18 CHAPTER ONE
Figuring Plasticity
Brain plasticity animates naturalized philosophy as a biological condition
to be reckoned with, if not celebrated. But it can also be seen as a trope of
the contemporary social order, or as a justification for biotechnological
intervention into everyday life. Malabou notes a resonance between neu-
ral plasticity and the demands for constant flexibility, multitasking, and
self- alteration in late capitalism. Similarly, Emily Martin describes a manic
plasticity demanded in the global marketplace, which asks us to be “always
adapting, scanning the environment, continuously changing in creative
and innovative ways, flying from one thing to another, pushing the limits
of everything, doing it all with an intense level of energy focused totally
on the future” (2000, 578 – 79). Others note that the popular discourse on
brain plasticity encourages subjects to physically modify themselves with
the help of neuroscientific expertise (Kraus 2012; Pitts- Taylor 2010; Schmitz
2012; Vidal and Ortega 2011). And while brain plasticity is conceived as hav-
ing tremendous clinical potential for reversing the effects of traumas and
degenerative diseases, it equally underpins biotechnical, pharmaceutical,
and military industries aimed at cognitive modification and enhancement
(Moreno 2012). A whole range of techniques, for example, involving cogni-
tive exercises, brain – machine interfaces, drugs, supplements, electric stimu-
lators, and brain mapping technologies, now target the brain for modifica-
tion and rewiring. In the contemporary understanding of plasticity there
may be no less than a “new master narrative of changing the brain- body,
which thrives on the technoscientific ambition to monitor, control, and
transform processes of life on the very level of their material composition”
(Papadopoulos 2011, 433).
Plasticity may offer a reprieve from biological determinism, but its “dual
association” with freedom and control (Papadopoulos 2011) must be con-
fronted. How can its promise be understood when plasticity so neatly co-
incides with dominant ideologies and practices, or when it threatens the
body- subject with techniques of governmentality? Malabou’s answer is to
distinguish the flexibility demanded by technoscientific capitalism from
the “true” plasticity given by nature. Flexibility, she says, is a discourse that
produces the subject in accordance with her neurobiology in only a dis-
torted and superficial way. Plasticity, by contrast, is an ontological condi-