Plasticities Sciences Arts

What is Plasticity ?

1. Plasticity is a property inherent to the matter.

2. It is observed at all levels of organization, describing at the same time a property of system and its own dynamics.

3. It is observed in and by a brain which thinks in a world whose evolutionary dynamics is fundamentally plastic, i.e. whose total behaviour is not rigid and passive, but on the contrary flexible, coherent and highly interactive.

4. It is not purely descriptive but has a raised predictive value of the dynamic behaviour of non-living or alive systems and of the meaning which we give to these systems. In other words, it is a founding property and not only a systemic or an emergent one (and in this direction, it is necessary to speak of metaplasticity).

5. Metaplasticity explores the genesis of natural processes. It should not be comparable at some holistic or vitalistic sight of the world which would wrongly mix isolated elements to serve a little digestible soup adding all the parts. To the contrary, it is a question of rigorously describing the unit in its diversity, the truth in its relativity, and reality as a process in which I (the actor) builds myself here and now.

6. It takes into account the events in their entirety: i.e. that it is not unaware of their generic or ontological contents, but that it does not seek them. Man is naturally registered there in an undivided reality that he structures and of which he is structured.

7. It is opposed to the functions of linearization and insulation. The plasticians deny any fracture of reality without seeing a manifestation of the whole.

8. Plasticity seeks the principles of coherence, the decompartmentalization of disciplines and the defragmentation of knowledge. It is thus clearly a transdisciplinary approach where art, the third element & science find a privileged means of expression.

9. The plastic attitude implies a constant adjustement of architectures.

10.It recommends an opened, pragmatic attitude without a school mindset.

The specificity of Plasticity

What distinguishes formally plasticity from the properties of elasticity, flexibility or malleability of the bodies is that it is not a simple property of a system or an emergent property of these systems (inert or alive) but:

1. That it can translates a passive phenomenon as much as active process of transformation in which the events evolve while co-existing mutually, in other words are structured as much as structuring (e.g.: single phenotypical expression, etc.);

2. That it implies a reciprocity between ascending and downward systems inside the same system: (e.g. neuroplasticity, morphogenesis, phylogenesis) or of interacting systems: (e.g. art/science, subject/object, brain/mind...);

3. That it has a universal capacity of tying or articulating the fundamental pairs such as the pairs informed vs formed (questioning first the form & the emergence of the form), form vs object, form vs subject, etc...

4. That when contradictory units (positive/negative, agonist-antagonist, etc...) clash inside these pairs, it obeys a transverse logic by creating complexes (e.g. ETP: space-time-plasticity, AEP: alter-ego-plasticity, NMP: neural-mental-plasticity) where plasticity plays the part of mediator;

5. That these complexes define or register a plastic process rather than translate a structure, an operation or an isolated function whose single property is to become the contents themselve of what they represent or of what happens to them (ex. NMP);

6. That plasticity acts directly at the anchorage point of dimensions or irreducible expressions by including the subject in the plasticity of the world (psychic sphere, art, otherness, intersubjectivity);

7. That when plasticity is addressed to whole systems of values, particularly regarding the interactions of the subject with the world, it becomes metaplasticity.