Plasticity and Double Reading

Habit cuts a trench; or so it seems—a channel coordinating conduct of the subject.  Having certainty that trees deaden in the winter or that the sun will rise tomorrow depends, according to David Hume, on the habitual recognition of like causes preceding like effects. To repeat is to condition propensity as such.  But if custom is “the great guide of human life,” what possibilities remain for opposing the transformation of formal repetition into force? (§5, 1, 6,)  If resisting that force sets the stakes for agency, what does it mean to resist?  For Catherine Malabou, resistance is isomorphic to explosion.  The brain not only receives form through experience; it shifts the very conditions of experience itself. The brain, in other words, is plastic.

 According to Malabou, “Plasticity unfolds its meaning between sculptural molding and deflagration…to talk about plasticity of the brain means to see in it not only the creator and receiver of form but also an agency of disobedience to every constituted form.”(6) The dialectic of reinscription and radical difference in the brain is not only biological, “it is a history.”(1) That is, “the structural bond [between history and the brain] is so deep that in a certain sense it defines an identity.”(1) But how can changes within consciousness, that is, changes in history, unveil themselves within a discursive field that is itself historically conditioned?  How can “the new world” express itself in “the old world?”  

I want to take a closer look at the relation of plasticity and the problem of a discursive limit by examining the possibility that language, in this case poetry, can upset the apparent mutual exclusivity of totality and the new. Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path explodes the conceptual syntax of its own theme—motion is more primary than the bare difference between disruption and continuity—by establishing a steady and reliable refrain of phrases throughout the text.  Rather than building structure, the refrain marks the cancelling of structure.  It marks motion that frustrates the category of difference between disruption and continuity. By going two ways at once Mean Free Path gets close to expressing an “agency of disobedience to every constituted form.”

To comprehend the conceptual connections across the patchwork phrasing of Lerner’s stanzas while simultaneously acknowledging the separation of those phrases amounts to reading two things at once.  Perhaps, this is precisely the phenomenon that occurs upon a fourth or fifth reading of the book, and, perhaps, that operation collapses the difference between order and continuity.  Try reading the following lines straight through, and then mix them around to connect the phrases: “It’s autumn.  Foils are starting to fall/ There are three hundred sixty-thousand/ And that’s love. There are flecks of hope/ Eight hundred eighty ways to read each stanza/ Deep in traditional forms like flaws.” (43) Now attempt to do both steps at once.  Achieving the third step, reading outside of a difference between disruption and continuity, exposes, I suggest, an analog to the explosive reinscription of form that neural plasticity produces in the brain.    

But in this very respect, discursive limit presents a problem.  The conditioning one goes through to develop a double reading seems to bring to the fore the very differences between disruption and continuity that such a reading means to obliterate.  When one considers the text as a whole, however, repetition puts this problem in check.  Learning to “double read” erases, or forgets, the difference between local ruptures and global repetitions in the text. When the phrases “night vision green,” “surface effects,” “wave,” “fascism,” “there in the trees,” and “to the pathos,” become the Mean Free Path’s refrain, movement itself overcomes the category of difference between disruption and continuity.  Through this dialectical process, we experience something like the text as being “situated between two extremes: on the one side the sensible  image of taking form (sculpture or plastic objects), and on the other side that of the annihilation of all form (explosion).” (5)