Plasticity: Form, Matter, Method
Description
Of late, the term plasticity has invited consideration in the humanities as a condition of materiality and a critical method.Catherine Malabou introduced the term to foreground the essential malleability of the structures and forms of life, drawing from scientific developments such as the neuroplasticity of the brain, to explore how the very materiality of embodiment is not subject to categorical fixity. Her account introduces a double bind: plasticity as the capacity to receive and hold form—as in the molding and sculpting given in the “plastic arts”—but also the capacity to obliterate form’s fixity entirely—plastiquer, in French, means bombing. Plasticity, then, wavers between form’s emergence and its detonation, a concept which offers us an understanding of forms and figuration as not only fluid, but also rife in latent volatility.
This seminar takes up that volatility to consider how plasticity—as a scene of form under pressure—can open onto a cross-disciplinary method for thinking transformation through aesthetic form. Ranjan Ghosh and Heather Davis engage plasticity through the material structure of plastic as a petrochemical substance. In their work, plastic’s material pliability is never separate from its shattered afterlives—its slow degradation into particulate residue that accumulates within the elemental and fleshly surfaces of the planet. If plasticity in Malabou’s sense names a detonative potential in form, plastic in the environmental humanities is a toxic latency that perturbs cycles of life and death, and resists incorporation into stable temporalities.
Possible questions to guide this interdisciplinary seminar include, but are not limited to:
- What kinds of forms—conceptual, political, aesthetic—are possible under conditions of plasticity?
- What does it mean to think form at the threshold of its dissolution? If formal qualities are what allow us to perceive and receive aesthetic objects, does focusing on the plasticity of form suspend our ability to read, and what emerges in that suspension?
- If the plastic seems at odds with the virtual and the immaterial, it reveals and foregrounds a materiality as flux: following trans scholars and artists like Cassils, what does this plasticity of matter tell us about bodies as media of transformation?
- Conversely, the slow temporality of plastic polymers in degradation seems to encumber flux. How might we think within this tension between plasticity (as flux) and plastic (as arresting)?
- If we begin with Malabou’s framing of plasticity and its political-philosophical claims, what stakes and orientations emerge from an interdisciplinary conversation that also holds plasticity’s materialist purchase, and its methodological stakes for reading aesthetic form?
- Finally, as method, how might plastic reading—attuned to malleability, deformation, and residue—reorient aesthetic criticism in the wake of both formal volatility and environmental saturation?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Cassandra Guan is an Assistant Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. She is completing a book project titled Maladaptive Media: Animation in Interwar Culture that explores the plasticity of the living in the first age of its technical reproduction. Her essays have appeared in journals and anthologies like Screen, October, Film-Philosophy, Parapraxis, World Picture, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Ulrike Ottinger: Film, Art and the Ethnographic Imagination.
Speaker Bio
Tania Sarfraz is a PhD candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. Working across deconstruction, film and media theory, media materialisms, aesthetics, and theories of (un)worlding, her research asks how aesthetic discourse produces us as speaking subjects. Her work has appeared in the “Media Aesthetics” special issue of communication +1, and she co-organizes a reading group dedicated to contemporary theory.
Speaker Bio
Lou Silhol-Macher is an International Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of German Studies and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University, where she teaches German Film and Media. Her research focuses on media aesthetics, theories of the image, and materialist formalism in visual arts and culture. She has published in Camera Obscura, liquid blackness, Qui Parle, and TRANSIT, as well as edited a special issue of Qui Parle on “Form and Its Discontents” (2025).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Rahma Haji’s scholarship is informed by black studies, gender and sexuality, and cultural studies. Her current project theorizes and charts the meme within a larger genealogy of black cultural production by focusing on the artistic productions of Arthur Jafa and Adrian Piper. In doing so, Haji maps out a prehistory of the meme by examining its relationship to performance, conceptual, video and internet art. Her second book project explores blackness, animatedness and artificial intelligence.
Speaker Bio
Heather Glenny is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Chicago, a Master’s in Art & Museum Studies from Georgetown University, and a BA in Art History with Honors in Education from Stanford University. Her teaching and research center scenes of medical learning in popular culture and formal education. She is currently writing about cadavers.
Speaker Bio
Weihong Bao is an Associate Professor of Film and Media, UC Berkeley and a co-editor of Grey Room. She has published on comparative media, media and the environment, affect theory, and propaganda theory and practice. She is the author of Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (University of Minnesota Press, 2015). Her new book, “Background Matters: Set Design and The Art of Environment,” is forthcoming from the University of California Press.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Kalpana Seshadri is Professor of English at Boston College.
Courses in Contemporary Theory; Anglophone Novels.
Author of Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race; HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language; and co-editor of The Pre-Occupation of Post-Colonial Studies.
Speaker Bio
Emmy Waldman is visiting assistant professor at Virginia Tech. She will begin as assistant professor at the University of Miami in Florida in August 2026. She received her PhD in English from Harvard, where she also held a postdoctoral fellowship. Her first book, Filial Lines, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press this spring. Her research also appears in venues including Twentieth Century Literature, Contemporary Literature, ASAP/J, Post45, and New Literary History.
Speaker Bio
Annie Felix is at work on a dissertation titled "Intermedial Perceptions: The Decorative Logics of 19th c. Optical Media" at the University of California, Berkeley. She attends to the intermedial promiscuities and perceptual architectures forged between proto-cinematic devices (such as the stereoscope and the kaleidoscope) and the decorative arts in late 19th century European visual culture.