Introduction: The Early and Late Stages of Cognitive Capitalism
The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism is an ongoing event structure composed of symposiums, workshops and publications initiated by Chiara Figone of Archive Books and myself through my art project the Office of Aesthetic Occupation. Our intention is to raise consciousness by disseminating information about cognitive capitalism in general and its associated discourses. This volume emanated from a conference held at the Institute of Contemporary Inquiry in Berlin in the spring of 2013. This was preceded by our initial event, co-sponsored with California Institute of the Arts and Art Center School of Design, in collaboration with my colleagues Arne De Boever and Jason Smith in the fall of 2012. The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part Two is being launched, on the occasion of our third happening at Goldsmiths College, University of London in cooperation with Mark Fisher and the Department of Visual Cultures.
The idea of specifically focusing on the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism was inspired by reading the books of a number of authors originally connected with Italian political movements such as Operaismo and Autonomism and included the writers Paolo Virno, Franco “Bifo” Berardi,and Christian Marazzi, amongst others. I was especially inspired by Bifo’s Soul at Work, which I read sitting on my porch in Venice, California, formally a quiet hippie haven on the edge of Los Angeles, where incidentally Google has moved its southern headquarters. (That emigration initiated a mass migration of other high tech corporations producing what is now known as Silicon Beach.) Of course earlier readings of Deleuze and Guattari, especially the Anti-Oedipus and Chaosmosis, provided the idea with extra layers of complexity. I met Bifo when I attended one of his lectures in Berlin and it was there I realized that many of my own ideas registered with some of his core intuitions. Cognitive capitalism, like other forms of capitalism that preceded it, is a contingent formation that subsumes the social, political, economic, psychological and technical relations in which it operates. My interest in materialist ontologies as they related to cultural plasticity and neural plasticity might provide bridging concepts with which to frame anew his Autonomist and Operaist arguments.
What is Cognitive Capitalism and Three Disclaimers?
Cognitive capitalism heralds a mutation of post-Fordist capitalist accumulation with its emphasis on flexploitation of labor processes and flexible specialization, just-in-time production and consumption, rapid acceleration in the pace of product innovation, faster product turnover times, computer and robotic interventions and an increase in the complexity of supply chains.
Pascal Gielen in his essay included here entitled, “A Chronotopy of Post-Fordist Labor,” adds two more conditions of post-Fordism that are relevant in its transition to cognitive capitalism. First what he refers to as de-verticalization. In his model, space and time have lost their vertical dimension and are characterized by superficiality and horizontality resulting in hegemony of a global chronotopy. This condition leads to specialized symptomologies manifesting themselves as lethargy, stress, depression, tunnel vision and burn out. The globally “organized free market economy” manifests itself “as instant bottomlessness or bottomless instantaneity.” (p. 198)
John Roberts, in his essay “The Psychopathologies of the Bourgeoisie,” focuses on the implications of the social and economic hegemony of neoliberalism from the angle of artistic production and distribution. After elucidating the conditions through which the left has maintained their grip on the discursive practices surrounding art theory, he explains how the ‘nuts and bolts’ operations by which art is produced and funded have been taken over by the right. Of the many results of this new condition, the entrepreneurialization of the cultural worker is the most invidious.(p. 60) But he also writes of the positive effect in which simultaneously a dispersionary force of cultural producers operate in defiance of the market. Together these two authors create the platform upon which to construct the next formation: that of cognitive capitalism itself.
Cognitive capitalism is defined by an early phase and a later phase, in which we are presently living. Three disclaimers need to be announced before moving on. Firstly, the actual date(s) of the transition are not clear although some have suggested, for example by Yann Moulier Boutang, that 1975 marked the first pure elaboration of its conditions (Boutang 2008, 9). (Note: Maurizio Lazzarato in his contribution assigns Enzo Rullani as the inventor of the term.) But can one really designate a moment for the emergence of the characteristics of cognitive capitalism with its emphasis on the predominance of knowledge as a commodity, the new nature of conflictual tendencies between capital and labor and the overriding technicity of new forms of computational machinery as it is insinuated directly into society and the workplace? (Vercellone 2007, 13-16)
Could not one instead argue that the so called machinic intelligence of the 19th century factory assembly line, in which the machine itself designates, organizes and informs the intelligence(s) needed to perform specific tasks and that the notion of abstract labor in its various forms of scarcity could be seen as the real roots of cognitive capitalism? Secondly, this designation does not claim that the conditions of the early phase, whenever and wherever they may be designated, have been subsumed by those of the later phase. In fact those contingencies of the initial phase still predominate much of the laboring landscape. Certainly this is true of the way that valorization creates artificial needs and desire leading to over-consumption and debt. What has been referred to as the asymmetry of debt and credit (Lazzarato 2011, 20). Thirdly, in opposition to those theorists whose use of the word cognitive is not meant to denote the brain but rather to refer to information and knowledge and who refuse any appeals to science as positivist I would embrace the position of Sylvère Lotringer who writes, “It would, by the way, be utopian to think one is able to situate oneself outside of these machines of meaning, these machines of science. […] It all depends on what you want to do with them in a perverse way, catching them off guard, quickly snatching them up in order to plug them into something else, onto the socius, or the cosmos.” (Lotringer 2005, 47) As such this project refuses to elevate cognitive neuroscience above cultural studies and the theory of cultural history in the production of the knowledge commons. Rather it understands that the two forms of knowledge creation can be co-determinant and coextensive as well as territorializing and deterritorializing. If we are to understand and deterritorialize the normalizing conditions of the cynical dispositions of cognitive capitalism as it is instituted through the networks of its own faith/truth structure, then we must understand the logics of its terms, mechanism and dispositifs.
Importantly, we must understand what challenges we face today so we can collectively cultivate and facilitate the proper response. For instance by using, producing and implementing a transverse armament of resistant social/cultural/political/psychological dispositifs to counter its overwhelming dispositions; especially when it is linked to the hypercomplex objects of neoliberalism for which it does its bidding.Hopefully this collection is a step in that direction.
Cultural plasticity is a term that denotes the degree to which any particular culture can adapt to objects, things and ideas erupting from outside the logics of its own historically developed institutional regimes and practices. As such its flexibility is tested when its, to use Quentin Meillassoux’s words, extro-scientific potentialities are made explicit, or it utilizes strategies of post-aesthetic poetics as Peter Osborne has intuited or it redistributes sensibility in order to engage forms of materialism that modulate some of its effects. Metanoia as elaborated by Armen Avanessian and Anke Hennig and discussed in this volume by Patricia Reed is another example. (p. 84) One of the underlying themes of this collection is that these mutations of the cultural landscape, for instance built space, has ramifications for analogous and sometimes complimentary changes in the brain.
The development of new possibilities for the elaboration of autobiography which resulted from the invention of the Portapak video tape analogue recording system as developed in Ina Blom’s essay “Video and Autobiography vs. the Autobiography of Video” is a case in point. She delineates how the changing conditions for the production of autobiographies of selfhood in the early stages of new media, for instance in the works of Joan Jonas and Keith Sonnier, simultaneously produced an analogous transformation of the autobiography of video. Her delineation of the autobiography of video and its complimentary effect on the process of subjectivization present a looking glass through which we might observe and understand the technologies of the late 20th century, such as the Internet, CAD software or After Affects, that have followed and have produced transformational effects on the laboring subject.
Karl Lydén delineates the heroic act of parrhēsia in which one speaks the truth freely even it might mean risking ones life as an antidote to the chatter of communicative capitalism and the overwhelming subsumption of image culture. In the transition between the semiotic turn of the late seventies and early eighties and its transition to communicative capitalism in the nineties and now to the cognitive turn in the early 21st
century, knowledge, in its many forms, is the prime force for the processes of subjectivization. As such parrhēsia and truth as truth building for collective reinscription becomes a new form of therapy. Importantly for us here is “The care of the self as expressed in a set of truth acts, and even shaping of the formal conditions for such acts, has to transform into the collective shaping of a communist set of practices.” (p. 129) In the last section of the book a number of authors will use theories of epigenesis, in which the brain’s neuroplastic capacity is sculpted by culture, to understand the importance of such practices like parrhēsia as a therapeutic regimen for the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism.
This book is divided into three parts; 1. Cognitive Capitalism – The Early Phase; 2. The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism and its Responses; 3. The Cognitive Turn.
Section 1:
Cognitive Capitalism – The Early Phase
The early phase of cognitive capitalism is delineated by the following traits. It is constituted by precarious labor in which part-time employment is performed in isolation. The precarious worker is a freelancer and always on call, anxiously awaiting their next assignment, working in multiple time zones simultaneously with clients sometimes halfway around the globe. This is related to its second characteristic that is what Jonathan Crary and others have called the “24/7 work-day,” in which the formal subsumption has given way to real subsumption (Crary 2013, 33). Thirdly, value has been replaced by valorization in which the cost of a product to a consumer depends to a great extent upon the quality of its lived or imagined experience. Valorization is one of the strong links between cognitive capitalism and post-Fordism through its connection to attention which is captured by quick-changing styles and marketing. Behavioral economics and herd behavior join valorization as forces that effect investing practices and market “labile affect.” Immaterial labor in the knowledge economies concerns a form of creativity and virtuosity. Poesis and Praxis become entangled as both do not leave a trace. Artistic labor becomes a key model for labor in general and in cognitive capitalism, which is also called creative capitalism. We will understand as this book unfolds that immaterial labor is not so immaterial as it plays an important role in reconstituting the memory circuits and attention networks of the material brain. Cognitive capitalism has redefined the definition of the consumer from someone who simply shops to someone who produces data as a result of unpaid labor. These activities of the shopper produce data profiles that are bought and sold by data barons. Data barons are the 21st century analogue of the Robber Barons of the industrial revolution. Financialization of capital describes the process whereby worker compensation funds are invested in the market and hedge funds thus tying their future incomes to the success or failure of the companies they work for. This has repercussions on their ability to resist unfair labor practices as any demonstration created to put pressure on the company’s profits may also affect their own profits.
Maurizio Lazzarato in his essay “Does Cognitive Capitalism Exist?” questions the very notion of the cognitive in cognitive capitalism because of its entangled relation to science and cognitivist paradigms. He argues against this approach because “A new subjectivity cannot come from a mere treatment of flows (linguistic, cognitive, economic, etc.), nor can any new knowledge or innovation.” (p. 111) Accordingly cognitive explanations do not have the capacity to reach down to the substructures of inarticulate and undifferentiated understanding. As a result the concept of the cognitive threatens to shield off the possibility of change and rupture. The semiotic, cognitive and discursive systems form a system of extensive crystalized relations, modular systems are extensive while networked systems are intensive, and as such are linked in a chain of narrative linkages. As a remedy to this condition Lazzarato introduces an idea from Guattari called the existential function “which will function as the creative motor of enunciation and subjectivation while being perfectly non-discursive.” (p. 97) He later links this existential function to the ‘aesthetic paradigm’ or the topical art of cartographies. Cartographies are like diagrams and as Gilles Deleuze states in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, “The diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe but it is also a germ of order or rhythm” […] “The diagram or abstract machine is the map of relations between forces, a map of destiny, or intensity, which proceeds by primary non-localizable relation and at every moment passes through every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another.” (Deleuze et al. 2002, 102 and Deleuze et al. 1998, 36) This art of cartographies has the potential to jumpstart the production of a new form of subjectivity in order to combat the stasis that has set in. For as we will argue shortly the productions of this aesthetic paradigm not only mutates the conditions of the sensible, changing it from an extensive to an intensive existential assemblage but its underbelly as well. As such aesthetics through reconfiguring surface representations affects the substructural and tectonic relations releasing new emergent patterns that redefine the explicit cultural landscape and subjectivity as well. This volume suggests that another component to conditions of evolving subjectivity needs to be considered. The evolving map of political-social-psychological-economic and spiritual relations produces a cultural landscape, for instance the designed urban space, that has implications for the brain as well and calls out through a process of interpellation the indeterminate and living variability of its neural plasticity sculpting it anew. (See discussion of Pasquinelli and Kwinter)
Patricia Reed in her contribution describes what Marx called “fictional capital” and realizes that it is imbedded in a network of other machinic fictive phylum that together create the hyperobjects of our virtual world which has implications for the image of thought that attempts to cognitively map it. Is Reed calling attention to a new form of alienation in which human beings are alienated from their own condition of alienation? That in this totally subsumed fictive condition a new form of sublime alienation arises. Alienation in the past was first the result of a fear of nature, which then mutated to a condition of alienation from the incomplete productions of ones own laboring in industrial capital which were abstract and incomplete. In cognitive capitalism what Reed is alluding to and what Arne De Boever later on will further unpack is an “extro-machinic intelligence” created outside humanities episteme. Machinic intelligence today concerns creating laboring platforms for other machinic intelligences, like robots, rather then human beings and is formed by superordinate algorithms and super complex parametric equations. Machinic intelligence today and in the future, think here of ubiquitous computing, is precisely that, referring only to itself, no longer linked to human reason yet stimulating, probing, affecting various contingencies as a puppeteer would influence the actions of his or her puppet. Reed asks if poetics can ‘deregulate’ the conditions of this all-consuming fiction rendering its seamlessness inoperable to expose new surfaces and “uncalcify common sense.”
Section 2:
The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism and its responses
Cognitive capitalism is also characterized by a number of distinct psychopathologies such as attention deficit disorder, panic attacks, depression and autism. The specificities of the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism is a bridging concept between its early and late phases. First they are produced by living in the moment of cognitive capitalism; the anxieties and constant stress produced by the continual need to adapt to the accelerated pace of the new, its loneliness, its precarity and uncertainty, its linkage to surveillance and paranoia. On the other hand they are the product of neurobiological alienation in which the accelerated pace of cultural change, or cultural plasticity, outstrips the ability of the brains neural plasticity to adapt thus creating a lack of adequate perceptual and cognitive processing. In this form of what is called opaque alienation individuals experiences a real psychological syndrome with material sequelae registered as inconsistencies and aberrations in the neurobiological architecture of the brain, which create adaptation difficulties.
They are aware of the deficits and usually search out assistance. Full-blown attention deficit disorder and autism represent this opaque form of neurobiological alienation. I would like to suggest that, like sleep, transparent and opaque forms of neurobiological alienation especially the psychopathologies in their milder forms could be sites of creativity and experience beyond the reach of capitalist intervention. That they are in fact the sites of a recurring freedom! (Neidich 2014, forthcoming) The notion of an alternative way with which to regard the role of psychopathology reminds us of similar ideas of the famous Berlin Neurologists Kurt Goldstein’s in which illness, as Matteo Pasquinelli reminds us, is a normative process that creates other possibilities for creativity and understanding, conditions that may have consequences for the image of thought. We will return to the implications of his work in the last section of this book.
The authors of this collection give new life to the concept of psychopathologies. This kind of freedom, erupting as it does from the bowels of power’s grip, undermines it, tethers many of these essays together. For Yann Moulier Boutang a pattern emerges in history in which melancholia follows the defeat of the hope for radical transformation. He asks whether this sort of B-phase of depression follows the manic phase that greeted the information and computer age. This kind of regret and longing for modernism erupted from a realization that the utopian aspirations of a new connected world were now being supervised by a new form of beekeeper who was monitoring our moves and selling it to the highest bidder. But this is where Boutang’s pessimism ends. Far from the ashes of a new world of technological promise a phoenix appeared. With it emerged a business model that required more freedoms and creative impulses to keep it going. Instead of melancholia one is faced with the burnout. Finally, “Primitive accumulation of cognitive capitalism however is a much more complicated task. Subjection of the forces of invention needs to compete with an unavoidable condition; that of extracting value from the living. A much higher degree of liberty and socialization is required if you want to capture innovation and collective intelligence, which is by far the most valuable and hegemonic part of value today.” (p. 157)
For Arne De Boever, psychopathologies—and specifically panic, an overlooked psychopathology of cognitive capitalism—needs an extro-scientific apparatus to create forms of therapeutic fiction to deal with the pseudo-surrealistic conditions of the new economy and the machinic algorithms that control it and that constitute (in De Boever’s reading) a version of what Quentin Meillassoux calls the “great outdoors.” What is criticized in De Boever’s article is the ways in which human beings, born from inside an overwhelming nature, create a second nature as a form of protection from their fear of being overwhelmed. In this way, they at least still have linkages to nature through their self-actualization (which is, all the same, a kind of immunization against overwhelming nature). However, with the alienation of nature resulting from our present contemporary and algorithmic condition, a machinic intelligence develops outside what human beings can imagine with the common-sense tools they have at hand. This is the situation, delineated in De Boever’s article through a reading of Robert Harris’ novel The Fear Index, of the computer virus gone wild. Under this sublime condition, which in the 21st century has become the order of the day, fear is pointless; panic, and the correlationism it springs from, only adds oil to the fire. Could this hark back to what Ina Blom means when she states that “human seeming quasi-subjects taking on specifically human temporalities and forms of cognition also alert us to the tenuous nature of all such identifications”? What can be literature’s role in this kind of situation, in particular in view of the criticism that all narrative is correlationist?
Two kinds of pathology are endemic, according to Pascal Gielen, of cognitive capitalism. First as we mentioned is this chronotopy of bottomless instantaneity. The distinction between past and future is consumed by a bottomless present. Trauma is no longer something that needs to be uncovered from the unconscious as it can be recovered from the endless streams of omniscient data. Every trauma is recorded and continually circulating in the endless nomadic dance that is the Internet. There are no any longer any defenses with which to hide the past: everyone is exposed 24/7. “Our digital lives are evolving as a public portfolio.” (p.199) We need what he calls a “techno-mental” ecology to deal with these new conditions. (p.199) In this way he reconfirms Ina Blom’s above statement about the repercussions of new media on the autobiographical self. Gielen’s second psychopathology is related to a kind of hyper precariousness of exchangeability. Thus in a hyperconnected world in which one is always on call 24/7, a hyperconnected hysteria emerges. Hysteria in its 19th century guise was constituted through, according to the logics of psychoanalysis a relation between the contents of the symbolic unconscious and its outward manifestation as an improbable paralysis of a limb or blindness. In its 21st century form it is rather substituted for with a kind of hysterical fear of an impending precarious loss of ones connection to the web itself. The interior chambers of Charcot’s Salpêtrière Hospital demonstration chamber has now gone global and with it the fear of not being on call, not being wanted by the collective, being totally disconnected.
In his essay “The Only Place to Hide? The Art and Politics of Sleep in Cognitive Capitalism” Alexei Penzin once more confirms what Jonathan Crary in his book 24/7 suggests that sleep is the only natural barrier to an insistent non-stop laboring. But for him the philosopher must be a night watchman guarding the contents of sleep. Importantly, what was a model of sleep disruption in post-Fordism, so called insomnia, is substituted for by the much more dangerous sleep apnea in which respiratory and cardiovascular disruptions can endanger life itself.
Section 3:
The CognitiveTurn in Cognitive Capitalism
The later phase of cognitive capitalism is delineated by its ‘cognitive turn’in which labor itself is predominately mental in nature and is located in the ‘factory of the brain.’In a world in which the predominate forms of labor are intellectual and service oriented, the machinery of the brain takes on added importance as a locus of capitalistic adventurism and speculation. As such various interdisciplinary approaches have been engaged to understand its logics.
Matteo Pasquinelli’s essay, “The Power of Abstraction and Its Antagonism: On Some Problems Common to Contemporary Neuroscience and Theory of Cognitive Capitalism,” brings forward many important issues that deal with what is meant by the cognitive turn. Like the basic conception of this book he traces the relation of the mind and body and world back to the German notion of the ‘Lebensphilosophie,’ in which the living was rarely detached from the dimension of cognition or abstraction. Following the model of Kurt Goldstein it becomes his central condition for understanding both biopower and abstraction. “Going deeper in this genealogy, the power of abstraction will be disclosed at the original core that inspired the paradigm of biopower. It is not an exaggeration to affirm that neuroplasticity (as understood by Goldstein) was the original inspiration of the notion of biopower.”
Crucial to our understanding of the relation between biopower and neuropower is presented in a quote by Elizabeth Grosz with which Pasquinelli begins his essay, “Life cleaves to matter, elaborating and contracting matter, bringing to life the virtualities within the material in unknown directions.” (p. 275) But as Catherine Malabou has noted plasticity’s native land is the field of art. Plasticity characterizes the art of modeling and in the first instance, the art of sculpture. The plastic arts are those whose central aim is the articulation and development of forms; among these are counted architecture, drawing, and painting (Malabou 2005, 8). Key for us here are the notions of bringing to life the virtualities locked deep within the materiality in unknown directions and the idea of the plastic arts whose central aim is the articulation and development of forms. The plastic arts when they are delinked from commercial enterprise create a multiplicity of forms and variation. This variation is coupled to an inherent variation in the brain. As Olaf Sporns states, “The indeterminancy of the information content of world objects and events is matched by the structural variability of animal nervous systems, at many levels of organization.” (Sporns 1994, 5)
This variation of the brain is also a key component for what the neuroscientist Gerald Edelman calls the primary repertoire. This primary repertoire is the brain one is born with at birth. It is the result of a contribution of each of the biological parent’s genetic contribution to the child genetic make up and the events incurred upon the brain during pregnancy, such as, the effect of starvation, drug addiction, illness and the events of the birth event itself. As these events are particular to each individual each brain at birth is very different from each one another. Through its relational coupling, not correlation, with the unspecified world of objects its variability is sculpted by those consistent relations or features characteristic and essential for the animals survival. This is the key in which to understand Grosz last part of the statement, “Life emerges as a becoming thought or-as a consciousness, a becoming-brain.” Importantly it is a political becoming. For this becoming is the site of modern day capitalisms interventionist tactics. For how that matter is sculpted details the ontogeny of the neural zoe as it becomes the neural bios. Pasquinelli’s understands that “abstraction is intended also as the power of differentiation with respect to neural matter, the power to produce further bifurcation of information and perception perceptual flows” is key to this ongoing ontogeny. (p. 277)
Sanford Kwinter elaborates upon this further as it relates to architecture in his text “Neuroecology: Notes Toward a Synthesis.” Following the work of Bruce Wexler, incidentally a speaker from our first conference in Los Angeles, he reiterates the role of epigenesis in sculpting the brain in the infant and then proceeds to elaborate the second phase in the process occurring in the adult phase, “the focus shifts toward reversing the action of the sculptural knife, so that the shaping now of the external world becomes the main priority, in order to bring about, or simply extend, what I call the dynamic sympathetic mutuality with reality.” (p. 328) In other words adults modify the world to coincide with the in relation to the new contingencies of their neurobiologically modeled self-image. Or do they? For importantly each successive generations neural architecture is sculpted anew. The inherent variability and difference that is the function of the brains’ primary repertoire samples the pluripotential cultural plasticity according to different generational logics entangled and deranged as they are by the social, political, economic, psychic, and technological that delineate it. This leads Kwinter to make the concluding statement, “For every maturing organism notes, almost without delay, the unavoidable non-match between its internal (rearing) environment and the persistent elements of those of the previous (parental) generation’s, and hence seek almost immediately to impose upon it images, shapes, relationships whose effects will better correspond to, and generate, the desired internal states that have become existentially necessary to their intuitions of freedom and well-being. This is a profoundly creative as well as destructive and aggressive act.” (p. 329)
Liss C. Werner’s text “Towards A*cognitive Architecture: A Cybernetic Note Beyond – or the Self-informing Machinery” takes this idea one step further and proposes what she refers to as a ‘A*cognitivist architecture,’ “Architecture in a cyberbiological framework embedding its construct within the mind/body phenomenon immanent in social environments.” (p. 296) The world we live in is no longer defined by static Euclidean geometries and rather the result of multiplexed, distributed and form finding algorithms that have mutated the conditions of built space as a site defined by calculus. Think here of Otto Frei’s German Pavillon, Montreal World’s Fair, 1967. The crux of A*cognitivist Architecture, a product of digitisation and the Internet, lies in the intensity and amount of cognitive capital highly dependent upon it in perpetuating collective brainpower that is all but reduced to aesthetics only. It is about understanding the logic of becoming form, breeding forms, and understanding form as a result of communication processes and the ability to decode within a system, rather than form for forms sake. Cognition is extended: the world and the inhabiting organism constitute a single system. Their differences are fuzzy and nondescript. What this means for the brain is that in a world of nonlinear, distributed intensive systems the brain is also a nonlinear and distributed network system.
Charles T. Wolfe adds another dimension to this problem of how this environment might become interiorized as Lev Vygotsky states in his Mind and Society, “What takes place is what we have called internalization: the external sign that school children require has been transformed into a an internal sign … produced by the adult as a means of remembering.” (Vygotsky 1930) As Wolfe surmised this process is another key to unlock the mechanisms by which the environment can sculpt not only the individual but also the group. To do this he utilizes Balwinian Evolution or the Baldwin Effect.
Because of the importance of these claims in understanding the “cognitive turn” in cognitive capitalism I want to look at this idea more closely. As I show in my essay “Computational Architecture and the Statisticon” although neural plasticity is an important component of how culture might sculpt the brain it sometimes it is not enough. An interesting example is what is referred to as the “neuronal recycling hypothesis” (Dehaene 2004, 141-142). I explain this construct in detail in my own text so there is no reason to do so here except to say that reading popped into the cultural repertoire about 6000 years ago with the Sumerian Tablets and most evolutionary biologist believe that there has been too little time for genetic evolutionary factors to have played a role in the explanation of how we now have areas of the brain that light up during reading when we are being scanned in an MRI machine. (Dahaene 2004, 141-142.) Two complimentary theories could explain this. First is that this area called the Visual Word Form Area, located in the posterior brain, is the product of neuroplastic modulation from the pressures of the symbolic environment upon it as suggested by Terrence Deacon. In this case a given afferent message will cause long term stabilization of the neurophysiology of a given set of synapses that regulate each other forming a maximally intergrated and efficient network while others will regress.” (Changeux et al. 1993, 376) A second explanation would be that certain predispositions predetermined in the anatomy of that area make it the likely place for reading to be processed as suggested by Stanislas Dehaene. He points out that there is an area in macaques called the Inferior Temporal Area that does very similar things. That it is related to the Visual Form Area and is most likely its analogue. That in fact over generations the Inferior Temporal Area evolved to become the Visual Word Form Area through a series of small steps in which the primary area sculpted reading in accordance with its proclivities so that it would fit its already elaborated neurobiological architecture. Over time language would adapt itself.
This is a parsimonious explanation Together they create the dance that is so much apart of this volume between genetic and epigenetic factors. But there is one more key to this and that is what Wolfe alerts us to. That is to say Baldwinian Evolution (Deacon 2003). As we saw previously the brains of humans are highly variable. First, during human development as a result of different genetic contributions from the mother and father but also because of events occurring during pregnancy and subsequently as a result of very different events occurring during their lives especially early on during what are referred to as critical periods. This variability gives certain members of a population different adaptive capacities for the wide variety of changes that they might encounter in the environment: reading in this case being one. Some members of the population could adapt better and take advantage of what reading provided in a broader cultural context. This is where reading comes in and Wolfe quotes Peter Godfrey-Smith. Importantly, “The population will then have the chance to reproduce mutations that cause organisms to exhibit the new optimal behavioral profile without the need for learning. Selection will favor these mutants, and in time the behaviors which once had to be learned will be innate.” (p. 252) Could architecture and art provide the abstract contingencies? He then goes on to say, that is significant for us here that the Baldwin effect is very close, in fact, to the promise of the social brain, namely that “the human cerebral cortex [is] an organ of civilization in which are hidden boundless possibilities.” (p. 252)
This volume embarks upon a journey that is now in its beginning stages. To confront a cynical materialism in which research on the complexities of the brain are being used by neoliberal and capitalism formations to produce a normalized citizen consumer. It is my hope that the knowledge developed in these various events will begin a search for new methods with which to confront this trend or at least to slow it down. We need to produce an emancipatory materialism in the world and in the brain too!
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