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?