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.

In her 2012 book Ontology of the Accident – An essay on Destructive Plasticity, French philosopher Catherine Malabou –who is responsible for reviving the nineteenth century philosophical concept of Plasticity by applying it to diverse academic fields such as neuroscience, political theory and cognitive psychology– describes a fundamental tension between change and the process of identity formation in the following:

“We must all of us recognize that we might, one day, become someone else, an absolute other, someone who will never be reconciled with themselves again. (This) unrecognizable persona whose present comes from no past, whose future harbors nothing to come, (is) an absolute existential improvisation. A form born of the accident, born by accident, a kind of accident. A funny breed”. (2)

Malabou's (2022) expansive reading of the concept of plasticity offers us a generative space to speculate on post-rupture states in other ways than those that maintain a ‘core identity’, states that even Malabou herself might not fully articulate or wish to speculate upon. While for Malabou the destruction, break, or annihilation of form seems central to her account of plasticity, the negative plasticity account we forward emphasises the force of rupture in suspension or what we call a tension without intention; an indeterminate zone that resists resolution and closure and unsettles more stable notions of form, structure, identity and resilience.

The concept of a negative plasticity we will interrogate –across the fields of philosophy, art and education– will furthermore try to go beyond a simple binary-like ‘equilibrium between the receiving and giving of form’ (2012, 3) towards what Malabou herself identifies as the ‘third’ explosive dimension of plasticity, which is the plastic capacity to annihilate form altogether. As such, this article aligns itself with emerging debates in unproductive labour and queer temporality, positioning failure and unpredictability not as obstacles to be overcome but as generative forces in the production of knowledge.

Introduction

We reach out to the concept of negative plasticity, as a risk-ridden terrain of embodied thought and creative imagination, which wishes to flexibly transverse the regime of (plastic) intelligibility, as a site of legibility, and vice versa. We hazard this concept of negative plasticity, via Cathrine Malabou's (2005) reading of Hegel's logic of negation and negativity and yet, unlike Hegel's dialectical negation, we do not promise a reconciliation of opposing views, into a more worked out higher synthesis, following the logic of sublation, even though we cautiously touch upon it. Our reading of Malabou's notion of plasticity brings forth, instead of a logical and onto-logically oriented approach, a more material and affective register which we reflect upon in connection to everyday embodied practices. In short, we are inspired by Malabou's ‘third principle’ of plasticity which tries to account for a concept of plasticity that is not only capable of receiving and giving form, but also how, like an explosive (plastique in French means ‘plastique explosive’) contains a capacity for exploding, breaking or rupturing form, which is nonetheless generative. We read this form-rupturing capacity or potential in a non-linear way, as a negative liminal threshold that doesn’t need to be overcome or trespassed, but one that calls us to be attentive to it.

Importantly, this “explosive plasticity” does not rely on a self-preservation principle or assumption (i.e., the category of an ‘identity’ surviving a self-transformative process), which we find to be a weak link in some of the interdisciplinary work on plasticity, in the manner it comes to frame resilience as a desired outcome of plastic transformation on a personal and (inter-)disciplinary level. Neither do we warrant a Husserlian-like a-priori synthetic stable subject position which retains, and protends (in the sense of the Husserlian concept of protension) its personal identity throughout time. Rather, we proceed with caution, step-by-step, as the (interdisciplinary) terrain which we are currently working through is rampant with interdisciplinarily-infused metaphors of ‘overcoming’ boundaries and ‘bridging’, oftentimes, opposing world-views. These oppositions, we believe, are intrinsically incompatible yet oftentimes become flattened or glossed over, which leaves us mute, for it is through their irreconcilable tension that we believe innovative and ground-breaking ways of working can occur.

As such, we locate a certain affective void that is nevertheless transformative, in the notion of negative plasticity. We focus, for example, on the negative plasticity that is inherent to the creative process in the visual/plastic arts where accident, playfulness and serendipity play an important role in the bringing about of the artwork. In that sense, our work, and its dialogic format, departs from a deconstructive gesture that questions the western metaphysical emphasis on self-same presence, identity, or origin, and yet it tries to vulnerably speculate which forms and trans-formations the next step might entail. Within all these accounts, we stretch, or stress, for a non-method of tension without intention, that reveals negative plasticity to be a yet-to-be-formed form that is part and parcel of what plasticity is, can, and has, always been about.

In terms of structure, and form, we do this through an open-ended dialogue, or conversation, that is itself negatively plastic, or in other words, changes us –its interlocutors– and the form of our dialogue, as it goes along. We find that the dialogical –almost-epistolary– form is better suited to articulating (negative) plasticity than other academically interdisciplinary oriented approaches around plasticity. This, we speculate, also has to do with a normative, under-examined, and teleological feel-good story, of more affirmative accounts of plasticity that warrant the self-preservation of forms of, primarily, academic and disciplinary infrastructures; infrastructures that privilege, and keep in their prioritized place, STEM dominant disciplines. Put bluntly, and paraphrasing on George Orwell's 1945 book Animal Farm, we respect yet challenge interdisciplinary work that forwards, yet keeps in place, a dormant idea or narrative that all disciplines are equal, but some are more equal than others.

The purpose of choosing a dialogic approach in order to unfold the concept of negative plasticity within the limited breadth of an academic article, is an attempt to performatively broaden such conventional academic forms. Succinctly put, we unpack, or unfold, a “mini theory” of negative plasticity in a somewhat performative key in the arena of the academic page, remembering that the etymological root of the word theory, [theōria (θεωρία)], means a specific type of ritualized spectating or viewing. This dialogic format thus attempts to make (more) space on two fronts. On the first front, the dialogic format attempts to strike a chord between two individual artistic-academic inter-locutors and the manner in which negative plasticity does transformative work on both throughout their exchange. On the second front, it invites readers to imagine a new void/voided form, or empty stage, where negative plasticity can exist as it disrupts assumptions of continuity in transformation, both on a content level and on a formative level.

Instead of masquerading to be what we are not, we speculate from our non-STEM practices and backgrounds (Humanities and Art), how the concept of negative plasticity vis-a-vis the suspension of explosion or annihilation of form, can be generative of new understandings and forms of plasticity. This more playful, or speculative, gesture, or form of dialogical exchange leads to a blurriness, or opacity, between three different registers or states of negative plasticity. We forward these speculative, imaginative, or poetic registers of plasticity, as potentially plastic states in which an idea of a ‘core identity’ is disrupted — neither fully transforming into an entirely new system nor continuing as before. We move playfully between what could be articulated as, a negative concept of plasticity, a negative plasticity, and the plasticity of negation. Rather than defining, or tying down these different forms, or approaches, into a fixed or rigid form, or definition, we let them play out on the page, while we are well-aware that they are not, and do not imply, the same thing. We leave their possible different understandings or interpretations open for further disarticulations, disruptions or deformations. We suggest readers use, or embrace them, as possible negative horizons, or coordinates, to become oriented and disoriented at the same time.

Lastly, we would like to keep negative plasticity in a speculatively opaque register, and not pin it down, or even plethorize it (as in making plural), precisely because we do not wish to claim that it (a negative plasticity) ex-ists ‘in the world’, in the same manner that STEM dominant disciplines and epistemes, seem to in-sist on a resilient concept of a (positive) plasticity that maintains its core identity throughout transformations. We opt for a somewhat poetic force that destabilizes a fully transparent key of ideation, on the concept of plasticity, especially because we are fascinated by its disruptive plastic potential that mutates and changes form –and identity– as it forms itself. Instead of trying to tame this potential down, as in to track its so-called resilience through its different possible definitions, we choose to remain at-tension to what it can still become.

School's Out!

Ohad Ben Shimon (OBS): I find it interesting to dwell on this question of negative plasticity in a time in which the educational systems around our house (two primary/middle schools and a preschool) are on recess in a winter-break and all the noises we usually hear playing in the playground are mute. The only traces of the school systems we can hear are the clock-timed recess bells that keep haunting the neighborhood environment in a timed-manner that is devoid of educational personnel or children. The time, in such a time, seems more plastically malleable and embodied. There is no study or work done, but the educational time is still present, albeit in an absent manner. The school is both here, and not here. It is shaped by the negative absence of the durational time of active study/work and the silent present time of non-study/non-work.

Play

Mercedes Azpilicueta (MA): I was reading an article by educator Daniela Pelegrinelli (2021) on Brian Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play; and there, it was mentioned that play is a paradox because it is and it is not what it appears to be. “Animals when playing they bite themselves softly, knowing that the playful bite connotes a bite but that it is not what a real bite connotes.” ¹ And that the dramaturg Richard Schechner suggests that “the playful bite is not only a non-bite but also that it is not a non-bite. So that results in a positive, the sum of two negatives. What it implies is that the playful bite not only is not a bite, but that surely it is what a real bite represents” (qtd. in Pelegrinelli 9). ² And maybe it would be good to add that following Gilles Brougère (2005), animal play does not exist as a natural category per se, but rather as a human concept, a way we describe and interpret animal behavior through our own cultural frameworks (Brougère 2005).

OBS: About the playful bite that is both a bite and a non-bite, I am thinking of seduction and desire and how they play a role in a kind of fore-play, a before-play, that is already quite playful and seductive. This fore-play lures the other into an intensive exchange or movement of affects. Can we speak of plasticity in this before-play way? In other words, how can we imagine what comes, or becomes, be-fore-play, as a negative plasticity of a kind? Also, the Buddhist notion of emptiness, as a negative plasticity from which all forms of life unfold, seems to come to mind. Maybe this alluring movement also has to do something with art for you?

MA: The be-fore-play space and time might have to do with some form of negative space. There could be negative plasticity at that moment as it is the moment of the pure possibility. The moment before knowing what will happen. Or how something will manifest. We can think of a simple example; the moment when grabbing a color pencil, one that perhaps is watercolored, and we don’t know yet how it will behave with our own gesture of hand movement, the trace it will leave on the paper, or how soft or translucid that trace will become when brushing it against water. It might grow, the hue might change, depending on the color of the paper, depending on the amount of pigment and water applied.

OBS: What would be a good way to approach negative plasticity through interdisciplinarity? What kind of knowledge/s do you think are important to integrate?

Embodiment

MA: I think that the body has to be present, that its own knowledge cannot be neglected. It has to be integrated if we are going to go for an interdisciplinary approach. On the other hand, you need negative space for the form to unfold. You need potential to imagine the impossible. In the studio the negative space manifests as empty space. A cleared space, not cluttered, clean walls, good light. Next to that, negative mental space is needed, so meditation or a space to walk around in, to move things, to feel the ‘dead’ time, is needed before making something new.

Coming back to the article by pedagogue Daniela Pelegrinelli, Kenneth Burke's studies suggest that ‘play is probably what he determines to be a “dramatized negation,” since for animals, which possess no way of saying “no,” it is the only way to indicate the negative through an affirmative action, which is clearly not the same as the one it represents’ (qtd. in Pelegrinelli 9). ³ Burke says that, ‘prior to the emergence of language in evolution, the negative could have been dramatized and interpreted only by gesticulations and stylizations of the positive’ (qtd. in Pelegrinelli 9). ⁴

And to continue diving into animal play, Robert Fagen says that ‘the most irritating feature of play is not the perceptual incoherence that disturbs us, but it is play itself that provokes us with its inaccessibility. It makes us feel as if behind it all there is always something we do not know or have ceased to accept for what it is’ (qtd. in Pelegrinelli 9). ⁵

The paradox around what play means feels like something that could help us unlock what happens within the creative process. And thinking of the creative process as something plastic as well. The way animal-play-behaviorist Robert Fagen describes play as something that represents inaccessibility to us (humans) is intriguing. The unknown space that play seems to hint towards is directly related to the idea of creating without knowing what's ahead of us. Maybe it has to do with growing comfortable with the unknown —or rather making comfortable with the unknown— where the end result isn’t certain, but the process itself is filled with potential and possibility. In that sense, play —nor making— is not about a fixed goal but about engagement with something that resists finality or certainty.

Many times there is this imploding force inside the body that resists finishing a work. It sounds a bit like self-sabotaging but it is not. Sometimes it is hard to make the final decisions towards a piece of work, because remaining longer in that uncertain space and time is tempting. It is a moment and space of pure possibility where delay and drift in the studio enacts an alternative temporality. When the work is finally materialized it is as if all those energies are embodied by the chosen materials which also account for the work's performative nature.

When making something, we can see how play mirrors the creative process in the sense that there's this tension between what we know, and what we don’t know, and the act of creating seems to involve a certain trust in the unknown, or even a pleasure in uncertainty. Creativity, like play, forces us into this liminal space where we're not just ‘thinking’ but experiencing something in a way that's unbound by rules or expectations. There's something wild about play, how it exists without purpose, yet it's a space for growth, exploration, and, sometimes, profound breakthroughs.

Disobedience and Failure

Play also makes us more receptive to different notions of temporality such as queer temporality that invites delays, non-linearity, and a refusal of closure, as a resistance to normative, productive time. Here we can think of the work of Jack Halberstam (2020) in Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire, and the queer reading on Maurice Sendak's book Where the Wild Things Are. In Halberstam's words, Max, the protagonist of the story, “is potentially an anticolonial wanderer who refuses to settle the wild places he visits and who rejects the leadership he is offered” (4). Sendak's book is a call to resist tamed domesticity and “an imperial order of things” (5).

Play, in that sense, implies a sense of disobedience as well as the freedom to fail. A place where ‘failure’ isn’t as definitive as it would be in more structured settings. Dancing with the unknown makes the act of making more fluid, less about arriving at a destination, and more about experiencing the unfolding process, regardless of the outcome. Negative plasticity, in that sense, could be about being reshaped by what does not occur or in other words, by the failures, the moments of discomfort, or rupture, rather than being undone by them. It's a process of being negatively malleable, or plastic, even in the face of what might seem like setbacks or difficulties.

At the moment, I am working on a series of modular works that can be used by children and adults. It's a work on play, disobedience and other forms of resistance. The work, called CaccHho CucchhA and commissioned by de Appel, Amsterdam, is an installation of multiple elements that can be arranged every time the public comes into the space. The audience is the performer that activates the space and its potentialities. It is still in the making, but one thing is certain: it is not certain how things will work out, or whether they will work out at all. There might be a need for adjusting a wearable, a piece of costume or some mending to be done.

In living with the consequences, rather than simply learning from them afterward, there's a kind of radical acceptance. In the context of art-making, failure might not even be the right word, maybe it's just a way of working that exists in the unknown. It's an ongoing negotiation between intention and surprise, control and chaos. And it's only through that engagement that something truly new might emerge. What do you think about the idea of being negatively plastic and the capacity of learning how to fail? Could there be a correlation?

OBS: I agree with you that the body must be integrated, when we discuss plasticity from an interdisciplinary perspective. This has to do with how an interdisciplinary research imperative often tends to stage a kind of universalist disembodied arena in which different disciplinary researchers gather together to embody their respective disciplines (i.e., ‘The Physicist’, ‘The Historian’, ‘The Industrial Designer’, ‘The Economist’, ‘The Artist’) in order to solve current day societal problems. Linking the researchers’ own sense of embodiment with that of the disciplines they work in has affordances but it also restricts the emergence of other affective potentialities to embody otherwise. This has to do with how the idea of professions, and professionalism, has developed in academic settings for over a century, into a kind of ‘subset of engineering’ (Rittel and Weber 1973, 168) ⁶ which affects how social relations within academic settings become organized or ‘socially engineered’ ⁷ (i.e., the rise in interdisciplinary collaborations). This engineering of social relations tends to vacate the present from being embodied otherwise, and this cuts off, so to speak, the body, and embodiment, from becoming something entirely unexpected, untamed, and new.

Not Playing the Game

In that sense, you are completely right, in how you point to the disobedience that is inherent to play. Its purposelessness, if taken seriously, makes room not just for a possible failure but, more excitingly so, for something that is completely beyond our imagination. The failure that we learn to welcome is a good first step, but it is only a fraction of what remains of a disappointed purpose. To embrace the full potential of negative plasticity would mean a sort of qualitative leap of faith, where the ideas of failure, or success, are not even part of the equation. In our respective fields, if we can speak of the humanities and the visual arts as fixed fields, the task is to be able to welcome a negatively plastic form, that might shatter not only our self-same forms but the entire coordinates of being and non-being professional, giving rise to entirely new forms of being and non-being in these fields. In that sense, there is no idea of failure or success we need to live up to. It is more about different variations, or degrees, of metamorphoses that we need to be attuned to.

To bring it down to more material, but also temporally embodied terms, how do you think we can see it in our everyday practices? Where do you recognize the concept, or form, of a negative plasticity in the art-making process? Do you recognize a less and/or more negatively plastic form? Are there certain degrees or temporalities of plastic negativity? And in connection to your response regarding the need for integrating the body in an interdisciplinary approach, to negative plasticity, how do you imagine that feels like?

MA: As a maker, a particular setting (an empty space, or certain space that presents itself as uncluttered, under control, tamed, hospitable) is needed to be able to make form. In that sense, a space that has the potential of a ‘core identity’ is crucial. Upon arriving at the studio, there is an intention to make something; and for that, the right tone in the space is needed. Then the space is slowly cleared out, in an attempt to make room, a performative mode of pretending to subtract something from this environment. This behavior feels quite negative as it precedes the manifestation of form. There is a feeling that the ordinary body needs to be put to sleep in order to awaken it for the making.

There is a wide range of female spiritualist-makers in the XIX century that started creating abstract art long before the so-called abstractionists that the (big) history of art claims. I have the impression these artists, like Giorgiana Hougthon, Emma Kunz or Hilma af Klimt, believed in a process where making was related to also very different practices such as spiritism, healing, research, telepathy and mathematics. I feel many of these interdisciplinary makers dealt with negative plasticity. For example, they would go into spiritist sessions and start drawing or doing automatic writing or start speaking with weird voices. They simply felt comfortable inhabiting that negative space. That could be one way to think of it, but also; we could say that these makers, these early abstractionists, didn't really care about performing as artists, they, in a way, imploded that idea of the artist. Maybe because they didn't have space for it in society, they could dedicate themselves to other activities, or tasks. We could also think that they diminished the potentiality of being ‘plastic’, and by doing so, they became negatively plastic.

Deworming or Form Follows Accident

Today a colleague at the art academy said, ‘form follows function’ or ‘form follows a vision’. That begged the question: What does negative form follow? Does it also follow function and/or a vision, just in a prior state? Or does it surpass that state and then, once form manifests, it can embody its negative aspect, or its negative form? This connects with your question about the different degrees or temporalities of plastic negativity. It seems that there are indeed different degrees of plastic negativity. The need to empty the physical and mental space in order to make space is one degree or register; the idea of renouncing work and deciding not to make, produce, answer that email, or play the game, seems as another degree of plastic negativity.

On the one hand, making space for form to come feels necessary, not in a sense that it follows a function or vision, but just letting it be like observing how materials react to each other. For example, when working on a sculpture, I’m sewing coco fiber mats together, testing how strong the stitches need to be. How the coco fiber will react to the bending and shaping of a particular form, feels like a test. Just like play, and the right to play should be. It is just the right to make, with no intentions, with no expectations. On the other hand, the practice needs to be imploded from within, it needs to rebel or destroy every —expected— possibility to become productive. In either way embodying some form of disobedience, that is felt in the body, is very necessary.

In relation to the need for integrating the body in an interdisciplinary approach to negative plasticity, I think that feels, first of all, uncomfortable. Just writing this very conversation feels to me as a challenging act. Usually, I don’t spend so much time articulating my thoughts. Having to sit down, write, re-write, edit, integrate comments from peer-reviewers, etc. feels like a stretch for my body. Any possibility to work in the interstice of practices, it's a challenge to the norm, to how we are used to doing things, to comfort and security. It's an invitation to the uncertain; so yes, it feels uncomfortable in the body. Our bodies and minds are so attuned to familiar patterns and ways of functioning that venturing into spaces of uncertainty feels almost like an interruption, a kind of unsettling. Something feels off, because we simply do not know how to do that. We are programmed to work and behave in a certain way. Our minds and bodies have been parasited to behave the way they do. It is almost impossible to question how things are dealt with. Being negatively plastic feels like deworming, in a sense that to make space for new possibilities and deeper understanding, we often need to cleanse or free ourselves from ingrained habits, even if those habits seem natural to us. And perhaps that's the paradox: in breaking out of established norms, in challenging our programming, in deworming, we might start to approach something more authentic and expansive. Could we also say that we might start being more regenerative?

When I think of negative plasticity as regenerative, it might seem contradictory at first. How do you understand the relationship between these two?

OBS: The question of form, or what form negative plasticity takes is a crucial question for us it seems. The utilitarian notion that form follows function seems to carry with it traces of industrialist society and design where function, and the functionality of human labor and production, is paramount. It is precisely the negative plasticity element we are speculating upon which tries to undo or, as you say deworm, the extent to which society and social relations have become predetermined by a functionalist, rule-abiding organizing principle. This is where the engineering imperative, to somewhat engineer social relations in a utilitarian way comes into play, also within inter- and transdisciplinary settings (i.e., bringing different disciplines together to solve societal problems). And this is where we might see the imperative or desire to integrate knowledge, as a kind of trace of this engineering, functionalist mindset - to integrate, organize, or engineer, inter- and transdisciplinary knowledge, to maximum utility for different stakeholders.

Within this engineered knowledge landscape, negative plasticity would then carry with it, as you elaborate upon, a double movement, gesture, or force, of not playing the game by imploding, or de-engineering, a functionalist mindset or practice of what it means to be a professional artist, in your case, while allowing yourself to (not) play the game of play, or to play it for the sake of play. It almost feels like a kind of cosplay where you would dress up, and enter the studio-as-stage, for a professional artist, to perform their function, only to debunk, debase, or deworm, your practice from within. To dress up, in order to dress down, or undress, which again, seems to lead to fore-play, a kind of pre-state of play.

Craft / Techne

How would you understand the idea of craft in this context? To my knowledge, the precursor to this professional, engineering imperative, and how it qualifies the idea of what an expert, or a disciplinarian is, comes from the idea of craft in pre-industrial era. The idea, and even meaning of the word expert, or expertise, originates from the word art in Ancient Greek, also known as techne τέχνη/ ars, as in a skill or craft. It then develops from pre-industrial society into engineering in the mechanical industrial era of steel and steam engines, and finally into social engineering of experts and their social relations (for example interdisciplinary collaborations) in the post-industrial, post-Fordist ⁸ era of immaterial labor. Do you see this kind of historical narrative also in your work as a plastic artist and maybe it has something to do with our ambition to give form to a negative plasticity?

Regarding the ideas you bring forth of the right to play, what do you think comes before that ‘right to play’? In other words, what determines the contours, parameters, or boundaries of what comes across as play? I am even thinking of difficult ethical transgressive situations, where two people might be said to be ‘playing’, but only one of the sides perceives this as play, and the other does not. Should we determine the way the situation is interpreted as both play, and non-play, as negatively plastic? To step out of the ethical dilemma for a while, and in relation to our current matter of inter and/or trans-disciplinarity, can we make the analogy that perhaps for one side of the inter and/or trans-disciplinary collaboration, the collaboration is fruitful, playful, and for the other not necessarily so?

Destructive Growth

In either way, the form negative plasticity would, or could, and then take, in these non-symmetrical relations, would indeed be surprising or unpredictable, even dangerous. To that extent, I think these negatively plastic relations can even be regenerative, but we might need to expand what we understand growing and growth (re-generation) to be, in this context. If we include the idea of destruction within our understanding of growth and re-generation how can we account for destructive growth, responsibly and ethically?

Further, when we both seem to agree that the body needs to be integrated in such inter- and/or transdisciplinary collaborations and relations, then ethical considerations and questions seem to become even more pressing and urgent. How do you see this element of risk playing out in embodied inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations? How can both sides or disciplines, take part in an ethical, or even peaceful, form of play, which both does justice to each of the disciplines in the relation and, at the same time, deworms, or disorganizes, the idea of disciplines, as such? What form would a peaceful (not necessarily safe) idea of play then take?

MA: I want to start by allowing myself to (not) play the game of play. I feel this is what it entails for me to be an artist, a maker, today. I need to perform and set the conditions for play to happen, but then, the experience should have the potential to be useless (and/or ludic-useful). Maybe in these useless actions or activities, this negative approach to making and producing, could help us transform the current way of living, (where decisions seem to be engineered by something external constantly), into a life that is really owned by ourselves. These small acts of rebellion, of disobedience, are powerful reasons to (not) play the game from within, to let it implode. I feel I am practicing more and more these acts of refusal, by declining a tempting invitation because the schedule is already rather full, by shortening the working time of installing an exhibition, by lowering expectations.

I feel that the resurgence of crafts in the last years is a response to the post-industrial, post-Fordist era of immaterial labor that we are part of. It is some form of resistance, some form of anarchic approach to plasticity, you could call it negative plasticity. I see a lot of makers, and art and design students, choosing laborious, lengthy techniques that contradict the fast rhythm of production that we are part of, pushing back against hyper-acceleration and dematerialization. In this sense, negative plasticity could suggest a kind of counter-conditioning—where instead of constantly adapting to technological and economic changes, artists and makers insist on friction, resistance, and slowness. I see it in the type of techniques that I favor, ones that involve hands, like sewing, painting, drawing, performing. I need to put my hands to work so that they dictate the time I live in. I feel that in our time, where even knowledge work becomes alienated, there's a return to embodied practices that contradict efficiency-driven logics. It's like a paradoxical loop: technological progress makes techné obsolete, yet the very alienation it creates generates a big desire to reclaim it. I find this paradoxical loop profoundly negative-plastic or even a form of destructive-growth.

We should definitely include the idea of destruction within our understanding of growth and re-generation. I am thinking about superposition; all these different phases are layered over whether it is in the creative process or in an interdisciplinary collaboration. In a way, generation implies destruction and vice versa. When I make something, something must be undone, reconfigured, or even abandoned—whether it's an idea, a material, or a feeling. These phases aren’t always sequential; instead, they overlap, coexist, and sometimes even contradict each other. Many times, I find myself developing a piece of work only to go back to the very initial insight I had of it. Perhaps after that first insight I decided to add another material, another layer, another idea. Sometimes I over-do it. I see that when I have to strip down all the additives and follow-up steps that I decided to invest myself in. It can feel un-productive to make and (un)make but I know it's part of the process. When we collaborate (be it the collaboration with other people or non-human, with other materials), a form of destruction happens when our ways of doing things, within the disciplines that we are part of, collide. Maybe we are forcing these existing ways of doing things, these frameworks that are very much ours, to dissolve and reform into something new. I have the impression that what we’re looking at isn’t just resistance, but a kind of disruption, maybe even a generative rupture, a deliberate embrace of destruction as a vital part of these processes of collaboration.

Risk

As for the element of risk playing out in embodied inter-and transdisciplinary collaboration, I feel that risk is necessary. There is no play without disobedience, as I was mentioning before. I feel that collaborations should allow for more disobedient, playful, space and time within each discipline alone. How could other logics appear, besides the ones that we know within each field? But what I am more interested in is what the conditions for interdisciplinary collaborations are. If we want to collaborate with each other, to be emancipating, then it has to be playful with a certain degree of disobedience across disciplines. I was glad to hear that we could have this conversation allowing ourselves to share our ideas in such an exploratory way for an academic journal. We are taking risks here already. Maybe disobedience should be repositioned in our scale of values. It could be that instead of seeking coherence and efficiency, we could look at friction, failure, unpredictability and uncertainty. Things we have been discussing at the beginning of our conversation.

I tend to collaborate with different fields, architecture, design, history, literature and music. However, too often, these collaborations are structured in a way that still replicates existing ways of doing, hierarchies or known methodologies. If we really want to generate new logics, we will have to create conditions where the familiar is suspended, where disciplines can disobey their own rules and expectations. But what's beyond disobedience?

Overall, I feel risk is central in this conversation. Without it, collaborations become mere translations between disciplines or fields rather than an actual transformation of them. Maybe what we need are disobedient frameworks, not just spaces where different disciplines meet, but spaces where they can unlearn, misbehave, and disrupt each other.

How do you think these disobedient frameworks could be practically cultivated? Should disobedience be designed into the structure of collaboration or is it something that has to emerge organically?

Interdisciplinarity! (Reflection Section)

OBS: To round up our dialogue about negative plasticity I would like to run with your last question regarding disobedient frameworks which I feel is very helpful for reflecting on what interdisciplinarity itself is and how the idea of negative plasticity tie in with this. As I hinted at in my response, I sense a certain engineered imperative to integrate knowledge in interdisciplinary work, to the extent that there seems to be no outside to either disciplinary work or interdisciplinary work. I feel that the days in which the promise that interdisciplinary work functions as an outside, rebellious, perhaps, disobedient, framework, are long gone.

Rather than focusing solely on integrating its components –as in the familiar nursery story of Humpty Dumpty, who, having fallen from a wall, requires being pieced back together–, I suggest that we may be entering a phase in which interdisciplinary work could benefit from embracing the possibility of its own disintegration. In other words, the integrative approach might run the risk of flattening, rather than attending to the force of rupture of the negatively plastic broken parts. This is why your idea of disobedience sounds tempting, but I would go further than trying to find an ‘inter-’ space of a kind between ideas, method, or discipline. As James Chandler (2009) highlights in his introduction to the Critical Inquiry special issue of ‘Doctrines, Disciplines, Discourses, Departments’ : ‘One might argue that the Interdisciplinary paradigm hypostatizes disciplines as such in order to sustain the sense that all dynamism in academic intellectual life must necessarily occur in the spaces between. Is this a picture of disciplinarity we wish to accept?’ (739). Rather than treating the space between disciplines as an obscure ‘black box’ that magically generates dynamism and integration, I find it more productive to think in terms of a deconstructive gesture. This means dismantling inherited models of interdisciplinarity to make room for new ones.

This is where negative plasticity might come in. We can draw an analogy between a plasticity that maintains a ‘core identity’, and the idea of disciplines and interdisciplinary, or what could be called the disciplinarity-interdisciplinarity imperative, or identity. Chandler is once again helpful in making the somewhat obvious point that: ‘For a discipline to do its work it must have a home base and a sense of its identity over time; it must have a local habitation and a name’ (734) in a similar way to how you describe the need for a studio as an empty, hospitable space that has the potential or promise of a ‘core identity’. In other words, disciplines –like plasticity– rely on a promise that their identity will be sustained by an a-priori organization of elements.

In order to break through, implode, as you say, or deworm, and dismantle, this organizing principle, plasticity, and the disciplinary-interdisciplinary imperative, should be shattered from a negative standpoint, a kind of degree-minus –to paraphrase on Roland Barthes’ idea of ‘degree zero’ ([1967] 1967), which attempted to find a form of writing which remained in neutral tension, or a kind of tension without intention, to the dominant cultural and ideological frameworks of his time. How this standpoint looks like we don’t yet know, as negativity implies surprise, accident, failure, error, emptiness, disobedience, etc, as we tried to sketch in this article-dialogue. Not knowing, or not-yet functioning, what, or how, negative plasticity is, or, can come about, would probably be a good starting point.

It might be that there is no such quasi-transcendental ‘outside’ to the idea of plasticity, or the ideas of disciplinary-interdisciplinary work, and that we are always already implicated in anything we do, and how we shape, and are shaped by our environment, in a kind of infinity mirror effect. This infinity mirror effect reflects back to the disciplinarity–interdisciplinarity imperative its identity, as it does to the notion of plasticity that maintains its identity through endless transformations.

My intention is not to find a neutral, objective, God-like, vantage point, in which “the field” (of academia, visual art, literature, science) could be surveyed. I am more interested in exploring how we can imagine interdisciplinary work, or plasticity, as a kind of embodied force or living practice that challenges the neutral, or transparent, imperative to do interdisciplinary! work or the idea of plasticity, in a solely affirmative key or register, in which identity is sustained through transformations.

I would like this idea of someone, or something, becoming, from one day, to the next, something else, or other to itself, without the ability to become reconciled, or integrated, to be the defining feature of what interdisciplinary work, and/ or plasticity is. Perhaps this idea could also fit in with your elaboration of the importance of play and surprise. This malleable, yet fragile, rupturing, threshold of identity itself, is also a call for science to be much more inclusive, and open, in its epistemological scope than it is today to include other, less dominant knowledge(s).

MA: I also have the impression that there might be no way out of interdisciplinarity or disciplinarity. We are very much interconnected through how we perceive who we are, and we will continue to be. As an artist or maker from this time, I think that we need to work more towards creating better ‘accidental’ conditions for having those interdisciplinary encounters so that they do not become something too organized or even stifling. To me, the idea of integrating knowledge resonates well with making those accidental conditions possible. I feel that when someone or something is integrated, it is when all aspects are considered, acknowledged, heard, seen, and cared for. And when further thinking about what are the conditions to (not) ‘play’ the game of interdisciplinarity, I can only think of carving a proper time and space for playing. What kind of time? A time that is the time of intensity, flow, and immersion–the time of play, creativity, and childhood wonder. It is a time that escapes productivity as we know it; a time that escapes sequentiality; and the time within disciplines that escapes from itself. As for space, I feel we need to first ask ourselves, how do we want to arrive at this conditional, accidental, place? I have the impression we need to enter through an untamed frontier that does not conform to the pressures of the environment or the disciplines. Crossing that untamed frontier will lead us to labyrinths and stairs, to slides and caves. In a sense that we will get lost, we will find other ways, make our own rules and own itineraries, invent new forms for embodying that disobedient space that we create in order to be able to inhabit it together.

Afterword

We have explored the concept of negative plasticity as it has unfolded through our dialogue, not to come to a final exemplary definition of what it is, but to confront the tensions the concept itself generates in our imaginaries. In this sense, the form of our dialogue tries to mirror its content: unfinished, unsettled, and open to interruption. We recognize the value of plasticity being framed and utilized as the preservation of a core identity across transformation. Our concern has been to probe the liminality of this continuity and the points where this continuity in transformations might rupture or suggest other ways to give attention to them.

To call these liminal thresholds “negative plasticity” is not to romanticize rupture, or to dismiss the persistence of form. It is to insist that failures, breaking-points, or disobedient forces are not merely the shadow side of adaptive-like plasticity that sustains, maintains and in a way occupies, an idea of a core “center”, but part of its generative capacity.

What we hope to have articulated through this dialogic, performative experiment, or exchange, is not merely a concept but a practice: it is a way of inhabiting uncertainty, while resisting the promise of resilience or the forced optimism of adaptation. Negative plasticity, as we speculate upon here, is less of a doctrine and more a mode of attention. It is being attentive to what resists preservation, to what interrupts continuity in transformations, and to what exceeds our desire to integrate.

What we have discovered while writing and editing this article is that –whether or not negative plasticity is something real in the world– it seems to be that if we still want to be able to account for a real world at all, negative plasticity is one of its main constitutional elements worth fighting for. Negative plasticity is a formative element in, of, and with, plasticity. Its void, or rupture-like qualities, gives form to plasticity as it is being formed and shaped by it. Much of this article was born out of the negatively plastic suspension of our everyday routines and practices as academics and artists. We needed to undo those practices and routines somehow as we gave shape to the article. As the summer break ends, schools reopen, and the kids return to playing in the school courtyards outside our window, perhaps we can imagine negative plasticity as a kind of summer break, a vacation break. It breaks-with (plastic) time, as it embodies other, more negatively plastic, trans-formative times.