Neuroplasticity, Historicity, and Mediation

The French philosopher Catherine Malabou challenges the understanding of the brain as a mechanical centralising machine instructing body parts in their movements and communications. Many maintain that the central nervous system seems to function well as an object of study, which provides us an identity that is unifying, stable, and perpetual. The brain seems to be the highest commander in chief of a rigid social hierarchy either in an organisation or in a larger society. Malabou, however, discusses the brain’s temporality and its innate transience that registers its very historicity. Indeed, the bond between brain and history ‘is so deep in a certain sense it defines an identity. It’s not just that the brain has a history—which is sometimes confused with that of its constitution as an object of the sciences—but that it is a history. In fact, today we can say that there exists a constitutive historicity of the brain’ Full reference in Zotero Library. The brain is not so much an entity that exists to control and fix the body; rather, it is a process, a temporality, that adapts, moves with us, and changes us. Malabou captures the brain’s engagement with history with the notion of plasticity, a dominant constituent of disciplinary vocabulary in neurosciences and neurology. She claims: ‘what we have called the constitutive historicity of the brain is really nothing other than its plasticity’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Plasticity contradicts rigidity and promises a process deeply embedded in temporality. The word plasticity, in its Greek origin, ‘means at once the capacity to receive form […] and the capacity to give form’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Being plastic is to shape and to be shaped at the same time. This means, the brain’s plasticity implies its own flexibility to be influenced and its ability to influence others, being formable and formative simultaneously. This dialectic of the brain’s plasticity then enables disobedience, rebellion, and explosion. Being flexible means both being conformist and being disagreeable. Technically speaking, neuronal formation, modification, and repair are key working areas of the brain, enabled by its plasticity. Initial input, development, and possible injury that would happen to the brain are prepared and covered by its nature of being plastic. Malabou argues: ‘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)’ Full reference in Zotero Library. This in-betweenness of plasticity enables it to function as mediation between two neuronal networks of synapses, which constitute the biological basis for consciousness and identity; and the plasticity is the individual biological foundation for larger social change at a global scale.

Malabou explains her neuro-philosophy in three steps. First, she discusses the three functions of plasticity. Plasticity is expressed through the genesis and formation of synapses or connections between neurons: ‘everything begins with establishing connections and then multiplying them and making them more complex. The growth in mass of the brain coincides with the extension of axons and dendrites, the formation of synapses, and the development of myelin sheaths around the axons’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Neuronal connections are inspired and encouraged by external influences. New synapses reflect the interaction between the brain cells and the outside world; ‘henceforth the environment of the brain qua organ (the modeling of connections) and its external environment (synaptic modulation by influence of the surroundings) play the role of morphogenic factors’ Full reference in Zotero Library.

Then the next function of plasticity is the individual’s creative modulation of the general outside influences. In plain words, each individual brain is endowed with the ability to make its own story or achieve its own learning result based on the synapses induced by external influence. Two effects happen in this process: ‘the efficacy of the synapse (its capacity to transmit signals from neuron to neuron) either rises, which is called “long-term potentiation” (LTP), or diminishes, which is “long-term depression” (LTD)’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Potentiation and depression happen in various modifications to allow the cognitive learning and performance of certain actions. ‘This phenomenon shows up quite clearly in the human brain during all learning processes’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Mistakes result in long-term depression while successes become long-term potentiation in individual learning processes. Potentiation and depression are not permanent. They also change according to circumstances: ‘by analogy with the process of becoming that stem cells undergo, one could claim that neuronal connections, because of their own plasticity, are always capable of changing difference, receiving or losing an imprint, or transforming their program’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Each brain configures and reconfigures its neuronal constitution according to the changing of time and space. There arises the third function of plasticity: the repair and regeneration of brain cells after damage. Neuronal renewal is essential for the brain to recover from injury and disease. This function is even more essential than the genesis and individuation of synapses. Malabou points out: ‘the idea of cellular renewal, repair, and resourcefulness as auxiliaries of synaptic plasticity brings to light the power of healing—treatment, scarring, compensation, regeneration, and the capacity of the brain to build natural prostheses’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Despite malfunctions and diseases such as paralysis of body parts by stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, or Parkinson’s disease, the brain still tries to compensate for the irretrievable loss by engaging long-term memory or reactivating dormant regions in the brain. Transplants thus become possible through this reparatory ability of cellular plasticity.

Through the three modes of plasticity, the brain acts within itself and interacts with the outside world. The brain is thus not a static and mechanic organ but proves a biological process that construes, changes, and reforms neuronal connections, constantly. Malabou concludes that these three areas of plasticity testify to the historicity of the brain because our brain could partly become what we do with it. ‘Plasticity, between determinism and freedom, designates all the types of transformation deployed between the closed meaning of plasticity (the definitive character of form) and its open meaning (the malleability of form)’ Full reference in Zotero Library. From this perspective, the German writer Hermann Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel, 1943) also shows the innate drive toward change in the order of Castalia, which is deemed to be permanent and universal. The deeply rationalist devotion to music, mathematics, and the Chinese language in the Game seems to anchor it to never-changing principles and perpetual laws. Yet Joseph Knecht, the protagonist of the novel, discovers the need for change through his intense discussion with Plinio, someone from the outside world, and his experience with the ancient Chinese divination book I Ging, the Book of Change. Knecht’s change resembles a new synapse in the brain of Castalia and induces its transformation. The Order of Castalia is not a mechanic rationalist organisation but also undergoes its own historicity like a brain’s biological process. Malabou also expands an individual brain’s plasticity to social life and relates it to economic, political, and social dimensions of global capitalism.

The cerebral and the socioeconomic seem to be naturally correlated to each other on the material basis of biological processes of cellular synapses. Brain plasticity is likened to a person’s flexibility on the job market or their employability: ‘an Alzheimer’s patient is the nemesis of connectionist society, the counter model of flexibility […] In fact, it is no longer possible to distinguish rigorously on an ideological level between those suffering a neurodegenerative disorder and those with major social handicaps’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Hence, any vision of the brain is also socioeconomic; the neurobiological is also the political. Malabou contends that the study of plasticity seems to confirm the normativity of the market economy and prominently excludes those who are not as flexible and docile as the market demands. She asks: ‘Can the description of brain plasticity escape the insidious command of the New World Order? Can it introduce something like a resistance within this very order? Can plastic brain measure the limits of their flexibility’ Full reference in Zotero Library? Malabou confirms this at the end of her treatise, but first moves to another thread of argument that leads up to the resistance of cerebral plasticity. She highlights that the essence of one’s identity is a complex network of synaptic interactions: ‘the “self” is a synthesis of all the plastic processes at work in the brain; this permits us to hold together and unify the cartography of networks already mentioned’ Full reference in Zotero Library. The neuronal thus construes the mental, the psychical, the consciousness, and the personality. If the synapses can change, then personality can be formed, transformed, and re-formed.

Hence, Malabou proposes a fourth type of plasticity, an intermediate plasticity between the biological being and the psychic mental state, or ‘a plasticity link […] enabling the transition from the neuronal to the psychical, the latter never being, in a certain sense, anything more than the metamorphosis of the former’ Full reference in Zotero Library. The self is biologically and psychologically a dialectic construction. It is a meta-neurobiological construction. Furthermore, plasticity as mediation is also pronounced in the emergence and disappearance of forms of life. ‘All current identity maintains itself only at the cost of a struggle against its autodestruction: it is in this sense that identity is dialectical in nature’ Full reference in Zotero Library. The equilibrium, either neurobiological or psychological, could only be maintained through the preservation and re-formation of life. ‘What results is a tension born of the resistance that constancy and creation mutually oppose to each other. It is thus that every form carries within itself its own contradiction. And precisely this resistance makes transformation possible’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Aesthetically speaking, Malabou argues, plasticity is situated between the homeostasis, or the maintenance, and self-generation, or the ability to change: ‘the historico-cultural fashioning of the self is possible only by virtue of this primary and natural economy of contradiction’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Preservation, explosion, and creation build the irreversible cycle of life, identity, form, and sociohistorical revolution. They happen simultaneously and alternately. Toward the end of her treatise, Malabou emphasises the importance of resistance that the concept of plasticity introduces. Children from less privileged or very problematic backgrounds are still able to erase the scarred cerebral traces left by their past and transform their lives with repaired neuronal marks. All sorts of personalities and identities are the results and processes of resilience, contradiction, effacement, remembering, and forgetting.

This brain resilience means a type of Hegelian resistance for Malabou: ‘creating resistance to neuronal ideology is what our brain wants, and what we want for it’ Full reference in Zotero Library. What Malabou means by neuronal ideology is the equalisation of brain plasticity with the marketable flexibility in the capitalist economy. Plasticity, however, negates and challenges the flexibility and should not and cannot serve as its biological legitimisation. Flexibility in the economic sense means fixity, rigidity, obedience, and docility of individuals and working classes as defined by capitalism. Plasticity, in its dialectic nature and with its mediating function, could help individuals and societies to break with the exploiting economic system and create a different world. Malabou thus envisions an alternate biological globalism because ‘the brain is not the natural ideal of globalized economic, political, and social organization; it is the locus of an organic tension that is the basis of our history and our critical activity’ Full reference in Zotero Library. Malabou refuses a reductionism that links the neuronal to the socioeconomic forces; rather, cerebral plasticity is itself the site of contradiction, mediation, transition, and reformation. Plasticity offers another material basis for the critique of global capitalism.

As a Hegelian thinker and a student of Jacques Derrida and poststructuralism, Malabou clearly uses concepts such as dialectic, historicity, inherent contradiction, mediation, and resistance to interpret and frame plasticity and make it useful for a Marxist critique of the capitalist condition. She explicates the philosophical and political impetus inherent in the neuronal plasticity and reveals its profound efficacy in political and social changes in global capitalism. Freedom, yet again, is also what Malabou aims to achieve through the microscopic observation of neuronal plasticity. To a certain extent, Malabou intentionally makes the connection between plasticity and market flexibility in order to call it into question. Yet one does not have to force the link between the biological process and the socioeconomic demand of capitalism. Labour in an agricultural society before the Industrial Revolution also includes brain plasticity. Consequently, the need to negate such a capitalist connection for the sake of seeking resistance may not seem necessary. Nonetheless, Malabou’s work provides a materialist reading of the psychological, the mental, and, eventually, the spiritual.

Indeed, I venture to read Hesse’s novel and Joseph Knecht’s departure from Castalia partly with Malabou’s philosophy of plasticity. Interestingly, despite her devotion to a materialist reading, Malabou cites Mind-Energy by Henri Bergson, a French philosopher in the nineteenth century, to strengthen her argument about resilience and resistance. Bergson, known for his philosophy of life, held a rather idealist stance; his philosophy of life inspired Hesse and his generation of modernist writers who questioned rationalism and materialism. From this perspective, Malabou’s reading of plasticity as resistance against capitalism is probably one possibility of philosophising on cerebral plasticity and its sociohistorical implications. Following the hint of Bergson, plasticity could also be made fruitful in connection to Hesse’s critique of Protestant rationalism and his vision of a new spirituality drawing on classical Chinese philosophy. Hence, to a certain extent, German literary modernism serves as a forerunner to some key questions that neuroscience and cognitive studies take seriously today.

This concludes the short exposition of my larger book project on German modernism, East Asian philosophy, consciousness, and spirituality from the perspective of cognitive science.