Neuroscientific brain models mirror and normalize specific political visions of democracy
Evidence
On the one hand, neuronal functioning as it is described today quite closely resembles a democracy: mutual support (reparation), freedom of choice (one somehow constructs one’s own brain), a crossing point between the public and the private (the interaction of the outside and the inside), belonging to many spheres, mobility, openness, availability, autonomy, absence of hierarchy between the network elements, and equality of function. (By contrast, the models of the central telephone exchange and the computer continue to evoke the old Soviet system or Brave New World.) In one sense, progress in the neurosciences has made possible the political emancipation of the brain. On the other hand, the scientific description of brain plasticity produces, while taking its inspiration from, an extremely normalizing vision of democracy, in that it accords an overly central role to the absence of center, a too rigid prominence to flexibility, that is to say, to docility and obedience. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 180
On the one hand, neuronal functioning as it is described today quite closely resembles a democracy: mutual support (reparation), freedom of choice (one somehow constructs one’s own brain), a crossing point between the public and the private (the interaction of the outside and the inside), belonging to many spheres, mobility, openness, availability, autonomy, absence of hierarchy between the network elements, and equality of function. (By contrast, the models of the central telephone exchange and the computer continue to evoke the old Soviet system or Brave New World.) In one sense, progress in the neurosciences has made possible the political emancipation of the brain. On the other hand, the scientific description of brain plasticity produces, while taking its inspiration from, an extremely normalizing vision of democracy, in that it accords an overly central role to the absence of center, a too rigid prominence to flexibility, that is to say, to docility and obedience. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 180
Categorization
- DEFINE: Core to the reader’s purpose: flexibility is here explicitly glossed as docility and obedience, the substitution the reader wants to catch.
- XREF: Directly supports the reader’s goal of distinguishing plasticity from flexibility; flexibility = docility rebranded, the exact inversion the reader is hunting for.
- ADDENDUM: Could support ‘Grafting & Growth’ framing insofar as plasticity-as-giving-form versus flexibility-only-receiving maps onto grafted versus merely bent structures, though the link is loose.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 180