My Exploding Plastic Brain

i <3 feminist materialism [wastebook 11/29/2024]

I’ve been dealing with mad fatigue and brain fog the past couple weeks, so my next video (and my words in general) are coming along slowly, slowly. In the meantime, here’s some reading I’ve been doing on neuroplasticity, eco-pharmacology, a bit of behind-the-scenes stuff, and a reading list I made for myself about fatphobia, which I think has probably gotta be the next era of my dopamine research.

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Last week I read an entire (80-page) book in one sitting: What Should We Do With Our Brain? by the French philosopher Catherine Malabou. The concept of neuroplasticity has completely changed how we think and talk about ourselves, and Malabou argues that it also leads us to the question of what we should do with this understanding of our brains.

I found this book in a pdf called The Plastic Brain: Neoliberalism and the Neuronal Self by Victoria Pitts-Taylor, which I’ve had stashed for years on a Google Drive. It came back to mind while I was thinking way too hard about these ads which constantly implore me to find my ADHD type:

“Once you learn the diagnosis and start managing it using behavioral psychology, the symptoms disappear almost instantly, and you almost forget how to waste time ever again.”

This is obviously AI slop, but the robots are just a funhouse mirror of humanity! The idea that you can change your brain through proper management has become ubiquitous in the last few decades. In The Plastic Brain, Pitts-Taylor looks at a bunch of articles from the aughts about neuroplasticity, and she finds a few major themes that vibe with the ideals of an individualistic, overstimulating, fast-moving neoliberal era:

1. the brain as untapped potential (“harness your brain power!”)

2. fitness and labor language (“the brain is a muscle and you have to work it!”)

3. an emphasis on flexibility (“isn’t it amazing how resilient your brain is?”)

Malabou spends a good chunk of What Should We Do With Our Brain? making a distinction between plasticity and flexibility — plasticity is not just formed, it also does the forming, and once formed, it can’t return to a previous form. Flexibility, on the other hand, is bending without breaking — it’s being acted upon, taking what comes in stride, but not acting. She writes:

We should not forget that plastique, from which we get the words plastiquage and plastiquer, is an explosive substance made of nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose, capable of causing violent explosions. We thus note that plasticity is situated between two extremes: on the one side the sensible image of taking form (sculpture or plastic objects), and on the other side that of the annihilation of all form (explosion).

She’s pointing out the contradiction inherent in plasticity — that it could serve neoliberal capitalist ends in its ability to adapt and be formed, yes, but it could also just fucking blow some shit all the way up:

“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. To cancel the fluxes, to lower our self-controlling guard, to accept exploding from time to time: this is what we should do with our brain.”

To accept exploding from time to time. I’m adding this line to the slug ethos. I’m always talking about letting go of expectations, but I have yet to fully accept my own explosions; I still hate myself when I lose my grip on the everyday and let it all pile up around me. I still can’t figure out how to make order, or make my brain do anything, to be honest. The only way I function is by accepting that it has always and already fallen apart, and just cutting a path through the mess of it.

Case in point:

I have been wanting to make video essays for years, but I kept getting stuck at the filming part. This is because I thought the shots needed to be beautiful, the backgrounds nice and neat, the bokeh lush. But every time I cleared a scene and made it look orderly, it felt fake and stale. My house is not like that. I am not like that!