Neuropolitics?

[Reading Malabou via Commolly.]

“…the other is our own machine” (Harraway)

1. (Malabou) Considers the politics of conflation of the contemporary (neuronal) subject to the materiality and functionality of the brain; and recognizes the concept of “the brain itself” (inc. the nervous system), as a new/key dispositif of contemporary media and culture.
2. (Commolly) Which brain model is who talking about? Problems with metaphors and easy relational analogies drawn between networks, nodes, synapses, affects, the market, and networked flows of global capital.
   Excitement about brain plasticity can provide a double-metaphor: as radical and conservative flexibility, openness and eternal adjustment.
3. Malabou’s argument: brain plasticity – the neuronal subject’s proven architecture for futurity, transformation, and ongoing change (through learning and the reconfigurement of memory) is formally misinterpreted as flexibility
4. When cognitive models of flexibility are the marketed models of cognition, we see the exploitation of metaphor, and the vulgarization of the concept of brain and mind away from the deconstructive AND dialectical agency of thought itself (i.e. philosophy) i.e. BOTH Derrida AND Hegel (etc!).  (see also The exploit??)
5. Now more than ever, we need to have a philosophy of the plastic, transforming, neuronal (networked/mediating) brain that is more than, but responsive to, its material foundations, and its actual and virtual functions. i.e. FORMING A POSITION
6. How does neuronal subjecthood change or query the history of the theory of the subject – a new ontology in/ via art and media?