Negative Plasticity

Abstract

Most scientific discussions of plasticity emphasize the preservation of a “core identity” across processes of transformation. In neuroscientific accounts of memory, for instance, plasticity is framed as the strengthening or weakening of synapses, while the brain's stability, and thus its enduring identity, is said to be maintained. Even in cases of memory loss, plasticity is described as that which preserves continuity despite rupture. We recognize the value of this view, and certainly, in many cases the continuity of a “core identity” is what makes plasticity possible. However, our intervention wishes to ask what other plastic states become available when the continuity of such a plastic “core identity” is disrupted, or becomes fragile, without being resolved, or recuperated into a new stable and continuous plastic form. It is on these fragile thresholds that we locate negative plasticity, not as a resilient, flexible or adaptable identity, that sustains across transformation, but as a form of negative liminality that possesses a generative indeterminate force of rupture which is irreducible to stable notions of identity.