nature, definition, and status of the experiential, phenomenological, and unsystematized. Empirik was initially a negative and pejorative term referencing charlatan medical practitioners who kept trying treatments until something worked without any explanation or generalizable theory, whereas factum referenced two possibilities that Mary Poovey has explicated — were “facts” to be considered deracinated particulars that stood outside of theory or were theories substantiated via deracinated particulars called “facts”?¹⁹

Today, however, these four terms are tightly bound in mainstream funded research, glossing their productive historical differences. Particularly noticeable is how the double-sided meaning of factum displaces the pejorative inscription of the term empirik and helps rewrite it as reverence for rather than disdain of sensory experience. The abjection of revelation as a form of knowing, for example, in Platonic and medieval Christian epistemology, and the elevation of a five-portal sensory hierarchy enables fact and empirik to conjoin the older term evidence to the newer term datum — datum as that which is given in a form amenable to detection by the sensorium. The implications of this shift are profound, for there is no mode of mainstream Western education today that does not highly value the loading of sensory apparatuses as the pathway to learning and knowing.

In Gall's Volume 1, though, these interrelationships are modified, indicating unsettlement in debates about proof, all the more pronounced in an era before university laboratories, hospital clinics, and research protocols were formalized.

These questions [about origins of dispositions], when they are resolved, will infallibly lead to the knowledge of the true sources of our propensities and our faculties, and, consequently, the prime motives of our actions.… But, on this subject, so vast and so worthy of our meditations, we have, as yet, had only scanty materials; We have wanted sufficient data; those, which we seemed to have, were too contradictory, to deduce from them the sure principles, which should serve as the basis for a complete and consistent doctrine. I shall support each of my propositions with such a number of positive facts, that they will not at all present simple opinions, but will have the character of remarkable truths, which, at all times, will be able to stand the test of experience, and, consequently, will be of permanent utility. (FB, 95–96)

If we thus consider the intersection of these three broader horizons — the unsettled nature and location of “I”; the controversial comparison of humans, animals, and plants; and the shifting role of human dissection and the senses — the interdependency of discourses within phrenological reasoning is clear and the circularity exposed: the unsettled nature and location of “I” is sheared off or “settled” by claiming that “inner” dispositions exist, assuming they are inside and invisible at birth. This assertion is supported by the “visual” comparison of behavior in species after birth, which demonstrates, for Gall, that from the beginning and without instruction, a duck tries to find its way to water while an eagle tries to fly. In addition, organization-as-“matter” provides the visual slate for discerning sameness and difference: the organization of an organ houses and enables expression of talents as one grows up, while the shifting status of dissection, evidence, and data — anatomical drawings, lumps, bumps, and behavior — is called upon to reinforce the initial belief that a disposition was innate.

Vision-as-Visuality

As it is necessary to admit five different external senses, since their functions are not simply modified or transformed sensations, but functions essentially different and belonging to distinct organic apparatuses, so is it finally necessary to recognize the various industrial aptitudes, instincts, propensities, talents, not as modifications of desire, preference, liberty, attention, comparison, and reasoning, but as forces essentially different, belonging, as well as the five senses, to organic apparatuses, peculiar and independent of each other. The innateness of the fundamental forces, moral and intellectual, is the basis of the physiology of the brain for, if in place of being able to demonstrate that they are innate, we could prove that they are only the accidental product of external things, and external senses, it would be useless to seek their origin and seat in the brain. (FB, 98–99)

The preceding sections have addressed some key conditions of possibility for the phrenological part of the first neuroturn to eventuate in the nineteenth century and the shaping effect such conditions could have on what came to be understood as education and how it would be recognized as such. Significant in phrenology's exposition and its delimitation of education were the roles attributed to and appeals made to discourses of vision and temporality. It is here that Gall's use of undifferentiated terms like Man, men, and human, captured in the quotes above and operating as seemingly universal, need to be approached and understood differently as part of a deeper and more subtle normalization project and, borrowing from Tavares, scopic regime.²⁰ While the Gallian oeuvre does not belabor the use of signifiers such as “race” or “disability” as per today's lexicons, searching his work only for such signifiers misses Tavares's point regarding “the remainder of what authoritative histories of education have neglected.”²¹ The unspoken “making up” of whiteness and normalcy as the seemingly incontestable plane of composition for labeling, grading, and judging everything and everyone else operates nonetheless and, in Gall's case, through already-in-motion assumptions about extant ontological hierarchies between races or nations and “propensities” or “capacities” between people and between people and animals. The entwining of assumptions about race and dis/ability especially reinforce belief in what Hortense Spillers from across the Atlantic, calls the “hieroglyphics of the flesh” and what Alexander Weheliye refers to as categories of the full human, the not-quite-human, and the nonhuman — classifications that emerge between the folds of appeals to vision and appeals to temporality without ever being overtly named as such.²²

One has to follow quite a convoluted road in Gall's texts, citational patterns, and preexisting debates about vision and ocularcentrism to illustrate how this “subtle” entwinement is achieved to reinforce what was already brutally enacted outside the republic of scholars. This journey reflects in part what Sylvia Wynter calls the movement from the spirit to the flesh, from Religion to biologized Race, as the major pathway for identification amid the fabrication of the New World out of the Old.²³ For instance, how Gall discusses the observable primarily as the visual but also as comprising the haptic (head squeezing, for example) and other sensory portals like smell is part of a longer heritage of debate in Western thought — a heritage he questions in a number of ways. He does not assume that a good painter is good because of their visual organs, and he does not assume that touch communicates superior information over and above all the other senses. Rather, the senses give us information about our environment and also pleasure — they are not just for survival — and crucially, the information that sensation contributes only has the ability to interact with innate dispositions that are already there. Sensations enable the inner talents to come forth and can shape their growth, but sensation, as Gall conceives it, is utterly unable to change the fundament that is inborn. Here, education is reduced to instruction imparted by others, reinforcing the restricted ontological base and matching or justifying a restricted epistemological act to suit it. In this provocative pairing, matching an “act” called education to a “perceived nature” called “innate” forged an alliance that far outstripped phrenology's prominence. While, within phrenology, education-as-instruction is given a rather circumscribed role and presence in a child's life because the core elements for the emergence of dispositions are considered already set, the symbiotic coupling of “nature” with “act,” of ontology as the basis for epistemology, has endured through to present-day educational movements, especially in developmental psychology.

What is also significant here is that Gall downplays the role of the visual and touch in those he criticizes as anti-innatist and pro-environment while, at the same time, relying heavily upon the operation of these senses as conditions of proof in his own position. Without observation through the eyes looking at corpses and at behavior, he has no argument about “different kinds”; and without head squeezing, he has no demonstration. This complex positionality was part of a longer set of trajectories that exceeded Gall's efforts to confirm innateness and that further entwined discourses of race and of dis/ability.

Discourses that invoke reference to terms associated today with vision are not reducible to the operation of the human eye. Vision as revelation, vision as truth-telling, or vision as seeing a picture demonstrate the broad range and uneven location of something that is now primarily coded as a sense. As David Levin has noted, for example, references to vision have been and still are multitextual, for “‘visual perception’ is never just a simple, immediate, straightforward, unproblematic presentation of the phenomenon of vision.”²⁴ The historicizing literature generally acknowledges this multitextuality, following the Philosophy 101 arc — from ancient Greece to the twenty-first-century West — pointing up shifting inscriptions of particular conceptual clusters and connected vocabularies including Being, light, and knowing in different epistemes.²⁵

The redefinition of vision to seeing with the eyes only is often denoted back to faint beginnings in Aristotle's “scientism” and moves forward in different incarnations from there. While Martin Jay notes to some extent, for instance, the differences between the Hellenic and Hebraic trajectories and muddies the distinction between medieval ocularphobic and modern ocularcentric cultures, more recent literature moves beyond the tyranny of Greece and the Mideast.²⁶ The role of what are now called the senses in epistemology, and especially the eyes, has been attributed a significantly longer lineage, going back at least to North African philosophies, particularly cosmologies circulating within ancient Egypt, subsequently modified by Aristotle, whose preservation and reinterpretation as text is then attributed to Islamic scholars and Celtic monks, and thereby reintroduced into medieval Latin Europe, where Aristotelianism flourishes among the Scholastics and where vision begins to take on the more reduced meaning of optics and visuality.²⁷

The presumption that seeing is believing also shapes the enfleshment that Wynter has argued becomes neurobiological in the nineteenth-century New World insofar as perceptual structures became particularly attuned to skin and phenotype. Skin and phenotype became signifiers for “capacity” and “behavior” for Wynter, and were eventually understood as neurologically ingrained, making their fabrication as social categories harder to inspect or deconstruct. That this ingraining process occurs in the context of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and further multifarious forms of nonlethal “physical” violence ensures that other possibilities for Being are sidelined and become almost impossible to imagine — “abnormalized” in the shadow of what she calls Western “Man's” dominance as an ideal figure for comparison that grounds and resecures every -ism. For Tavares, the effort it takes to disturb dominant scopic regimes by examining images such as photographs — a disruption that is not always construed as a negative — not only exposes the mainstream linking of perception to phenotype as a dominant analytical pathway to meaning-making, but it also reveals the instability of the visual register, portending the sensitivities that are required to attune to vast differences that “discourses of vision” have especially played in claims to truth.²⁸

Gall's position on the play of the senses both participates in the longer history of debate over multitextual links between discourses of vision and truth production and at the same time departs from some of the major presuppositions. He allocates the senses only a shaping role in regard to what is already innate and positions the brain as a series of organs that are intermediary. In retrospect, then, his texts can be positioned as one component among many that build a bridge for a wider movement from the spirit to the flesh and that begin to shore up, from a different direction, a perceptual apparatus for persuading a limited albeit elite audience toward enfleshment — a version of enfleshment obsessed with phenotype and assumptions about capacity-as-identity — that today endures.

Unlike much medical research today, however, where the structure of an organ is thought to determine the possibilities for function and brain death equals organic death, in Gall's work the brain was not considered necessary for life but a series of separate organs in which function was elevated over and perhaps determining of the structure that carried the function out. Gall's rendition of the term function (consonant with uses, properties, role, office, or duties) consisted of a set of primary instincts, dispositions, talents, and faculties — the terms often substitutable. In attempting to avoid the view that the soul–mind operates independently of the brain and its activities, and yet also avoiding holding that the brain is the primary origin and cause of activity referred to as mental, Gall's broader oeuvre arguably posits physiology as psychophysiology, that is, as an intermediate realm between the mechanical aspect of body and the immateriality he attributed to soul–mind as a higher or superior factor (see FB).²⁹

In terms of behaviour, it is patho-anatomy, however, that suggests a discrete locus: “The functions of the mind are deranged by the lesion of the brain: they are not immediately deranged by the lesion of other parts of the body.”³⁰ The brain draws its role as intermediary and as important via the logic integral to German-language Enlightenment theories of expression. Such theories posited that internal essences attain their manifestation as external phenomena.³¹ This creates a sequence of invisible essence/first cause — > instinct/faculty/power/function — > organ — > behaviour, which is the chain through which apparent certainty or confidence was reinscribed into judgments, linking claims about innate qualities to the “evidence” of phenotype and behaviour. The analyst or researcher appears to start at the end of the sequence with the observations and squeezing that then suggest the existence (or otherwise) of qualities and their first cause, working their way back.

Volume 1 is at pains to offer a correction to the overestimation of the role of the senses in this “working back,” especially in the case of those who oppose innatism and attribute talents to an exterior influence. Gall gives multiple examples of how scholars in the past have misinterpreted exterior sensations, especially touch, as building the seat of the mind, which he posits instead as inborn:

If touch makes us know the external world better than the other senses, for the sole reason that it finds bounds and resistance to its action, I will inquire whether the eye does not also meet with limits and resistance. If we must deal with metaphysical subtilties [sic] on the existence and non-existence of external things, then touch, resistance, repulsion, will not instruct us better than any other sensation; for, just as all other sensations have their seat solely in the brain, so the sense of touch, resistance, repulsion, has its seat only in the brain. (FB, 113–114)

As noted previously, though, Gall's broader arguments rely on touch and vision-as-visuality to confer legitimacy on the practice of dissection, on head squeezing demonstrations, and on the classification of species and behavior, such as identifying a duck as different from an eagle. I suggest here that this kind of double-sidedness indexes a practice of entitlement that overturns the earlier order of things around the pejorative use of the term empirik and, at the same time, installs a new version of authority that reshapes the constitution of whiteness-and-ableness-as-authority especially. In the pejorative inscription of empirik, simply observing a behavior — that is, someone getting better after trying this and that, without any deeper knowledge as to why and how — was not sufficient; rather, this practice was mocked. In phrenology, though, the “empirical” as observed behavior is rescued from the pejorative by appeal to the “material” organ. Still, this “rescue” threatens the “pure” status of religious beliefs in the freelance, unencumbered soul, drawing ire in a different way than the empiriks. The combination of behaviorist narrative and material organ acts to seemingly legitimate castes of educability and to upset conservative Christian commentators at the same time.³² Crucial, however, is the elision of debate over what gets to count as the visible, as a behavior, and as an organ, and also that which is posited as material in regard to that organ and when that occurs.

Here, then, within the formation of a new kind of scopic regime lies the operation of a new version of entitlement: the uninspected, nonreflexive, and unassailed authority to posit and retract the visibility criterion in regard to evidence, fact, data, and matter in proffering an analysis and forming a conclusion, in this case regarding the link between behavior and organ. In Volume 1, this entitlement is driven deep (no pun intended) within the assumption noted above that some Germanic philosophies especially were based upon — that whatever is presumed interior, hidden, and invisible to the naked eye will potentially reveal itself (in this instance, through the intermediary service of an organ) on an exterior surface. For education, this may seem relatively innocuous until questions are raised about how selections are made regarding the coding of behaviors as moral and intellectual and about contemporary practices that may see teachers, for example, making certain associations. In regard to coding, out of the many possibilities for selecting out behaviors and observabilities — from all the things that could occur “in front of” someone in a village or city in Europe, to what could be read about in scholarly and popular publications of the time, to what is exposed in cutting open a cadaver — Gallian texts can tell the reader little (directly) as to why the behaviors selected as related to innate morality do not include “behaviors” such as the enactment of slavery, the murder of “savages,” or the rape of children in the name of nations and empires. As regards associations, the habit of presuming on the basis of “race” or “dis/ability” that the brain is a compromised or advanced organ about which a teacher can do little remains on the table. Together, selective and dyselective coding and associational chains that run from belief in innateness, to phenotype, back to organology, further restrict, sort, and rank what could possibly be seen as an educative act (instruction only) and for whom it might have the greatest effect.

Vision, Temporality, and Matter

It is to Philo Judaeus that we owe the doctrine, that nothing can subsist without certain properties. It is only the metaphysical theologians, that have embraced the error, that all activity and all action is owing to a spiritual being, and that inertia is the essence of matter. (FB, 99)

If it be to the hands, that the origin of inventions and arts, is due, why do idiots and simpletons never invent any thing? (FB, 122)

The mobilization of entitlement occurs in Volume 1 within the legacy of important critical ambiguities that elevate some actions to the level of a concerning (or admired) behavior and not others and by producing associations between interior/exterior problematics. These ambiguities and problematics, far from precluding clarity and compromising entitlement, ensure it, for they allow the cards to be played in different ways depending on the person, group, or context under discussion — a trait consistent with the first neuroturn's psychophysiology. Reverberating through Gall's approach are ambiguities and problematics such as these: Is the modern fact made or captured? Is the separation of “words” from “things” a form of representation or production? In the appeal to vision-as-visuality, are the eyes considered objective or not fully trusted? Is calling one's work science an appeal to an all-knowing pursuit or reference to a limited range? Amid the to-and-fro, the uneven positing and retracting of the visibility criterion is wedded to relatively fixed notions of the temporal. In the process, both “vision” and “temporality” become embedded in appeals to the material as organizational and functional, which in turn produces castes of educability in the Gallian pedagogical scheme: “All these beings act thus, not because they have calculated that these processes are necessary to their preservation but because nature meets their wants, and has united the knowledge of them intimately with their organization. In all these cases, there are no previous habits, no instruction, no experience” (FB, 100).

The temporal here is key. No manner of instruction has taken place. There is nothing previous to the behavior that is exhibited. With the belief that that which comes before impacts that which comes after and, thus, with no events-in-time able to shape the content of behavior, the observation must point to something “already in there” that just comes out: “Each animal has the internal sense of his faculties, and knows the use of his weapons, independently of all instruction.… If you bring them up in a house, and then take them into the open field, the eagle will direct his flight to the heaven, the duck will make for the water, and the serpent will hide himself under the grass … without having been taught by any master” (FB, 125).

This version of temporality is caught between older European notions of the circular, cyclical, seasonal, and repetitive, on the one hand, with the newer invention of the clock and the linear, on the other.³³ In terms of the cyclical, if the disposition is innate, how and when did it get “in” there? Was this from God? Arriving at conception? History repeating from parent to child? Or a “prime mover” of the biological kind following Nature's rhythms? In terms of the linear, why is the innate not immediately obvious if it is already “in there”? Why does it take time passing to “see” it? Why should it require time at all? Bridging between these different “sensibilities,” Gallian temporality operates in relatively fixed ways, relying more heavily on the linear, with arguments sutured to a rather simple before-and-after sequence, while leaving the cyclical backgrounded or “hanging” as a possible question mark regarding the difference between origin and cause.

This version of temporality also operates somewhat differently relative to theories of neuroplasticity today, theories that undo much of the fatalism around brain injuries, for example, and that indicate the possibility for the (self-)engineering of adults and not just children. The version of vision, temporality, and materiality in Gall's physiognomy is such, then, that what is referred to as material is not infinitely malleable and open to “entanglement” but conjured as necessary. By fixing matter (the properties attributed to organs) as the receiver of sensations and as the site of expressed dispositions that direct how the sensations are received in the first place, the explanation for “visible differences” in terms of individuality is secured. In short, the objectivity attributed to linear temporality and its embeddedness in the fundament of matter enable the “differences” or vacillations between “individuals” to be accounted for elsewhere, especially in the vagaries of the mind:

But if, in this life, no faculty can be exercised without a material condition, as I shall show hereafter in an incontestable manner, we must necessarily suppose a material organization for the exercise of the intellectual faculties. Men have always regarded, as very important, the researches, which have for their object to determine the organs, by which animals and man receive the material impressions of the external world. Will it be less interesting, less noble, to try to discover the organs of the superior faculties of the mind? (FB, 134)

To this end, the relatively labile discourses of vision-as-visuality, more fixed and simplistic notions of the temporal, and their home in a particular version of the “material” as organization and function index systems of reasoning central to the first neuroturn. The first neuroturn might be considered via Gallian texts as part of a fundamental shift in the architecture of medical perception, which did not take place simply within the clinic.³⁴ Embedded in the emergence of a medical gaze that Gall treats simultaneously as moral, which posits and retracts the visibility criterion to suit the a priori beliefs, are particular assumptions about new pathways to truth production. As Michel Foucault in The Birth of the Clinic has already noted, these included the original powers attributed to the perceived and its correlation with language; the organization of objectivity on the basis of sign values; the secretly linguistic structure of the datum; the constitutive character of corporal spatiality; the importance of finitude in the relation of Man with truth; and the genesis of positivism.³⁵ Of special note here is the constitutive character of corporal spatiality in Volume 1, as the “idiot” and “animal,” and less frequently “the savage,” cross paths in ways that link rather than divide phenomenology and positivism:

But, have those animals who possess all the senses which we do, such as the baboon, and ourang-outang, have they more decency, and are they more moved in seeing blood flow, than other animals? Are idiots, who possess their five senses in perfection, more virtuous than the man born blind? Must not every reader perceive, that it is the interior alone which modifies the impressions on the senses, and thus leads us, by a precipitate and limited judgment, to believe their operation immediate? It is for this reason, that external objects act very differently on men and on animals; very differently on the hare and on the fox; on such or such an individual. (FB, 132)

The architecture of a medical gaze is not as for empiriks, then, based on trial and error, but on a redefinition of rationality driven by acute attention to and concern for how differences arise amid the limits of normalization:

The impressions, whether they come from the external world through the senses, or from the internal by the general organs of sensations, must, then, be considered as indispensable conditions, without which no perception and no thought can take place. But, no impression from without, no irritation from within, can become a sensation or an idea, without the concurrence of the brain. The faculty of perceiving impressions, of retaining and comparing ideas, and making application of them, is by no means in proportion to the senses either in men or animals, as is proved by the example of idiots and simpletons. Thus, could we even have it demonstrated, that man, of all animals, has the most perfect senses, we should not thus obtain the explanation of his surpassing all others in intellectual faculties. (FB, 128)

The implicit links between Man as “race” and “dis/ability” become key distinguishers here, rerooting the material-as-organizational. The reification of the material, as the intermediary between religion and science, is not, like social justice or new materialist discourses today, though, the champion of the underdog, the working class, or objects. The material becomes rather the “home” of discourses of vision and the temporal in ways that markedly challenge Church authority, on the one hand, and that refuse concession to “savage nations” as knowing anything philosophical, on the other. Gall's deployment of the material, rather than liberating toward “equality” or operating as anti-intellectualism, is a means of carving out a “third space,” one that nonetheless stultifies and creates hierarchies in a different way: “The builder-wasp has already learned, while yet a larva, the masonry of his mother; the bird learns from those who have given him life, to build his nest, to sing, to migrate…; and man would not become man, would remain a savage and idiot, without the means furnished by education” (FB, 137).

What this education is and is capable of will be discussed in the next section. The significant point here is how the inscription of time as objective, as outside culture, politics, or critique, operates in tandem with both the material-as-organization and education-as-instruction. For Gall, the differential manifestation of talents or problems is not proof of lack of innateness, but of the intricate operation of innateness via vectors of vision, temporality, and matter: “in certain individuals, some organs remain always in arrear, while others acquire the greatest energy. But this explanation shows again, that all the moral qualities and intellectual faculties are innate” (FB, 145).

The sequence seems both well-intended (salvific) and totalizing (systemic), generating a spectrum outside of which no one can step. Differentiation is then set to become a site of fascination: savage nations, alongside and blurred with idiots–simpletons–animals, populate one end of the spectrum, while genius and men of energy are on the other, with the vast majority presumed to reside between the two ends. The full human, not-quite-human, and nonhuman hierarchy that marks Weheliye's recognition of racializing assemblages is given a newish rationalization in the nineteenth century's first neuroturn. For instance, in arguing against the idea that the senses make the mental difference between men and animals in a positive way, Gall offers another correction by way of “savage nations” and the “heroes”:

This mode of expression again supposes the error, that man has senses more perfect than animals; and, as, on the other hand, we generally attribute to savage nations the most delicate senses, it would be from them that we ought to expect the most profound philosophy and the feeblest instinct; which will hardly be admitted. (FB, 131)

He asserts further that

The greatest men, it is true, bear the impress of their age, and cannot entirely defend themselves from the impression of the objects which surround them; still, we constantly see, that he who possesses a dominant energetic quality or faculty, pursues his route, and seizes with force the object which nature has pointed out to him.… Heroes, of all classes, come ready formed from the hands of nature, and with uncontrollable qualities. (FB, 143)

This raises finally and more fully the question of what education could be for at all, and why would one bother if such castes of educability and their innate limits abounded.

The Place of Education and a Particular Kind of Determinism

For Gall, those who attribute Man's nature and behavior primarily to external, exterior, sensorial, or environmental influence try to have it both ways:

This uniformity is, consequently, the strongest proof that nothing can derange the plan, which nature has prescribed by means of organization. For the rest, these panegyrists of the creative power of education, are in direct contradiction with themselves. At one time, the uniformity observed among men, serves to prove that education does everything; at another, in order to explain the difference in characters, they allege the impossibility of the greater part of individuals receiving a uniform education… (FB, 149)

This does not mean that education should not be engaged in, however, for the influence of it in shaping the disposition makes the difference between “savage” and not. The child with not too little energy and not too much is the best recipient of instruction, and in terms of innateness, there is no difference between the theory as applied to “genius” and “idiot”:

Genius is only the energetic activity of some quality or some faculty. If, then, in cases where the faculties have the greatest energy, the cause which produces it, and which is most striking, is inherent in the organization, we must naturally conclude that the cause of their ordinary activity is equally founded in the organization. Difference of more and less proves nothing against the common origin of obscure and decided faculties. (FB, 14)

While decided faculties do not always need formal instruction (according to Gall, to become great like Mozart or evil like Nero required no instruction), animals, as with humans, are recipients of a certain inborn power, making education-as-instruction that which guides like a trellis, not that which implants.

This version of determinism does not follow a standard structural–functional logic. We do not have limbs because we need to use them, both to survive and to evolve. Rather, the reverse: we have limbs that we then find uses for, which can in turn lead to survival and evolution — or not. This subtle displacement of a Creator designing limbs for humans as evidence of some kind of organic, sensorial superiority relocates the place of education pragmatically within the domain of the invisible play of “powers.” The superior faculty of mind or soul–mind of the (so-called non-savage, non-idiot) human, in Gall's exposition, helps (full) humans to make more of the environment, to make different things of sensation from someone next to you, and to express one's inherent dispositions.

As such, a major difference from the second neuroturn here announces itself, at least on the surface. The systems of reasoning in the first neuroturn point to a fundamental shift in the architecture of perception along at least two lines: (1) the narration of “experience” radically alters to enable both the medical gaze and phenomenology (material organs linked to behavioral descriptions), and (2) death is relocated in binary opposition to life (and incrementally advancing within it, as for “idiots” and “simpletons” who in Gall's view don't invent anything). What marks the distance from twenty-first-century approaches is the criterion of changeability.

The key organic quality now attributed to the brain as neuroplasticity undermines to some extent the determinism of Gallian hierarchies, which at no point entertain the idea that what is innate is able to be undone. Theories of changeability today, however, could quite possibly be seen as still implicated in a different hierarchy — the hierarchy of internalization — in which the discourse of experts is meant to be taken up and acted upon by those educated enough to self-regulate and self-fashion, that is, to engage in a lifelong project of perfection, one that is still not available to “idiots,” “savages,” and “simpletons.” The point here is not that the second neuroturn literature speaks overtly in such terms or encourages such denigration, but that the endurance of pathologization as a mode of reasoning has limits and overlaps that can too quickly collapse the innovations offered back into the very thing from which they might genuinely wish to depart. This potential and blurriness in regard to what exactly the second neuroturn or educational neuroscience research posit as innate underscores how education-as-instruction is circumscribed in both the first and second turns in different ways. In the former, it can only ever shape the inborn, resecuring an overarching caste system (which a Creator may or may not have designed) that is considered clearly “observable” as the differences between humans. In the latter, education-as-instruction can be grasped by those capable of rehabilitation or salutogenic prevention to change a previously deterministic narrative, as long as they meet the criteria for being able to understand that and carry it out in the ways experts of the interior, self, and mind suggest. In short, driven deep in both scenarios are not abstract or transcendental concepts somehow hiding in the fold, but mundane questions over the nature of Being, notions of innateness and environment, and why these are posed around particular “attractors” or “boundary objects” (such as brain, mind, and self) in certain locations, at certain junctures, and as explanations of difference and sameness — as, that is, “the problem of our era.”³⁶

Conclusion

Education perfects, deteriorates, represses, and directs the Innate Faculties, but can neither destroy nor produce any. (FB, 135)

I have not argued here that the first and second neuroturns participate in the same version of morality, fad, or hierarchism. I have argued that the first neuroturn's braining of mind via intersecting horizons of debate over an “I,” speciesist reasoning, and shifting conditions of proof gave ground in Gallian texts to a reformulation of entitlement. The new form traded on the uneven positing and retracting of vision-as-visuality and the relatively fixed notion of the temporal, ensconced in appeals to materiality rather than materialism. Particularly important is that this confluence reconstructed in both direct and indirect ways discourses of race and dis/ability, regenerating castes of human being and educability consonant with wider European “high colonialism” projects that drew a distinction between savage and civil, idiot and sane. Through linking some observable behavior to certain organs and to a limited set of moral and intellectual identifiers, particular dispositions came to be described as innate. Such dispositions, including talents or criminality, were believed to be unleashed or augmented by sensory experience, but not undone. Integral to the formula was the interplay of vision, temporality, and materiality with education-as-instruction, which provided a key prism through which authorization strategies passed: no instruction seen, yet behavior occurs and organs have a shape = dispositions exist and must be innate.

The critical ambiguities and problematics that the first neuroturn left the wider educational field to deal with today are many and costly. First, the running together of mind–brain in phrenology, which today operates as rather naturalized, sanctioned a complete disregard for the major role environmental forces and cultural differences play in the formative processes of education. While the paradoxes and dangers of this understanding have been elaborated above and forwarded many times over in educational debates, some more elusive contemporary ironies and concerns related to this asymmetry still endure. The existence of contemporary cultures for which there is no such thing as a mind, as a body, or a mind/body dualism, for example, exposes the provincial and globalizing forces of the first and second neuroturns in defining Being in the wake of spirit/matter binaries and claiming relevance via organology. Significantly, where such mind/body beliefs do circulate and are taken-for-granted, such as in large swathes of Western education, further elisions occur, for instance, in the deeper genealogical questions as to why differentiations, labeling, and classificatory regimes matter in the first place. The diminution of culturally relevant and historically shaped awareness carries the risk of continuing a form of onto-epistemological dispersal as a kind of academic and medical imperialism, as normative for gaining funding for the study of “the human.” This risk encompasses pedagogical settings that are clearly more than clinical and instructional and in which access to funding for solving urgent problems has long been relatively limited. Second, theorizing about “the mind” through “learning” as visible performance of a behavior does not undo the selections, dyselections, and associational chains that were already being forged across the nineteenth century through constructs of race and dis/ability that traded on innatism. The distortions, particularly profound in mathematics education in the twentieth century, still presumed some kind of subject matter–specific talents and weaknesses that were believed to be inborn and embedded in internal organs and by which educational practices were considered hamstrung. The net effect, well known and widely deplored, has been the systemic delivery of fatalist narratives to millions of schoolchildren and the restriction on life choices and chances for some, while smoothly advancing others. For phrenology, however, the major springboard for this belief was a claim to the materiality of the organs of the brain. The question regarding what appeals to materiality-as-real can be invoked to support or deny remains an open one, vexing both experimental science and contemporary new materialist efforts to occupy a moral and/or methodological high ground. Third, education-as-instruction, while meeting the visibility criterion for “empirical science,” has contributed to a marginalization of alternative ways of understanding pedagogic practices, language, family communication, and knowledge transmission. As both a new excuse for old practices of constraint targeting people of color and people designated as having disabilities, education-as-instruction in its innatist versions outlasted the phrenology movement and helped to sustain a form of resource-hoarding around whiteness and ableization. By reducing education to instruction and instruction to that which can be seen — and today, learning to quantification of that which can be seen — the more diverse range of knowledge and wisdom practices becomes, in turn, difficult to “see” or genuinely honor. Collectively, the normalization of Being and science around interior/exterior problematics, the issue of what counts as morality and learning and why, and the restriction of education-as-instruction and its complicity with innatist doctrines, suggest the significance of revisiting abjected sources such as Gallian texts. Despite the status of being a discredited fad or pseudoscience, the discourses circulating through Gallian texts encouraged a particular view of science that positioned internal-organs-as-material-mediators of fate, one that enabled an asymmetry in theorizing about the mind and education for decades to come.

Such a catalogue of costs also leaves the current field of education with complex and difficult questions about the role and direction of research. Today, instruction is seen, behavior does occur, organs are studied, so does this automatically mean that that is bad or that something else should be considered as innate? If innateness is posited, either subtly or directly, what versions of proof would confirm it, and how would the “it” of innateness look? What kind of society, with what kind of social compact, would want to know, and why? What would the implications be for educational practice? Such questions are important to pose frankly, for what counts as truth, how this is posited, affirmed, and debated, and why teaching, learning, memory, or wellness are now being redefined in the form of educational neuroscience are not a function of objective or neutral technical rationalities, but are inherently inseparable from what, whose, and which lives matter within the claims to and operations of scientific materiality.

Endnotes

1 Bernadette Baker, “From ‘Somatic Scandals’ to ‘a Constant Potential for Violence’? The Culture of Dissection, Brain-Based Learning, and the Rewriting/Rewiring of ‘the Child,’” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 12, no. 2 (2015): 168–197, DOI: 10.1080/15505170.2015.1055394.

2 Melissa M. Littlefield and Jenell Johnson, The Neuroscientific Turn: Transdisciplinarity in the Age of the Brain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012).

3 Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013).

4 See these contrary accounts: Mariale Hardiman, The Brain-Targeted Teaching Model for Twenty-First-Century Schools (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2012); and Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (New York: Basic Books, 2013).

5 Bernadette Baker and Antti Saari, “‘Anatomy of Our Discontent’: From Braining the Mind to Mindfulness for Teachers,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 39, no. 2 (2018): 169–183. DOI:10.1080/01596306.2018.1394425.74.

6 Baker, “From ‘Somatic Scandals’ to ‘a Constant Potential for Violence’?”; and Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

7 The following takes as its focus primarily the 1835 translation of François Joseph Gall, On the Functions of the Brain and Each of Its Parts: With Observations on the Possibility of Determining the Instincts, Propensities, and Talents, or the Moral and Intellectual Dispositions of Men and Animals, by the Configuration of the Brain and Head, vol. 1 of On the Origin of the Moral and Intellectual Faculties of Man, and the Conditions of Their Manifestation, trans. Winston Lewis (Boston: Marsh, Capen & Lyon, 1835). Volume 1 sets the stage for what is to come in this multivolume set by taking on the theme of morality and the brain. Whereas today this theme might call up images of how criminality or depravity could be localized in the brain, with fMRI depiction of areas “lit up” when repugnant behavior is occurring, Gall's volume is dedicated instead to an overview and critique of then-current understandings of humans, animals, and plants; the senses; and an extended discussion of materialism versus fatalism.

8 Hannah M. Tavares, Pedagogies of the Image: Photo-archives, Cultural Histories, and Postfoundational Inquiry (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Nature, 2016), 16.

9 Jacques Derrida, “La différance,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (1968; repr. London: Routledge, 2005).

10 For examples of critiques of phrenology in these broader contexts, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981); and Kurt Danziger, Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language (New York: Sage, 1997).

11 Gall, On the Functions of the Brain and Each of Its Parts, 96. This work will be cited in the text as FB for all subsequent references.

12 John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1692: repr. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1975).

13 Bernadette Baker, William James, Sciences of Mind, and Anti-imperial Discourse (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

14 Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of Mind.

15 Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (London: John Murray, 1859).

16 Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of Mind.

17 Andrea Carlino, Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning, trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 2000); and Kelly Oliver, Family Values: Subjects between Nature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997).

18 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned.

19 Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

20 Tavares, Pedagogies of the Image, 17. Tavares herself borrowed the term “scopic regimes” from Christian Metz via Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New Press, 1988), 3.

21 Ibid., 16.

22 Hortense J. Spillers, “‘Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe’: An American Grammar Book” (1987), in Black, White, and in Color: Essays in American Literature and Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), 203–209; and Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).

23 Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1995), 5–57.

24 David Michael Levin, ed., Sites of Vision: The Discursive Construction of Sight in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 7.

25 John Lechte, Genealogy and Ontology of the Western Image and Its Digital Future (New York: Routledge, 2012).

26 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

27 Bernadette Baker, “Activate or Evacuate to Educate? Roles of a Sensorium in Onto-epistemologies,” in The Sensuous Curriculum, ed. Walter Gershon (Charlotte, NC: Information Age, 2019), 1–26; Edward Bruce Bynum, The African Unconscious: Roots of Ancient Mysticism and Modern Psychology (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999); and Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

28 Wynter, “1492: A New World View”; and Tavares, Pedagogies of the Image.

29 Tory L. Hoff, “Gall's Psychophysiological Concept of Function: The Rise and Decline of ‘Internal Essence,’” Brain and Cognition 20, no. 2 (1992): 378–398.

30 François Joseph Gall, Letter from Dr. F. J. Gall to Joseph Freiherr von Retzer, upon the Functions of the Brain, in Man and Animals (1798), first published in Der Neue Teutsche Merkur, vol. 3 (December 1798), 311, Http://www.historyofphrenology.org.uk/texts/retzer.htm.

31 See also Hoff, Gall's Psychophysiological Concept of Function.”

32 Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of Mind.

33 Richard Sorabji, Matter, Space, and Motion: Theories in Antiquity and Their Sequel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988).

34 Littlefield and Johnson, The Neuroscientific Turn.

35 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic (New York: Random House, 1994), 199.

36 Derrida, “La différance.”

Citing Literature

Biography

BERNADETTE M. BAKER is Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, 464 Teacher Education Building, Madison, WI 53706; e-mail <[email protected]>. Her primary areas of scholarship are curriculum history, philosophies of education, curriculum studies, and new technologies.

Volume70, Issue4

August 2020

Pages 395-419

Inside Out: Head-Based Ontologies, Vision, and Temporality in the First Neuroturn

Abstract

Introduction

Phrenology's Theory of Difference: Assumptions of an “Inner Disposition,” the Observation of “Shape, Skin, and Behavior,” and the Mediating Role of Organs in Claims about “the Innate”

Body as Extension Endowed with Properties? The Location and Nature of “I”

Comparing Humans, Animals, and Plants

Dissection and the Entwining and Disconnect between Conditions of Proof

Vision-as-Visuality

Vision, Temporality, and Matter

The Place of Education and a Particular Kind of Determinism

Conclusion

Endnotes

Citing Literature

Biography

Information

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Inside Out: Head-Based Ontologies, Vision, and Temporality in the First Neuroturn

Abstract

Introduction

Phrenology's Theory of Difference: Assumptions of an “Inner Disposition,” the Observation of “Shape, Skin, and Behavior,” and the Mediating Role of Organs in Claims about “the Innate”

Body as Extension Endowed with Properties? The Location and Nature of “I”

Comparing Humans, Animals, and Plants

Dissection and the Entwining and Disconnect between Conditions of Proof

Vision-as-Visuality

Vision, Temporality, and Matter

The Place of Education and a Particular Kind of Determinism

Conclusion

Endnotes

Citing Literature

Biography

Related

Information