Flexibility ideology rewards docility, but plasticity enables refusal and revolt.

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

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Directly answers the reader’s stated purpose: here Malabou explicitly inverts flexibility as docility rebranded. Connects to the earlier plasticity-vs-flexibility distinction the reader is tracking.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘Let us get enraged’ as the political payoff of plasticity theory — how the plasticity/flexibility distinction ends in a call to relearn anger.
• DEEPTHINKING: This is the climactic normative claim of the book’s whole argument — plasticity as revolt, flexibility as submission — dense and resists summary.

Related

• Flexibility is docility rebranded as adaptability, and rage is the ethical answer to it (similarity 0.91)
• Explosive rage can oppose a culture that rewards docile flexibility (similarity 0.88)
• Explosions of rage can be legitimate resistance against a culture of docility. (similarity 0.87)
• Refusing flexible self-modification is what we should do with our brain (similarity 0.84)
• Flexibility is an ideological norm, not a neutral description (similarity 0.82)
• Brain plasticity research has changed nothing socially or politically (similarity 0.81)
• Brain plasticity includes a capacity to destroy form, not only create it (similarity 0.80)
• Flexibility is an ideological norm that naturalizes neuronal processes to justify social functioning (similarity 0.80)
• The neuroscience of plasticity has not made people freer or happier (similarity 0.79)
• Brain plasticity is often misread as flexibility, a docility-based economy (similarity 0.79)
• Brain plasticity includes a refusal to submit to any model or form. (similarity 0.79)
• The brain’s explosive excess resists self-obedience and drives formative change. (similarity 0.79)
• Plasticity adapts while flexibility submits, so the two are not interchangeable (similarity 0.79)
• Flexibility would mean identity changes without any critical test (similarity 0.78)
• Plastic resilience requires colliding energies; mere flexibility is passive conciliation (similarity 0.78)