Brain plasticity is often misread as flexibility, a docility-based economy

Evidence

If I insist on how close certain managerial discourses are to neuroscientific discourses, this is because it seems to me that the phenomenon called ”brain plasticity” is in reality more often described in terms of an economy of flexibility. Indeed, the process of potentiation, which is the very basis of plasticity, is often presented simply as the possibility of increasing or decreasing performance. Very often, the brain is analyzed as personal capital, constituted by a sum of abilities that each must ”invest optimally,” like an ”ability to treat one’s own person in the manner of a text that can be translated into different languages.” Suppleness, the ability to bend, and docility thus appear to join together in constituting a new structural norm that functions immediately to exclude. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 154

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core of the book’s thesis: plasticity is collapsed into the economics of flexibility, and docility masquerades as adaptability.
• ADDENDUM: Directly feeds the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s concern with stratified societies normalizing self-subjection — here, flexibility as docility is the workplace’s soft version of self-renunciation.
• DEEPTHINKING: This is the load-bearing inversion the reader wants to catch in management memos: the neural-workplace analogy smuggling docility in as adaptability.
• XREF: connects to: Plasticity moved from sculpture to education and biology by extension — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 224; Plasticity is not the same as polymorphous flexibility — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 225; Plasticity, unlike neoliberal flexibility, retains memory of prior forms — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1742