filamentosmovimentos

"There is a plasticity to the brain, which people have mistaken for 'flexibility'. The true potential of neuronal man has been missed because the neo-liberal world of global capitalism endorses the idea of a flexible, de-centered, networked, yet docile neuronal man. Neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio, Joseph E. LeDoux and others are valuable because they have explained the nature of neuronal man. But they are also mistaken because, while accepting the fact of the brain’s plasticity, they have misunderstood its potential for indeterminacy and creativity in the formation of the self by subordinating the fact of plasticity to the notion of flexible adaptation and biological survival. Above all, they have obfuscated the difficulty of theorizing the transition from the neuronal to the mental. The challenge for us is to accept the position of neuronal materialism without succumbing to a false reductionism and hence for us to find a way to think through the transformation of the brain’s plasticity into the mental, into freedom.
Malabou’s analysis is thus to show us how knowledge of the plasticity of the brain can help us realize our potential for freedom and creativity. She suggests that to ask “What should we do with our brain?” is 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” and instead to “visualize the possibility of saying no to afflicting economic, political, and mediatic culture that celebrates only the triumph of flexibility”.
(...) "The transition from the neuronal to the mental supposes negation and resistance", she writes. “There is no simple and limpid continuity from the one to the other, but rather transformation of the one into the other out of their mutual conflict."


Ruth Leys in
http://nonsite.org/issues/issue-2/on-catherine-malabous-what-should-we-do-with-our-brain