Ordinary Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism

August 6, 2026
|In #7 The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part One (2013)
|By Tiziana Terranova

There is no life whatsoever without
norms of life, and the morbid state
is always a certain mode of living.
—Georges Canguilhem

Capitalism is pathological, Deleuze and Guattari once said. Like all societies, it is rational and irrational at the same time. It is rational in its mechanisms, its cogs and wheels, its connecting systems and even in the place it assigns to the irrational. Logistical and productive arrangements, the organization of the factory floor or the office space, sophisticated cybernetic and telematic technologies, rules, regulations, protocols and markets, all is reasonable, yet only if one accepts its axioms. “It’s like theology, everything about it is rational if you accept sin, immaculate conception, incarnation. Underneath, however, it is a different story: it is delirium, drift. The stock market is certainly rational: one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious, it’s mad… the system is demented, yet it works very well at the same time.”1 What one should be looking at, Deleuze and Guattari argued, is the way in which each specific society distributes the relation between what is rational (“the interests being defined in the framework of this society, the way people pursue these interests, their realization”) and what is irrational (“desires, investments of desire… on which interests depend in their determination and distribution of an enormous flux, all kind of libidinal-unconscious flows that make up the delirium of this society”).2 It is this distribution that underlies the distinction between the “normal” and the “pathological.”

Is a there a specific distribution of the rational and the irrational, of interests and desires, of the normal and the pathological in what a recent strand of Marxist theory defines as “cognitive capitalism”? Cognitive capitalism is just one of a number of terms that have tried to politically inflect the “colorless” notion of the knowledge or information economy. The insistence on the term “capitalism” stresses the invariance of the fundamentals of the capitalist mode of production, such as the “fundamental role played by profit and the centrality of the wage relation, or more precisely of the different forms of waged labor on which the extraction of surplus value depends.”3 As such it is part of a range of new terms which have also tried to question the uncritical identification of the economy withthe capitalist economy tout court (such as communicative capitalism, semioinfocapitalism, biocapitalism, neoliberal capitalism and such likes).4

Unlike other terms used by Marxist-influenced theories to define contemporary capitalism, theories of cognitive capitalism deploy the term “cognitive” to define “the new nature of work, the new sources of values and forms of property which provide the basis for the accumulation of capital…” 5 Carlo Vercellone, for example, claims that the term“cognitive” is employed to define the main source of value which now lies within “the knowledges and the creative capacities of living labor… The importance of routine-based productive activities and material labor which consists in transforming material resources by mean of material tools and machines, decreases in favor of a new paradigm of work, simultaneously more intellectual, immaterial and relational.”6

The theory of cognitive capitalism, then, specifically addresses the ways in which capitalism no longer simply exploits the capacity of the human body to perform manual, repetitive work in the assembly line but increasingly mobilizes its cognitive capacities. In as much as knowledge production is by its nature not subject to the same kind of homogeneous measurement that grounded the law of value in industrial capitalism, it produces an excess and a tension with relation to the capitalist extraction of surplus value. In the terms provided by this theory, cognitive labor undermines the classical law of value, in as much as its productivity can no longer be measured through the arithmetic instrument of the working hour or confined to the time and space of work. While one can measure the productivity of manual labor performed in the assembly line by counting the number of items assembled in a given time, how should one measure the cognitive labor performed by a scientist, an artist, a teacher, a designer, or a writer? Do they ever really stop working that is thinking? Furthermore, the notion of cognitive labor suggests that this type of value-creation is not confined to those who would be classed as “cognitive workers” from a sociological point of view, but affects the global mass of living labor—including activities performed in leisure time such as posting comments, photographs or videos to social networking platforms or inventing a new fashion style that only later will be picked up by the industry. For Christian Marazzi, the creation of value is thus increasingly unlinked from direct processes of production, spreading through externalized networks ranging “from outsourcing to crowdsourcing”: “We work for free any moment of the day, there is a continuous transfer of unpaid labor on to the consumer. We can think about the banking system with online banking, the postal system, not to mention IKEA (who forces you to assemble everything yourself at home) or Google.”7 Consumption as such is increasingly identified as constituting a creative activity actualizing new worlds by socializing tastes, values and judgments. More radically, according for example to Maurizio Lazzarato, the end of the hegemony and centrality of factory work to the accumulation of value implies a crisis of political economy reactualizing the potential of a neo-Tardean “economic psychology” that reveals the underlying social nature of value.8 As a result, it is argued that contemporary capitalism is characterized by a strong tension between the social features of production and the private character of accumulation. In as much as the private character of accumulation tends to destroy the immaterial commons of knowledge required by this type of economy, it enacts a self-destructive cycle. As an economy of debt and austerity displaces the economy of credit fueling the digital economy of the nineties and noughties, we witness the “becoming rent of profit”, evident in the increasing amount of surplus value generated by financialization, real estate speculation, and the enforcement of intellectual property regimes and copyright.9

From advertising and marketing to the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, from media production to the arts, from care of the body and the self (care of children, the elderly, the sick, beauty and fitness) to the aesthetic production of everyday life (everything pertaining to the home, fashion and style), ultimately, contemporary capitalism implies a real subsumption of the whole of life stretching from the biological life of the species to the spiritual life of publics, from bios to noos, from organic to inorganic life.10 Real subsumption, however, should not be identified with complete domination, on the contrary. Cognitive capitalism is crossed by a constituent tension between the tendency to exploitation, subsumption and proletarianization on one side, and autonomy, self-reference, and self-creation on the other.

As a concept aiming to politicize the notion of the knowledge economy from a post-workerist Marxist perspective, the notion of cognitive capitalism is not immune to critique. Identifying the source of value in the cognitive capacities of living labor belies an emphasis on the symbolic and the linguistic that underestimate the centrality of the affective and the pre-cognitive to the operations of contemporary capitalism and downplays the active role played by its technical machines. The notion of psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism in a way short-circuits such cognitivism by foregrounding unconscious and libidinal processes that disrupt the smooth productivity of cognitive production while at the same time stressing the problematic nature of the incorporation of the technical machine or fixed capital in the body of living labor. Attention deficit disorder, depression, anxiety, panic, burn-out syndrome, and even new quasi-pathologies such as Internet addiction expose a kind of excess of the life of the psyche with relation to the imperatives of productivity.

It is not by chance, then, that the “neurological turn” identified by Anna Munster as characterizing a certain discourse around networked media has increasingly displaced the centrality of the life sciences and artificial life in the nineties.11 If nineties digital capitalism invested in the neo-evolutionary powers of production of biological life, the last decade has witnessed a new investment in the sciences of the brain and the technologies of artificial intelligence. Thus on the one hand, as Catherine Malabou has pointed out, the neuroplastic, flexible brain has come to provide a new image of networked capitalism,12 while on the other hand for Munster research in artificial intelligence has “shifted away from the construction of human-machine intelligence and the goal of creating an artificially intelligent‘mind’, and over to ‘practical’ applications for industry and for the military … ‘smart applications’… such as electronic fraud detection, voice and face recognition and data mining systems.”13

The rising powers of the “neuro-image” materialized through imaging technologies such as fMRI defines the difference between the normal and the pathological as a function of brain activity while at the same time new ordinary technologies of artificial intelligence expose new capacities of inhuman assemblages to pay attention to the processes immanent to the productive powers of the social brain.14 The definition of what is a psychopathology and its social generalization thus unfolds as part of a mode of power/knowledge which conceives the life of the psyche in terms which displace the centrality of repression, Oedipus and the unconscious structured like a language in favor of a technical and neuro-centric conception of the ordinary psychopathologies of the networked brain.

This knowledge of the brain, however, is far from constituting a kind of exclusive property of the neurosciences. From Deleuze and Guattari to Toni Negri, the brain, in fact, also constitutes a key concept for those philosophies that have tried to construct a materialist alternative to psychoanalysis. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously argued that the molecular biology of the brain constitutes a better image of thought than the psychoanalytic unconscious.15 Charles T. Wolfe has also recently reconstructed what he calls a genealogy of the social brain, providing an historically materialist account of psychic life which stretches from the Spinozist parallelism of body and thought to Soviet psychologists’ conceptualization of the socialist cortex and Toni Negri’s statement that the brain is the main productive force or the common.16 Maurizio Lazzarato has also dedicated a book to Gabriel Tarde’s critique of political economy where the concept of the brain as both society of neural cells and as engine of material and immaterial production founds a new social economic psychology which is alternative both to orthodox Marxist political economy and to neoclassical economics.17

In the following pages, I will be briefly looking at two main examples of ordinary psychopathologies which respectively refer to a neuronal modification of the structure of the brain triggered by interaction with information and communication technologies: attention-deficit disorders and anhedonia (the inability to experience pleasure). Reflecting the enduring power of Canguilhem’s analysis of the formation of the category of the normal and the pathological in contemporary nosology, such pathologies are defined both as quantitative variations “departing from the normal…by hyper- or hypo- “(as in the case of attention disorders) or as error (as in the case of anhedonia).18 Looking at such pathologies from a post-autonomist perspective, however, allows us to deploy what we might almost describe as a “stratagematic” and “schizoanalytic” reading or a transformation of the assessment of the parameters at play.19 It is not a question of building a comprehensive account of such psychopathologies, but introducing some elements of problematization both in the neurological account of psychopathology and in critical accounts that tends to stress only the suffering experienced by the cognitariat in cognitive capitalism… “Hyper” or “too much” will thus be also read positively as excess, implicating that which cannot be completely absorbed by cognitive capitalism and which lingers as a remainder of what is not containable and subsumable within its logic. “Hypo” or “too little” and “absence” as error, will be read as a stratagem of subtraction, of flight from cognitive capitalism’s capture with ambivalent political implications. Overall the purpose of this exercise will be to establish whether the link between psychopathology and the brain produces a reading which not only stresses the cost paid by the psyche to exploitation, but also its autonomous strategy of excess and subtraction pointing to the horizon of the constitution of an autonomous, self-productive social brain. This is why this essay will not so much focus on explicitly pathologic forms of psychic suffering as much as on ordinary psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism.

 

(In)attentive

Our lived relationship with the brain becomes
increasingly fragile, less and less “Euclidean”
and goes through little cerebral deaths. The brain
becomes our problem or our illness, our passion
rather than our mastery, our solution or decision.
—Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image

In a recent comic strip, cult Italian cartoonist Zerocalcare describes what could be defined as an ordinary occurrence in the daily life of cognitive labor.20 “Almost every night at home the eternal struggle is staged between on the one side the forces of good, life and joy, and, on the other side, the forces of work.” It is almost nine in the evening and Zerocalcare needs to finish his drawings which must be submitted to the editor by the day after. As he is considering not finishing his work in time for the deadline in order to indulge in other kinds of bodily pleasures, a kind of superego is evoked in the shape of ex British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Expressing the spirit of forced work under the pressure of competition, Thatcher threatens him with the example of the Chinese worker who never stops working and slaps away his other animal spirit who incites him to desertion. Giving in to the violence of Thatcher, Zerocalcare decides to work and switches on his computer with the intention of checking his email before starting with the assigned task. The next table sees him five hours later, at 2.15 in the morning, having been absorbed in what his animal spirit calls “the Bermuda timezone”: “The Bermuda timezone is that span of time between 9pm and 2am where apparently normal people sit in front of the computer and within the time of an eye-blink realize that five hours have inexplicably passed, swallowed by a dense curtain of fog and oblivion, jeopardizing deadlines, exams, health…” As a result, Zerocalcare does not meet his deadline and must spend the rest of the night fighting off the vengeful and angry spirit of Margaret Thatcher.

One of the explanations that Zerocalcare gives himself (beyond having been drugged with Rohypnol or kidnapped by aliens) is the existence of a hypnotic function within the Facebook chat, which is activated around that time. However, as his brain’s long-term memory is short-circuited by what Sherry Turkle once described as “computer holding power”, software is paying attention, accumulating a mass of micro- data about his interaction with the network.21 A quick retrieval of the chronology on his web browser brings back unknown memories of aimless drifting from website to website chasing trivial information.

It is clear that what we are dealing with here is not so much the pathologization of attention in children and adolescents, but a kind of ordinary psychopathologization such as that identified by Nicholas Carr in his much quoted article on “Why Google is Making Us Stupid” (later turned into a book The Shallows).22 Such pathologization of attention is an ordinary occurrence in the life of cognitive capitalism, expressing not so much a clear boundary between the normal and the pathological as a modulation of a general pathologization of neural life which crucially implicates our symbiotic relation with digital screens. Citing neuroscientific research on neuroplasticity, Carr has argued that multi-tasking and “always on” connectivity produce an excess of stimulation of the regions of the brain associated with short-term memory, while downplaying and atrophying long-term memory. The notion of the neuroplasticity of the brain is thus drawn on to emphasize the production by means of computers and communication networks, of a subject incapable of long-term memory and as a consequence of focused concentration and rational argumentation.

As attention is identified in new economy discourse as the new scarce resource in an economy of information, a new “crisis of attentiveness” is produced. It has been the merit of Jonathan Crary’s work on early capitalism, to show how such crisis is far from being a new phenomenon.23 It was in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century that a crisis of attention was first denounced—triggered by a new commercial, urban culture of sensory stimulation. Looking back at the first expansion of industrial capitalism into the structures of perception in the nineteenth century, Crary shows how “at the moment when the dynamic logic of capital began to dramatically undermine any stable or enduring structure of perception, this logic simultaneously attempted to impose a disciplinary regime of attentiveness.”24 In the late nineteenth century, it was the new field of scientific psychology that identified attention as a fundamental problem. Crary underlines how “the emergence of a social, urban, psyche, and industrial field increasingly saturated with sensory input” turned “inattention” into a “danger and a serious problem even though it was often the very modernized arrangements of labor that produced inattention.” Crary thus points towards the “crisis of attentiveness” as a crucial aspect of modernity, something that is produced by the “changing configurations of capitalism.” These changing configurations are described by Crary as first introducing “an endlesssequence of new products, sources of stimulation, and streams of information” and then as responding to ensuing crisis of attentiveness “with newmethods for managing and regulating perception.” However, “the articulation of a subject in terms of attentive capacitiessimultaneously disclosed a subject incapable of conforming to such disciplinary imperatives.”25 As a widespread, almost normal psychopathology, this hyper-attention and hypo-attention expressed what from the point of view of capital is both a limit and a new source of potential extraction of value. It indexes both a withdrawal and a subtraction from productivity as when employers complain of widespread use of social networking sites during working hours and at the same time a kind of excess of neural life, the life of the brain with relation to strategies of capture of value. If it is true that Zerocalcare’s browsing history does produce data which are somehow turned into economic value by software such as Google’s AdSense and AdWords, it is also true that advertisers who at the beginning were convinced by the accuracy of Google’s measure of attention, increasingly complain about the “degraded” quality of such attention.26 In its ordinary pathologization, such a deficit of attention seems to characterize the entirety of living labor whether it acts in its capacity as waged work or as free labor. Unfocused workers do not perform well because multitasking and constant connectedness distracts them from scheduled work. Unfocused, drifting populations of potential customers browse the Internet in a state of absorbed distraction, where the process of moving from site to site happens too quickly to extract more than a micro-rent. Read as a constituent strategy of resistance of the social brain to exploitation and subsumption, such ordinary pathologies of attention seem to imply the excess of a new kind of brain that unfolds in connection with its devices. Is there more of a hint of a “future social brain” unfolding within this dynamic process? Gabriel Tarde again famously drew on psychopathological phenomena such as hypnosis, “magnetization”, and somnabulism to cast light on what he thought to be the most basic presupposition of the social: our inclination to be affected by others, “our constant openness to a plurality of suggestions.”27 And on what conditions and on the basis of what ongoing experiments can such hypnotic relations to technosociality be turned into a new technology of autonomous self-creation such as the one wished for by Félix Guattari in his conceptualization of the post-media age?28

 

Anhedonia

What can we do so that the break-through
does not become a breakdown?
—Gilles Deleuze

On an autumn day of 2011, during a particularly intense season of struggles by precarious cognitive labor in Rome, Italy, a series of billboards appeared plastered all over the walls of a neighborhood popular with the cognitariat, Il Pigneto. In striking red, yellow and black, the signs read like this: “Enough with rising drug prices”: “Psychoactive substances are a tool of synthonization and synchronization of the precarious and intermittent times of life and work. […]” Referring to the examples highlighted in the poster, such as “the rise of 12% in the price of cocaine, 20% for marijuana, 25% for MDMA, and 16% for heroin”, the poster stated that “rising prices for such substances are an indiscriminate attack to the bare life of the working class.” Countering the “prescriptive regimen of the dose” with the “illicit regimen of the hit”, this provocative media campaign of the Italian cognitariat draws on the importance of the modulation not only of attention, but also of pleasure and desire to the life of cognitive labor.29

As Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey have pointed out, “the development of psychopharmacology and its steady infection of the social generates new media spaces, new media with their own messages.”30 When talking about the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism, then, one should not underestimate the powers not only of “electronic technologies working at a distance in extended space but chemical technologies creating distances in intensive space.” The result is a psychotopology of the techno-social brain “meshing with the loops and hits of online connectivity, catalysing circulation through the topologies of networks linking synapses, minds, emotions, techno-science, geopolitics, creating grey media for grey matter and vice versa.”31

The ordinary, normative character of pleasure and desire, their relation to the neurochemical composition of the brain and the potential of a new psychopharmacological solution to libidinal disinvestment in economic behavior is central to a video posted on YouTube by a young neuroscientist from Stanford University, Brian Knuston.32Posing the question of desire from the perspective of science, rather than philosophy, the neuroscientist asks of desire functional questions such as: “what are the neural substrates that support desire, when does it happen, what are the conditions for it to emerge, and is it good for anything? Is it good for making decisions for instance? And is it also important for our well being?” The question of desire, the conditions for its emergence, its value are posed from the point of view of a normal subject capable of performing economic decisions and imply also the emergence of an abnormal subject, the schizophrenic-anhedonic, unable to mobilize it. The two kinds of research are presented as intrinsically distinct but overlapping in as much as research into the neurological basis of decision-making also, almost incidentally indicates a possible program of development of new pharmaceutical drugs curing schizophrenia and depression. Through a kind of neuro-economic reductivism, psychiatric diseases are said to be caused by “disorders in decision making” and can be addressed by neurochemically targeting those regions of the brain responsible for “rational” decision-making. The concluding remarks give us a sense of the axioms of this specific piece of research: brain activation reflects desire and predicts financial choice, while also indexing health symptoms. On this basis, neuroeconomics can be used to build “a comprehensive theory of decision making that can account for the wide spread of decisions that people make both when they are rational and reflective and when they are not.”

The bulk of the experiment concerns what the neuroscientist describes as “a scientific enquiry into desire”, which revolves around the study of neurological excitement as anticipation and intention. Having defined desire as that which motivates decisions and anticipation as anticipation as an “evoker” or “sign” of desire, the researcher demonstrates that anticipation of making money or deciding to buy something activates the same region of the brain as that discovered in laboratory rats in a famous experiment from 1954 performed by James Millner and Peter Olds. The original research experiment was part of a larger, Cold War, behaviorist scientific effort to implement strategies of mind control at a distance. The setup of the project involved, in fact, an attempt to control the behavior of a rat (waking it up) by means of an electrode in the brain. The failure of the original experiment produced an interesting result: it isolated a region of the brain (“a subcortical region across the memellion line and possibly even far back”) which reacted to stimulation. Overturning the original experiment, rather than trying to control the behavior of the rat at a distance, Millner and Olds decide to let the rat control its own brain—even if in a limited and controlled manner. They let the rat access a lever which could be pressed at its own will. The result was remarkable: “The rat kept doing it on and on and on, did not stop. The rat would rather do this than sleep, eat, drink and have sex (that is basic biological functions).”33

Knuston’s experiment into the visualization of desire (that is the construction of a neuro-image able to plot the activation of different regions of the brain) showed activation or lack of activation of a region of the brain not too far from that identified by Millner and Olds in 1954—but with improved temporal and spatial resolution thanks in advances in fMRI technologies. This time it is not so much a question of giving the experimental subject access to his own stimulation, but of finding an external stimulant able to activate the region of the brain connected with pleasure and hence with anticipation, intention and ultimately choice. The best stimulant, it turns out, is money: as Knuston puts it in the video, money can become an optimal experimental tool in as much as it not only “motivates” people (for example to work), but also because of its reversibility (you can give it and take it away) and scalability (you can modulate the exact amount involved). It also allows to map precisely what Knuston describes as the “most ubiquitous economic decisions out there”, that is “investing money or purchasing products.”

The subjects of the experiment are wired up to a computer and asked to make investment decisions by clicking on a button. A lag is introduced between the time of the decision and the time of the outcome allowing the plotting of the pre-cognitive, affective reaction of the brain to the stimulation. The research showed how anticipation of making a large amount of money (relative to the experimental subject’s income) activated the same region of the brain that caused the rat to lose interest in vital functions such as sex, food, drink and sleep. Activity in the same region was also shown to occur when facing the decision to purchase a commodity with a given price.

The conclusions drawn by the neuroscientist are startling from the point of view of the pathologization of neural life in cognitive capitalism. As Deleuze and Guattari pointed out, the distribution of the rational and irrational in a given society does not express a universally valid distinction, but is specific to its axiomatics. It corresponds to a division of interest and desire that experiments such as this somehow enact. The behavior of the rat that given access to its own brain unfailingly chooses to stimulate it at the expense of its own survival casts a dark shadow on the “normal” behavior of the stock market broker involved in making neurochemically-fired choices triggered by anticipation of massive future gain.

On the other hand, if the behavior of the economic investor is normalized as expressing a standardized relation between anticipation and gain which allows functional economic behavior, the lack of activation of such region is explicitly linked to a pathology that is described as a kind of anti-economic behavior, schizophrenia. “Schizophrenic are said to be suffering a lack of desire, negative symptoms, include anhedonia and lack of motivation. Some medications tend to make this symptom worse, others do not.”34

Wired up in the same kind of way, schizophrenics could still perform economic decisions that rewarded them with money, but showed no activation of the “money spot”—that is no investment of desire. Schizophrenia is thus re-coded as a disorder of desire, an error causing a lack of activation that threatens the functioning of normal, functional neuro-economic brain. Treating them with “a-typical” neuroleptics targeting those regions of the brain restored them to the normality of functional economic behavior.

In critical and philosophical term, there is, as one should expect, a reduction of desire as a productive, connective, open process of world-creation to an economy of pleasure “as a repressive (negating) power.”35 In this sense, the experiment confirms current critiques of subjectivation in networked media, such as those proposed by Jodi Dean and Bernard Stiegler, who see the latter as decomposing and destroying desire by dissipating it into the reproductive circuits of communicative capitalism and thus creating “disassociated milieus” of transindividuation.36 The experiment can thus be seen as practically enacting the decomposition of libidinal energy in networked communication whereby users’ participation is reduced to a sterile act of consumption for which the subject is paid in worthless “tiny nuggets of pleasure.”37

What is pathologized seems only an error causing a subtraction, that is a lack of or refusal to feel pleasure that would belong to schizophrenics and turned them into disordered subjects. But what is exorcised is also the excess that is built into the reward-oriented behavior of economic subjects—the self-destructive behavior of the wired rat. Furthermore, techno-social economic decision-making in stock markets enacts not so much the aggregate behavior of individual economic agents, but also affective contagion and the inhuman speed of digital technologies. As it has been recently pointed out, since at least 2006 a “robot-phase transition”, triggered by technologies such as High Frequency Trading, has seen “the quantity of robot-robot interactions in stock markets operating at millisecond speed [exceeding] that of human-robot interactions”—negating both the anthropocentric and individualistic model of economic behavior.38 Rats, electrodes, imaging technologies, plots, computers, artificial intelligences and human subjects are linked in a chain which enacts the irrationality of capitalist ratio. What in the rat was pathological, becomes rational for the economic investor. Even as the market is posed asthe topos of a self-regulating, rational system, its rationality is exposed as connected to anticipation, the neurochemical hit of reward, and the autonomous power of runaway artificial intelligences. The resulting picture rather than confirming the assumptions of neuroeconomics on the nature of human behavior seems rather to disclose a collective capitalist brain exposed not simply to the occasional and random catastrophe or “black swan event”, but, haunted by “little cerebral deaths”, that is “frequent black swans events with ultrafast duration.”39

On the other side, is it possible to see, once again, in schizophrenia, and specifically in the singular element identified as pathological from the point of view of neuroeconomics, that is anhedonia, a symptom of withdrawal from the circuits of communicative capitalism? Do such experiment unwillingly point out the limits to the functioning of capitalism in forms of libidinal disinvestment not simply in money-making, but more generally in the subjective rewards promised by cognitive capitalism as a measure of success? Would the anhedonic position be exemplified in the growing number of NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training)? Can the lack of interest and anticipation experienced by anhedonic subjects turn into a more general disinvestment into the figure of homo economicus, enterpreneur of oneself, agent of economic decision-making at expense of all else?

While the identification of schizophrenia as lack of desire can be read as a line of flight from the relentlessly reductive figure of homo oeconomicus, it also seems reductive in this case to read these two figures in terms of a neat opposition. Gilles Deleuze, summarizing his work with Félix Guattari on schizophrenia and the unconscious, presented the former as a condition where a struggle took place between two poles: an exacerbated working of the machines (a non-organic functioning of the organ-machines) and a catatonic stasis—“[a]ll the phases of this struggle… translated in the type of anxiety which is specific to the schizophrenic.”40 Neuroeconomic experiments such as the one explained above seem to confine schizophrenia as lack or error only to the second condition (lack of pleasure or the catatonic body), while in fact normalizing the “exacerbated workings of the machine” at work in the social brain of financial capital.

Creating a binary opposition between the functional and ordered economic subject (socially translated as the investor) and the dysfunctional and disordered schizophrenics (socially translatable into the NEETs), such experiments dismiss the mutual powers of contamination of these two struggling poles: “there is always some stimulus or impulse stealing into the heart of the catatonic stupor; and vice versa, stupor and rigid stasis are forever creeping over the swarming machines…”41 Deleuze suggested that opening up the schizophrenic process in such a way as to counteract those strategies of normalization which employ chemical or institutional means to literally “lock the schizophrenic up” requires a combination of “lived chemistry” and “schizological analysis.”42 As he also asks, what kind of group, what kind of collectivity would be required to turn the catatonic body and the hyper-machinic body into something else? As the milieus of individuation, that is the conditions by which new kinds of subjectivities can be formed, are increasingly defined by the powers of corporate networked media, what kind of social brain can be materialised to unleash a new “molecular revolution” arising from libidinal disinvestment in the rewards of cognitive capitalism?

 

 

  1. Gilles Deleuze, “Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium,” in Félix Guattari, Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972-1977, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 35-36.
  2. Deleuze, “Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium,” 36.
  3. Carlo Vercellone, “Lavoro, redistribuzione del reddito e valore nel capitalismo cognitivo. Una prospettiva storica e teorica,” in Lavoro e produzione del valore nell’economia della conoscenza. Criticità e ambivalenze della network culture, eds. Federico Chicchi and Gigi Roggero, special issue of Sociologia del lavoro, no. 115 (Milano: Franco Angeli Editore, 2009), 32. On cognitive capitalism see also Carlo Vercellone, “From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect: Elements for a Marxist Reading of the Thesis of Cognitive Capitalism,” in Historical Materialism, 15 (2007), 13-36; and Yann Moulier Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism, trans. Ed Emery (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012).
  4. On communicative capitalism see Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); on semioinfocapitalism see Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009); on biocapitalism see Andrea Fumagalli and Cristina Morini, “La vita messa al lavoro: verso una teoria del valore-vita. Il caso del valore affetto,” in Lavoro e produzione del valore nell’economia della conoscenza. Criticità e ambivalenze della network culture, eds. Federico Chicchi and Gigi Roggero, special issue of Sociologia del lavoro, no. 115 (Milano: Franco Angeli Editore, 2009); on neoliberalism as an intensification of capitalism see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
  5. Vercellone, “Lavoro, redistribuzione del reddito e valore nel capitalismo cognitivo. Una prospettiva storica e teorica”, 45.
  6. Ibid.
  7. Christian Marazzi, “Moneta e capitale finanziario” Da Marx all’operaismo, 23 March 2012, Commonware Uninomade #5, (http://www.uninomade.org/marx-operaismo-5-video/). Last accessed 17.02.2013.
  8. See Maurizio Lazzarato,Puissances de l’invention: La psychologie économique de Gabriel Tarde contre l’économie politique (Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2002).
  9. See Carlo Vercellone, “The Crisis of the Law of Value and the Becoming-Rent of Profit,” in Crisis in the Global Economy: Financial Markets, Social Struggles, and New Political Scenarios, eds. Andrea Fumagalli and Sandro Mezzadra (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010).
  10. See Tiziana Terranova, “Another Life: The Nature of Political Economy in Foucault’s Genealogy of Biopolitics,” in Theory, Culture & Society (November 2009), 26.
  11. Anna Munster, “Nerves of Data: the Neurological Turn in/against Networked Media,” in Computational Culture: A Journal of Software Studies, no.1 (December 2011); available at: http://computationalculture.net/article/nerves-of-data.
  12. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
  13. Anna Munster, “Introduction: Neuro-perception and What’s at Stake in Giving Neurology Its Nerves?” in Nerves and Perception: Motor and Sensory Experience in Neuroscience, ed. Anna Munster (Open Humanities Press, 2011), 2.
  14. See J. Macgregor Wise, “Attention and Assemblage in a Clickable World,” in Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility, and Networks, eds., Jeremy Packer and Stephen B. Crofts Wiley (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 159-172. See also Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley, eds., “Paying Attention,” in Culture Machine, Volume 13 (2012). (http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/ issue/current). Last accessed 17.2.2013.
  15. See especially Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); also Sean Watson, “The Neurobiology of Sorcery: Deleuze and Guattari’s Brain,” in Body and Society, 4 (December 1998), 23-45; and Ubaldo Fadini, “Sul cervello-soggetto.” Millepiani Vol. 20 (2001), special issue on Félix Guattari Pensiero Globale, cervello sociale. La lotta dei concetti contro le opinioni per resistere al presente, 109-126.
  16. See Charles T. Wolfe, “The Social Brain: A Spinozist Reconstruction,” in ASCS09: Proceedings of the 9th Conference of the Australasian Society for Cognitive Science, 2009. (http://www.academia.edu/234118/The_Social_ Brain_a_Spinozist_Reconstruction).
  17. Lazzarato, Puissances de l’invention.
  18. See Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 43.
  19. On the use of stratagems in media theory, see Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, Evil Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
  20. 20Zerocalcare, “La fascia oraria delle bermude”(http://www.zerocalcare.it/2013/01/21/la-fascia-oraria-delle-bermuda/). Last accessed 16.2.2013.
  21. See Sherry Turkle, “Videogames and Computer Holding Power,” in The New Media Reader, eds., Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 499-513.
  22. Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” in The Atlantic, (July-August 2008). (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/306868/). Last accessed 16.2.2013; Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011).
  23. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 13.
  24. Ibid.
  25. Ibid.
  26. John Naughton, “Traditional TV has survived the net threat, but for how much longer?” The Observer, 15.1.2012 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jan/15/john-naughton-tv-versus-youtube). Last accessed 16.2.2013.
  27. Bruno Karsenti, “Imitation: returning to the Tarde-Durkheim Debite,” in Matei Candea, ed., The Social After Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), 52; also Gabriel Tarde “What is a Society?” in The Laws of Imitation (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1903), 59-88.
  28. Félix Guattari, “Toward a post-media era,” Mute 1.2.2012 (2012). (http://www.metamute.org/editorial/lab/towards-post-media-era). Last accessed 17.02.2013.
  29. Massimo Lugli, “Droghe: basta aumenti del prezzo: manifesti shock al Pigneto,” in La Repubblica, 20 September 2012. (http://roma.repubblica.it/cronaca/2012/09/20/news/droghe_basta_aumenti_del_prezzo_manifesti_choc_al_pigneto-42875748/). Last accessed 17.02.2013.
  30. Matthew Fuller and Andy Goffey, “On the Usefulness of Anxiety,” Monica Narula, ed., Shuddhabrata Sengupta and Jeebesh Bagchi Sarai Reader 08: Fear (Delhi, India: The Director, Center for the Study of Developing Societies, 2010), 23.
  31. Ibid.
  32. Brian Knuston, “Visualizing Desire” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CUK8D-kX0fE#!). Last accessed 17.02.2013.
  33. Ibid.
  34. Ibid.
  35. Luciana Parisi, Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 198.
  36. See Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010); and Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010).
  37. Dean, Blog Theory.
  38. See Neil Johnson et al., quoted in Inigo Wilkins and Bogdan Dragos, “Destructive distraction? An Ecological Study of High Frequency Trading.” Mute (2013), 4. Retrieved (http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/destructive-destruction-ecological-study-high-frequency-trading). Last accessed 17.02.2013.
  39. Wilkins and Dragos, “Destructive distraction? An Ecological Study of High Frequency Trading”, 4.
  40. Gilles Deleuze, “Schizophrenia and Society,” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 (LosAngeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 19.
  41. Deleuze, “Schizophrenia and Society,” 19-20.
  42. Deleuze, “Schizophrenia and Society,” 28.