Contemporary labor demands mirror neuronal functioning, bodying forth capitalism’s current form.

Evidence

Humans make their own brain but they do not know that they do so. We are entirely ignorant of brain plasticity. Yet we are not at all ignorant of a certain kind of organization of labor—part-time jobs, temporary contracts, the demand for absolute mobility and adaptability, the demand for creativity … The brain is our work, and we do not know it. Yet we know very well that we live in a reticular society. We have understood that to survive today means to be connected to a network, to be capable of modulating one’s efficacy. We know very well that every loss of suppleness means rejection, pure and simple. Is the difference really all that great between the picture we have of an unemployed person about to be kicked off the dole and the picture we have of someone suffering from Alzheimer’s? … There is thus no need, in a certain sense, to be acquainted with the results of current discoveries in the neurosciences in order to have an immediate, daily experience of the neuronal form of political and social functioning, a form that today deeply coincides with the current face of capitalism. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 52

Categorization

• XREF: Directly powers the reader’s task: here the neuronal-social equation is asserted (flees through analogy), the grounds on which the brain-workplace link is presumed rather than argued. — connects to: ADHD and dyslexia are pathologies of late capitalist control circuits — Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No…, 54; Capitalism sustains itself by calibrating workers’ dejection just below paralysis — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1829
• SEED: The ‘unemployed person vs. Alzheimer’s patient’ juxtaposition is a striking image distinguishing deserved-from-organic rigidity — could anchor an essay on how neuro-moral vocabularies blame the inflexible.
• DEEPTHINKING: The mapping that equates an unemployed person’s loss of suppleness with an Alzheimer’s sufferer’s loss of suppleness is where the asserted analogy does its ideological work; the passivity of ‘flexibility’ as docility-readable is being installed.