An Archaeology of Plasticity (Chapter 1 Impressionable Biologies, Routledge, 2019) (original) (raw)
Related papers
IMPRESSIONABLE BIOLOGIES (Routledge, 2019) (Introduction and Chapter 2)
Introduction and Chapter 2 (Plasticity Before Plasticity)
This chapter addresses humoralism as an ontology of the ancient and early modern body. Although some humoralist frameworks traded in notions of stability and even fixity, the humoralist body was always marked by a contextual dependency on time and place that gave it the resources to undermine or consume this fixity. This is why humoralism appears as the most visible site to assess the permeability, plasticity and dispersion of ancient and early modern biological matter. However, with this permeability, a constant anxiety and policing of bodily boundaries accompanied the politics of humoralism. Even more significantly, this policing was deeply gendered and racialized. In the second part of the chapter, I address this unequal distribution of the “burden of plasticity” toward women and racial groups deemed at risk of degeneration. Particularly, I explore arguments about maternal impression (how a gestating mother’s thoughts and emotions could leave a permanent imprint on her unborn child) and body malleability in women, seen as being at greater risk of leakage, and therefore subject to more intense attention and surveillance.
Florence Chiew interviews Maurizio Meloni on his new book, Impressionable Biologies: From the Archaeology of Plasticity to the Sociology of Epigenetics. The conversation reflects on a number of key themes and arguments in Meloni’s work, such as the use of the term ‘impressionability’ to explore longstanding ideas of the permeable body in constant flux in response to cosmological changes. This notion of the body-porous is one whose history Meloni traces back to ancient traditions and systems of medicine, such as humoralism. In this important book, Meloni makes a compelling argument for questioning the current emphasis on the novelty of biological plasticity as an exclusively contemporary phenomenon, and urges us to take a longer genealogical perspective to appreciate how histories of corporeal plasticity have always been part of deeply gendered, racialized and classed discourses in which social hierarchies have been made through physiological distinctions.
On the traces of the biosocial: Historicizing “plasticity” in contemporary epigenetics
History of Science, 2019
This paper builds upon historico-epistemological analyses of plasticity across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to distinguish among uses of this notion in contemporary epigenetics. By digging into this diachronic phase of plasticity thinking, we highlight a series of historically situated understandings and pragmatic dimensions of this notion. Specifically, our analysis describes four distinct phases in plasticity thinking across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: (1) plasticity as chemical modification of the body by its milieu; (2) plasticity as explanandum for the modifications of life’s ontogenetic and phylogenetic substrates; (3) plasticity as mechanistic process in need of distinct explanations in ontogeny and phylogeny; and (4) plasticity as responsive potential to perturbations of a complex genetic system of development. These four versions of plasticity provide, in turn, the opportunity to discern synchronically the uses of this notion in epigenetic biosciences....
The Concept of Plasticity in the History of the Nature-Nurture Debate in the Early 20 th Century
In this chapter, I analyze how the effort to bring together " nature " and " nurture " has put forward " plasticity " as a key concept in biology. While the notion of plasticity appeared in the field of genetics in the early 20 th century as a solution to the debate between " nature " and " nurture " – the notion of plasticity proved a key concept in articulating those genes and environment –, in social science the opposition seems to persist (probably because the meaning of plasticity itself has not remained stable or uncontroversial among the different fields of biology). In order to understand the issues raised by the nature-nurture debate, it therefore appears necessary to provide a comprehensive view of the history of plasticity within the debate.
Plasticity and Pathology, 2016
Preface pathology, as neurological concepts, point to complicated phenomena in the history and theory of the human sciences. To grasp the significance of these phenomena we need an open and multidisciplinary approach. WE WOULD LIKE to thank Alan Tansman, director of the Townsend Center, for his intellectual and material support for this project, which is part of a broader initiative on "Thinking the Self." We would also like to thank Anthony Cascardi, dean of arts and humanities, and Carla Hesse, dean of social science, as well as the Department of Rhetoric for generously funding the original workshop. We are indebted to Teresa Stojkov, associate director of the Townsend Center, for all her help making this edited collection a reality.
The Status of the Body in Purist Plasticity
Body Matters. Architectural Humanities Research Association 21st International Conference: Book of Abstracts, 2024
This paper explores the notion of plasticity within the discourse of Purism, reflecting on how the meaning of corporeality inherent in this notion relates to the movement’s key premises. In the context of neo-classicist tendencies in post-First World War French art, Amédée Ozenfant and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret emphasized the significance of plastic reality as the sole domain enabling the creation of “pure” art. In their view, neglecting the laws of the physical world leads to an “art of allusions,” where the essence of an artwork is derived not from its plastic base, but from secondary, symbolic conventions. However, for Ozenfant and Jeanneret, the perspectivism of plastic experience offers only fragmentary knowledge, because it fails to empirically grasp the whole of a plastic entity. They emphasize the necessity of reconstructing “total plasticity,” which becomes possible only through the intellectual organization of primary, experiential cognitions. This represents an intelligible detachment from experiential continuity and the immediacy of the body. Such activity of the mind is not aimed at diverging from the physics of plasticity, but rather at expressing its universal laws beyond the mere appearance of plastic objects. The process of purification, understood as the transition from an empirical to a formal approach to plastic reality, will be used to explain the ambiguity of the notion of plasticity in Purist discourse. The movement’s approach to the question of the body will be analyzed by starting with the polysemy of the substantive la plastique used by Jeanneret and Ozenfant, which, in addition to referring to modelling and sculpture, also introduces meanings such as “the form of the body.” In this context, the paper will seek to explain how such an “organic” view of the body relates to the movement’s evolutionary definitions of the purification of corporeal objects.
Review Article: Re-shaping the Space Between Bodies and Culture: Embodying the Biomedicalised Body
Sociology of Health & Illness, 1998
The context Over the past 300 years, the biomedical discourse on the body has become embedded in our modern culture. As scholars begin to position bodies centrally in the sociology of health and illness, those working in the field of biomedicine continue to devise ways to transform the boundaries of these bodies. Bodies have become more malleable as they become more healthy and less sick or vice versa. While health and illness are terms that are culturally and socially defined, all cultures have known concepts of these terms. These vary from culture to culture according to how sick and healthy bodies become visible and, more importantly, the extent and range of the scopic drive (Braidotti 1994), which makes these bodies visible. Whether sick or healthy, bodies are viewed as empirical objects to be quantified and classified. Alongside the scopic drive generated by biomedicine, a powerful desire to classify forms of deviance, locate them in biology and patrol them in wider social spaces exists in society. Since the 19th century, the somatic territorialising of deviance has been part and parcel of a larger effort to organise social relations according to categories denoting health versus pathology,
As Lively Mock'd as Ever: Plasticity and the Aesthetic Image of Life
Doctoral Dissertation, 2018
This dissertation contends with the treatment of the biological in literary representation, arguing that the biological lacunae particularly visible in critical practice are best redressed by a formal exploration of aesthetic images of life. Biology, as I will show, admits of contingency, spontaneity, and novelty at the level of its aesthetic representation in a manner entirely distinct from what might be gleaned from a critical practice focused exclusively on the annals of discursive history. I approach this dynamic as an isomorphism of symbolism and biology and argue that just as contemporary philosophy has, through the work of Catherine Malabou, traced the symbolization of the biological, aesthetic criticism should seek to trace the biologization of the symbolic, that is, should seek to trace the way biology imposes its presence as an ontological piece of representation. Working my way back from the prominent appearance of three specific tropes in naturalist texts, I demonstrate within this dynamic that the aesthetic image of life asserts its plasticity against an impossible transcendental alterity, an alterity too long taken for granted in critical practice.