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Plasticity, Flexibility, and Autoimmunity in Catherine Malabou’s What Should We Do With our Brain?

I will begin this essay where Malabou herself begins in her book, with the question of what it means to produce a “consciousness of the brain” – a question that, for her, is “at once philosophical, scientific, and political.” It is a question that has not been meaningfully addressed in any of these domains, however, because in each an “ideological screen” interposes itself precisely between our consciousness and our brain, generating misunderstandings of the latter that redound to the benefit of an acquisitive and authoritarian power structure. What this ideology contrives to misunderstand is the brain’s own plasticity, whose “true sense” is thus “hidden,” and for which it substitutes the concept of flexibility. The polysemy of plasticity in its “true sense” is lost in this substitution, its meaning cut to fit contemporary capitalism’s demand for constant adaptation. In the opening pages of the book Malabou provides an etymological breakdown of the word “plasticity”: “from the Greek plassein,” meaning “to mold,” its two basic senses are “the capacity to receive form” and “the capacity to give form,” to which she adds a third sense, that of its “capacity to annihilate the very form it is able to receive or create,” referring here to “plastic” as a term used to describe explosives. Flexibility, on the other hand, “grasp[s] only one of the semantic registers of plasticity: that of receiving form,” and lacks the creative as well as the explosive significations of plasticity. This is no accident: the emphasis here is on, as I have already said, adaptability, the need to be “docile vis-à-vis one’s environment” and “ready for all adjustments” which, as Malabou points out, are conditions of “employability” in today’s economy. The stress placed on flexibility as a personal virtue eventuates in a social logic of what Malabou terms “polymorphism,” which she defines as an openness to all forms, “capable of donning all masks” and “assuming all postures.” This near-absolute openness, she argues, “engenders the undoing of identity.” The dissolution of identity in the polymorphism of flexibility is what makes the latter concept perhaps the ideological sticking point when it comes to producing a consciousness of the brain. What is at stake in producing this consciousness is in fact a new understanding of identity as a creative power situated between the brain’s capacities to receive and to destroy forms. Flexibility is an obstacle to this understanding insofar as it is a restrictive construal of plasticity which locates its significance only at the first of what Malabou calls its “extremes,” namely, the capacity to receive form. I want to suggest that neglecting the explosive capacity of neural plasticity leads one also to overlook its creative capacity, inasmuch as the latter is consequent upon what Malabou refers to as an explicitly dialectical tension between the receipt and maintenance of form, on the one hand, and the annihilation of form on the other. I want to suggest, moreover, that this is an autoimmune dialectic, in Jacques Derrida’s sense of that term, rooted in the brain’s vulnerability as a biological thing exposed to the vagaries of material existence. It is this autoimmunity, the brain’s ever-possible “autodestruction,” as well as the generative possibilities it occasions, against which the ideology of flexibility is marshaled.

The prevailing ideological universe of flexibility is one in which the time-worn cliché of the brain as a “centered and centralizing program” coexists with an organization of work modeled on decentralized neural networks. Post-Fordist capitalism privileges organizational forms adapted from new understandings of brain function: as the brain’s “functional networks” – the neural activity underlying, for instance, the formation of a mental image – are not centralized but rather distributed transitory structures in each of which different zones of the brain can play different roles, so the contemporary capitalist firm is one in which “network is the master term,” and where work is performed by temporarily assembled “teams or projects.” The exemplary subject in this ideological universe is the “neuronal manager,” whose role is not to command or give orders but to travel between and facilitate the formation of these temporary networks: “His principal quality is his mobility, his ability to displace himself.” He thus embodies the endless lability that the ideology of flexibility expects from individuals, whose brains are now known to consist of infinitely modifiable synaptic connections, and who are therefore called upon to use this capacity to their social advantage: “Very often,” Malabou writes, “the brain is analyzed as personal capital, constituted by a sum of abilities that each must ‘invest optimally.’” The apparent opposition, then, between the cliché already alluded to – the brain as, in Malabou’s words, “a centered and centralizing program that leaves no room for plasticity and entertains no relation with alterity,” a cliché which, “despite being undermined by scientific discoveries,” displays a curious “endurance” – and the networked capitalism that derives its principles of organization from these same scientific discoveries, is reconciled in the figure of the worker or manager enjoined to take responsibility for her own flexibility. These “flexible individuals,” Malabou writes, “combine a permanent control of the self with a capacity to self-modify at the whim of fluxes, transfers, and exchanges.” An unceasing injunction to self-control is thus joined to an incapacity for independent action; individual abilities are mobilized in the service of a polymorphic effacement of identity. This personal capacity for adaptation is, as I’ve already noted, a powerful predictor of one’s “employability,” and thus a determinant of one’s inclusion in the social. If an unremitting mobility is both a sign of neural health and a condition for social inclusion – if, as Malabou says, one “must always be leaving […] in order to remain” within the networked society – then those who either evince an “overly rigid fidelity to self,” or allow their self-mastery to slacken and succumb to neural infirmity, mark themselves for exclusion.

If one conceives the “overly rigid fidelity to self” as a form of resistance to the dissolution of identity in the flux of flexibility, then one has in these two offenses against the flexibilist ideology something like the poles of Malabou’s dialectic of identity. Resistance is in fact a pivotal concept in understanding this dialectic: though Malabou speaks of the “extremes” of plasticity as the principle of identity in terms of “the taking on of form” and “the annihilation of form,” it is crucial and might go without saying, at least where this dialectic is concerned, that one should not interpret “the taking on of form” to denote the adaptive polymorphism of flexibility (though this is certainly a property of plasticity). Rather, one should, with respect to this dialectic, view the taking on of form (which here means something like the emergence of an autobiographical self) as, in Malabou’s words, a “struggle against its autodestruction” in the brain. The “self-fashioning” of identity is indeed contingent upon this autodestruction: the former, in implying “the elaboration of a form,” also implies the effacement of a form which precedes it. This “coincidence between formation and the disappearance of form is diachronic,” in that one form succeeds another – “one thus changes identity or ‘self’ in the course of time” – but this diachronic coincidence itself depends upon a synchronic coincidence, in that “the threat of the explosion of form structurally inhabits every form.” It is in this manner, then, that plasticity in its creative sense rests on plasticity in its explosive or destructive sense. 

Here it seems appropriate to introduce the concept of the brain’s autoimmunity as a tool for understanding the creative plasticity of identity. Martin Hägglund defines autoimmunity (following Derrida) as the principle that life is necessarily mortal and thus includes death in its own definition: “everything is threatened from within itself, since the possibility of living is inseparable from the peril of dying;” “[t]he vulnerability of life is thus without limit, since the source of attack is also located within what is to be defended.” Mortality as an exposure to death is always also an exposure to time, and therefore to transformation and corruption. This exposure to time is fundamental to the Derridean critique of the metaphysics of presence, which posits that, since the “interval of time divides everything in advance,” nothing is fully present to itself, and everything is open to its outside, including, perhaps first of all, the outside within itself. 

In this view, every “temporal entity” bears what Hägglund (again following Derrida) calls “the structure of the trace.” The “trace” itself, he writes, “is not itself an ontological entity but a logical structure that explains the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space.” This mutual becoming of time and space constitutes the structure of the trace. Time must become space in order for there to be anything like duration: because time is “nothing but negation,” an exclusively destructive force, in order for anything to exist and endure in time it must be spatial, since only in space is a simultaneity possible, and only the simultaneity of spatial existence enables anything to “remain the same,” withstanding time’s unceasing, dissolutive violence. There is thus a logical interdependence of time and space in the structure of the trace: only the perdurance of a spatial instance allows one to mark the passage of time, which “has to be spatialized” in order “to be anything;” likewise the simultaneity of space, “itself a temporal notion,” is only intelligible in its relation to temporal succession (this is “the becoming-time of space”). The trace, as a structure that encompasses the organic and inorganic, has consequences for the understanding of life, insofar as it entails a view of the latter as “essentially mortal and as inherently divided by time.” The trace, owing to the fact that it “enables the past to be retained” and “is characterized by the ability to remain in spite of temporal succession,” is “the minimal condition for life to resist death in a movement of survival.” This resistance to death, however, signals continual vulnerability to death: as a spatial entity immersed in time’s annihilating inconstancy, the trace “can only live on … by being left for a future that may erase it.”

The image of life as sustained through resistance to death finds echoes in Malabou’s account of the formation of identity in the “struggle against its autodestruction.” Identity itself has a trace structure for Malabou: identity is not, as psychoanalysis would have it, “imperishable,” possessed only of a positive or a constructive plasticity – while it does indeed persist throughout an individual’s life and can undergo all manner of mutation (again, one “changes identity or ‘self’ in the course of time”), its material basis in the brain leaves it susceptible to outright destruction. Discussing neuroscientist Antonio Damasio’s concept of the “proto-self,” the “coherent collection of neural patterns that, moment to moment, represent the internal state of the organism” for purposes of homeostasis, Malabou notes that this elementary “body scheme or schema” has its genesis in “different actions of self-preservation”: “Fighting against external threats of destruction allows the unity of the individual being to take shape and helps the constitution” of this proto-self. This struggle against or resistance to destruction from outside is “the very origin of personal identity.” Identity is thus formed in a struggle, if not against its “autodestruction,” at least against the possibility of destruction inherent in the brain and the organism the brain inhabits. Just as the structure of the trace includes the successive time of transformation and the simultaneous time of spatial relations, here the brain’s, and thus identity’s, destructibility both lays it open to its spatial outside and enables its metamorphosis through time in response to this outside. 

This question of openness and responsiveness to an outside is central to Malabou’s thinking about the brain’s creative plasticity. Underlying the contradiction that characterizes the dialectic of identity – “formation/explosion” – is “a more original contradiction: that between the maintenance of the system, or ‘homeostasis,’ and the ability to change the system, or ‘self-generation.’” It would seem on closer inspection, however, that the latter ability does not so much contradict as modify homeostasis: in homeostasis the nervous system is concerned with “preserv[ing] itself from destruction” and must therefore “keep itself in the same state.” This is the work of the proto-self and its “neural ‘map” of the organism, in which one might identify a sort of weak creative power, insofar as the nervous system here “continuously generates and specifies its own organization.” (Indeed, this language of “generat[ing] … its own organization” evokes Malabou’s counterposition of “self-generation” and homeostasis, only here the self-generation is within homeostasis itself.) The processes of homeostasis are interrupted, however, by “event[s] coming from the outside,” which “call[] upon ‘another level of cerebral structure,’ charged with transforming maintenance into a creative ability.” Perhaps the relevant distinction here is, again, that between the synchronic and diachronic threats of explosion and destruction: homeostasis betokens the perishability that is coeval with any individual brain, whereas the self-generative powers of creative plasticity only come into view in response to unpredictable events contingent on the brain’s temporal and spatial exposure. In each case neural creativity indexes a different modality of the brain’s vulnerability: homeostasis, as a universal feature of all nervous systems, points up the mortality of all life and its consequent need to defend itself; self-generation brings one rather closer to the peculiarities of a personal history, that “contact with the stimuli of the world” that is always singular. 

For Malabou, then, to be conscious of the brain means to be aware that this vulnerability of the brain is also the source of its creative power in the sense just outlined. Rather than a model of identity that joins “a permanent control of the self” to “a capacity to self-modify at the whim of fluxes, transfers, and exchanges,” such as one finds in flexibility, wedding a constant egoic vigilance to an indifference in the face of the shaping of one’s identity by external forces, a consciousness of the brain – which here denotes crucially a consciousness of those creative and explosive plasticities omitted from a “flexible” identity – at once accepts and resists the brain’s innate fragility. That the brain is not a closed system but is affected by events arriving both from within and without, implies that the persistence of an autobiographical identity through time requires, as already suggested with the example of the proto-self, a capacity to resist and maintain itself against threats, and also entails a responsiveness of this identity to the unforeseen that admits of change and inventiveness. What marks both sides of this dialectic is what is absent from the ideology of flexibility – namely, the possibility and actuality of loss. Even in the creative self-fashioning of identity, as already noted, there is an effacement of a preceding form of identity to make way for the form succeeding it. “[A]ll change of identity is a critical test,” Malabou writes, “which leaves some traces, effaces others, resists its own test, and tolerates no polymorphism. Paradoxically, if we were flexible, in other words, if we didn’t explode at each transition, if we didn’t destroy ourselves a bit, we could not live.” Destruction is thus both a threat to and a resource of a self-fashioning identity, and the forms this identity takes are, relatedly, to be received, maintained, and exploded. This dialectic of identity in Malabou is a dialectic of what she calls, following psychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik, “resilience,” which she defines as a “psychical process” of “reconstruction and self-reconfiguration, developed simultaneously against and with the threat of destruction.”

That, on this view of the brain, one can wield its susceptibility to destruction for self-transformative ends, obviously does not mean that the destructive or explosive power of the brain is amenable to something like conscious control. One cannot always merely elect to “destroy [oneself] a little bit” – one must recognize that the “resistance to form itself,” which Malabou seems to suggest can be enlisted in a resistance to social control, points to the very unruliness of the brain’s explosive plasticity, to the reality that “in a certain sense the brain does not obey itself, that it manufactures events, that there can be an excess in the system, an explosive part that, without being pathological, refuses to obey.” This unruliness raises again the specter of identity’s autodestruction, alluding to obscure depths in the brain, inaccessible to consciousness, which harbor forces that menace one’s sense of self-control. A consciousness of the brain, in Malabou’s sense, would in some measure enjoin one to accept and yield to these tenebrous neural agencies: “to lower our self-controlling guard, to accept exploding from time to time: this is what we should do with our brain.” This consciousness understands the brain, then, as both a freedom – the ground of one’s self-fashioning – and a passion, in the etymological sense of something suffered. The brain would not be the site of our creative self-transformation or the freedom occasioned by an exposure to contingency if it were not also the locus of a profound fragility, the vulnerability without limit of autoimmunity, which breaches the surface of consciousness in “media images of neurodegenerative disorders,” those bugbears that trouble the consciousness of the brain which Malabou advocates, reminding one that “the source of attack is also located within what is to be defended.”

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