Plasticity against elasticity offers a model for renewed solidarity

Evidence

The old solidarity that neoliberalism decomposed has gone, never to return. But this does not mean that we are consigned to atomised individualism. Our challenge now is to reinvent solidarity. Alex Williams has come up with the suggestive formulation “post-Fordist plasticity” to describe what this new solidarity might look like. As Catherine Malabou has shown, plasticity is not the same as elasticity. Elasticity is equivalent to the flexibility which neoliberalism demands of us, in which we assume a form imposed from outside. But plasticity is something else: it implies both adaptability and resilience, a capacity for modification which also retains a “memory” of previous encounters. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1742

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Malabou’s pivotal distinction between plasticity and elasticity, a genuinely reusable concept.
• ADDENDUM: The adaptability-and-resilience framing connects to themes in my tree/grafting essay about flexible structures retaining history.