The plastic-brain model emerged alongside capitalism’s shift to auto-organization

Evidence

The new model of the brain progressively elucidated by modern neuroscience emerges in a particular context: it co-occurs with a radical modification of the economic and social environment. The look of capitalism has changed, passing from a planned system, managed from above and overseen by a central authority, to an auto-organization at once dynamic, multipolar, and adaptive to circumstance. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 18

The new model of the brain progressively elucidated by modern neuroscience emerges in a particular context: it co-occurs with a radical modification of the economic and social environment. The look of capitalism has changed, passing from a planned system, managed from above and overseen by a central authority, to an auto-organization at once dynamic, multipolar, and adaptive to circumstance. This new model of organization clearly suggests an analogy with cerebral reality: ‘‘Like neuronal cohesion, contemporary corporate economic and social organization is not of a central or centralizing type but rests on a plurality of mobile and atomistic centers, deployed according to a connectionist model’’ (p. 42). Might we have a ‘‘neo-liberal’’ brain that would impose its model on our socioeconomic organization? Or, inversely, might the global economy’s upheaval generate a conceptual change that would affect, by contagion, our view of the way the brain functions? — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 18

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the flexibility-vs-plasticity catch: the ‘adaptive, multipolar’ corporate form is exactly the flexibility rhetoric the reader wants to catch as submission rather than genuine plasticity. — connects to: Cognitive capitalism blurs the work-play divide by investing in minds and social relations — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 366; Neoclassical agent theory collapsed when selves became infinitely plastic. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 327
• QUESTION: Whether the neuroscience or the economics came first, and whether causality runs either way at all, is flagged here as genuinely open.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 18