Flexibility functions as enforced docility within exploitative culture

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 (#expands, via linked claim)

In a way, this argument echoes the conception of routines advanced by Feldman and Pentland (2003), stressing, on the one hand, the ostensive side as a fixed, overarching pattern and, on the other hand, the performative side as the actual practicing of a routine involving some variation. — Jörg Sydow, Georg Schreyögg, and Jochen Koch, Organizational Path Dependence, 49 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Worker flexibility often functions as a euphemism for precarity — Brooke Erin Duffy, (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love:…, 571; Stable regimes sustain strong flexible repertoires shaped jointly by culture and structure — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 273; Flexibility is passivity — conciliation, not resilience — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 252 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Flexibility is docility rebranded as adaptability, and rage is the ethical answer to it #expands (0.95) — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 257
• Conformity functions as adaptive social coordination, not weakness #complicates (0.78)
• Organizational routines combine a fixed ostensive pattern with variable performance #complicates (0.72) — Jörg Sydow, Georg Schreyögg, and Jochen Koch, Organizational Path Dependence, 49