Explosive rage can oppose a culture that rewards docile flexibility

Evidence

To cancel the fluxes, to lower our self-controlling guard, to accept exploding from time to time: this is what we should do with our brain. It is time to remember that some explosions are not in fact terrorist—explosions of rage, for example. Perhaps we ought to relearn how to enrage ourselves, to explode against a certain culture of docility, of amenity, of the effacement of all conflict even as we live in a state of permanent war. It is not because the struggle has changed form, it is not because it is no longer really possible to fight a boss, owner, or father that there is no struggle to wage against exploitation. To ask ”What should we do with our brain?” is above all to visualize the possibility of saying no to an afflicting economic, political, and mediatic culture that celebrates only the triumph of flexibility, blessing obedient individuals who have no greater merit than that of knowing how to bow their heads with a smile. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 257

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s stated purpose of catching how ‘flexibility’ is docility rebranded as adaptability — the culture-industry/critique themes from the Frankfurt School reading.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the reader’s core project of spotting plasticity/flexibility conflation: here Malabou names flexibility explicitly as obedience.