“Plasticity contrasts, and is designed to replace, both infinite malleability and immutable substantiality. It is, at bottom, neither stability nor instability, but metastability. Remarking on current brain research, Catherine Malabou writes that ‘the word plasticity has two basic senses: it means at one the capacity to receive form (clay is called “plastic,” for example) and the capacity to give form (as in the plastic arts or in plastic surgery). Talking about the plasticity of the brain thus amounts to thinking of the brain as something modifiable, “formable,” and formative at the same time.’” (Sparrow, 2015, 191).

It is best to begin reflecting on Tom Sparrow’s writings on the notion of plasticity in Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology (2015) by looking at the foreword After the Flesh by Catherine Malabou. Here Malabou first sets up the initial conceived distinction between the “Körper, the objective, anatomico-physicological body, and Leib, one’s own body… the living body, the place of sensations and emotions, the “flesh.”’ (Malabou, 2015, 13). Or to state this differently; between the structure of the body in the pure mechanics term of the building blocks or skeleton and the lived body, or the body that is modified through experiences and sensations, the flesh here is the object of direct experience. The flesh thus has the power to establish or give organised existence to something; the flesh gives existence to the body, the lived body. This notion of embodiment draws similarities with Steven Shaviro’s writings on consciousness and sentience in Discognition, Shaviro also drew upon the work of Malabou in her writings on the brain. Shaviro posits the mind if heuristic and embodied, operating within an intrinsic material context that can also be extended to expand into the environment to entangle with artificial prosthetics. The body is the outward presence of the subject’s mental life, for example touch and voice, the body acts as an extension into the world of the self, “the phenomenological body stands in the sphere of immanence… a sphere which, after the epoché, is reduced to the presence of the thing itself.” (Malabou, 2015, 13). The notion of plasticity is then brought in in further discussion around the lived body, we need to rethink and question the materiality of the body and the pre-conceived concept of the flesh as the future of the physical body. If we are to move beyond flash we meet plasticity as the future in a process of rematerialisation, links here can already be made to ideas around the synthetic body and the addition of synthetic components with a plastic materiality.

Tom Sparrow in the chapter On Aesthetic Plasticity is careful to not confuse plasticity with elasticity, as derived from Merleau-Ponty’s “reversible body” (Malabou, 2015, 16) that a plasticity denotes a malleability in the limits that separate a body from the world and from other bodies. Sparrow posits there have historically been two opposing points of view as to the body, 1. That the body has a rigid core that not open to be manipulated and transformed and 2. That there is no structural body; it is an anonymous field of desire and in constant flux. The plastic body is neither; it’s a somewhat in-between state of the rejection of the rigid but not the total anonymity of it either. He states however that Merleau-Ponty’s view of elasticity ‘does not deliver us a plastic body.’ (Sparrow, 2015, 190).

‘Elasticity can be understood by considering a rubber band. The rubber band is flexible and deformable, but in the absence of resistance or external force it tends toward a specific formal state. Accordingly, elasticity does not properly describe a structure open to permanent deformation.’ (Sparrow, 2015, 190).

Elasticity here is critiqued in that it doesn’t go far enough, whilst it has the properties to be deformed without an actant in order to do this it returns to a formal structure. A body under permanent deformation thus denotes a breakage in elasticity, resulting in death showing here that an elastic structure is not illustrative of the bodies’ historical formation. Plasticity in contrast does not seek to return to equilibrium, to a stable state. ‘If anything, their malleability is always seeking to return to the equilibrium point… Plasticity, on the other hand, pursues no such telos.’ (Sparrow, 2015, 191). If we are to revisit the initial quote, we see that plasticity is fundamentally the ability to receive form (to be modified and manipulated to alter its structural classifications) and to give form (to modify others and to alter their structural classifications). Plasticity therefore instils not just the role of the sculptor, or the one modifying its structure, but the role of formative developmental guide, or the one teaching the body experience. In this sense it would be interesting to experiment with plastic materials, in particular silicone that has the material properties that made it malleable even when cured, here using the physical material of plastic to communicate an idea of plasticity that is in fact not rooted in any physical realm. Here we can again draw parallels to Steven Shaviro’s Discognition and in particular the notion of a copy derived from an original only shares the same identity briefly before its own lived experience modifies it, copies have an intrinsic determinism of being an exact replica but this opens up space for improvisation, of potential to be transformed indefinitely. ‘Plasticity describes the simultaneous determinacy and indeterminacy of morphogenesis. In other words, it names the potential of the body to have its initial determination transformed indefinitely.’ (Sparrow, 2015, 192).

Much like Shaviro’s writings on sentience, the body has a capacity for learning and the formulation of intelligence through lived experience. The subject and object begin in a state of dependence and immaturity in need of growth, these states are fundamentally creative and productive as they pre-figure the formulation of intelligence in the modifying of the subject and object. This works to show a plasticity as an adaptability for growth, ‘the “power to modify actions on the basis of the results of prior experience, the power to develop dispositions.”’ (Sparrow, 2015, 203). However, Sparrows goes further to suggest that with age the body becomes unable to grow and its plasticity is paralyzed. It is at this stage that the demand for adaptation increases, we can link here to the notion of prostheses and artificial components that seek to prolong “life”, or seek to prolong plasticity in the sense of having the power to modify actions and break out of routine. ‘In other words, death is the extinction of growth, or the absolute slackening of plasticity.’ (Sparrow, 2015, 204). This merging on intimate terms with the machinic or synthetic I have spoken extensively about previously through Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto also links to Sparrow’s notion of metabolism. The metabolic process is the trading of a bodies matter with the matter of its surroundings, in a process of exchange to give rise to the living body whose matter is under constant modification. ‘“Metabolism thus is the constant becoming of the machine itself – and this becoming itself is a performance of the machine.’ (Sparrow, 2015, 209). We can also read here a feed forward approach of the modification or control of a process using its anticipated results and effects; this output/ input exchange puts the machine in a constant state of becoming. The inorganic can be taken in by the organic, metabolised not in the sense of physically consuming it, but in the sense of the organic responding to and being physically modified by the inorganic. Sparrow here, as read through Yukio Mishima, uses an example of a body builder’s body having its properties shaped by the steel weights it lifts. The organic body is now a machine insofar as the organic/ inorganic metabolism process demonstrates the machinic process.