A Brief Essay on the Transcendental Poetry of the Brain in Transition

Introduction

As Warren Neidich has shown in a series of publications as well as in his art practice, the epistemological model of the brain as a hyper-organ is a thought-guiding one, taking precedence over other models since the early twentieth century and reorganizing patterns of thought and the engineering and programming of structures and infrastructures.As Warren Neidich has shown in a series of publications as well as in his art practice, the epistemological model of the brain as a hyper-organ is a thought-guiding one, taking precedence over other models since the early twentieth century and reorganizing patterns of thought and the engineering and programming of structures and infrastructures.¹ As Neidich would put it, the brain model has reached a viral state, exercising structural violence through its connection to the digital complex which is not only driving global communication, but also the distribution of power, knowledge, goods, and resources.² As a radical (feminist) Deleuze-Guattarian, I feel a quasi-natural impulse to avoid this type of topic—to hold on to the brain without organs (BwO),³ the body fed from the violence of cultural anatomization, which always includes acts of dominance and disciplining.

Yet, a critique directed at the brain model does not just build on organology and the brain without organs: a critique cannot be formulated from the escapist point of view of the BwO alone. Instead, it makes sense to shift this pairing: to draw parallels between the BwO, which is insaisissable dans l’immanence (elusive in immanence), and the historical succession of organ models, organ plans, organizational modes, and organic tics. Looking at the various transformations and articulations of organ models and their historicity takes the pressure out of all these models—and out of the brain model as well.

Against this background, the global pandemic we have been facing since 2020 and its social and political effects must be examined and interrogated as a crisis (or culmination point) of the brain-world model. What are the intrinsic consequences that the pandemic brings to bear on the brain model and vice versa? Virology must be reconsidered as a science (or area of knowledge) that cuts across different fields under discussion and advances the ontological homogenization of the so-called main organ—the brain. Further, technologies appear as “brain” technologies (or “brain-of-the-world” sets) in the realms of technology and subjectivity. Here, both the absolutized brain and its technologies are affected (or infected) by “viruses” that undermine their functionality in the guise of a non-dialectic move of not putting up open resistance to a system, but invading and altering it for its own benefit by way of adaptation and parasitic employment. This type of undercover “non-opposition” performed by viruses challenges (expands) the idea of the brain, putting to the test its capacities of self-organization, learning, auto-plasticity, and other features of supreme intelligence. In a way, the virus plays the role of the assassinator within the total model of the brain, forcing us to rethink the brain itself in order to evolve its ontological line of potentials, perhaps away from the brain model altogether. (The controversies surrounding vaccination could also be a way of thinking of the invasion of the virus into thought and rationality itself through the ambivalence that it causes towards science and that which cannot be seen with the naked eye.)

The atmosphere created by the involvement of the virus in evolutionary or autopoietic brain activity and its neuronal plasticity wages dualistic or gnostic battles between good and evil, the essence of which easily feeds into conspiracy theories and neo-messianisms of all kinds. This is as a symptom for a situation that is becoming more and more difficult to evaluate, which is why I am trying to review the capacity of model-making by the organicist brain doxa and project it onto an analytical plane in several steps. First, I will outline the properties of organicist models in general, as the brain is not the first organ to come into prominence on an epistemological level to unfold a force field and emmantly (re)shape all other fields of knowledge production. Second, I would like to address the historicity of the organicist model, assuming the hypothesis that the brain model is already past its zenith. Further, I would like to start a more speculative discussion about what a subsequent brain model could look like if we are not content filling new wine into old skins to save a model that is already obsolete. This is, of course, a difficult question that concerns not only the brain, but also deserves a well-articulated, active discussion that reaches out to further horizons that I can only very generally touch upon here. Finally, what is of interest is the idea of a continuing competition between organicist candidates for such an organization, which is why I would like to return to a psychology of organ modes and ask about their importance and general influence on understanding, knowledge production, and technicity.

Transcendental Poetry and Diagram-Making: The Role of the Organs

In the title of this essay I refer to “transcendental poetry,” a notion coined by the Austro-German philosopher Alois Dempf.⁴ In his great philosophy of history—which centered on questions of social organization, innovation, and the relationship between technologies and body-based means of encountering the world—Dempf proposed to conceive of the irreducible principles of discourse formation as topoi relating to a system or a (noetic) faculty he called “transcendental poetry.” As a historian, he saw that these principles, once established, were able to form strong force fields for a certain period of time and have a meta-structural impact (as principles do), but at the same time they were transitory, entirely historical and vanished at some point. As far as they represent a non-absolute Leitidee (guiding idea), a contingent principle, this is not a matter of metaphysics, but of poetry.

I would like to engage this idea as a starting point when discussing the brain model and its epistemological role. Looking at the hype the brain faces within cognitive science, neurophysiology, neuroaesthetics, and cognitive philosophy, it makes sense to put it to the test through the prism of Dempf’s idea of transcendental poetry by asking questions such as: What is it that makes the brain a powerful model? Does the brain model have to constantly be expanded with new dimensions in order to guarantee its supreme position, even at the price of having to resort to allegorizations such as juxtaposing the brain model with apparently similar-looking structures (unstable in themselves) such as “text,” nerves, or digital structures? Like all other organs that work together in the organization of the body, the brain has an objective side and a subjective side: this is what makes the discourse on the brain as self-contradictory as it is attractive. The “brain” is, at the same time, an automated apparatus—namely, an organ: a production site of self-awareness, interconnectedness, and hypercomplexity. It therefore cannot be ruled out that this part of the epistemology of the brain “comes automatically,” as it were, as it must and will perform all scientific thought processes assigned to it—according to transcendental poetry, a circular characteristic of principles.

In order to analyze the model of the brain and its presumed historicity, it is crucial to start with a comparative investigation of the presumed “organization” of knowledge through organs that were believed to be “(self-)organizing” at a higher level than others. As hierarchization itself is a typical organizational mode in Western cultures, it has, of course, its feedback loops and echoes inside the scheme of the organism of the body as a provider of “organizational” material or fantasies. Parallel lines of temporary cultural primacy of one organ over the others—for example, of the thymos, the heart, the kidneys, the liver, the nerves, and the sex organs—may be assumed across different histories. My survey of “star organs” over the course of history might shed some light, step by step, on what I mean by calling this an argument of transcendental poetry in the sense of Alois Dempf’s speculative metaphysics.

A History of Organs—Different Organs, Different Gestures of Organization

The Thymos

As Hermann Schmitz and Peter Sloterdijk have pointed out, the thymos⁵ is not only an interesting organ—though no longer present, known, or respected today—but the very principle of a politics of affection which ranks types of “organic” states of existence in early and late antiquity. The thymotic world gives preference to the fiery and passionate, not to the cool, phlegmatic, or rational.⁶ This is why the thymos became the organic foundation of heroic and prophetic culture. This culture of rage and ardor belongs to a context favoring not only heroism, but also the patterns of agency that go with it—namely, militarism and values of revenge, domination, and boldness. Thymos-based states of being are not only the defining characteristics of heroic culture, they also help conceive the image of a god who would excel in, and act out, fiery or hot-blooded affects, sending plagues and drowning those he finds to be evil. The (biblical) concept of “just wrath” stems from the “thymotic age.” Its defining concept accounts not just for the human hero, but also for the god whose greatness derives from the supernaturality of his rage and ardor. Of course, there is a strong tendency for transgression, for “losing one’s mind” and getting obsessed with the meaning of being directed by higher forces and spirits.

The Heart

The heart contrasts the thymos’ organic value or hyped-up temper, as it is engaged, for example, by Christian paradigms. Ethically, it is the seat of emotions such as compassion, empathy, forgiveness, and self-sacrifice. Against the backdrop of the older cultures of rage and revenge, organization through the model of the heart marked the turn toward a more “human,” but less heroic (than idiotic in the sense of Dostoevsky’s idiot) modernity. The transcendental poetry of the heart looks to how the heart is charged with meaning in a never-ending process of semiosis. The sun was considered to be the “heart of the cosmos” and each and every thing has its own kind of heart.⁷ Maybe the latest attempt to save the heart’s preeminent position was its being metaphorically short-circuited with the image of the steam engine or urban traffic arranged (“pulsating”) around stations and knots. Structural differences between points of higher and lower energy were explained through the heart model even before the discovery of blood circulation. The “heart of stone”⁸ or the “cold heart” were pathological conditions.⁹ In the age of the brain, the reign of the heart is definitely over, although there still is a symbolic competition between the heart and the brain in the early modern era, providing material for many stories.

The Liver

The liver, historically preceding the social order of the heart as well as that of the thymos, was understood to be the organ of life—the organic site of life into which the whole cosmos had inscribed its conundrum.¹⁰ Inspection of, and divination from, the liver was a mantic procedure derived from an intricate doctrine of anatomy which interpreted the liver as an all-connected prophetic organ. The livers that the Hittite or Romans priests read the future from were mapped like a modern brain, showing sectors or “lobes” carrying different functions. As the liver of the Hittite oracle “organized” life, indicating—that is, programming—the future of the social body, the individual’s body was reigned and guided by it too, as it was producing life, energy, and intelligence. This is why the sentence of damnation that was imposed on Prometheus—defier of the gods, lover of humans—was the worst that Zeus could think of: an eagle feeding on Prometheus’s liver, which then grew back overnight, only to be eaten again the next day in an endless cycle of torment. It seems that no other organ has ever reached a mantic status equal to the one the liver held for thousands of years. It was considered to be something like a metabolic center processing the cyclical workings of the system of ingestion and excretion as a cleansing, maintaining, and power-providing organ.¹¹ This role is not only the most magic one, but also an ecological one that would be well worth (re)considering.

It is easy to see that the organs capable of systemic “organizing” do so in relation to any anatomic “rest.” The thymos fired up the whole person, the heart warmed the solar system and emanated benevolent radiation, the liver transfused life, and the brain today controls and synthesizes the whole organism.

The Kidneys

The kidneys belong to a different system, namely, the watery or lymphatic one, which indicates a switch to passive mode in the direction of affects. As a “controlling organ,” the kidneys regulate a person’s receptibility, his or her being exposed to the will of the gods, blind fate, or bad luck. Where the thymos reigns and informs cultural behaviors of activism and dominance, the kidney mode is, as it were, the opposite side of the coin. This is best evidenced by the god-trusting and humble Job and his epic lamentation in the Bible, when he says that God was relentless in taking his wrath out on him: “He slashes open my kidneys and does not spare; he pours out my gall on the ground” (Job 16:13).¹² Job and God together epitomize the dichotomy of thymos and kidney, the one filled with holy wrath, the other with fatalist acceptance. Here the German saying comes to mind that something “is getting to my kidneys” (Es geht mir mir an die Nieren). It is used to express that something is cutting directly to the core of my very being and is shaking me fundamentally. This is why the kidneys are the organs that, after the heart, figure most prominently in the Bible. They are tasked with the processing of feelings when there is no solution at hand—when there is a keen and profound sense of human thrownness, of being thrown into the world in a proto-Heideggerian sense, when resignation and acceptance make themselves felt. It is easy to see why this organ mode stood little chance of having much of a career as a “lead organ” on a broader cultural or epistemological plane. It is the more active organs—inspiring the wish for domination, a will to power and control—that leave their marks on history.

The Nerves/Neurons/Ganglia

Early twentieth-century writings refer to the nerves as a bodily system suited to accompany the rise of electricity and its everyday use—including all the horrible accidents that made this use so dangerous and promethean.¹³ A new field of research established in Vienna, electropathology, devoted itself to the study of all types of symptoms, discolorations of the skin, wounds, charred flesh, and so on, incurred from contact with electricity. Its specimens are still on display today inside the so-called Fools’ Tower, the oldest psychiatric clinic in continental Europe, on the former premises of Vienna’s General Hospital. The nervous system played an important role in the medicine of the period and a large portion of diagnoses focused on problems of the nerves. The nerves were conceived of as running through the body and intersecting at knots and hubs which were called ganglia. Talking about these ganglia became common and popular in order to explain biological heritage, inherited character, or disposition. The ganglia played a role as a proto-DNA model that provided information about a person’s entelechial potential. The nerves were seen as extremely powerful at an “organizing” level, as is evidenced by Viennese psychoanalysis and related schools of psychology, which introduced and popularized medical terms such as neurosis, neurasthenia, and so on. Nerves, innervation, and enervation played a role in the understanding of post-World War I European models of sovereignty, as the nerves were somehow thought to be simultaneously in and around the body. They were inside-outside sensors capable of expanding or tele-sensing, which made them relevant for structures of control and excess (in a Bergsonian sense). Electrical infrastructure looked and worked similar to the nervous system, as both were constructed as systems that transported and transmitted energy and information.

The Sex Organs

The most successful competition for the brain model was introduced through Viennese psychoanalysis’ concentration on genitality and sex. Transcending and virtually taking over all other organs and their capacities, the sexual organic model (in the Freudian¹⁴ sense) can be seen as not only equal to the heart, kidneys, thymos, and liver in accordance with the principles of transcendental poetry, but in a certain way appears to be the most powerful of them all. Interestingly, Freud’s teacher, Theodor Meynert, a highly renowned physiologist and biologist, was hesitant to place the focus entirely on the brain, wondering if he should not opt for the genitals instead—as discourse in fin-de-siècle Vienna was already sufficiently “genitalized.” Meynert finally turned “modern” and opted for the brain, so Freud had a clear path ahead of him to choose the alternative—and when he did, he became the subversive and forever successful type of “modern.” Meynert’s successors were no longer so sure about the preeminence of the brain: Paul Flechsig, for example, wrote in his 1927 Meine myelogenetische Hirnlehre (My Myelogenetic Brain Theory), that “Nothnagel explained to me one day that he would be giving up brain science altogether because it had become outmoded and there were more important things to do.”¹⁵ Genitality as a model combined potential of the other “lead organs,” but prompted an alternative discourse that paralleled the scientific one.

The discussion that followed after Freud made the sex drive and its organic apparatus front and center of his analytic theory is therefore consequently unachievable, as was clearly seen by psychologist Erik H. Erikson, who criticized the “organ mode”¹⁶ and its inherent inconsistencies, which he identified as an asymmetry between the concept and subjective (infantile) self-perception. In any case, the emphasis on the organ mode—as a model that describes a developmental process progressing from the oral to the anal to the genital—in psychoanalysis and individual psychology mirrors the epic theme of the “lead organ” inside the body, which is not only resonant with the world but able to comprehend and envelop it while “organizing.” Meynert’s hesitancy is interesting: it is as if, to him, a focus on the genitals and on sexuality meant “prehistorizing” or primitivizing the human being. But if such prehistorizing could have happened through the genital mode, if the genital mode laid open another fully functional layer within the transcendental scheme of this poetry of sovereign organs, what is it then that the brain is mirroring? Does the (first and) last of all organ modes bring the organ mode full circle (going through the “prehistoric” genital mode), resetting it all back to the beginning? Something like that must have been the basic idea Georges Bataille was obsessed with when he started dealing with eros¹⁷ against the backdrop of the discoveries of Altamira and Lascaux.

The Brain

It seems that older cultures had no focus on the brain in their politics of relations with the world; instead, they processed their field of sensation through other major “machines.” There was no mantic practice or augury of divination from animal brains—the brain was not considered to have the kind of impact that other organs had. I would assume that in cultures of hunter-gatherers, breeders, and planters, the treatment of (and interaction with) animals and plants opened a specific path to self-construction, to economies and practices of body-based actions taken within the human field. The element of reciprocity that was inherent in this process of the appropriation of the Earth through hunting, breeding, and engineering and through the selection of animals and plants gave cause to many forms of bodily disciplinarian techniques among humans: as you do unto cattle, you will do unto men.

Historically, the functional rise of the “brain mode” is documented to have begun with the general rise of literacy in the early modern era (around 1600 AD), which, in turn, had to do with proto-industrial strategies and procedures of text-making, the grammar rage in philology in line with the humanistic ideals of the era, and the emergence of a novel book-printing technology. The revolutionary effect of spreading literacy, foreseen by the hesychasts around Abraham Abulafia (as historian Moshe Idel would have diagnosed) has been discussed in an impressive way by media theorists like Marshall McLuhan¹⁸ and Derrick de Kerckhove.¹⁹ What they have called the Gutenberg Galaxy installed the brain model on a specific level of automatized stability within the cultural setting (as the brain machine or machinic brain). Writing, calculating, and computing requires an organic base of supreme efficiency in combining, connecting, and synthesizing. As had previously happened in history in the perspective of functions, the production of life, the divination of the future, or bargaining with the gods, qualities of general subjectivity were once again equated with the workings of a specific organ. The brain paradigm was established in order to provide a substrate and to anchor the combinatorial machinery, calculation, self-surveillance, the maximum control mode. The way the problems and issues were addressed and solved by this equation were gradually concealed over time so that the function and its organ at some point came to be understood as more or less identical: the brain equals complexity, connectivity, maximum scrutiny; hypersynthesis, hyperautomation equals the mind equals the subject. This historically evolved and slowly but firmly established paradigm in the cultural software of our times also elicited criticism, for example, from Markus Gabriel.²⁰ At the same time, radically affirmative texts were published that hitch the brain model to the idea(l) of the democratic government, which is claimed to work best if informed by “brain principles” and “brain properties.”²¹

Since the 1990s, recent upgrades—which must constantly be made to keep up the semantic charge of the model—include interesting links associating the brain with digital architectures, planetary intelligence and AI, learning algorithms, and autopoietic systems of all kinds. It is fascinating to watch the brain model evolve through the centuries and move beyond the original bonds between text and brain, but it is evident, having first emerged in Western culture in the early modern era, that the model is contextualized within a text-based, literate culture promising rationality. The features attached to the brain establish its status as a superior organ: they all refer to script-based cultural techniques, calculating, and computing in the sense of the early modern age (combining and relating sets of information and signs). With the dominance of text apparently in eclipse because of our contemporary image-based culture of information, the question arises: What could be next in a succession of organizing organs?

The Organ of the Future

My vision is a very simple one—necessarily bound to fail, as transcendental poetry related to what Foucault would call a discourse formation²²—as something that emerges as a collective conviction and has machinic evidence and functions. Suggesting, or even inventing, a future “lead organ” on that level is, of course, speculative, but let us try anyway.

When I look at successful and stimulating contributions to contemporary debates, it is not so difficult to see a strong pull into ecological, geobiological, multispecies,²³ and other similar activities, which are united by common concerns about climate change, the deterioration of the soil, the detrimental effects of capitalization on agriculture, the inability to conceive of the Earth as a planet, as a whole, as well as radical doubts about the ontological superiority of humankind. Under these conditions, I see a huge chance for the intestine to make the cut, as the intestine (gut or bowel) must also function as an “encounter zone”—not so very different from the brain, but situated right at the level of metabolic realism. This is where the importance of the gut-brain axis,²⁴ as science has already termed it, comes in. The intestines form a symbiotic miniature system that applies intelligent modes of diagnosis and utilization of what is fed into it, metabolizing (transforming) the material, the biotic entities ingested into, and by, the body. If understood within the frame of reference of these complex functions of the gut, eating is a necessary undertaking that literally engages the fruit, the meat, and the wheat. In public discourse, eating—that is, the oral—has long outdone sex, or the genital. Instead of music shows, cooking shows are the new entertainment format.

It is this regressive atmosphere that the era of the intestine is dawning upon. The intestine provides the setting for interspecies drama, the truth of Lynn Margulis’s microbiotic world,²⁵ the mood maker, the liminal space between me and them, the Self and the Other. The regression—in this instance just another word for the loss of ontological priority and the ensuing eco-radical form of self-degrading—is aware of the fact that the “organization,” the encounter of different species, always occurred without the system as such being properly conceived or thought through. The brain mode lacked awareness of its own construction through the cooperation of microbes and so on. The intestine, though, not only knows, but acts. It is the more active brain, the memory and the entelechy that makes sure that eating a cucumber does not transform you into a cucumber. This, which is seen as the miracle of quintessence in the early modern age of four elemental spirits, is the “intelligence” of the intestine—and it is an eco-intelligence. This is why its rise to power seems imminent.

1. Warren Neidich, Neuromacht: Kunst im Zeitalter des kognitiven Kapitalismus, trans. Jan Georg Tabor (Berlin: Merve, 2017); Arne De Boever and Warren Neidich, eds., The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, parts 1–3 (Berlin: Archive, 2013/14).
2. See Warren Neidich, “The Neurobiopolitics of Global Consciousness,” accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.warrenneidich.com/the-neurobiopolitics-of-global-consciousness/; Warren Neidich, “The Neural Interface,” accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.warrenneidich.com/the-neural-interface/; Warren Neidich, Breaking the Noise Barrier,” accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.mqw.at/mq-journal/2014/warren-neidich-breaking-the-noise-barrier; Warren Neidich, “On Cognitive Capitalism,” accessed August 26, 2021, https://www.warrenneidich.com/on-cognitive-capitalism/.
3. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “The Body without Organs,” in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 9–16; Éric Alliez and Jean-Claude Bonne, Body Without Organs, Body Without Image: Ernesto Neto’s Anti-Leviathan, vol. 1, Undoing the Image, trans. Robin Mackay (London: Urbanomic, 2017).
4. Alois Dempf, Theoretische Anthropologie (Bern: A. Francke, 1950); Alois Dempf, Die unsichtbare Bilderwelt: Eine Geistesgeschichte der Kunst (Einsiedeln: Benziger Verlag 1959). For more on Dempf,  see “Professor Alois Dempf—Philosoph aus Altomünster,” Kulturspiegel Altomünster, November 2007, https://www.altomuenster.de/media/1444/ksp-alois-dempf.pdf.
5. See, for example, Peter Sloterdijk, Zorn und Zeit: Politisch-psychologischer Versuch (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2006); Hermann Schmitz, System der Philosophie, vol. 2.1, Der Leib (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber 1965).
6. See also Christoph Demmerling and Hilge Landweer, Philosophie der Gefühle: Von Achtung bis Zorn (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2007).
7. See Vanessa Schlüter, Wissen im Herz der Dichtung: Kardiozentrische Lyrik von Petrarca bis Marino Mainz (Göttingen: Mainz University Press, 2018).
8. T. A. Hoffmann, “Das steinerne Herz” [The Stone Heart], in Nachtstücke, vol. 2 (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1817). English translation: E. T. A. Hoffmann, “The Agate Heart,” in Hoffmann’s Strange Stories (Boston: Burnham Brothers,1855), 412–27.
9. Wilhelm Hauff, “Das kalte Herz,” in Märchenalmanach auf das Jahr 1828 (Stuttgart: Franckh, 1827).
10. This idea is brought up again in a more recent medical text by Ansgar W. Lohse and Ulf C. Goettges, Das Schweigen der Leber: Die lebenswichtigen Geheimnisse eines stillen Organs (Stuttgart: TRIAS, 2021).
11. See also Gerburg Treusch-Dieter, “Leber—Labyrinth—Opfer,” in Die Heilige Hochzeit: Studien zur Totenbraut, 2nd ed. (Herbolzheim: Centaurus, 2001).
12. For a discussion of the symbolic role of the kidney see Athanasius Diamandopoulos and Pavlos Goudas, “The Role of the Kidney as a Religious, Cultural and Sexual Symbol,” American Journal of Nephrology 22, nos. 2–3 (2002):107–11, https://www.karger.com/Article/Abstract/63747.
13. See Michael Worbs, Nervenkunst: Literatur und Psychoanalyse im Wien der Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt a. M.: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1983).
14. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962). For a translation of the original 1905 version of the essays see Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: The 1905 Edition, trans. Ulrike Kistner (London: Verso, 2016).
15. Paul Flechsig, Meine myelogenetische Hirnlehre: Mit biographischer Einleitung (Berlin: Springer, 1927), 10 (translation by the author).
16. See Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950) and Erik H. Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed (New York: Norton, 1997).
17. See Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986) and also Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989).
18. Marshall McLuhan, “Alphabet: Mother of Invention,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 34, no. 4 (December 1977): 373–83; Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).
19. Derrick de Kerckhove, La civilisation vidéo-chrétienne (Paris: Retz, 1990).
20. Markus Gabriel, I Am Not a Brain: Philosophy of Mind for the Twenty-First Century, trans. Christopher Turner (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017).
21. See, for example, Hans-Otto Thomashoff, Mehr Hirn in die Politik: Gegen Unzufriedenheit, Polarisierung und Spaltung, Mit den Erkenntnissen der Hirnforschung für eine bessere Politik (Munich: Ariston, 2021).
22. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970); Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972).
23. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
24. See, for example, Paul Enck, Thomas Frieling, and Michael Schemann, Darm an Hirn! Der geheime Dialog unserer beiden Nervensysteme und sein Einfluss auf unser Leben (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 2017); Gregor Hasler, Die Darm-Hirn-Connection: Revolutionäres Wissen für unsere psychische und körperliche Gesundheit (Stuttgart: Schattauer, 2019).
25. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, What Is Life? (London: Simon & Schuster, 1995); Lynn Margulis, The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution (London: Basic Books, 1998).