ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relations between writing and intelligence in the terms of plasticity. It discusses the value of reason in posthuman terms and argues that there is an essential embodied relation between reason, synaptogenesis, and the plasticity of intelligence. In Western culture, writing has been the supplemental technology enabling the plastic, dialectical process through which individuals particularize the universal and form dispositions as the "insistent accidents" recognize as individuation. Neuroscience allows rethinking this relationship between writing, technologies, and habit to the formation of John Dewey's intellectual dispositions. Bernard Stiegler's account of organology and synaptogenesis compliments and clarifies the ethical dimension of Catherine Malabou's plasticity. As Stiegler argues, at rates faster than the speed of nerves, destructive digital technologies replace individuation with their own prefabricated, depersonalized imperatives, working as systematic impediments to thinking, creating autotomized synchronies of psychic and cultural participation with the goal of the profit of a nihilistic oligarchy.
