Event Title
Plasticity and Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse
Start Date
28-6-2010 9:00 AM
End Date
28-6-2010 10:30 AM
Description
This presentation is part of the Vision of the Dolls: Theorizing technology, identity and agency in Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse track.
In her recent work, Catherine Malabou argues that continental philosophers have much to gain by considering scientific inquiries into brain plasticity. “The statue is alive,” she writes, referring to our own potentialities for sculpting neurological change. Plasticity is not simply an object of study; we are its author as well as its product. Our brain is essentially what we do with it. Does Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse corroborate Malabou’s insights into plasticity? Or does it dramatize the stakes of evading consciousness of plasticity, leaving us instead with ideologies of determinism and capitalist adaptability?
In terms of its plasticity, the brain is modifiable and formative, capable of repairing itself and of changing its capacities in response to situations and experiences. We often confuse plasticity with the notion of flexibility—change that is rigid, programmable, determined by genetics. Flexibility coincides with the spirit of capitalism, offering bodies that are docile and adaptable, lacking the creative or explosive genius of plasticity.
Do the dolls demonstrate flexibility or plasticity? On the one hand, the Dollhouse operates according to corporate ideology, manufacturing and enslaving dolls as commodities for profit. On the other hand, the dolls themselves seem to gain new capacities through their own embodied activities, rather than in obedience to the centralized imprinting process.
Malabou is especially interested in the methodological problem of how we might think plastically about the plasticity of the brain. Being plastic is defined by the capacity to be totally transformed. To think plastically would involve in part acknowledging that we might at any moment become someone else—that we are in fact all dolls, able to receive or lose an imprint, to transform our capacities as sculptors of ourselves.
Does Dollhouse dissolve the distinction between who is a doll-like active and who is an actual? We encounter a scientist, “looking down on everyone, like God,” responsible for diagnosing “memory glitches” and for remedying such problems therapeutically. While we see a future world in which the technological imprinting goes “wireless,” affecting any body within reach, we also meet a heroine with a “cure” that will secure the possibility of staying entirely true to oneself. What, however, would it mean to be true to oneself? Invoking the existential value of imprinting, Dollhouse representative Adele de Witt comments, “An active is the truest soul among us.” Malabou acknowledges that the concept of plasticity is both frightening and monstrous. To what extent, ultimately, is Dollhouse open to the monstrous insights of plasticity?
Plasticity and Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse
This presentation is part of the Vision of the Dolls: Theorizing technology, identity and agency in Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse track.
In her recent work, Catherine Malabou argues that continental philosophers have much to gain by considering scientific inquiries into brain plasticity. “The statue is alive,” she writes, referring to our own potentialities for sculpting neurological change. Plasticity is not simply an object of study; we are its author as well as its product. Our brain is essentially what we do with it. Does Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse corroborate Malabou’s insights into plasticity? Or does it dramatize the stakes of evading consciousness of plasticity, leaving us instead with ideologies of determinism and capitalist adaptability?
In terms of its plasticity, the brain is modifiable and formative, capable of repairing itself and of changing its capacities in response to situations and experiences. We often confuse plasticity with the notion of flexibility—change that is rigid, programmable, determined by genetics. Flexibility coincides with the spirit of capitalism, offering bodies that are docile and adaptable, lacking the creative or explosive genius of plasticity.
Do the dolls demonstrate flexibility or plasticity? On the one hand, the Dollhouse operates according to corporate ideology, manufacturing and enslaving dolls as commodities for profit. On the other hand, the dolls themselves seem to gain new capacities through their own embodied activities, rather than in obedience to the centralized imprinting process.
Malabou is especially interested in the methodological problem of how we might think plastically about the plasticity of the brain. Being plastic is defined by the capacity to be totally transformed. To think plastically would involve in part acknowledging that we might at any moment become someone else—that we are in fact all dolls, able to receive or lose an imprint, to transform our capacities as sculptors of ourselves.
Does Dollhouse dissolve the distinction between who is a doll-like active and who is an actual? We encounter a scientist, “looking down on everyone, like God,” responsible for diagnosing “memory glitches” and for remedying such problems therapeutically. While we see a future world in which the technological imprinting goes “wireless,” affecting any body within reach, we also meet a heroine with a “cure” that will secure the possibility of staying entirely true to oneself. What, however, would it mean to be true to oneself? Invoking the existential value of imprinting, Dollhouse representative Adele de Witt comments, “An active is the truest soul among us.” Malabou acknowledges that the concept of plasticity is both frightening and monstrous. To what extent, ultimately, is Dollhouse open to the monstrous insights of plasticity?