"“If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.” ...

Photo Visual Concepts | ART 238 Instructor: Tasha Bjelić | [email protected] | Classroom: VA 287 Reading and Writing Response Guidelines: There will be 5 Reading + Writing Responses due throughout the course. Please read each text by the assigned due

date and complete your writing response. Your response should be 1-page, 11-point Times font, and include: 1-2

paragraph summary, 1-2 paragraph reflection, and one question to ask the class about the reading. You must submit a physical copy to me in class. I will be checking spelling and grammar. Please number your responses. Readings will be available electronically via Dropbox or as an emailed link. Each response paper will be worth 5 points toward

your total grade.

Writing Response Example:

Student Name

September 1 2019

“Plasticity and Flexibility”

In the book “Plasticity and Flexibility: For a Consciousness of the Brain”, Catherine Malabou

calls for a new consciousness of the brain as “plastic”. She describes the brain as a work of art. It’s

something we make, yet we don’t know it. The brain’s plasticity means it can receive form, give form and

annihilate form. Moreover, the political agency conceptualized with plasticity provides new ways of

forming the self to then work to reform wider social-political patterns.

According to Malabou, there has been a conflation of plasticity and flexibility. For her, acting

flexible is tied to wider capitalistic relations as a kind of docility within the capitalistic economic system.

Being a flexible worker, doing what the boss wants, etc. Plasticity, on the other hand, includes the

potential to be inflexible, to make form outside the capitalistic economic system. She calls for “the

coming consciousness of plasticity” (143) or the coming consciousness of the brain’s full potential (its

relationship to capitalism, the role of flexibility, etc.) in order to change social dynamics.

Malabou’s notion of plasticity, its opposition to flexibility (going along with capitalism), as the

“coming consciousness” required to alter capitalism resembles the Kantian logic of exiting “immature

consciousness” in order to move to maturity, to become enlightened. Doreen Massey’s intervention would

be to assess this “coming consciousness” in a lived situation. Applied to my own life, her example of

flexibility as pro-capitalistic – an ideology that is materially present in the brain subjugating the brain’s

full potential – problematically suggests a delinquent-plasticity of the brain for people without the

privilege to negate “flexibility” in the workplace.

Would Malabou categorize my brain as delinquent because I have to work?