Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

WARREN NEIDICH
rolled individual of the future. Critical periods are temporal windows in
which the nervous system is especially sensitive to the effects of the environment
mediated for the most part by parental influences early in life through
what the great Russian Psychologist L.S. Vygotsky called internalization or
the internal reconstruction of a formerly external activity. 2 The acquisition
of language is internally reconstructed and is coupled to a process called
epigenesis in which even local cultural influences can play an important role
in sculpting the pluripotential of the brain. Epigenesis is defined as the
means through which the unfolding of the genetically prescribed formation
of the brain is altered by its experiences with the environment, whether that
be the milieu of the brain itself or the world. At one time, when man lived in
nature it was nature that had provided the experiences to alter the brain.
Today, as more and more people move to the designed spaces of the city, it
is culture. When one considers brain function in this context, the term
neural plasticity is used. Neural plasticity delineates the means through
which the components of the brain—that is, its neurons, their axons,
dendrites, synapses and neural networks (refered to as its firmware)—in
addition to its dynamic signatures, like temporal binding, which allow
distant parts of the brain to communicate, are modified by experience. For
instance, the immature brain has the capability of learning over 6.700
different language variations, even if it chooses to learn only one or a few. The
Japanese child growing up in London can learn English perfectly, without any
trace of an accent, as can the English child growing up in Tokyo.
Human infants have special cognitive abilities that are built for exactly
this cultural variation. For example, in the realm of vowel sounds,
infants of just six months have been shown to restructure their auditory
space according to the local language; the space becomes systematically
and irreversibly distorted […] The end result is a range of spectacular
biases in our auditory perception, which make adults unable to even
hear the difference between sounds that are fundamentally distinct in
some other language. 3
2 L.S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).
3 Stephen C. Levinson, “Introduction: The Evolution of Culture in a Microcosm,” in
Stephen C. Levinson and Pierre Jaisson (eds.), Evolution and Culture (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT, 2006), 14. Note that the words “cultural variation” are used to refer to language
learning.
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