Plasticity is adaptive while flexibility is submission, not resourcefulness

Evidence

Plasticity, in effect, is not flexibility. Let us not forget that plasticity is a mechanism for adapting, while flexibility is a mechanism for submitting. Adapting is not submitting, and, in this sense, plasticity ought not to serve as an alibi for submitting to the new world order being dreamed up by capitalism. ”Not to replicate the caricature of the world: this is what we should do with our brain” (p. 78). To be conscious of the plasticity of one’s brain is to give oneself the means to say no. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 23

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the crux definitional distinction the reader wants: plasticity adapts, flexibility submits — the exact distinction to catch substituting one for the other.
• XREF: Connects to Foucauldian docility (governmentality, discipline and punish) — ‘flexibility as docility rebranded’ echoes Foucault’s docile bodies. — connects to: Diversified flexibility confers resilience in unpredictable environments across scales — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 343; A closed system’s openness to modification while transforming itself is plasticity — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1283
• SEED: An essay angle: how corporate wellness and ed-tech copy substitutes ‘flexibility’ (submission) for genuine plasticity, reading management language as a definitional bait-and-switch.
• ADDENDUM: The submission-vs-adaptation distinction parallels the immodesty-tracking of control rhetoric, though this is more sharply a workplace/bodily control question.