Plastic individuals resist flexible self-modification at capital’s whims

Evidence

The problem of a dialectic of identity—between fashioning and destruction—poses itself all the more pointedly as global capitalism, currently the only known type of globalization, offers us the untenable spectacle of a simultaneity of terrorism (daily detonations—in Israel, Iraq, Indonesia, Pakistan …) and of fixity and rigidity (for example, American hegemony and its violent rigorism). It is as though we had before our eyes a sort of caricature of the philosophical problem of self-constitution, between dissolution and impression of form. Fashioning an identity in such a world has no meaning except as constructing of countermodel to this caricature, as opposed simply to replicating it. Not to replicate the caricature of the world: this is what we should do with our brain. To refuse to be flexible individuals who combine a permanent control of the self with a capacity to self-modify at the whim of fluxes, transfers, and exchanges, for fear of explosion. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 256

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s stated purpose: this passage names the flexibility trap — permanent self-control plus self-modification at the whim of fluxes — that must be caught in management memos.
• DEEPTHINKING: The mapping of global simultaneity (terrorism/fixity) onto the philosophical problem of self-constitution is dense and resists summary — identity work as countermodel to a world-level caricature.