Catherine Malabou and Michel Foucault: the inside and the outside

I listened to a talk Catherine Malabou gave at Kingston University titled Continental Philosophy and the Brain: towards a critical neuroscience.  Malabou provides us some hints regarding her small book What Should We Do with Our Brain?  Malabou writes in this book that “to survive today means to be connected to a network, modulating one’s efficacy”.  My immediate thought regarding this of course is the network of the internet, how the computer has connected us in various ways, providing us with information that changes the way we look at the world.  We are more likely now to think that violence in the world is escalating at a tremendous speed, murders are becoming more extreme, etc, but this seems to be an effect on the capacity for information to spread much quicker across global boundaries instead of some empirical fact.  What I found most interesting about this talk is Malabou’s obvious use of Michel Foucault’s work (obvious now that she mentioned it).

Take for example what Foucault wrote in The History of Sexuality, “We are dealing less with a discourse on sex than with a multiplicity of discourses produced by a whole series of mechanisms operating in different institutions”.  One of the discourses Foucault is speaking of is the pedagogical controls of early and late learning.  Malabou makes it clear that the brain has a large capacity to change form which she calls plasticity (she took Hegel’s notion and neuroscience), but she makes it clear that flexibility of the mechanisms of the brain does not create novelty, “flexibility is plasticity minus its genius”.

Again, Malabou states that, “Humans make their own brains and they do not know that they do so”.  We have to ask why exactly Christ yelled out, “they know not what they do”.  The answer is to be found in these social networks and discourses of power that Foucault depicted so craftily.  As Foucault mentioned many times in such cases as “law being deferred to medicine” we become a particular species or in psychoanalytic parlance we are unable to break free from our symbolic structure that we provided in our understanding of what society wants from us.  Foucault even writes that in the 18^th century the homosexual became a species, not a particular way of desire but instead an entire subject that would be a concern for the state.

Malabou states that this idea of plasticity means (should) to change ones destiny but why exactly are we as multiplicities stuck in repetition?  Foucault talks about power, and “Power is not something that is acquired, seized, or shared, something that one holds on to or allows to slip away, power is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations”.  He even states that power relations are barely perceptible on some level which of course the degree of affect must be substantial in order to change the experience and to change the circuitry of the brain (neuronal networks).

Much like Foucault again, Malabou writes that “The screen that separates us from our brain is an ideological one”.  We continue to follow the path of this ideology and we see no other path outside this particular one.  Antonio Damasio writes something similar, “how the owner of the movie in the brain emerges within the movie”, this is exactly the question.  If the brain has this capacity of plasticity then why do we follow along the same ideological habitual way of thinking?

Foucault wanted to understand life as a “work of art” which Malabou proclaims is part of her project when she is speaking of the plasticity of the brain, as a plastic art form.  There are no universally valid presuppositions to human life, but as Malabou mentions “The role of the surroundings is fundamental here. A great deal of the development of the human brain is accomplished in the open air, in contact with the stimuli of the world, which directly influence both the development and the volume of connections”.