The Mind’s We: Morphogenesis and the Chaosmic Spasm – Social Recomposition, Technological Change and Neuroplasticity

On November 10th and 11th, 2012 I took part in the conference The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, organized by the California Institute of the Arts’ MA Aesthetics and Politics program at the West Hollywood Library in Los Angeles. This conference has been the first opportunity for exchange and cross-fertilization between the European theory of social composition and the Californian cultural landscape. Speakers included Jonathan Beller, Jodi Dean, Tiziana Terranova, Patricia Pisters, and Bruce Wexler. Arne De Boever, Warren Neidich, and Jason Smith organized, introduced, and moderated the event. The subject, the location, and the intellectual mixture evidenced by the list of speakers make this conference an important step in the creation of a philosophical and political awareness of the present crisis of capitalism and of the possible evolution of mental ecology. To my knowledge, this was the first time that the European methodology, which has been particularly focused on the problems of social subjectivation, was confronted with the Californian experience, and with the particular composition of labor that is peculiar to the land of Apple, Disney, and Google. Furthermore, the European philosophy focused on historical subjectivation met the Californian theoretical context, marked by a special attention to the implication of technology and the ecology of mind.

The conceptual innovation emerging from this conference is the following: when social recomposition meets neuroplasticity, the theoretical fields of neurology, ecology of the mind, and cyberculture are approaching those problematics that European thought has considered from the point of view of Ontology or the point of view of History.

Since the ‘60s the psychedelic experience and meditation on the altered states of mind encountered the mind-changing potencies of the high-tech industry. The Institute for Mental Research of Palo Alto, the works of Gregory Bateson and of Paul Watzlawick, the imagination of Philip K. Dick and the psychedelic politics of Timothy Leary marked a mentalist re-framing of the legacy of European philosophy and the condition for a re-conceptualization of social becoming.

In the last thirty years, a new economy and new technologies have found their cradle in California, nurturing a technomentalist culture and giving rise to a special brand of social Darwinism which is expressed well in books like Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control (1992).