Drafts by RAS SH
The Dynamics of Plasticity, 2018
In The Future of Hegel, Catherine Malabou connects plasticity to Absolute Knowing, which in her v... more In The Future of Hegel, Catherine Malabou connects plasticity to Absolute Knowing, which in her view is the knowledge of the necessity of contingency, and that the futility of trying to decide their which one of the two – necessity or contingency – has ontological priority. It thus marks ‘the openness to the event’, the eventual dissolution of any individual ‘I’ of experience. Absolute Knowing is the knowing that the composite perspectives of the dialectics cannot be disentangled, that ‘each determinate moment brings the other into view through a new angle’ (Malabou 2005, p. 166), and consequently that the individual perspective is always already bound up with other perspectives. She later opposes the use of ‘plasticity’ within neuroscience, arguing that it neglects of the moulding capacities of destruction and displays a bias towards endless flexibility. Malabou argues that in the brain is not a control centre. Its constant interaction with the environment makes any categorical division between the neuronal and the social impossible. In this paper, I will try to bring these encounters together, asking: does the concept of Absolute Knowing offer a way of grasping Malabou’s delocalized view of agency? Is she proposing a distributed or ecological sense of agency, in line with what Lambros Malafouris calls metaplasticity?
I extend this to the concept of ‘unity’ in Malabou’s reading of Hegel, leading me to the chain metaphor and the Gaia hypothesis. In relation to the latter, the terms 'sympoiesis' and 'holobiont' are introduced. They both undermine the premise of selfishness, i.e. the individual competitors acting to further their own gains, as a ‘selfish gene’ cannot be selfish if it does not have permanent boundaries – if it is constitutively entangled with other processes. While Malabou approaches these questions through the ‘mutual aid’ of Kropotkin, I am informed by Donna Haraway and Scott Gilbert (among others), who emphasize the symbiotic interrelations between organisms and ecosystems and argue that cooperation is an evolutionary factor on par with competition.
Papers by RAS SH
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Drafts by RAS SH
I extend this to the concept of ‘unity’ in Malabou’s reading of Hegel, leading me to the chain metaphor and the Gaia hypothesis. In relation to the latter, the terms 'sympoiesis' and 'holobiont' are introduced. They both undermine the premise of selfishness, i.e. the individual competitors acting to further their own gains, as a ‘selfish gene’ cannot be selfish if it does not have permanent boundaries – if it is constitutively entangled with other processes. While Malabou approaches these questions through the ‘mutual aid’ of Kropotkin, I am informed by Donna Haraway and Scott Gilbert (among others), who emphasize the symbiotic interrelations between organisms and ecosystems and argue that cooperation is an evolutionary factor on par with competition.
Papers by RAS SH
Conference Presentations by RAS SH
I extend this to the concept of ‘unity’ in Malabou’s reading of Hegel, leading me to the chain metaphor and the Gaia hypothesis. In relation to the latter, the terms 'sympoiesis' and 'holobiont' are introduced. They both undermine the premise of selfishness, i.e. the individual competitors acting to further their own gains, as a ‘selfish gene’ cannot be selfish if it does not have permanent boundaries – if it is constitutively entangled with other processes. While Malabou approaches these questions through the ‘mutual aid’ of Kropotkin, I am informed by Donna Haraway and Scott Gilbert (among others), who emphasize the symbiotic interrelations between organisms and ecosystems and argue that cooperation is an evolutionary factor on par with competition.