Flexibility is plasticity stripped of its power to give and erase form

Evidence

We will formulate the following thesis: today, the true sense of plasticity is hidden, and we tend constantly to substitute for it its mistaken cognate, flexibility. The difference between these two terms appears insignificant. Nevertheless, flexibility is the ideological avatar of plasticity—at once its mask, its diversion, and its confiscation. We are entirely ignorant of plasticity but not at all of flexibility. In this sense, plasticity appears as the coming consciousness of flexibility. At first glance, the meanings of these two terms are the same. … The problem is that these significations grasp only one of the semantic registers of plasticity: that of receiving form. To be flexible is to receive a form or impression, to be able to fold oneself, to take the fold, not to give it. To be docile, to not explode. Indeed, what flexibility lacks is the resource of giving form, the power to create, to invent or even to erase an impression, the power to style. Flexibility is plasticity minus its genius. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 56

Categorization

• DEFINE: Core definition distinguishing the two terms: plasticity both receives and gives form; flexibility only receives form, reduced to docility.
• XREF: The management-memo substitution this reader wants to catch — ‘flexibility on the job, flexible factories’ — is exactly the workplace framing Malabou names as plasticity masked. — connects to: A closed system’s openness to modification while transforming itself is plasticity — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1283; Plasticity names both malleability and the power to give form — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1310
• ADDENDUM: ‘Flexibility as plasticity minus genius, docility rebranded as adaptability’ connects to how workplace ‘immodest/adaptive dress’ discourse rebrands compliance — a mode of docility masquerading as virtue.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that giving-form AND erasing-form (the plastic bomb’s literal sense) are constitutive of genuine plasticity, and that flexibility cuts this to mere receptivity, resists quick summary — it grounds the whole critique of ‘adaptability.’
• QUESTION: Does Malabou ever contend with the empirical sense where flexible = statistically adaptive but not form-giving, or does she purely use the etymological register to convict the term?
• APHORISMS: Amid the definitional core: flexibility is docility, the power merely to receive — adaptability demanded of workers is structurally the refusal of creative power.