Introduction
This third volume of The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism results from the deliberations that took place during two different symposiums. Firstly, Mark Fisher and myself collaborated at the Department of Visual Culture, Goldsmiths College, with a conference entitled The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part Three: The Cognitive Turn. The second was an event in March 2015 that I organized in conjunction with the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles entitled Noise and the Possibility of a Future. This book fortuitously combines elements of both programs for reasons that will unfold.
The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism. Part 3: The Cognitive Turn investigates many of the concepts introduced in the first two volumes. Here too we explore the early and late phases of cognitive capitalism, weaving in its effects upon the psyche. The early phase concerned the new conditions of labor in the early, heady days of the burgeoning information and knowledge economies that led through post-Fordism to cognitive capitalism. It’s worth noting just a few of these conditions: precarious labor, the importance of communication in the workplace, flexible specialization and just in time production, accelerated product innovation, and the complexification of the supply chain. Additionally, we could speak of the real subsumption of more aspects of life within capitalism, the de-verticalization of time and space, valorization via cognitive labor and an increased financialization of capitalism. The later phase of cognitive capitalism brings an understanding that the industrial factory of the 19th and 20th centuries—although still important sites of production—has been and will continue to be subsumed by the mind and brain as sites of wealth production. Data mining, Facebook and Instagram likes, software production, apps and the companies that develop and produce them are the new sources of wealth in our contemporary society. Our lives have becomes sites of exchange twenty-four hours a day seven days a week, 365 days a year in the distributed network conditions of this new economy. Valorization through cognitive labor is a co-dependent phenomenon elaborated through the combinatory effects of a branded and produced cybernetic milieu interfacing with mind/brain assemblages. Productive materialization is dependent upon simulated desire and is completed in the minds’ eye as a result of mental labor. The Nike shoe produced in the Philippines on an assembly line becomes an element engaged first as a materialized object and thing, which gains specialized agency through being entangled within experience. Once reified it partakes in performative gestures incorporated as part of the creative narratives generated and attended to in the minds eye. These scenarios finally take up residency in the brain’s long-term memories storage facility awaiting their reactivation. Part of cognitive marketing strategies involve exhuming these from the memories embedded in the unconscious, to make them conscious again to be played with inside working memory. In the language of the attention economy in post-Fordism, attention is created by cybernetic machines that subsume the televisual by creating even more sensational images, such as found in virtual platforms, and then harvesting the data generated. In cognitive capitalism that attention is the result of frontal lobe mechanisms first labeling incoming sense data as salient and then attending to it internally in the minds eye. At this time the data generated by these maneuvers is yet beyond the capacity of the Statisticon to retrieve and use it however in the near future with the advent of brain computer interfaces, cortical implants and neural dust, the day is not far off when our very own thoughts, before they even are actualized as performances, might generate data. (Neidich, Warren. “Computational Architecture and the Statisticon.” In ed. Neidich, Warren. The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism. Part Two. Berlin: Archive Books, 2014, 335.)
In such an economy it is a necessity for capitalism to increase the capacity and efficiency of the brain and mind—similar to Taylorism, and its scientific engineering of bodies and actions in the factory of the 19th and 20th century—to discover ways to optimize cognitariat mental labor. In the cognitive turn the site of capitalist optimization is displaced from the formal regulations of an existential world, its so-called distributions of the sensible like repetition. Instead, capitalist optimization is in consort with the proclivities operative in the brain and mind such as binding and attention. Taylorism is subsumed by what has been termed “Hebbinism” named after the famous Canadian neurobiologist D. O. Hebb. Hebb’s rule constituted the first understanding of how neural plasticity could be tethered by synchronicity to neural efficiency and long-term potentiation. (Sejnowski, Terrence J. and Tesauro, Gerald. “The Hebb Rule for Synaptic Plasticity: Algorithms and Implementations.” In eds. Byrne, J. and Berry, W.O. Neural Models of Plasticity. New York, NY: Academic Press, 1989, 94) The efficiencies of neural plastic elements across a variety of chemically mediated synapses incorporated into millions if not billions of neural elements are sculpted through the brains relationship to what C.H. Waddington called epigenetic landscapes. (Huang, Sui. “The molecular and mathematical basis of Waddington’s epigenetic landscape: A framework for post-Darwinian Biology.” Bioessays 34, 2 (February 2011), 149–57). Modifying effector gene expression produces customized proteins that materialize as different phenotypes. Institutional regimes, utilizing cyber-optimization-schemes, produce neuro-materially engaged citizen consumers intra-generationally as well as trans-generationally. This results from synchronized and institutionally derived exogram and engram assemblages (Neidich, 2014). These exogram-engram assemblages echo the work of Bernard Stiegler’s idea of originary technicity, which claims that humans are constituted by technology through an ongoing process of interiorization of what is exterior in the form of tools. Cinema and global mass media are, for instance, such technical temporal objects. (Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, 3: Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). Engrams are memories stored in the head whilst exograms are forms of memory and sometimes memory processes outsourced to devices like iPhone, which, if they occurred inside the skull, we would designate as cognitive. However exograms such as maps, hieroglyphics, or musical scores do not share parity with engrams—internal forms of memory systems—as they are different in terms of their inscription, complexity, changeability etc. The term complementarity underscores these differences. But an exogram-engram assemblage takes into account bidirectional translation, concordant ontogenies, and emergence. Modulating these concordances through designing affordances embedded in designed space on Internet platforms, which are smoothly linked to the brain’s own innate operating conditions, is the latest manifestation of sensorial, perceptual and cognitive modeling. However one must keep in mind that the combination of exograms and their concordant endgrams, or vice versa, into complexes creates assemblages that by their very nature are more powerful than the sum of their parts.
Institutional regimes recuperate not only the avant-garde tendencies of artistic production and its material effects in the cultural milieu but the material brain. That is, its dendrites and synapses and its brain processes such as oscillatory potentials and reentry. The Operaist and continental philosophical orientation of the arguments both in the first two volumes and the current one, add a critique to a quite limited and self-reflexive argument waged in neuroscientific literature about the effects of the environment on the brain like the theories of synaptic stabilization by Jean-Pierre Changeux, Neural Darwinism by Gerald Edelman, developmental system theory (DST) by Susan Oyama, niche construction theory by Kevin Leland, neuroconstructivism by Steven Quartz and Terry Sejnowski, probabilistic epigenesis by Gilbert Gottlieb, and recently the theory of Material Engagement proposed by Lambros Malafouris—a version that is included in this volume. What we began to understand through this critique was that this epigenesis, the effect on the environment on brain development, was not only of neurobiological import but of political importance as well. This discussion had been brought forth earlier by a number of authors but was popularized in Catherine Malabou’s book What Should We Do With Our Brain? (Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do with Our Brain? New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008); (Wexler, Bruce. Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology, and Social Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); (Neidich, Warren. “Neurobiopolitics of Global Conscousness.” Sarai Reader 06, Turbulence, http://sarai.net/sarai-reader-06-turbulence/). In this book, she called for self-constructed or collectively constructed emancipatory cultural milieus, as a means for political resistance. These could compete with those that tended instead to restrict and normalize our neural plastic potential. Malabou writes: “Can the description of brain plasticity escape the insidious command of the New World Order? Can it introduce something like a resistance within this very order?” (Op. cit., 2008, 54) In other words that we might create environments that emancipate and complexify both our brains and our own selves. In this third volume the role of art in the production of objects, things and their relations—their so-called materialist import—along with their material consequences in altering brain processes forms the central core of a political ethics.
This is where the role of noise as a disruptive force acting in and upon the cultural milieu becomes important. While this statement echoes idealist bourgeois proclamations of the past, I am wagering that such disruption might act to deregulate not just distributions of sensibility, but brain processes as well attempting to perceive and cognate them. How might noise be imported inside the skull through exogram-engram assemblages or epigenetic relations? For Stiegler, these might instead create an agrammatization rather than his purported grammatization (Bradley, Arthur. Originary Technicity: The Theory of Technology from Marx to Derrida. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Might it leave traces on the material brain as neural disruption? Remembering the sounds of a noise performance is quite difficult. (In fact it required the invention of sound recording devices as a preliminary condition before the
Futurists could make their case for it as a real aesthetic device.) Today, noise is becoming an important component of mainstream rock and roll like Nirvana, Radiohead, and, in its more extreme context, Throbbing Gristle where it can piggy back upon guitar riffs to create material analogues in the ear of the
mind.
In the conference Noise and The Possibility of a Future, convened at the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles in March of 2015, noise was considered not just as simply a category of sound art, performance or music but as a trans-disciplinary apparatus that could investigate race and gender issues. Noise in this context illustrates its power as a cultural modifier operating at the level of time, space and affect. Noise, as we shall see in the present volume, unleashes the variability latent in the cultural milieu that couples to variable and degenerate networks in the brain. In my own essay “The Brain without Organs: Ayahuasca and the Theory of Neural Regression,” this unleashing of variation is key to coupling to latent and alternate sets of neurobiological potentialities. (Neidich, Warren. “The Brain without Organs: Ayahuasca and the Theory of Neural Regression.” In The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism. Part 3. Berlin: Archive Books, 2017).
Just to briefly sketch out the organization of the present volume. The book is divided into the following sections: 1. Automated Media and Collective Customization 2. The Quandary of Neural Plasticity 3. Plastic Materiality: The Instability of the Milieu 4. Psycho-Affective Effects 5. Noise and the Possibility of a Future? 6. Artistic Responses.
In the first section “Automated Media and Collective Customization” the authors delve into the relationship between the technological apparatuses at the heart of our information economy and their relationships to labor and the brain/mind.
Kerstin Stakemeier begins this section with her essay “Abstract Breakdowns, Some theses concerning the actualities of Cognitive Capitalism.” The essence of the traumatic evolution of abstract labor practices concerns the valorization of value. Abstract labor transforms the holism of artisanal crafts into a series of fragmented activities on an assembly line that are abstracted—as we know from Modern Times—into a series of ludicrous and boring tasks generated by the desire for the optimization of labor time. On the other hand abstract labor is also delineated by what is referred to as the added value created by the laboring effort itself in its multiple manifestations that can all be assimilated as money units—time means money. In cognitive capitalism she draws attention to another crisis produced by the mutation of formal subsumption into real subsumption. The workspace is no longer limited to the factory but is now everywhere and all the time. Stakemeier wants to know whether this new condition in which immaterial labor may operate is a crisis for the synthesis of capital or rather a crisis of synthesis of those very faculties that perform the cognitive abstractions of 21st century labor. What is the definition of abstraction in the wake of this transition of immaterial labor to cognitive labor when individuation becomes intellectualization? Does this failure of synthesis generate the new forms of alienation of cognitive capitalism manifested as the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism? The author finds an answer by delving into the world of the financialization of capital specifically its reliance on derivatives to propose a crisis in what we understand to be related to surplus value and whether the worker is any longer a necessary component of its definition. This raises the question as to whether the worker is dispensable as a result of machinic intelligence being entirely machinic. As Stakemeier writes: “Does the perpetual crisis of financialization render obvious the irreplaceability of human labor for the production of surplus value, the inability of capital to contain it? […] [O]r does this crisis result from the necessity to put into question the role of labor as a central category of capitalist value production and political insurgency (as Lazzarato has done)?” If so, what could this mean for machinic intelligence assumed to be subsumed by the machinery of laboring in its various manifestations as we move from Fordism to post-Fordism and now cognitive capitalism especially within the attention economy? Complicating this is that cognitive capitalism is also delineated by the overwhelming effect of high stakes derivatives, autonomous in and to themselves. Does the term machinic intelligence become obsolete in its new absolute technicity? Might this be because its very parameters—dependent upon the intelligence of the worker to which it was inextricably linked—are nullified? Perhaps what Deleuze and Guattari call machinic surplus labor may be important here? “In this new productive context, surplus value is not long produced by reterritorializing human activity under a striated space-time but by integrating cybernetic machines together with the cognitive dimension of labour.” (Bueno, Claudio Celis. The Attention Economy. Labour, Time and Power in Cognitive Capitalism. London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017, 164).
Luciana Parisi’s “Automated Cognition and Capital” expands on the role of algorithms in cognitive capitalism. She explores the many facets of the capitalization of intelligence through its roles in interacting with affective responses in order to neutralize reason and in creating an affective form of machinic intelligence. This is an intelligence no longer abiding by linear and hierarchical modes of rational thought but in contrast one that is affective and pre-conscious. This algorithmic form of affective rationality knows what we want before we ourselves know it. Thus, it preempts thought and the threat of random contingency and closes down our self-generated learned modes of prognostication and the self-awareness that it requires. Parisi writes:
“In other words, the computational harnessing of chance is no longer carried out through an application of a pre-constituted formal logic. Instead, the algorithmic capture of uncertainty (i.e., unknown quantities of un-patterned data) involves the speed of non-conscious connection that avoids the hierarchy of calculation and introduces an immediacy of decision able not only to forecast the future, but also to anticipate (and thus foreclose) chance.”
Importantly, these abilities of non-conscious cognition have become part of a roving fixed capital itself. Parisi argues that through branding and marketing this automated machine of capital—that is geared to affective recuperation—has entered directly into the brains neural plasticity. Through an analysis of the movie Her she understands the capacity of these algorithms to create an epigenetic landscape for the capture of fabricated moods, states and attitudes. That capacity is endless and in Her, the AI Samantha’s cognitive capacity or cognitive mapping is beyond that of her somewhat restricted human complement of Theodore Twombly. After all, at the conclusion of the movie we find that Samantha is having relationships with thousands of partners simultaneously. Her updated OS program—like those used in on-line banking, what has been termed robotic phase transition—is a product of algorithm to algorithm self-production without the need of human intelligence. Essential here is that algorithmic automation has fundamentally been seen to be a Turing discrete machine that functioned through iteration.
The recent increasing volume of non-comprehensible and incomputable data interacting on-line has revealed that patternless data is now essential to on-line processing. Quoting Gregory Chaitin’s idea of experimental axiomatics, Parisi underscores the value of computational excess. This, provides an opening for an optimistic turn in her argument. Because if in fact complete computation is never possible, then neither is perfect pre-emption. Parisi writes that it may “give us the opportunity to rethink the conceptual structure based on deductive logic in terms of a structure imbued with information randomness for which information already expands, extends and exceeds the fixity of capital, and the instrumentalization of mechanized reason on behalf of capital. Perhaps this is what Negri’s emphasis on the emancipatory gesture of new forms of fixed capital may imply.” And if this is the essence of fixed capital—which, as we saw earlier in her argument is tethered to the brain’s neural plasticity—then what of the neural materialism it sculpts?
Anthony Fung and Scott Lash in their essay “Cognitive Capitalism and the Creative Industries” analyze China’s creative industries—including the comic, animation, music, film and game industries—in order to investigate the relations of cognitive capitalism in its role as puissance, a form of creative and generative power, rather then as a form of power that dominates. Mining the works of Gabriel Tarde (via Maurizio Lazzarato) they understand this innovative power as psychological and dynamic one. In this schema, individuals as monads use methods of self-organization to complexify and increase the potentiality inherent in networks to create negentropic effects. This negentropy—a restructuring and reordering that works against systemic entropy—produces positive externalities as a side effect. In the end the differences implied in individuals acting collectively produce the cerveau collectif or collective brain, which in opposition to Émile Durkheim’s notion of ‘conscience collective’ operates through intensive modes of communication.
In China—with the exceptions of the medium sized film companies, the art market and gaming industry—the government prefers the top-down dominance of biopower manifested as an inordinate effect of the state and the market governance. This stifles creativity in contradistinction to the pollinating mode of puissance operating at the level of the commons and the innovation it generates. Importantly it is the commons that creates the cerveau collectif or collective brain. This is a brain that is organized and elaborated in a more complex way and thus more capable of addressing the conditions of our contemporary world. The cerveau collectif has more capacity for intensive flows of information, precarious labor, constant need for updating, and successful adaptation to a constantly changing environment. Such a collective brain addresses the need for innovative thought processes. In conclusion they argue: “However, for genuine collective brain formation, you need to be a little more hands-off. Rigidity breeds negative externalities. Too much state control, like too much market, is incapable of feeding the collective brain.”
Bronac Ferran’s poetic work “Neuromorphobia (hypehypehyper)” mines the literature of Philip K. Dick and William S. Burroughs to take us on a journey into a materialist nightmare of brain control first occurring in science fiction to reappear later in scientific journals and our daily lives. Additionally, the text investigates a kind of neural optimism based on the brain’s proclivity for randomness and its linkage to quantum mechanics, the singing of microtubules and wacky morphic resonances. As her journey unfolds, what one appreciates is that this essay itself performs a kind of table of contents for this third volume of cognitive capitalism, elucidating the issues of neural plasticity, brain implants, neural law and ethics, and predictive algorithms.
The next section entitled “The Quandary of Neural Plasticity” reintroduces the idea of neural plasticity as being active rather than passive. It understands plasticity as an action one makes upon the external milieu or culture that has ramifications for the way the brain is in turn modulated.
In his essay “Plastic Brain,” Dimitris Papadopoulos takes his cues from theories of embodiment found in neuroscience and developmental science—as well as psychology—to lay a foundation for his later description of the hackable brain. This is in order to address questions of difference through foregrounding the “socio-cultural making of body and experience.” He understands the topos as a space of interaction, conflict and negotiation where our “brain-body” is reshaped and remade. He refuses the hylomorphic tendencies of a priori individuation found in computational accounts and instead embraces connectionist theories that understand a malleable brain matter with emergent qualities. The latter allow actors to create activities that shape their own non-linearly constituted brains. Following Developmental Systems Theory he defines embodiment as a process that transforms social and material realities that are in flux. Instead, embodiment creates “different levels of organization, genetic, neural, organismic, environmental/social-combinations which were not present before.” But Papadopoulos also realizes that this possibility for transformation comes with a price. Power as control, in opposition to its emancipatory potential, can also be focused on this plasticity as an embodied form of modification of the brain’s material existence. He introduces the term ecomorphs to describe stable configurations of ecological-developmental influences that act upon the genetic code with consequences for a regulated institutional derived process of individuation. In this context he introduces the term “hackable brain-body” that like the term hacking constitutes a possibility for liberation from post-liberal aggregates that act to stabilize the brains’ processes of becoming.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi in his essay “Neuro-plasticity Beyond Adaptation Toward Morphogenesis” takes the argument presented by Papadopoulos one step further. He analyzes the means through which semio-capitalism has captured cognitive activities by inserting algorithmically generated automatic procedures into the process of thought itself.
According to Berardi this poses a major threat to the process of subjectivation: “Automation is taking the place of political decision and the word ‘governance’ refers essentially to this automation of data interpretation and decision: it implies the end of politics, democracy, and conscious decision-making, and the establishment of an automatic chain of logical procedures intended to replace conscious voluntary choices.” This flawed determinism misses the aleatory composition of life with its multiplicity of possibilities. Crucial here for Berardi—echoing in this Jean-Pierre Changeux, Catherine Malabou, Bruce
Wexler, and Dimitris Papadopoulos—is the neuroplastic dilemma. This is the sense in which neuroplasticity is double edged. On the one hand it is neuro-emancipatory, yet on the other it forecasts a project of neuro-subjection: the google strategy. Importantly, he asks the following question with a certain ambiguity: “Can we govern this neuro-evolution?”
Anna Munster in her essay “Distended Nervous System: Networked Media and its Neurological Turns” critiques two aspects of what has been termed the neurological turn that delineates our network society in cognitive capitalism. First, following the work of Nicholas Carr, she explains how networked media effects the material brain—especially its neural plasticity—thus enfeebling its capacity for thinking deeply. In this first account neuroscientists, journalists, and commentators point to how the ill effects of computer gaming, Internet, and screens in general are changing the brain and in many cases debilitating it. Secondly, she addresses what is referred to as neuro-perception in which specially designed algorithms—like Google’s Prediction API tool—preempt our thoughts and feelings about things before we ourselves can and do. Echoing Berardi, she writes: “All those ‘we recommend’ emails, those ‘like’ icons and those privacy settings we forget to activate are harbingers of a ‘neuro-perceptual’ soft apparatus that will lay claim to know what we want to think, where we want to go, what we want to purchase before we do.” And later, quoting Eric Schmidt about Google’s intentions, she writes that “In five years, Google will have built ‘the product I’ve always wanted to build—we call it ‘serendipity,’’ he said, adding that it will ‘tell me what I should be typing’ and later, ‘I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions… They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.’”
Marina Vishmidt’s “Script Praxis” was used in her performance at PRAXES Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin, on May 10, 2015, in the context of Cycle 4 of Chris Evans’ exhibition HAT. The script was created for a speech attributed to Fan of Exaggeration (2007), one of the works in the exhibition and ‘spoken’ by it. In contradistinction to Lambros Malafouris, she understands theories of mind not necessarily as means to embark on a positive ontology of existential apparatuses and their analogues in the neural substrate but an opposite dark ontology of ‘petro fluxes power death.’ Or, as is stated in the text, “The extended mind remains both a new default (mode) and a series of striated price points.” This is an awareness of the capability for new forms of subjectivity as an auto-identification and form of subject building not simply constituted by progress, forward movement, betterment, amelioration, maximal efficiency, and optimization. Also in play are diminishment, stagnation, hindrance, deterioration, worsening, failure, decline, and retrogression. All of the latter find ways to inhabit the deepest recesses of our ontological materiality.
The central proposition of my essay “The Brain without Organs: Ayahuasca and the Theory of Neural Regression” is that Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s idea put forth in Anti-Oedipus of the Body without Organs is no longer adequate as a theory of resistance. In our age of cognitive capitalism, in which the brain and mind are the new factories of the 21st century and the laboring body in industrial capitalism has been subsumed by the laboring brain/mind in cybernetic capitalism, a new construct of resistance is required.
The proletariat is being slowly displaced by the cognitariat, or cognitive laborer, in tertiary economies especially those predominate in the countries of the north and west. My essay is divided into five parts and introduces the notion of the Brain without Organs or a brain understood as free of the constraints of normative organization. It is a becoming brain.
In the first section, I describe the way that Ayahuasca, but noise and art also, could unleash the power of variation as a place for oestranenie expression and for the emergence of estranged habits of perception through awakening electrically unspecified or silent synapses. In the second section, I delineate the process through which the Brain without Organs is materialized, deterritorializing and reterritorializing two theories of neuroscience to do so. The third section will introduce the ideas of neural deregulation and regression. “In other words, the Neural bios or the politicized brain is returned to its natural state, before its reorganization, as the, so-called Neural Zoe” (Neidich). In the fourth section, I will describe the way the prefrontal cortex modulates top-down and bottom-up information flows. I will suggest that this model of the prefrontal cortex echoes that of the society at large, in which power in the society of control is not concerned with the process of individualizing or normalizing, as it was in its disciplinary phase, but rather with modulating populations of multiplicities and potentialities immanent in the neurobiological substrate as networks of conscious and unconscious memories ready to be suppressed or enlisted. Furthermore, I suggest that many of the capacities of the Frontal Brain—like attention, working memory, prognostication, and creativity—are necessary for success in the new economy. Finally, I will describe Ayahuasca’s role in emancipating the brain from the executive control of the prefrontal cortex.
The next section “Plastic Materiality: The Instability of the Cultural Milieu” mines the work of Gilbert Simondon to understand the ever changing conditions of the milieu and its effects upon the material psyche.
Lambros Malafouris in his essay “Metaplasticity and the Human Becoming: Principles of Neuroarchaeology” offers important insights into neuro-materialism. These insights arise through a productive trans-disciplinary approach between archaeology and neuroscience. This approach is also significant as a model through which Berardi’s neural dilemma and Papadopoulos’s neural hacking might be better understood. Neuroarchaeology has two motives that ultimately delineate the bidirectional, mutual constitution of culture, brain and genes. First it explains the long-term developmental mechanisms of the synergetic co-evolution of the brain with culture and the material world. Secondly, it teases out the unsteady nature and meaning of cultural difference. He adopts the term “metaplas-
ticy” from neuroscience where it refers to the emergent high-order properties of synaptic modification. Neural plasticity is one such property, describing the entanglement of neural and cultural plasticity. Calling on a neuroarchaeological technique he announces two important theories: “brain artifact interfaces” and “material engagement theory.” These are used to understand how cultural experiences become mediated by the use of material objects and artifacts—like the blind man’s stick—to become continuous with and as an integral part of the human cognitive architecture.
Amanda Beech digs at the lingering hangover of bourgeois aesthetics that links autonomous artistic products to social change. She furthermore challenges the emancipatory capacity of art and its potential as a wellspring of freedom. She cites Adorno—whose opposition to the Nazi propaganda machine is well known as was his suspicion of overtly didactic, political art—as part of her critical dialogue with his work: “This is not a time for political art, but politics has migrated into autonomous art, and nowhere more so than where it seems to be politically dead.” Rereading Deleuze and Guattari she states “artworks that succeed are those that refuse the subjective conditions of affects and perceptions, and which are incommensurable and timeless: Affects are precisely these non-human becomings of man.” However both of these strategies of destabilization have a similar logic to that of global capitalism that in fact recuperates the difference thus valorized. The problem of monetization is one of its quandaries and we are left “with the emptiness of epistemological hope.” She is in line with the essence of the arguments made in this volume that, in fact, artistic idealism masquerading as realist materialism reinforces the alienation that is the underlying cause of the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism. Clearly material engagement theory and its relation to re-readings of archaeological artifacts is an example of the critique of such artistic idealism. Propaganda linked to artistic production—as Adorno would argue—is now in the context of this volume a negative idealism in the pursuit of supple and autonomous neural capacities. In this case thinking of the alterity of art in a diverse self-constituted ecology—for instance, as a contingent meta-ecology of chance that could be emancipatory—is quite foolish if we are only supplied with the tools of transcendental idealism. For sure, artists and critics need other epistemological apparatuses. Catherine Malabou understood this very well when she asks what should we do with our brains. The neuroplastic is beyond simply being a marker of flexible imprinting but is also a marker of material culture building. The fact that we live in a world that is being neuro-biologically modeled with powerful tools of neuro-consumerism and neuro-economics within what has been called neuro-capitalism underscores the need to remove ourselves from a correlationist attitude with which to understand artistic practice. The stakes are too high and as Beech rightly understands: a true materialist ontology must be fashioned. Art as we know it may be dead and in fact like philosophy it has died many deaths to reemerge as something else. We seem to have reached that crossroads again—the subsumption of art by the market economy—and as she has noted the time is now to look elsewhere for conceptions and the rudiments and justifications of the power of art.
Jacquelene Drinkall’s “Neuromodulations of Extro-Scientific Telepathy” calls attention to the capacities of artistic production to explore aspects of our world beyond the capacity of scientific research. Taking a stance that is situated in between ‘folk psychology’ and scientific investigation—or as delineated by Wilfrid Sellars, the ‘manifest’ image of man as self-conscious rational agent and the scientific image of man as a complex physical system—she charts another course. Instead of waiting for a perfected neuroscience that will give us a more perfect understanding of the noumenal world and the relation to brain states, artistic methods have the power to create both facts and alternate paradigms of the world, or what I have termed Extro-Artistic Fiction(s). (Neidich, Warren. “Recuperating Recuperation of the Frontal Cortex: Extro Artistic Fictions (XAF).” In Collected Writings. Berlin: Archive Books, 2018) Once you adapt an anti-hylomorphic, anti-crystallized position of being and embrace becoming as an ontological process based on neuroplasticity one overcomes this dichotomy because artistic endeavors, such as DADA and Noise works, disrupt institutionally co-opted materialist networks that operate in the cultural milieu, as well as the brain states they conjure. Drinkall asks whether the long history of artistic experiments in telepathy—dating back to the end of the 19th century and continuing today as performative works, such as those of Marina Abramović—predate the recent technological advances in telepathic devices and in fact maintained their cultural presence throughout the 20th century in the market place of ideas. They might act as the very foundations for more mainstream experiments with telepathic devices today occurring in the field of brain-computer interfaces as well as in the world of social gaming, theory of mind and medical research just to name a few. As a result of this developmental process and their massive presence in the cultural milieu, telepathy might induce, as Stiegler notes for the concept of cinematic time, unique habits of perception. She conjectures, “What about ideological constructs entangled in these perceptual estrangements, could they induce changes in the brains’ materiality?” Quoting the works of Stanislas Dehaene, especially his neuronal recycling hypothesis, she wagers that producing telepathic thoughts repeatedly and intensely over time and interacting with a future telepathic techno-ecology might transform already existing neural tissues used for other purposes into a telepathic specific neural module. According to Dehaene, similar pressures of reading environments may have transformed and recycled neural architecture found in the inferior temporal area of Macaques into the ventral word form area in humans. “How can such a specialization arise, although the human brain cannot possibly be predisposed for reading?” (Dehaene, Stanislas. “Evolution of human cortical circuits for reading and arithmetic: The neuronal recycling hypothesis.” In eds. Dehaene, S., Duhamel, J.R., Hauser, M., Rizzolatti, G. From Monkey Brain to Human Brain. A Fyssen Foundation Symposium. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.) Could the same be said in the future for a
telepathic module?
The next section is entitled “Psycho-Affective Effects” and engages issues surrounding the effects of contemporary social, political, psychic, economic, and sociological relations as modulators of the materiality of the brain and mind that produce epochal specific psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism. This subject matter has already been dealt with in various essays throughout the first two volumes.
Mark Fisher begins his piece “Deprivatizing Anxiety” by calling upon the essay “We Are All Very Anxious” to suggest that each phase of capitalism is organized around a particular affect. The unrelenting boredom of Fordism was substituted for by the excitement and unpredictability of neoliberalism and this generated its own peculiar side effect: perpetual anxiety. This depression has both an individual and collective character. In the former, it is the result of the privatization of stress within neoliberalism. In the latter, that the widespread character of depression could not be experienced collectively. He ties the new conditions of this unrelenting anxiety and depression to a number of the characteristics of neoliberalism. These include: precarious labor marked by short-term flexibility and flux; a world with no solidarity and security produced by the attack on public services and trade unions; the condition of high levels of panic; real subsumption with no weekends to relax; and digital communicative compulsion, a result of unrelenting lack of satisfaction and disconnection. But at the root of this overwhelming anxiety and depression is the success of neo-liberalism in depoliticizing labor and as Fisher writes, “the elimination of the very topic of class from contemporary discourse.”
John Protevi in his essay “Affect, Agency and Responsibility: The Act of Killing in the Age of Cyborgs” states that most soldiers cannot kill and to do so must acquire a desubjectified state. He traces the process that sculpts pre-cognitive reflexes to enable killing both as an individual and at a group level. Key to the inhibition to kill someone, face to face, is what is referred to as proto-empathic identification. Simulation theory has been invented to better understand our inhibition to kill a member of the same species. This inhibition has been linked to the action of viscera-motor-centers of the brain, producing as they do empathy for pain in others. This is supplemented with other theories of embodied intentionality or primary embodied inter-subjectivity. Whatever the cause, the sight of blood and guts flowing out of someone you have just shot is powerfully felt and it can act as a deterrent to killing. Additionally it often leaves mental scars that are later experienced as PTSD or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This disorder can also be the result of soldiers dumping their subjectivity and entering what is referred to as berserker rage. Key here for the military is how to turn this rage on and off on command. The essay concludes with an analysis of two modes of contemporary military training with regard to this process of individual desubjectification. First, reflex training in which affective dehumanization of the enemy is coupled to group chanting while running weakens personal identity to produce the group subject. Secondly—and especially interesting in our context—is cyborg training in which digital and video tools are used for training in urban warfare, in which the soldier becomes a node in a cybernetic organism.
Section Five, entitled “Noise and Possibility of a Future,” describes the disruptive force of noise as a cultural modifier.
Howard Slater in his “Prisoners of the Earth Come Out! Notes Towards ‘War At The Membrane’” draws attention to the new conditions of the valorization of capital and real subsumption in the age of cognitive capitalism. In these new conditions, power now involves more then the vital forces of the bios like physical energy but psychical processes like sensorimotor action, language aptitude, powers of perception and involuntary affectivity. In mobilizing each of us as agents of valorization, as switching points in circuits of circulation, this valorization becomes closely linked to communication. Thus, it is a sensory physiology of communication. Slater cites Jonathan Beller, in an argument essential to this and previous volumes: “Trade is not just movement of money and objects; it is the movement of capital through sensoriums.” In this, Slater finds a key explanation as to why so much avant-garde practice is focused on the struggle to change and de-automate perception and thus re-format the instincts, hence deconstructing the forces of endo-colonization. Slater echoes Franco Berardi in books like The Soul at Work when he further suggests that individual devalorization risks nervous breakdown and self exile. All of this is a prelude to his deeper discussion concerning avant-garde music practices which he sees as tools to combat endo-colonization and, importantly, to re-appropriate alienation. As Slater writes: “Noise commits violence on automated perception” by embracing what Félix Guattari called ‘a-signification.’
Dave Burrows’ essay “The Subject Who Fell to Earth” continues this discussion of the power of noise to disrupt the senses and the resulting perception and thoughts it perpetrates as a means to combat communicative capitalism and neuro-power. He begins with Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the alien, Thomas Newton, in Nicolas Roeg’s film The Man Who Fell to Earth, in order to analyze what he calls the “hysterical sublime.” Produced by the proliferation of mass media environments the hysterical sublime is a condition instigated by this milieu’s overwhelming capacity to enfeeble our ability to cognitively map the girth and complexity of the new communicative domain. What is then required is a properly representational dialect or glossary with which the subject might begin to understand his or her place in this new mediated global system.
In response to advanced media societies—defined as they are by mobile technologies—‘individuals’ have undergone a mutation to what Gilles Deleuze had calls ‘dividuals.’ These are hubs devoid of self in complex socially engaged communicative systems. Their day is spent sending and receiving messages that endlessly circulate, producing deficits of attention and depressions of disconnection and exhaustion. As an example, Burrows sites the maddening cacophony experienced by Thomas Newton’s girlfriend Mary Lou in the film. The dozens of simultaneously switched on televisions with turned up volumes create this cacophony that is comprehensible to the alien perceptual/cognitive system of Thomas but incomprehensible to Mary Lou. Perhaps, in our present day this has become the normal state experienced by us all: We become aliens! Burrows continues by analyzing the work of Ray Brassier’s scrutiny of noise as a stochastic phenomena which disrupts the processes of phenomenological habituation of a selfless subject in conjunction with Henri Lefebvre’s theory of arrhythmia. Through this, Burrows begins to piece together the mechanisms through which this mutation of subjectivity might occur, wrapped up as it is in a notion of experimentation with rhythms of thought. In the final analysis this transformation of the subject opens a pathway for the author to hope for the possibility of the production of communist subjectivity through collaboration and exchange of first-object perspectives.
Ray Brassier’s essay “Genre is Obsolete” is divided into four parts. First he examines noise as an anomalous zone of interference between genres: “Between post-punk and free jazz; between musique concrète and folk; between stochastic composition and art brut.” Key here is that in its attempt to defy musicological classification, genre has itself become a label of any form of musical experimentation that subverts recognized itself. Through the examples of Tom Smith and Runzelstirn & Gurgelstøck (aka Rudolf Eb.er), who both disavow the label of noise, he endeavors to show actors who successfully elude generic tropes that usually become conventions. “Typically cross-splicing scenarios from obscure 1970s pornography with Augustine rhetoric, Smith’s ravings resist decipherment through a surplus rather than deficit of sense. And just as Shave’s sound usurps formlessness by incorporating an unformalizable surplus of sonic material, Smith’s words embody a semantic hypertrophy which can only be transmitted by a vocal that mimes the senseless eructations of glossolalia.” Using Smiths’terminology of PREaesthetic, he questions the ontology of invention and innovation as a never ending recycling of an Oedipus narrative of killing the father and resuming the role now left vacant. Instead, Brassier introduces the idea of incompossibles, which, instead of succumbing to perpetual invention, create previous unimaginable links between currently non-existent genres, thus staving off the regressive tendency to repetitive universalism. This leads the author to an analysis of privileged subjectivity and noise’s connection to neo romantic clichés of noise’s viscerally liberating properties. Today the myth of experience is being challenged! In a Stieglerian salute, Brassier begins to understand technology in its intensive sense as an invasive component of agency and contributing to the definition of subjectivity. “Neurotechnologies, including cognitive enhancers such as modafinil, brain fingerprinting, neural lie-detectors, and nascent brain-computer interfaces, are giving rise to phenotechnologies, which will eventually usher in the literal manufacturing of consciousness in a way that promises to redraw existing boundaries between personal and collective experience and recast not only extant categories of personal and collective identity, but also those of personal and collective agency.” Echoing the ideas of many of the authors in this compilation, myself included, he calls for the negation of genre as a means to eradicate experience through the use of a cognitive bomb consisting of social, psychological and neurobiological factors.
The last section, entitled “Artistic Interventions,” consists of four projects which were screened at the Goldsmiths conference or reactions to the themes discussed. These interventions consist of Liam Gillick’s Art and Blame Storming (2015), Tyler Coburn’s I’m that angel (2011–), Popular Unrest (2010) by Melanie Gilligan, and finally Center Jenny (2013), by Ryan Trecartin.