Flexibility is an ideological norm, not a neutral description

Evidence

How can we fail to see that the only real view of progress opened by the neurosciences is that of an improvement in the ”quality of life” through a better treatment of illness? But we don’t want these half-measures, what Nietzsche would rightly call a logic of sickness, despairing, and suffering. What we are lacking is life, which is to say: resistance. Resistance is what we want. Resistance to flexibility, to this ideological norm advanced consciously or otherwise by a reductionist discourse that models and naturalizes the neuronal process in order to legitimate a certain social and political functioning. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 225

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• DEFINE: The core contrast for the reader’s purpose: flexibility is named as ‘an ideological norm’ reducing plasticity to docility/adaptability, exactly the definitional work the reader wants.
• SEED: Article angle: how ‘flexible’ became management-speak for ‘compliant’ — the genealogy of flexibility as ideology across neuroscience and workplace discourse.
• XREF: Echoes the reader’s framing of ‘flexibility only receives — docility rebranded as adaptability’; also resonates with Foucault’s docile bodies lineage.

Related

• Flexibility is an ideological norm that naturalizes neuronal processes to justify social functioning (similarity 0.93)
• Flexibility is merely reproductive and normative, not creative. (similarity 0.84)
• Refusing flexible self-modification is what we should do with our brain (similarity 0.83)
• Brain plasticity is often misread as flexibility, a docility-based economy (similarity 0.83)
• Flexibility is docility rebranded as adaptability, and rage is the ethical answer to it (similarity 0.83)
• Flexibility ideology rewards docility, but plasticity enables refusal and revolt. (similarity 0.82)
• Flexibility is plasticity stripped of its power to give and erase form (similarity 0.82)
• Plasticity is adaptive while flexibility is submission, not resourcefulness (similarity 0.80)
• Flexibility is an unrooted notion while plasticity is a historically grounded concept (similarity 0.79)
• Flexibility demands adaption to a world that lacks continuity itself. (similarity 0.79)
• The neuroscience of plasticity has not made people freer or happier (similarity 0.79)
• Neuroscience without a theory of transformation exposes itself to ideological co-option (similarity 0.78)
• Flexibility is passivity — conciliation, not resilience (similarity 0.78)