Book small final_cover new 6/15/13 9:19 AM Pagina 1 This book collects the papers that were presented at “The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part One” conference in Los Angeles in November 2012. The conference brought together an international array of philosophers, critical theorists, media theorists, art historians, architects, and artists to discuss the state of the mind and the brain under the conditions of cognitive capitalism, in which they have become the new focus of laboring. How have emancipatory politics, art and architecture, and education been redefined by semiocapitalism? What might be the lasting, material ramifications of semiocapitalism on the mind and the brain? 1 The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part One is part of a series that will pursue these and other questions. What is the future of the mind under cognitive capitalism? Can a term such as plastic materialism describe the substantive changes in neural architectures instigated by a contingent cultural habitus? What about the unconscious under these conditions? How might it be modified, mutated, and modulated by the evolving conditions of global attention? Is there such a thing as cognitive communism, and what might be its distinctive pathologies? How does artistic research—the methods and practices of artistic production and the knowledge they produce—create new emancipatory possibilities in opposition to the overwhelming instrumentalization of the general intellect under semiocapitalism? Edited by Arne De Boever and Warren Neidich JONATHAN BELLER FRANCO “BIFO” BERARDI ARNE DE BOEVER JODI DEAN WARREN NEIDICH PATRICIA PISTERS JASON SMITH TIZIANA TERRANOVA BRUCE WEXLER ARNE DE BOEVER is Assistant Professor of American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. He is the author of States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel and Narrative Care. WARREN NEIDICH is an artist and writer who works in multiple media. He is currently a research fellow at the Delft School of Design, TU Delft School of Architecture. ISBN 978-3-943620-04-7 15.00 EUROS 9 783943 620047 A B ARCHIVE BOOKS Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 2 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 3 Edited by Arne De Boever and Warren Neidich Texts by Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Jason Smith, Tiziana Terranova, Jodi Dean, Arne De Boever, Jonathan Beller, Bruce Wexler, Warren Neidich, Patricia Pisters ARC HIVE BOO K S Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 4 Published on the occasion of The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part Two at ICI Berlin, this book collects the papers that were presented during the first part of the conference in Los Angeles in November 2012. This volume is the first of a series of books that attempts to broaden the definition of cognitive capitalism in terms of the scope of its material relations especially as it relates to the conditions of mind and brain in our new world of advanced telecommunication, data mining and social relations. It is our hope to first improve awareness of its most repressive characteristics and secondly to produce an arsenal of discursive practices with which to combat it. © 2013 by the authors and Archive Books Edited by Arne De Boever and Warren Neidich Designed by Archive Appendix, Berlin Printed by Erredi, Genova Published by Archive Books Dieffenbachstrasse 31 10967 Berlin www.archivebooks.org ISBN 978-3-943620-04-7 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 5 CONTEN TS Franco “Bifo” Berardi The Mind’s We: Morphogenesis and the Chaosmic Spasm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Jason Smith Soul on Strike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Tiziana Terranova Ordinary Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Jodi Dean Collective Desire and the Pathology of the Individual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Arne De Boever “All of us go a little crazy at times”: Capital and Fiction in a State of Generalized Psychosis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Jonathan Beller Pathologistics of Attention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Patricia Pisters Madness, Miracles, Machines: Living in a Delirious World Without Walls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Bruce Wexler Neuroplasticity, Culture and Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 Warren Neidich Neuropower: Art in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 6 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 7 FRANCO “B IFO” BERA RDI 7 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. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 8 8 FRA NCO “BI FO” BER ARD I” 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 Watzklawicz, the imagination of Philip K. Dick and the psychedelic politics of Timothy Leary marked a mentalist reframing 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. The technical transformation implied in the process of globalization is changing the socio-cultural prospects so deeply that theoretical tools inherited from European critical theory no longer suffice for imagining the future of human evolution. This is why I think that the Los Angeles conference has displaced the object of socio-anthropological reflection, linking the conceptual sphere of social recomposition and psycho-subjectivation with the conceptual sphere of technomental evolution. Global recession and the acceleration of the environmental decay seem to suggest that human evolution is over, unless society shifts from the present paradigm of economic growth and capital accumulation to a paradigm based on a different conception of wealth, so as to create a different set of collective expectations. However, such a shift is not in view at the present. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 9 THE MIND’ S WE 9 Sub-Individual and Super-collective: Where Change Happens The conceptual and practical sphere of modern politics has lost its ground. In the age that began with Machiavelli and culminated with Lenin, human will (embodied by the prince, the State, the Party) was able to reign over the chaotic variation of events and projects, and was able to submit individual interests and passions to the common goals of social order, economic growth and political progress. The infinite proliferation of information flows unleashed by the accelerating network technology has made impossible the conscious elaboration of information by the individual mind, and the conscious coordination of individual agents of will. The loss of effectiveness of political action has to do with time: reason and will, the essential tools for political action, are unable to process in time and decide in time. The technical transformation has changed the conditions of mental activity and the forms of interaction between the individual and the collective sphere. In the age of voluntary action that we call Modernity these two spheres—individual and collective—could be seen as distinct, externally linked, and interacting on the basis of an effective intentionality. Individual and collective organisms are composed of the same material substances and by the same unconscious motivations, so they are not distinct in their material composition; but in the past it was possible to describe separately the conscious acts of the individual and the effects that the individual intentionality was able to produce on the collective dimension. Now the distinction between individual and collective has been blurred. First of all these two dimensions interact at the level of sub-individuality. The word “individual” is designating something that does not actually exist. In Latin this word refers to something that cannot be divided, but individuals are actually Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 10 10 FRA NCO “BI FO” BER ARD I” composed of countless sub-individual substances and psycholinguistic flows, and the so called free will is only the effect of the changing elaboration of info-flows and of neuro-chemical flows. Therefore, as Gilbert Simondon has written in L’individuation psychique et collective “the individual is a system of individuation, a system which is individuating itself .”1 The process of individuation is the continuous resolution of the never dissolved polarity between system and environment. The process of individuation starts from the pre-existing reality of the collective sphere, but the collective sphere has simultaneously to be considered as effect of the interaction between existing individuals. Collective voices resonate in the individual Unconscious, and the collective sphere is the meeting point of uncountable individual voices resounding together. Coming from the social dimension and traversing the collective space, flows of information are acting at the level of sub-individuality. Furthermore individual and collective dimensions interact at the level of super-collectivity, where crowds and multitudes are involved in automatic chains of behavior, and driven by techno-linguistic dispositives. The swarm effect actually is the automation of individual behavior traversed and concatenated by technolinguistic interfaces. As Bruce Wexler recalled in his lecture at the Los Angeles conference, man is the animal who shapes the environment that shapes his brain. I will just point out that Infosphere is the environment where this mind-shaping occurs. 1 Gilbert Simondon, L’individuation psychique et collective (Paris: Aubier, 1989), 17. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 11 THE MIND’ S WE 11 Connective Format and Social Mind In the present digital Infosphere, the conscious activity is involved in super-individual connective concatenations. The connective concatenation shapes the Unconscious and the Imagination according to a discreet—versus continuous— modality of perception. Syntactic rules of semiotic exchange take the place of those semantic rules that were working in the dimension of conjunctive relation and analogical communication. Those who dwell in the digital global sphere cannot escape the implications of the connective concatenation if they want to interact in the collective sphere. So the individual has to comply with the rules of interaction of the collective, if he/she wants to produce effects in the collective dimension. This is why politics no longer works: because one cannot interact efficiently in the collective dimension if one has not previously accepted the rules of compliance that shape language, action and interpretation of signs. Social composition is reframed by the establishment of a connective format of interaction between humans. In the industrial world the social brain is modeled by standardized acts of physical production, but the mental sphere is only partially involved in the process of standardization. The metal worker is obliged to move his muscles according to the rhythm of the assembly line, but his mind is relatively free. Cognitive capitalism is all about the standardization of the cognitive processes, and mental activity cannot be detached or diverted by the flow of information, as this flow is exactly the cognitive machine. Unconscious and imaginative processes are therefore influenced by the submission of cognitive behavior to the connective format. In The Mind’s I, a book edited by Daniel Dennet and Douglas Hoefstadter and published in 1981, philosophers, psychologists, computer programmers and novelists were invited to investigate the interdependency between hardware Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 12 12 FRA NCO “BI FO” BER ARD I” and software of cognitive processes.The main question of the book may be expressed like this: what is the relation between neuro-physical composition of the brain and conscious selfperception of the thinking organism? What is the mind of my “self ”, what is the “I” of my mind? In that book, Dennet and Hoefstadter were investigating the effects of interaction processes on the individual brain. We should now reformulate this basic question at a different level: we should investigate the effects of the technical sphere of communication on the social mind, and of the Infosphere on the sub-individual dimension. Finally, we should understand how sub-individual flows are reshaping the collective space of sensibility. We should study the formation of the social mind from the point of view of the relation between sensibility and culture: the Mind’s we. Structure and Machine Neo-marxist Italian thinkers labeled as “operaisti” and poststructuralist French philosophers like Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard and Foucault—notwithstanding the difference of their intellectual trajectories—have investigated a similar question: how the process of subjectivation develops, starting from the material layers of social existence: technology, language, affection. Thanks to the formulation of the concept of “composition” (class composition, social composition), Italian neo-marxism in the ‘60s directly questioned structuralist methodology: while structuralism is based on the notion that the subject’s evolution is governed by internal patterns, in a post-structuralist approach, social composition evolves due to the interference of external factors that enter the space of subjectivation. Not internal structures, but external machines shape molecular sub-individual flows, funneling them into the provisional ever-changing forms of sensibility. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 13 THE MIND’ S WE 13 In the article “Machine et structure,” published in the magazine Change in the year 1971, Félix Guattari explains his break with Lacan and his will to go beyond the Freudian conception of psychoanalysis as a system of structures (mythological, symbolical): We can say that the structure is positing its elements in a system of references connecting every element to other elements, in such a way that the structure itself can be referred to other structures as an element of a larger structure. The structural thought of totalization and de-totalizations is clasping the subject, because it is not accepting the idea of losing grip on the subject as far as it is not able to get it back within a new structure. The same does not apply to the machine, that is always excentric in relation to the subject. The subject is always elsewhere. Temporality gets into the machine in many ways and plays as an event. The emergence of the machine marks a break that is not homogeneous with the structural representation.2 A structure is a system of inner relations, of interactions governing the subject from inside. A machine, on the other hand, is an eccentric actor: it comes from outside and changes the framework in which the subject is located so that the subject itself is changing its form. Therefore the machine jeopardizes the structural pattern, and provokes a displacement of the subject. While the structure is essentially morphostatic and territorializing, the machine is the factor of deterritorialization that leads to morphogenesis. 2 Félix Guattari, “Machine et structure,” in Change, 12 (1971), 50. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 14 14 FRA NCO “BI FO” BER ARD I” So the concept of machine (that simply means: whatever agent is working and producing effects) gives Guattari the possibility of replacing the structured subject with the vision of a process of subjectivation that is the effect of the action of machines. Composition Consciousness and Subjectivation The common ground of investigation of the aforementioned French and Italian authors can be found in these questions: what is the subjective side of the social becoming? How does it happen that social forces develop different forms of consciousness and conflicting intentions? The answer can be found in the word composition. The subjective side of social becoming is perpetually changing as it is the result of the never-ending transformation of the psychocultural composition of the collective brain, of the collective soul, of the collective Unconscious. One can view the becoming of social subjectivity as a solution and mixture of various chemical substances melting together. Consciousness is the surface of the perpetual process of de-composition and recomposition that Félix Guattari names: subjectivation. And consciousness is also the ability to locate oneself in the map of compositional flows of information, desire, conflict… This is why I propose the word “compositionism” in order to encompass the two philosophical movements which flourished in Italy and in France in the era of ‘68 and have been producing long-lasting effects in contemporary philosophy less in Europe than elsewhere. Those philosophers retrace the process of subjectivation through a recognition of the perpetually changing composition of social life: cultural, economic, psychological and mythological streams enter in the same process of subjectivation. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 15 THE MIND’ S WE 15 The process of reproduction of social life involves the hard matter of the physical transformation of the environment, but also involves the soft side of intention, perception and imagination. We call this soft side of social becoming subjectivity, and we call subjectivation the process of decomposition and recomposition that leads to the evolution of subjectivity. In his last book, Chaosmosis, Guattari writes that “among the fogs and miasmas which obscure our fin de millenaire, the question of subjectivity is now returning as a leitmotiv. All the disciplines will have to combine their creativity to ward off the ordeals of barbarism, the mental implosion and chaosmic spasms looming on the horizon.” 3 The word “spasm” is remarkable and unexpected. As far as I know (I may be wrong), this word cannot be found anywhere in previous books by Guattari, not in those he wrote alone and not in those he wrote with Deleuze. What is the meaning of the expression “chaosmic spasm”? Spasm In the medical lexicon a spasm is a sudden involuntary contraction of a muscle, which is generally painful. In the context of analysis of social subjectivation, I would say that the spasm is an excessive compulsive acceleration of the rhythm of the social organism, a sort of forced vibration of the rhythm of social communication. A spasm is a painful vibration that forces the organism to an extreme mobilization of nerves and muscles. We should understand this acceleration and this painful vibration in the context of an environment that is the contemporary sphere of cognitive work and nervous exploitation. I call this environment 3 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Baines and Julian Pefanis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 135. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 16 16 FRA NCO “BI FO” BER ARD I” semiocapitalism because the main source of production of value in this environment are semiotic tools: language is thus directly involved in the production and exchange of both material and immaterial goods. When cognitive energy becomes the main force of production, as capital valorization demands more and more productivity, the nervous system of the organism is subjected to accelerated exploitation in order to make possible productivity increase. Guattari always saw technology in general as a factor of enrichment, of mind enhancement and social liberation. But machines interweave and connect with capitalist exploitation, and this is producing an effect of subjection aimed to the continuous increase of productivity and exploitation. Here comes the spasm: the spasm is the effect of the violent penetration of capitalist exploitation into the field of info-technologies, which are obviously acting on the sphere of cognition, of sensibility, and of the Unconscious itself. Sensibility is invested by info-acceleration, and the vibration induced by the acceleration of nervous exploitation is the spasm, the spasmic effect. What should we do when we are in a situation of spasm? Guattari is not using the word “spasm” in isolation. He says precisely: “chaosmic spasm.” Chaosmosis is the overcoming of the spasm, the relaxing of the spasmodic vibration. In the interaction between individual and collective sphere, in the link between individual neuro-activity and collective connective concatenation, the “mind’s we” is evolving. The neuro-plasticity of the sub-individual organism interacts with the rhythms of the super-collective automatisms of the swarm. Chaosmose and Chaoide Why does Guattari use the expression “chaosmic spasm”? Why can the spasm be seen as chaosmic? What is chaosmosis at the end of the day? Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 17 THE MIND’ S WE 17 Chaosmosis is the creation of a new (more complex) order (syntony, and sympathy) out of the present chaos, which is an effect of the spasmodic acceleration of the surrounding semio-universe. Chaosmosis is the osmotic passage from a state of chaos to a new order. But here the word “order” does not have a normative meaning, nor an ontological meaning. Order is here to be intended as harmonic relation between mind and the semio-environment, and also as sharing of the same mindset. Sym-pathy, common perception. Chaos is an excess of speed of the Infosphere in relation to the ability of elaboration of the brain. In What is Philosophy?, which is a book about philosophy and about growing old as well, Deleuze and Guattari speak of the relation between chaos and the brain. “From Chaos to the Brain” is the title of the Conclusion of the book, and it begins with the following words: We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master. These are infinite variabilities the appearing and disappearing of which coincide. They are infinite speeds that blend into the immobility of the colorless and silent nothingness they traverse, without nature or thought. This is the instant of which we do not know whether it is too long or too short for time. We receive sudden jolts that beat like arteries. We constantly lose our ideas.4 4 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatttari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), 201. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 18 18 FRA NCO “BI FO” BER ARD I” The stream of consciousness is too slow to process the information that comes from the world of acceleration (info-technology multiplied by Semio-capitalist exploitation), so the world cannot be translated into Cosmos, mental order, syntony and sympathy. Here we are talking of something that has very little to do with politics and history, and much more with neuro-plasticity in the evolution of brain. Not an acceleration of the rhythm of mental elaboration, but a reframing of the relation between infosphere and mind, a process of re-syntonization and re-focalization that cannot be pre-arranged by political will, but only prepared by a modeling of sensibility. Chaosmosis is the shift from a rhythm of conscious elaboration to a new rhythm, adapt to elaborate what the previous rhythm could no more consciously process. In order to define the shift from one rhythm to a different rhythm, from one refrain to an other refrain, Guattari proposed the concept of “chaoid.” Chaoid, in Guattari’s parlance, is a sort of de-multiplier—a device which reduces the scale of complexity (or the scale of dimension of speed...) of the environment, so that the operator can act consistently—, an agent of re-syntonization, a linguistic agent able to act as a refrain different from the spasmic refrain, and able to de-multiply the spasmodic rhythm. “The primary purpose of ecosophical cartography”, writes Guattari, “is thus not to signify and communicate but to produce assemblages of enunciation capable of capturing the points of singularity of a situation.” 5 5 Guattari, Chaosmosis, 128. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 19 THE MIND’ S WE 19 Neuroplasticity, Adaptation I’m not talking about adaptation. The prevailing techniques of therapy are aimed to adapt the suffering organism to the social and technical environment. Psychopharmacology and psychiatric therapy aim to soften psychic suffering in order to normalize behavior and to reduce the existing subjectivity to the tasks of cognitive exploitation. Reprogramming is a technique of normalizing of the singularity, whose aim is the restoration of the neurotic subjection and suffering effectiveness in the process of neural exploitation and capital accumulation. But the process of recomposition that I’m trying to outline here is a complex dynamics of mutual transformation of the social environment and individual minds. Neuroplasticity should not be conceived merely in the prospect of conciliating the activity of the individual brain with capitalist needs: biopolitical formatting and submission of the mind to the economic goals of cognitive capitalism. I’m not talking even about the deceptive pretention of “slowing” the infosphere, the nostalgia for a pre-connective environment, the re-humanization of techno-capitalism. The claim of reterritorialization and re-humanization is a reactionary utopia doomed to failure, and can only produce effects of aggressive identification. In order to escape the pathological effects of deterritorialization, people tend to desperately grasp aggressive forms of belonging: Volk, Nation, Race or Belief. Neither adaptation nor aggressive identification are what I’m looking for. Modern culture has conceived change in terms of history, and action in terms of politics. I think we should focus on neuro-evolution and develop forms of action aimed to shape it. The main task we are facing now is to find ways to consciously interact with neural evolution, and de-activate those technoautomatisms that entangle the mind’s activity in the established frame of connective capitalism. We have to think in terms of meta-connectivity. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 20 20 FRA NCO “BI FO” BER ARD I” In the sphere of financial capitalism, the prevailing linguistic concatenations are producing a spasmogenic rhythm. The spasm is not only exploiting the work of men and women, not only submitting cognitive labor to the abstract acceleration of the info-machine, but is also destroying the organism’s sensibility, by submitting this sensibility to the stress of competition and acceleration. In Guattari’s parlance “chaoid” is a semiotic device that makes possible the disconnection from the pathogenic rhythm and the creation of a new concatenation between consciousness and Infosphere. Chaosmosis is the evolutionary process of recomposition that leads to the emergence of a new concatenation, and therefore to the possibility of a new sympathetic syntony of the molecules composing the social body and the flows circulating in the Infosphere. The first step of this chaosmosis will be the disentanglement from the present stressing concatenation; the second will be the neural reframing of the relation with the infosphere. This is not a political project, as politics has broken down and is unable to deal with the process of meta-subjectivation that is implied in the chaosmosis. Guattari suggests that we must create chaoids for disentanglement, for prefiguration and re-syntonization. Chaoids have nothing to do with the sphere of will and political decision, they belong to the sphere of art, education, and therapy, where sensibility is shaped. Paradigm Shift and Cultural Transition During the transition from industrial capitalism to cognitive capitalism, human subjectivity is invested by the cognitive immaterialization of production, as the precarization and fractalization of labor are provoking a deep mutation of the psychosphere which resonates with the technological and cultural becoming. This mutation is not a linear process, as the different levels of human activity (cultural, psychological and neural) do not change in unison. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 21 THE MIND’ S WE 21 During the past decades, while the transition to cognitive capitalism was underway, many authors, from many different points of view, have spoken of a paradigm shift, showing how the paradigm is changing at the epistemological, technological and economic levels of social life. A short reminder about the most important theorizations on this point may be useful. In his most celebrated book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the epistemologist Thomas Kuhn defines the transition from an epistemological framework to a new one in terms of paradigm shift. The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative process, one achieved by an articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes some of the field’s most elementary theoretical generalizations as well as many of its paradigm methods and applications. During the transition period there will be a large but never complete overlap between the problems that can be solved by the old and by the new paradigm.6 The concept of paradigm shift has been essential in the analysis of the transformation that has invested every sphere of theory and social practice in the age of transition from the sequential to the simultaneous techno-sphere. In the book Understanding Media, published in 1964, Marshall McLuhan already spoke of electric light as a medium which redefines the whole space of contents. 6 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 85-6. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 22 FRA NCO “BI FO” BER ARD I” 22 The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message. [...] For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs... As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed in bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden implosion has heightened human awareness of responsibility to an intense degree.7 Electricity, then electronics: this is the technological background of the late modern transition that gives way to the general transformation of economy, social communication, and of culture. In 1977, L’informatisation de la societé, a report commissioned by the President of the French Republic Valery Giscard D’Estaing, was published in Paris. In this book the sociologist Alain Minc and the engineer Simon Nora anticipated telematics, a major technological innovation proceeding from the intersection of telephone and computing, and predicted the coming crisis and deterioration of national sovereignty, as an effect of the globalization of political and economic information. And Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave, first published in 1980, forecast the overall transformation of the social sphere, as an effect of the spread of the electronic technologies in daily life and the economy. The Third Wave brings with it a genuinely new way of life based on diversified, renewable energy sources: on methods of production that make most factors assembly 7 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), Introduction. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 23 THE MIND’ S WE 23 lines obsolete; on new not nuclear families; on a novel institution that may be called the electronic cottage; and on radically changed schools and corporations of the future. The emergent civilization writes a new code of behavior for us and carries us beyond standardization, synchronization and centralization, beyond the concentration of energy, money and power.8 The paradigm shift is also crossing the scientific and epistemological space. In The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean-François Lyotard writes that “the status of knowledge is altered as societies enter what is known as the postindustrial age and cultures enter what is known as the postmodern age.” 9 And in the field of science and epistemology, in fact, the mechanical paradigm that has prevailed in the centuries following the Newtonian revolution is now giving way to the paradigm of uncertainty outlined by Werner Heisenberg in 1959.10 But the paradigm shift has to be conceived as a tendency and a possibility, not as a necessary consequence determined by the change of social and technological environment, as the tendency and possibility that is implied in the environmental transformation is obstructed and hindered by the persistent force of the past. This is why the process of reconfiguring human subjectivity and the reconfiguration of the neuroplastic social brain are actually asymmetrical and asynchronous. 8 Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (New York: Bantam Books, 1980). 9 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984), 3. 10 Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: HarperCollins, 2007). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 24 24 FRA NCO “BI FO” BER ARD I” Capitalism, as the general form of the economy, entangles and obstructs the potential developments of the social brain. If we want to understand this entanglement we have to retrace the history of present subjectivity, and we have to analyze the various layers of its becoming, the psychic, the cultural and the aesthetic. Social Morphogenesis After the End Of Democracy Morphogenesis is the process of becoming-form, and thanks to morphogenesis new forms come to being. This process can manifest itself as the effect of conscious and voluntary action of a subject generating new forms, or as self-organization of chaotic matter that cannot be governed by will or consciousness, spontaneous emergence of a form that finds a way towards a new order. Do new social forms come into existence spontaneously, as an effect of a natural process that human beings are obliged to accept and to deal with? Or do they come into existence for a conscious act of will, as effect of a project, of a conflict, a political decision and action? Obviously this dilemma is too simplistic, and things happen in different ways, spontaneity and will are confused, chance and intentions intermingle in the historical process. But I want to know if the process of change can be managed by deliberate human action in the present conditions of crisis. My question is: can the present agony of modern capitalism be consciously managed by political action, and turned into a new form of social existence? Obviously political power has never been able to actually control the whole of social relationships, and Reason has never been able to reduce the infinite complexity of reality to knowledge, but in the Modern age it was possible to know and to control a relevant part of the social complexity, and Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 25 it THE MIND’ S WE 25 Modernity can be seen in retrospect as an age of relative reducibility and governability of the social world: politics was the technique based on the ability to know what is relevant in the overall flow of information, and the art of predicting its becoming so, to govern the main events and trends. The shift to the hyper-complex reality of the networked world has made impossible to understand and control the relevant flows of information circulating in the Infosphere and continuously stimulating the social brain. Therefore the old art of politics is showing itself more and more impotent to predict, reign and turn collective action towards a common goal. Consequently power is less and less reliant on the possibility of government, and is attempting to submit the flows of information, the intentions and actions of the social body to the model of governance. Governance is the effect of the embedding of technolinguistic automated devices in the continuum of social behavior and communication. Thanks to the automation of interconnected relations, organization and order are expected to emerge from the chaotic matter of social life: biology, media, technology, economic interests, affection, unconsciousness. Life, language, production are penetrated and interconnected by a dissemination of devices (dispositifs) aiming to submit the linguistic behavior to pre-conceived procedures and finalities, whose task is to make actions and enunciations predictable and manageable, and finally reducible to the overarching goal of capitalist accumulation and expansion. In 1972 the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas and the sociologist Niklas Luhmann debated on the predictable effects of the evolution of media and of the expansion of social information.11 11 Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 26 26 FRA NCO “BI FO” BER ARD I” Over-simplifying their complex arguments I will roughly synthesize like this: while the optimist rationalist Habermas believes that the enhancement of human communication is destined to consolidate democracy and improve daily life, Luhmann was expressing doubts on the positive effects of the expansion of the Infosphere, and conjectured that the expansion of the domain of information was destined to shift the emphasis from rational political decision towards administrative processes of differentiation. Democracy therefore is not reinforced, but endangered by the expansion of the Infosphere. In the current situation, marked by the infinite expansion of the Infosphere —particularly of economic and financial information—rational elaboration and political decision are no more within the reach of individual or social organizations. Democracy, as a result, has been replaced by automatic procedures, by algorithms and devices for automatic selection and recombination whose general rationale is the replication of the capitalist form. The efficiency of the rational will and political action depends on the possibility of processing the information flows and choosing the best options. When info-flows are too fast, too dense, too compressed for rational elaboration and decision on time, then what was called politics in the Modern age becomes unable to choose and consciously generate new forms. Neither democracy nor authoritarian power seem able to process the infinite and hyper-accelerated flow of information, so morphogenesis can no more be a process of conscious decision and elaboration, and turns into a self-regulating effect of blind emergence. The info-networked Super-organism is evolving outside the sphere of human decision and knowledge, although its evolution is affecting the human environment— sometimes in a catastrophic way. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 27 THE MIND’ S WE 27 Capitalism as Double Bind Slavoj Žižek says that the financial collapse is not the end of the world, just the end of capitalism that we can hardly imagine. He’s possibly right, but the problem is this: what if the semiotic model of capitalism — and particularly of financial capitalism — has become the only one grid of perception and interaction? What if the biopolitical model of capitalism has pervaded the very fabric of social reproduction? “The organism which destroys its environment destroys itself,” Gregory Bateson said in a speech delivered at the Korzybski Memorial in the year 1970. And also he said: If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable in the pre-cybernetic era, and which were especially underlined and strengthened during the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty or thirty years before the logical reduction ad absurdum of our old positions destroys us.12 Thirty years have gone, and we have not stopped thinking in Darwinian terms of competition, of survival of the fittest. Capitalism is agonizing, and the planet is dragged into the agony as well. Monetarism as autonomization of the monetary function can be considered as the capitalist attempt to escape or at least defer the final collapse of capitalism. 12 Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972), 451, 462. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 28 28 FRA NCO “BI FO” BER ARD I” In order to prolong its agony capitalism is subjecting the social energy and particularly the general intellect. The relation between capital and general intellect (the living force of knowledge and the technological potency of labor) can be interpreted in terms of relation between the Form and the Content. Just try to imagine this scenario, which is not so unlikely: the financial system of Europe totally crashes, national states stop paying wages to public workers, and all of a sudden money loses its grip on the social mind. Would our skills, our knowledge, our competences be cancelled by this sudden apocalyptic event? Not at all, of course. We would be the same as we are now. Engineers would be able to build bridges, doctors would be able to heal sick people, and poets would be able to create their imaginary worlds. Exactly like now, and possibly better. The crumbling of the form would not affect the content. But the agony of the capitalist form, if protracted in time will slowly but steadily dismantle the social content, and it is already doing this. The de-financing and privatization of the public school, for instance, is going in this direction. The majority of the population is marginalized and mass de-schooling results. Private schools are reducing knowledge to the idolatry of the economic dogma, technical skills are separated from social understanding and science is separated from the humanities. This is the school reform that started in 1999 with the signature of the Bologna Chart—in actuality, it is the destruction of the legacy of the autonomy of knowledge, and of transdisciplinary research. The form is destroying the content. The relation between the form and content sometimes becomes pathogenic, and starts producing what Gregory Bateson named double binds. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 29 THE MIND’ S WE 29 Bateson has described this process in his studies on the genesis of schizophrenia: the context is affecting the understanding of the message, in such a way that communication itself is jeopardized at the end, because the form of interaction (medium) changes the content, or perverts the understanding of the content (meaning). The more serious and conspicuous degree of symptomatology is what is conventionally called schizophrenia. … The literal is confused with the metaphoric. Internal messages are confused with external. The trivial is confused with the vital. The originator of the message is confused with the recipient and the perceiver with the thing perceive.13 In situations like these the content has to be disentangled from the form, and a new form has to arise from the self-organization of the content. Generation by Schism What is Form (morphè)? For Gestalt theory the brain perceives objects thanks to the existence of forms that are embedded in the perceptual constitution of the mind. As Gestalt, the Form is the condition for the differentiation of objects from the surrounding environment, and for the interpretation of their meaning. But we can also say that Form is the semiotic pattern that our mind projects into the world, and the model for the production of external objects. In this sense Form can also be defined as a prototype, the original in-formation which shapes matter. 13 Ibid., 261. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 30 30 FRA NCO “BI FO” BER ARD I” By this point of view we can say that Form is a general semiotizer: the paradigm that makes possible the attribution of consistent meaning to phenomena that we experience as signs. When Guattari speaks of chaosmic spasm he is saying that the general semiotizer is no longer able to semiotize, and the social mind is deprived of the ability to process information in a consistent way. The refrain is no longer able to resonate with the surrounding info-environment. This is the spasm. Then a process of re-syntonization begins, and Guattari names this process chaosmosis. In the chaosmotic process forms emerge from chaos by vibratory approximation to an order that is functional and aesthetic. Functional order makes possible the manipulation of objects, while aesthetic order enables the conjunction of objects in the sensibility and sensitivity of the living organism. In certain cases, the form—as semiotic grid—can become a tangle, a generator of double binds. In these cases the Form (the Gestalt) is not helping to interpret and to handle the contents of the collective mind, but it is limiting the possibility of development of the matter-content and jeopardizing the concatenation of mind and Infosphere. When the Form starts to jeopardize and destroy the contents that are organized and in-formed by it (knowledge, skills, technology, social emotionality), then disentanglement is the only alternative to devastation and death. In our society Capital is the General Gestalt of our experience of production and circulation of things. The authors who have been speaking of paradigm shifts have generally forgotten to say that this shift is not necessary nor linear. The paradigm shift is a tendency and a possibility, but in the process of social becoming this tendency and this possibility may be obstructed and hindered by the overwhelming force of the automatism implied in the past form of subjectivity. We have to be aware of this contradiction if we want to understand the real process of social morphogenesis, in the present time, and in the present conditions. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 31 THE MIND’ S WE 31 Capitalism, as the general form of the Economy is entangling the potential developments of the social brain, impeding and diverting the paradigm shift. If we want to understand this entanglement we have to retrace the history of the present subjectivity, analyzing the various layers of its becoming, the psychic, the cultural and the aesthetic too. Bateson uses the word “schismogenesis” to describe the process of differentiation internal to human groups and the generation of new levels of anthropological integration. I want to use the same word—schismogenesis—in order to describe the separation that leads to the generation of new forms. The generation of a Form that is more likely to foster the development of the potencies of the Content can only happen by dissociation, and disentanglement of the potentiality of the content from the entangling Form. Schismogenesis means therefore, in my intention, self-organization of the contents after their dissociation from the entangling Form, and proliferation by contagion (affective, informational, aesthetic contagion) of the new Form that is generated by the schism. In our present condition a question arises: is disentanglement still possible, when the mind of the social organism has been deeply infected by the viral proliferation of double binds? And also: what is the origin of the proliferation of double binds in the social mind? The paradigm shift is a general tendency inscribed in the evolution of contents of knowledge, technology and social production, but this tendency is hindered by entangling forms, which act as a form of repetitive semiotizer generating double binds in the social mind. In order to understand why the social mind is unable to free itself from these entangling forms of semiotization we have to analyze the cultural and psychological becoming of sensibility, and the infection of the social organism that is investing the sphere of sensibility. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 32 32 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 33 JAS ON SMIT H 33 Soul on Strike 1 The soul is the clinamen of the body. It is how it falls, and what makes it fall in with other bodies. The soul is its gravity. This tendency for certain bodies to fall in with others is what constitutes a world. The materialist tradition represented by Epicurus and Lucretius proposed a worldless time in which bodies rain down through the plumbless void, straight down and side-by-side, until a sudden, unpredictable deviation or swerve—clinamen—leans bodies toward one another, so that they come together in a lasting way. The soul does not lie beneath the skin. It is the angle of this swerve and what then holds these bodies together. It spaces bodies, rather than hiding within them; it is among them, their consistency, the affinity they have for one another. It is what they share in common: neither a form, nor some thing, but a rhythm, a certain way of vibrating, a resonance. Frequency, tuning or tone. 1 Editors’ note: This text was previously published as the preface to Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy, trans. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 34 34 J A SON SM IT H To speak of a soul at work is to move the center of gravity in contemporary debates about cognitive capitalism. The soul is not simply the capacity for abstraction, for the subsumption of the particular. It is an aesthetic organ as well, the exposure of thought to the contractions and dilations of space, to the quickening and lapsing of time. To say the soul is put to work is to affirm that the social brain or general intellect (to use two of Marx’s phrases that have some currency in these debates) is not the primary source of value in the production process. Rather the soul as a web of attachments and tastes, attractions and inclinations. The soul is not simply the seat of intellectual operations, but the affective and libidinal forces that weave together a world: attentiveness, the ability to address, care for and appeal to others. The contemporary subject of cognitive capitalism—Bifo speaks of the cognitariat, but perhaps there are other names—is not simply a producer of knowledge and a manager of symbols. Capitalism is the mobilization of a pathos and the organization of a mood; its subject, a field of desire, a point of inflexion for an impersonal affect that circulates like a rumor. The cognitariat carries a virus. Bifo’s book The Soul at Work calls itself an experiment in “psychopathology,” and it describes how something in the collective soul has seized up. The world has become heavy, thick, opaque, intransigent. A little, dark light shines through, though. Something opens up with this extinction of the possible. We no longer feel compelled to act, that is, to be effective. Our passivity almost seems like a release, a refusal, a de-activation of a system of possibles that are not ours. The possible is seen for what it is: an imposition, smothering. With the eclipse of the possible, at the point zero of depressive lapse, we are at times seized by our own potentiality: a potency that, no longer invested in vectors of realization, washes back over us. Depression occurs, Franco “Bifo” Berardi argues, when the speed and complexity of the flows of information overwhelm the capacities of the “social brain” to manage these flows, inducing a panic that concludes, shortly thereafter, with Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 35 S OUL ON STRIKE 35 a depressive plunge. Depression is so widespread today, Bifo argues, because the contemporary organization of production of surplus-value is founded on the phenomenon—the accumulation—of speed. In well-known pages from the Grundrisse, Marx spoke of a tendency, a limit point in the process of the valorization of capital: the impossible possibility that capital might circulate “without circulation time,” at an infinite velocity, such that the passage from one moment in the circulation of capital to the next would take place at the “speed of thought.” Such a capital would return to itself even before taking leave of itself, passing through all of its phases in a process encountering no obstacles, in an ideal time without time—in the blinding flash of an instant without duration, a cycle contracting into a point. No less an authority than Bill Gates restages this fantasy—a limit point of capital, toward which it strains, its vanishing point—in his Business @ the Speed of Thought, cited by Bifo as a contemporary formalization of this threshold, summoning the possibility of the circulation of information that would, Gates fantasizes, occur as “quickly and naturally as thought in a human being.” There is speed and there is speed. It is not simply the phenomenon of speed as such that plays the pathogenic role here. The social factory is just as much governed by the destabilizing experience of changes in rhythms, differences in speeds, whiplash-like reorientations imposed on a workforce that is flexible, precarious and permanently on-call—and equipped with the latest iPhone. This organization of work, in which just-in-time production is overseen by a permanently temporary labor force, is mirrored in the form of governance characteristic of democratic imperialism, sustained as it is by appeals to urgency, permanent mobilization, suspensions of norms: governance by crisis, rule by exception. It is impossible to separate the spheres of the economy and the political these days. In each case, a managed disorder, the administration of chaos. The social pacts and productive truces of the old welfare states are gone. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 36 36 J A SON SM IT H Instability is now the order of the day. Disorder, a technique of government. Depression starts to look less like a drying up of desire than a stubborn, if painful, libidinal slowdown or sabotage, a demobilization. The soul on strike. The Soul at Work wants to answer this question: How did we get from the particular forms of workers’ struggle in the 1960s, characterized by widespread “estrangement” of workers from the capitalist organization of production, to the situation today, in which work has become the central locus of psychic and emotional investment, even as this new libidinal economy induces an entire range of collective pathologies, from disorders of attention to new forms of dyslexia, from sudden panics to mass depression? How, in other words, have we passed from the social antagonisms of the 1960s and 1970s, when worker power was paradoxically defined by a refusal of work, its autonomy from the capitalist valorization process, and its own forms of organization—its defection from factory discipline—to the experience of the last two decades, where work has become the core of our identity, no longer economically necessary, yet vital to the constitution of the self? In short, from fleeing work to identifying with it? Something happened in 1977. Bifo hangs his story on this mutation. It’s the year when the refusal of work reaches a fever pitch in the Italian autonomia movement, the year that the logic of antagonism and worker needs—what Mario Tronti called the “antagonistic will” of the proletariat—gives way to a logic of desire, in which social productivity can no longer be accounted for in strictly economic categories, and in which the insurrectionary vectors no longer map onto the old imaginary of social war. The centrality of the category of worker needs in the struggles of the 1960s took primarily two forms. In the sphere of consumption, there was the form of direct democracy known as “political” pricing, in which neighborhoods and entire sections of cities unilaterally Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 37 S OUL ON STRIKE 37 reduced the costs of goods and services such as housing, transportation and electricity, on the basis of a collective decision that refused any economic rationality in the determination of prices. At the point of production, the primary lever of antagonism was the wage struggle, in which worker power was exercised in a refusal to link wage levels to productivity, insisting the wage be treated as an “independent variable.” The mutation represented by the events of 1977, in which the logic of needs and antagonism gives way to desire and flight, is where The Soul at Work really begins. For what is at stake in its story is the aftermath of this mass defection from factory discipline, this unilateral withdrawal from the social pact drawn up by capital and its partners, the unions and the worker parties, in view of “saving” the Italian economy after the war. It asks: how has the sphere of desire, the field of the imaginary and the affective, whose affirmation as the fundamental field of the political once led to a collective abandonment of the sphere of work, been transformed into the privileged force in the contemporary order of work, the privileged moment in the production of value? Desire braids together emotional, linguistic, cognitive and imaginary energies that affirmed themselves against the regime of work in the 1960s and 1970s, a refusal that is then paradoxically put to work by capital itself. This colonization of the soul and its desire—the entry of the soul itself into the production process—spawns paradoxical effects. It transforms labor-power into what managerial theories call human capital, harnessing and putting to work not an abstract, general force of labor, but the particularity, the unique combination of psychic, cognitive and affective powers I bring to the labor process. Because this contemporary reformatting functions through the incitement of my specific creative and intellectual powers, I experience work as the segment of social life in which I am most free, most capable of realizing my desires: most myself. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 38 38 J A SON SM IT H Soul at Work analyzes the contemporary dynamics of capital in its “cognitive” phase using a method it calls compositionism. This term is used by Bifo to avoid the misconceptions induced by the use of operaismo—workerism—to describe the specifically Italian current of Marxism he both inherits and breaks with. Though strictly speaking the phase of classical operaismo begins in the early 1960s and ends with the dissolution of the group Potere Operaio (within which Bifo militated) in 1973, the larger field of compositionist thought remains very active today, encompassing a wide range of tendencies represented by thinkers such as Paolo Virno, Antonio Negri, and Maurizio Lazzarato. This tradition is founded on three imbricated theoretical breakthroughs: the axiom asserting the primacy of worker’s struggles in the development of capital, the study of the changing composition of the working class as the key for deciphering novel forms of political organization and action, and Marx’s description (in the Grundrisse) of the emergence of the “general intellect” as a form of worker power that threatens to destroy the bases for organizing production to extort surplus-value. The first concept requires that every analysis of the changing structure of capital be understood not on the basis of the internal contradictions of capital itself, but as a certain response to, and use of, proletarian aggression: worker insubordination alone initiates restructuration on the part of capital. This response, in which the organic composition of capital—the ratio of fixed to variable capital—undergoes a mutation, induces a recomposition of the internal consistency of the working class. This axiom of the priority of worker refusal required, in turn, the development of a phenomenology of proletarian experience. This phenomenology described the changing internal composition of the various layers of the working class, identifying emerging strata that would assume a dominant role in the immediate process of production: for example, the increasing importance of the mass worker in Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 39 S OUL ON STRIKE 39 the Fordist factory, after the hegemony of the skilled worker of earlier social compositions. On the basis of this analysis of the different strata of the working class, novel political forms of organization and action—beyond the Leninist party and its revolutionary strategy—adequate to this composition. Finally, the thesis on the “general intellect,” in which Marx sees the use of automation in the production process reaching a moment when labor-time can no longer be posited as the measure of value, implies both of the preceding concepts: the move to an increasingly automated system of production is seen as a response to worker struggles around the working day, while the positing of the intellect and knowledge as a productive force implies a change within the composition of the working class, with certain sectors (in Bifo’s analysis, the cognitariat) emerging as the paradigmatic form of labor. Insofar as the method of class composition is undertaken in view of seeking out novel openings in the social war—its elevation to another level of complexity and intensity—the specter of a labor process increasingly founded on the production and management of knowledge initiated, an erosion of the classical division of labor and its corresponding organizational diagrams. Placing pressure on Marx’s analysis of the general intellect allowed the militants of the compositionist tradition to diagram a series of mutations in the dynamics of contemporary class antagonism. The collapse of the distinction between conception and execution, between managing production and production itself, threatened to generalize the site of conflict to society as a whole, diminishing the absolute privilege accorded the factory as the unique point of production and exploitation. The Soul at Work begins from these analytical premises. Using the thesis of the general intellect as a starting point to describe the dynamics of cognitive capital, it reformats this concept to include the range of emotional, affective and aesthetic textures and experiences that are deployed in the Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 40 40 J A SON SM IT H contemporary experience of work, and gives it another name: soul. From there, The Soul at Work explains the emergence of the current regime of accumulation as a reaction to the intensification of proletarian refusal to work that began in the 1960s and reached its peak—the point of mass defection from the factories and the wage-relation—in 1977, with the proliferation of areas of autonomy and the supplanting of worker needs with communist desire. And most importantly, it attempts to decipher the possible forms of politics opened by a new class composition whose paradigm is the cognitive worker. What mutations in the forms and vectors of politics are implied by the definitive implosion of the Leninist schema of the Party and the revolutionary destruction of the bourgeois state? In other words, what are the possibilities of communism today, in a post-political moment when the classical forms of organization and action corresponding to an earlier class composition have withered away? We’re starting to talk about communism again these days. We don’t know yet what it is, but it’s what we want. The enigmatic final lines of The Soul at Work ask us to contemplate the possibility of a communism that is no longer the “principle of a new totalization,” but an endless process of constituting poles of autonomy communicating via “therapeutic contagion.” Politics, Bifo suggests, still belongs to the order of totality. Whether understood as the management of social conflict through the mediation of the State and the forms of juridical equivalence, or as the practice of an irreducible antagonism, the political has always been wedded to the logical and metaphysical categories of totality and negation. Communism means the withering away of the political. But the post-political era opens not onto an administration of things, as Engels once dreamed, but to what is here daringly called therapy—that is, with the articulation of “happy singularizations” that defect from the metropolitan factory of unhappiness. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 41 S OUL ON STRIKE 41 The call-to-arms sounded by the Bolognese autonomopunk journal A/traverso (founded by Bifo in 1975) was “the practice of happiness is subversive when it’s collective.” This call still resonates, however muffled. Today, we can add: happiness is collective only when it produces singularities. Bifo calls the contemporary organization of production in which the soul and its affective, linguistic and cognitive powers are put to work the factory of unhappiness because the primary function of the work the post-Fordist factory commands is not the creation of value but the fabrication of subjectivities—the modeling of psychic space and the induction of psychopathologies as a technique of control. In a phase of capitalist development in which the quantity of socially necessary labor is so insignificant that it can no longer seriously be considered the measure of value, the ghostly afterlife of the order of work is an entirely political necessity. Work is a matter of discipline, the production of docility. When work becomes the site of libidinal and narcissistic investment, spinning a web of abjections and dependencies that exploits rather than represses desire— we become attached and bound to our own unhappiness. “Happiness” is a fragile word. In a book he wrote about Félix Guattari, Bifo concedes that it can sound “corny and banal,” to which we might add rotten, having languished in the fetid mouths of the planetary petit bourgeoisie long enough to be tainted for all time. Our metaphysicians held it in contempt. Hegel identified it with dumb immediacy, blank as an empty page. Kant was equally clear, founding his moral philosophy on the premise that it is better to be worthy of happiness than to be happy—ethics opens in the fault between the order of value and an order of affections structured by aesthetic textures and the contingencies of space and time. Psychoanalysis taught us that happiness comes at a price: a renunciation of drives, which, far from banishing them, makes them that much nastier, turned back against us in the guise of guilt and cruel self-laceration. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 42 42 J A SON SM IT H In the Grundrisse, Marx admonished Adam Smith for confusing freedom with happiness and work with necessity, sacrifice and suffering. This is true, he thundered, only from the perspective of the current regime of work, wage-labor as “externally forced labor.” But if work is for us sacrifice, it can one day be “self-realization”: the construction and mastery of one’s own conditions of existence, freedom as selfobjectification, the making of a world as the production of the self itself. In a society in which work is no longer organized by a small clique which has monopolized the means of production through violence, crime and economic reason, work will become seductive. Labor will be attractive, says Marx following Fourier, because it is no longer work at all but its negation and overcoming, the accumulation of joy and the collective composition of a commons. Such pleasure will not be mere play or, God forbid, “fun,” but what Marx in Grundrisse calls “damned seriousness”: “Really free working, e.g. composing, is at the same time precisely the most damned seriousness, the most intense exertion.” The task of the communism to come is the constitution of poles of autonomy where what Marx calls the “individual’s self-realization” and Bifo calls “happy singularizations” become shared possibilities. The contemporary regime of work has produced a perfect inversion of the scenario Marx projects—work has become the site of libidinal investment, but produces pathologies and depression rather than the damned serious practice of happiness. The creation of zones of therapeutic contagion requires not only a defection from the archaic form of the wage—in which we still pretend to measure value with the time of work—but undertaking a labor on ourselves, a working through of our attachment to work. The great epoch of the refusal of work required that we go on the offensive against ourselves, that the proletariat destroy itself as a class, as labor-power. Today, we are told, this politics of destruction is replaced by a therapy that is Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 43 S OUL ON STRIKE 43 primarily aesthetic in nature: the composition of a refrain that constitutes a territory subtracted from the social factory and its temporalities and rhythms. For Marx, the privileged example of really free working—happiness itself—is “composition,” the construction of the communist score. Now we know: the aesthetic paradigm of the communism to come will consist in the singularization and elaboration of formsof-life, a communism whose song will free the space in which it resonates, and spreads. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 44 44 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 45 TIZIANA T ERR ANOVA 45 Ordinary Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism 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 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. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 46 46 T IZI ANA TERRAN OVA 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 2 Deleuze, 3 Carlo “Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium,” 36. 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). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 47 O RDINA RY PSYCHOPATH OLOGIES OF COG NITIV E CA PITALIS M 47 As such it is part of a range of new terms which have also tried to question the uncritical identification of the economy with the 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 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. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 48 48 T IZI ANA TERRAN OVA 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) Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 49 O RDINA RY PSYCHOPATH OLOGIES OF COG NITIV E CA PITALIS M 49 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 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). Ca ?? Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 50 50 T IZI ANA TERRAN OVA From advertising and marketing to the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, from media production to the arts, from care of the body and the self (care of children, the elderly, the sick, beauty and fitness) to the aesthetic production of everyday life (everything pertaining to the home, fashion and style), ultimately, contemporary capitalism implies a real subsumption of the whole of life stretching from the biological life of the species to the spiritual life of publics, from bios to noos, from organic to inorganic life10. Real subsumption, however, should not be identified with complete domination, on the contrary. Cognitive capitalism is crossed by a constituent tension between the tendency to exploitation, subsumption and proletarianization on one side, and autonomy, self-reference, and self-creation on the other. As a concept aiming to politicize the notion of the knowledge economy from a post-workerist Marxist perspective, the notion of cognitive capitalism is not immune to critique. Identifying the source of value in the cognitive capacities of living labor belies an emphasis on the symbolic and the linguistic that underestimate the centrality of the affective and the pre-cognitive to the operations of contemporary capitalism and downplays the active role played by its technical machines. The notion of psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism in a way short-circuits such cognitivism by foregrounding unconscious and libidinal processes that disrupt the smooth productivity of cognitive production while at the same time stressing the problematic nature of the incorporation of the technical machine or fixed capital in the body of living labor. 10 See Tiziana Terranova, “Another Life: The Nature of Political Economy in Foucault’s Genealogy of Biopolitics,” in Theory, Culture & Society (November 2009), 26. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 51 O RDINA RY PSYCHOPATH OLOGIES OF COG NITIV E CA PITALIS M 51 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 neoevolutionary 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 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. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 52 52 T IZI ANA TERRAN OVA 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 unconscious15. 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 cervellosoggetto.” 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. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 53 O RDINA RY PSYCHOPATH OLOGIES OF COG NITIV E CA PITALIS M 53 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. 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. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 54 54 T IZI ANA TERRAN OVA Looking at such pathologies from a post-autonomist perspective, however, allows us to deploy what we might almost describe as a “stratagematic” and “schizoanalytic” reading or a transformation of the assessment of the parameters at play.19 It is not a question of building a comprehensive account of such psychopathologies, but introducing some elements of problematization both in the neurological account of psychopathology and in critical accounts that tends to stress only the suffering experienced by the cognitariat in cognitive capitalism... “Hyper” or “too much” will thus be also read positively as excess, implicating that which cannot be completely absorbed by cognitive capitalism and which lingers as a remainder of what is not containable and subsumable within its logic. “Hypo” or “too little” and “absence” as error, will be read as a stratagem of subtraction, of flight from cognitive capitalism’s capture with ambivalent political implications. Overall the purpose of this exercise will be to establish whether the link between psychopathology and the brain produces a reading which not only stresses the cost paid by the psyche to exploitation, but also its autonomous strategy of excess and subtraction pointing to the horizon of the constitution of an autonomous, self-productive social brain. This is why this essay will not so much focus on explicitly pathologic forms of psychic suffering as much as on ordinary psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism. 19 On the use of stratagems in media theory, see Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey, Evil Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 55 O RDINA RY PSYCHOPATH OLOGIES OF COG NITIV E CA PITALIS M 55 (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”: 20 Zerocalcare, “La fascia oraria delle bermude” (http://www.zerocalcare.it/ 2013/01/21/la-fascia-oraria-delle-bermuda/). Last accessed 16.2.2013. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 56 56 T IZI ANA TERRAN OVA “The Bermuda timezone is that span of time between 9pm and 2am where apparently normal people sit in front of the computer and within the time of an eye-blink realize that five hours have inexplicably passed, swallowed by a dense curtain of fog and oblivion, jeopardizing deadlines, exams, health...” As a result, Zerocalcare does not meet his deadline and must spend the rest of the night fighting off the vengeful and angry spirit of Margaret Thatcher. One of the explanations that Zerocalcare gives himself (beyond having been drugged with Rohypnol or kidnapped by aliens) is the existence of a hypnotic function within the Facebook chat, which is activated around that time. However, as his brain’s long-term memory is short-circuited by what Sherry Turkle once described as “computer holding power”, software is paying attention, accumulating a mass of microdata about his interaction with the network.21 A quick retrieval of the chronology on his web browser brings back unknown memories of aimless drifting from website to website chasing trivial information. It is clear that what we are dealing with here is not so much the pathologization of attention in children and adolescents, but a kind of ordinary psychopathologization such as that identified by Nicholas Carr in his much quoted article on “Why Google is Making Us Stupid” (later turned into a book The Shallows).22 21 See Sherry Turkle, “Videogames and Computer Holding Power,” in The New Media Reader, eds., Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 499-513. 22 Nicholas Carr, “Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains,” in The Atlantic, (July-August 2008). (http://www. theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/ 306868/). Last accessed 16.2.2013; Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 57 O RDINA RY PSYCHOPATH OLOGIES OF COG NITIV E CA PITALIS M 57 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. 23 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception. Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 13. 24 Ibid. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 58 58 T IZI ANA TERRAN OVA 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 endless sequence of new products, sources of stimulation, and streams of information” and then as responding to ensuing crisis of attentiveness “with new methods for managing and regulating perception.” However, “the articulation of a subject in terms of attentive capacities simultaneously disclosed a subject incapable of conforming to such disciplinary imperatives.” 25 As a widespread, almost normal psychopathology, this hyperattention 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 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. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 59 O RDINA RY PSYCHOPATH OLOGIES OF COG NITIV E CA PITALIS M 59 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 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. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 60 60 T IZI ANA TERRAN OVA Anhedonia What can we do so that the break-through does not become a breakdown? —Gilles Deleuze On an autumn day of 2011, during a particularly intense season of struggles by precarious cognitive labor in Rome, Italy, a series of billboards appeared plastered all over the walls of a neighborhood popular with the cognitariat, Il Pigneto. In striking red, yellow and black, the signs read like this: “Enough with rising drug prices”: “Psychoactive substances are a tool of synthonization and synchronization of the precarious and intermittent times of life and work. [...]” Referring to the examples highlighted in the poster, such as “the rise of 12% in the price of cocaine, 20% for marijuana, 25% for MDMA, and 16% for heroin”, the poster stated that “rising prices for such substances are an indiscriminate attack to the bare life of the working class.” Countering the “prescriptive regimen of the dose” with the “illicit regimen of the hit”, this provocative media campaign of the Italian cognitariat draws on the importance of the modulation not only of attention, but also of pleasure and desire to the life of cognitive labor.29 29 Massimo Lugli, “Droghe: basta aumenti del prezzo: manifesti shock al Pigneto,” in La Repubblica, 20 September 2012. (http://roma.repubblica.it/ cronaca/2012/09/20/news/droghe_basta_aumenti_del_prezzo_manifesti_ choc_al_pigneto-42875748/). Last accessed 17.02.2013. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 61 O RDINA RY PSYCHOPATH OLOGIES OF COG NITIV E CA PITALIS M 61 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.32 Posing 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? 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 Destre” (http://www.youtube.com/watch? feature=player_embedded&v=CUK8D-kX0fE#!). Last accessed 17.02.2013. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 62 62 T IZI ANA TERRAN OVA 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” decisionmaking. 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. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 63 O RDINA RY PSYCHOPATH OLOGIES OF COG NITIV E CA PITALIS M 63 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.” 33 Ibid. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 64 64 T IZI ANA TERRAN OVA 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 34 Ibid. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 65 O RDINA RY PSYCHOPATH OLOGIES OF COG NITIV E CA PITALIS M 65 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. 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. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 66 66 T IZI ANA TERRAN OVA 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 as the 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 39 Wilkins and Dragos, “Destructive distraction? An Ecological Study of High Frequency Trading”, 4. 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. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 67 O RDINA RY PSYCHOPATH OLOGIES OF COG NITIV E CA PITALIS M 67 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 nonorganic 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. 40 Gilles Deleuze, “Schizophrenia and Society,” in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995 (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 19. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 68 68 T IZI ANA TERRAN OVA Creating a binary opposition between the functional and ordered economic subject (socially translated as the investor) and the dysfunctional and disordered schizophrenics (socially translatable into the NEETs), such experiments dismiss the mutual powers of contamination of these two struggling poles: “there is always some stimulus or impulse stealing into the heart of the catatonic stupor; and vice versa, stupor and rigid stasis are forever creeping over the swarming machines...” 41 Deleuze suggested that opening up the schizophrenic process in such a way as to counteract those strategies of normalization which employ chemical or institutional means to literally “lock the schizophrenic up” requires a combination of “lived chemistry” and “schizological analysis.”42 As he also asks, what kind of group, what kind of collectivity would be required to turn the catatonic body and the hyper-machinic body into something else? As the milieus of individuation, that is the conditions by which new kinds of subjectivities can be formed, are increasingly defined by the powers of corporate networked media, what kind of social brain can be materialised to unleash a new “molecular revolution” arising from libidinal disinvestment in the rewards of cognitive capitalism? 41 Deleuze, “Schizophrenia and Society,” 19-20. 42 Deleuze, “Schizophrenia and Society,” 28. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 69 JODI DEAN 69 Collective Desire and the Pathology of the Individual An interesting strand of contemporary theory designates the specificity of capitalism with the qualifier “cognitive.” 1 I do not write under this term, although I am influenced by theorists who do insofar as they also highlight communication. Franco Berardi, for example, observes that “cognitive labor is essentially a labor communication, that is to say communication put to work.” 2 While communication encompasses a wide array of waged and non-waged activities expropriated for and exploited by contemporary capitalism, the term “cognitive capitalism” feels to me like an academic version of the hacker dream of leaving the meat. It gives away too much. The term accepts the neoliberal claim for a knowledge society wherein workers are primarily creative workers or a kind of “cognitariat.” It’s not surprising, then, to find those interested in contemporary knowledge management emphasizing the convergence between capitalist management gurus like Peter Drucker and Marxists Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno.3 1 These theorists include Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Christian Marazzi, Yann Moulier Boutang, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and others influenced by the Italian workerist tradition. 2 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work, trans. Francesca Cadel and Giuseppina Mecchia (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009). 3 Michael A. Peters and James Reveley, “Knowledge Work Under Cognitive Capitalism,” in Truthout, (May 18, 2012). http://truth-out.org/ opinion/item/9035-knowledge-work-under-cognitive-capitalism. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 70 70 J ODI DEA N In a way, the term “cognitive capitalism” makes the world appear smarter than it is, as if intelligence replaced manufacturing when in fact manufacturing was pushed out of some countries and onto others in the search for ever cheaper labor, when factory work was becoming all the more brutal and massified even if less visible.4 Further, the term cognitive capitalism implies that affective labor is something new. This obscures rather than acknowledges the long histories of women’s affective labor and the struggles around attempts to enclose it in the home and harness it for capital.5 Finally, “cognitive capitalism” overplays immateriality even as it brings materiality, meat, bones, and blood back in via the emphasis on brains. And here especially I am reluctant to embrace the term because of the ways its diagnoses, the pathologies it identifies, can be rendered functional for capital: they can tell capital what it needs to fix. Workers too depressed? Try Zoloft! Working so many hours that focus is impossible? Try Adderall! Or, in a more recent configuration, one that is sinister in its playfulness: bored by your screen of spreadsheets and memos? Watch some cute kitty videos—these improve worker efficiency!6 4 See George Caffentzis, “A Critique of ‘Cognitive Capitalism,’” in Cognitive Capitalism, Education, and Digital Labor, edited by Michael A. Peters and Ergin Bulut (New York: Peter Lang, 2011). 5 See Silvia Federici, “On Affective Labor,” in Cognitive Capitalism, Education, and Digital Labor. 6 Sarah Kliff, “Want to improve your productivity? Study says: Look at this adorable kitten!” the Washington Post, October 1, 2012. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/ 10/01/want-to-increase-your-productivity-study-says-look-at-thisadorable-kitten/. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 71 COL LECTIVE DESIR E AND THE PATHO LOGY OF THE INDIV IDUAL 71 Rather than viewing contemporary capitalism as cognitive, I view it as communicative.7 As Hardt and Negri write, “Communication is the form of capitalist production in which capital has succeeded in submitting society entirely and globally to its regime, suppressing all alternative paths.” 8 Whether of affects, images, anxieties, or ideas, communication is the means of capitalist subsumption, the vehicle for its intensification and expansion. My focus here is on one pathology associated with the capture and instrumentalization of our communicative capacities, that it to say, on what happens when our basic sociality serves as a primary means of capitalist expropriation, which it has since capitalism began. This pathology is the individual form of subjectivity, a form that emerges historically and is today the site of opposing dynamics, of pressures that simultaneously disperse, concentrate, and overburden individuality as personal singularity. My discussion might be particular to the hyper-individualistic culture of the United States. In an overview of histories of the individual, the political theorist Steven Lukes describes differences among nineteenth century French, German, English, and American concepts of the individual, noting how the American version implied capitalism, liberal democracy, and the American Dream.9 7 For a more complete discussion of communicative capitalism see Jodi Dean, Publicity’s Secret (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), and Blog Theory (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010). 8 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 347. 9 Steven Lukes, “The Meanings of Individualism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 32, No. 1 (Jan.-Mar., 1971), 45-66. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 72 72 J ODI DEA N I do not attend to these differences (and so may overgeneralize from an American situation, which may still be beneficial insofar as it sets out a kind of imperialist individuating). Rather, I focus on the individual as a form like the commodity is a form. The commodity is a form for value. The individual is a form for subjectivity, indeed, a form endeavoring to abolish collective subjectivity by separating it into and containing it within individuated bodies and psyches. C.B. MacPherson locates a “possessive individual” at the heart of the liberal theory of the seventeenth century which conceived the individual “as essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them.”10 For liberals like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, MacPherson argues, “The human essence is freedom from dependence on the wills of others, and freedom is a function of possession.”11 This individual is not understood as part of something larger, as fundamentally interconnected with others, as dependent on relations to others human and nonhuman. Rather, it is a proprietor of capacities engaging other proprietors. This necessarily and unavoidably capitalistic orientation, fundamental not only to liberal understandings of property but also to the market and to contracts, is crucial to MacPherson’s critique of liberalism. We should note its fundamental reflexivity: proprietorship relies on a series of separations and enclosures. Capacities are separate from others as well as separate from the self or ego, which can thus enclose these capacities within its person. Training, whether moral or technical, is then work on and for the self rather than part of collective reproduction for the common good. 10 C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 3. 11 Ibid. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 73 COL LECTIVE DESIR E AND THE PATHO LOGY OF THE INDIV IDUAL 73 Enclosed within the individual, capacities become so many objects available for exchange, and, as capitalism evolves and expands, for investment, stylization, and self-branding. Even as I treat the individual as pathology, I also consider how we are moving beyond the pathology of the individual form. The last couple of years have been tremendously exciting. People have come together in opposition to capital and its demands for cuts, austerity, and more and more money for the one percent. Critical analyses of our setting and diagnoses of the pathologies plaguing it need to be supplemented by attention to the ways people are already overcoming them, moving beyond them, expressing new or formerly repressed capacities. My tag for this beyond is “collective desire.” My research in this direction is just beginning, still provisional and in flux.12 The intuition I pursue here is that recognizing the pathological nature of the individual form lets us see possibilities for emerging senses of and desires for collectivity. More precisely, rather than looking at drugs and mental illness as pathologies, we should consider the likelihood that the individual form itself is the pathology; drugs attempt to maintain it, keep it going. The individual, then, is pathological in the sense that the setting in which it functioned is passing away. So the problem is not that the extremes of a contemporary capitalism that has merged with the most fundamental components of communicativity is making us depressed, anxious, autistic, and distracted and so we need to find ways to preserve and protect our fragile individualities. Rather, depression, anxiety, autism, and hyperactivity signal the breakdown of a form that was always itself a problem, a mobilization of reflexivity, a turning inward, to break connection and weaken collective strength. 12 For a provisional account of collective desire, see Chapter 5 of my The Communist Horizon (London: Verso, 2012). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 74 74 J ODI DEA N The setting that is passing away is bourgeois capitalism. I use “bourgeois capitalism” to indicate an economic form inclusive of industrial as well as post-industrial, communicative, capitalism; Keynesian as well as neoliberal approaches to the economy; and a vision of the subject as a free, rational, individual as well as the critique of the exclusivity of this vision. In bourgeois capitalism, the individual appears as a form of freedom even as it functions as that enclosure of the common that fragments, disperses, and diminishes that collective power capable of guaranteeing freedom. As capitalism has intensified, so have the pressures for and on the individual. The individual is called on to express her opinion, speak for herself, get involved. She is told that she, all by herself, can make a difference—collective action, though, that’s off the table, either impossible or too repressive to constitute a real alternative. It is no wonder that communicative capitalism enjoins us to uniqueness, to specialization and specificity: we have to distinguish ourselves to get hired or, for most of us, to maintain the fantasy of something like a fair competition (it would be horrible to think that we went into enormous debt for nothing, that we put all the work into a proposal, design, or manuscript that had no chance). At the same time, this specialization supports marketers’ interests in ever more granular access to customers, police efforts to locate and track, and capital’s concern with preventing people from coalescing in common struggle. Once we acknowledge, however, that the individual form is not threatened but is the threat, not a form to be preserved but one whose dissolution points to emerging collectivity, then we can move beyond the diagnosis of the pathologies of what has already passed and amplify alternative tendencies in the present. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 75 COL LECTIVE DESIR E AND THE PATHO LOGY OF THE INDIV IDUAL 75 Alone Together Sherry Turkle’s ethnography of people and machines explores “networked life and its effects on intimacy and solitude, on identity and privacy.”13 Reporting on her interviews with teenagers, Turkle describes young people waiting for connection, fearful of abandonment, and dependent on immediate responses from others even to have feelings. For example, seventeen-year-old-Claudia has “happy feelings” as soon as she starts to text. Unlike a previous generation that might call someone to talk about feelings, when Claudia wants to have a feeling, she sends a text.14 Turkle also reports people’s anxieties about face-to-face interactions, expectations associated with the telephone, that is, speaking to another person in real time,15 and the multitasking that implants an uncertainty as to whether another is even paying attention. Combined with pressures for immediate response and the knowledge that the “internet never forgets” insofar as it’s difficult for most of us to eliminate all traces of our digital identities after they’ve been uploaded, archived, and shared, our new intimacy with technology, she demonstrates, is affecting the kinds of selves we become. We experience solitude, privacy, connection, and others differently from how we did before. For Turkle, these new experiences are pathological.16 13 Sherry Turkle, 14 Turkle, 176. 15 Turkle, 205. 16 Turkle, 178. Alone Together (NewYork: Basic Books, 2011), 169. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 76 J ODI DEA N 76 Drawing from Erik Erikson’s work on personal identity, she argues that networked technologies inhibit the kind of separation necessary for maturation. Parents are always in reach, available, even if they are not actually present but themselves over-worked, distracted, and over-extended. Young people do not learn how to be alone, how to reflect on their emotions in private. Fragile and dependent, they fail to develop that sense of who they are that they need to have “before” they “forge successful life partnerships.”17 Rather than innerdirected and autonomous (Turkle refers to David Riesman), the culture of mobile phones and instant messaging has raised other-directedness “to a higher power.”18 The expectation of constant connectivity eliminates opportunities for solitude even as people are “increasingly insecure, isolated, and lonely.”19 Turkle concludes, “Loneliness is failed solitude. To experience solitude, you must be able to summon yourself by yourself; otherwise you will only know how to be lonely.” 20 On the one hand, Turkle is surely right. There is nothing surprising in her account of contemporary “tethered selves.” From her diagnoses of narcissism (which in their gesture to what is arguably Freud’s most unreadable essay could be seen as indexing the fraught problematic of individuation) to her worries about the constant and even addictive character of networked communications, she repeats already well-known criticisms of teens and media. On the other hand, the language Turkle employs when she speaks of solitude might signal something more than an updating of the critique of mass and teen culture for a networked age. 17 Turkle, 175. 18 Turkle, 167, 19 Turkle, 157. 20 Turkle, 288. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 77 COL LECTIVE DESIR E AND THE PATHO LOGY OF THE INDIV IDUAL 77 She uses the second person—“you must be able to summon yourself by yourself”—and shifts from a descriptive to an imperative mode: “you must” if you are to know something besides how to be lonely. Turkle relies on this mode because she has described the reflective individual as threatened by networked technologies and she wants us to join her in defending the individual from this threat. Directly addressing the reader, she insists that the reflective individual be shored up (even as she rejects technologically mediated forms of this shoring up as themselves pathological). For Turkle, a self that is less bounded, more expansive, less separate, more connected, is immature, at risk of loneliness. It needs to form its identity, separate itself from others, and go through the stages of its becoming individual. I should add here that what Turkle links to technology, Dany-Robert Dufour (in The Art of Shrinking Heads), has linked to the acceleration of the process of individuation more broadly, particularly in connection to the decline in symbolic efficiency or change in the structure of the symbolic.21 The contemporary subject, he says, is called upon to create itself.22 Turkle’s interviewees describe themselves in ways that rub up against Turkle’s own concerns with separation and individuation. For example, a nurse, tired after eight hours at work and a second shift at home says that she logs onto Facebook and feels less alone. A college junior explains, “I feel that I am part of a larger thing, the Net, the Web. The world. It becomes a thing to me, a thing I am part of. And the people, too. I stop seeing them as individuals, really. They are part of this larger thing.”23 21 Dany-Robert Dufour, The Art of Shrinking Heads (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2008). 22 Dufour, 16. 23 Turkle, 168. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 78 J ODI DEA N 78 The student’s words here remind me of a line from Félix Guattari in “The micropolitics of fascism”: “The collective engagement is at once the subject, the object and the expression. No longer is the individual always the reference point for the dominant significations.” 24 The college junior feels himself and others to be part of a larger collectivity such that viewing himself and others as separate, as individuals, makes no sense; it loses the connection that arises through their mutual engagement. For Turkle, though, connectivity is so pathological that she depicts it biochemically, as an addiction. Her argument relies on Mihaly Csikscentmihalyi’s work on “f low.” Most references to flow are positive, descriptions of a desirable experience of focus, involvement, and immersion. Turkle’s, however, is critical: “In the flow state, you are able to act without self-consciousness” (as I will explore in a minute this absence of self-consciousness is an attribute crowds theorists also associate with being in a group, mass, or crowd). For Turkle, this acting without self-conscious is a problem because “you can have it when texting or e-mailing or during an evening on Facebook” (again, the use of the second person pronoun points to Turkle’s own anxiety, her attempt to implicate us in practices that are threatening and most be combatted).25 Melding game and life, that is, actual games like World of Warcraft, with email and Facebook, Turkle explains, “When online life becomes your game, there are new complications. If lonely, you can find continual connection. But this may leave you more isolated, without real people around you. So you may return to the Internet for another hit of what feels like connection.”26 24 Félix Guattari, Molecular Revolution, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Penguin, 1984), 203. 25 Turkle, 226. 26 Turkle, 227. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 79 COL LECTIVE DESIR E AND THE PATHO LOGY OF THE INDIV IDUAL 79 She uses neurochemistry to justify the language of addiction: “Our neurochemical response to every ping and ring tone seems to be the one elicited by the ‘seeking’ drive, a deep motivation of the human psyche. Connectivity becomes a craving; when we receive a text or an e-mail, our nervous system responds by giving us a shot of dopamine. We are stimulated by connectivity itself. We learn to require it, even when it depletes us.”27 What’s interesting in Turkle’s pathologizing treatment of connectivity is the way she blurs interaction with machines—phones, computers—with interactions with people. Our brains react to sounds by releasing—injecting— dopamine. But rather than this reaction being a valuable reinforcement of our connections with others, it is a dangerous stimulant that can deplete us. Would happy neurochemical responses to seeing people face-to-face be similarly suspect? Is the thrill of contact with others at a party, in a rally, at a concert, or in a crowd also at risk at becoming a craving insofar as such intense and demanding contact might also deplete us? If we do not give normative priority to the individual, that is, to the individual as the proper or exclusive form of subjectivity, then we could read the evidence Turkle offers differently. We could read it as an indication that a political form of separation and enclosure is changing, mutating, becoming something else. To say that the individual is a form with a history is not particularly controversial. It is also widely acknowledged that the setting that produced the individual has changed. Hardt and Negri, for example, follow Gilles Deleuze in describing this change as the passage from disciplinary society to the society of control. They point out how disciplinary logics worked primarily within the institutions of civil society to produce individuated subjects.28 27 Turkle, 28 Hardt 227. and Negri, Empire, 329. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 80 80 J ODI DEA N Michel Foucault is explicit on this point in Discipline and Punish where he notes how the crowd is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities.29 Very briefly and schematically, by the end of the twentieth century, disciplining and mediating institutions—the nuclear family, the prison, the school, the union, and the church—were in crisis. The spaces, logics, practices, and norms previously coalescing into social and economic institutions have broken down and apart. In some instances, the release of an institutional logic from its spatial constraints has given it all the more force; in other instances, the opposite has occurred. Thus, corresponding to this pervasive dissolution is an “indeterminacy of the form of the subjectivities produced.”30 Consequently, Hardt and Negri conclude that the bourgeois individual—the citizen-subject of an autonomous political sphere, the disciplined subject of civil society, the liberal subject willing to vote in public and then return home to his private domesticity— can no longer serve as a presupposition of theory or action. They suggest that in its place, we find fluid, hybrid, and mobile subjectivities who are undisciplined, who have not internalized specific norms and constraints, and who can now only be controlled. Networked communication technologies facilitate this control (together with other mechanisms like walls and weapons). As the decline of discipline weakened individuating structures, new techniques of individuation took their place. An easy example (one prominent in Turkle’s discussion) is the adoption of mobile phones as personal media devices for kids. 29 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 201. 30 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 197. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 81 COL LECTIVE DESIR E AND THE PATHO LOGY OF THE INDIV IDUAL 81 Enabling parents to keep track from a distance, phones fill in for the direct supervision and contact that has diminished in the wake of increasing work demands on parents, particularly, mothers. Additional such techniques and technologies of individuation include competition in intensified labor markets as they induce a marketing relation to oneself; targeted advertisements that urge consumers to differentiate and specify themselves; locative technologies associated with mobile phones and GPS; cookies and other data-gathering techniques associated with transactions on the internet; political injunctions to personal participation; and, in the US, a rights-based political culture focused on personal identity, harm, and exclusion as opposed to common, collective, and systemic injustice; within this culture, systematic problems such as exploitation in the workplace and amplified personal indebtedness are treated as the effects of individual choices, preferences, and luck. The fluidity that Hardt and Negri observe, then, is accompanied by technologies and practices that try both to pinpoint and to push, that try to fix and that try to sway. The result is that the expectation of unique individuality exerts demands that are as constant and unyielding as they are impossible to meet. That the young people Turkle interviews express anxieties associated with autonomy and connection is not surprising. They are enjoined to individuality, told each individual is selfsame, self-creating, self-responsible: one is born alone and one dies alone; you can rely on no one but yourself. Yet the technologies that further individuation—personal smart phone, music player, laptop—and the platforms that encourage it— Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumbler—provide at the same time an escape from and alternative to individuation: connection to others, collectivity. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 82 J ODI DEA N 82 Crowds Elias Canetti’s weird yet compelling anthropology of crowds (Adorno described it as a scandal) addresses an anxiety different from the one that concerns Turkle.31 He considers not the fear of being alone but the fear of being touched: “There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown.” 32 The one place where man is free of this fear is in a crowd. “The crowd he needs is the dense crowd, in which body is pressed to body,” Canetti writes, “a crowd, too, whose psychical constitution is also dense, or compact, so that he no longer notices who it is that presses against him. As soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he ceases to fear its touch.” 33 Turkle thinks that people’s aversion to talking on the phone (as opposed to texting) and conversing face-to-face reflects their need for filters, ways to handle overload. They reflect, she suggests, not only a longing for solitude but also the way that in a simulation culture we have become cyborgs.34 This explanation does not ring true (not least because of the archaicism “cyborg”). Canetti suggests an alternative: we may be coming to prefer the crowd, the presence of many that opens us to collectivity and relieves us of anxiety. One-on-one conversations may feel too constraining insofar as they enclose us back in an individual form. Rather than part of a group, of many, we are just ourselves. 31 “Elias Canetti: Discussion with Theodor W. Adorno,” Thesis Eleven 45 (1996), 1-15. 32 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984), 15. 33 Ibid. 34 Turkle, 209. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 83 COL LECTIVE DESIR E AND THE PATHO LOGY OF THE INDIV IDUAL 83 If this is plausible, then we have an alternative way to think about preoccupations with numbers of friends, followers, blog hits, shares, and retweets. They do not indicate personal achievement, fame, influence, or popularity. They mark our absorption in the crowd, how densely we are enmeshed in it. So, to be clear, we can think of these counts in the individualist terms given us by capital and we can also recognize them as something else, as markers of belonging to something larger than oneself. In this latter sense, they reassure us that we are not unique but common. For Canetti, the relief we feel in a crowd is paradoxical. It arises from a fear of others, a feeling that others are threatening that “reverses into its opposite” in the crowd.35 In a discussion with Adorno, he explains that he believes that people like to become a crowd because of “the relief they feel at the reversal of the feeling of being touched.”36 From this vantage point, the craving for dopamine Turkle describes seems more like the relief we may feel when we shake off the fears associated with individuation, such as isolation, exposure, and vulnerability. One might object that Canetti’s crowd is physical and the networked crowd is virtual. This objection is absolutely right and compelling—part of the power of the occupations of Tahrir Square, Syntagma Square, and Occupy Wall Street’s multiple parks and sites is in the force of bodies out of doors in collectivities authorized by neither capital nor the state. But this is not the end of the story. For one, Canetti also describes invisible crowds of the dead and spermatozoa, perhaps a pedantic point but one that opens up nonetheless a connection to virtual crowds. 35 Discussion with Adorno, http://www.scribd.com/doc/53699813/ Adorno-Canetti-A-Discussion 36 Ibid. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 84 84 J ODI DEA N I should add that he is not unique here. Gustave Le Bon’s influential (albeit notoriously reactionary) work on crowds treats the crowd primarily as a psychological concept. He goes so far as to claim enigmatically that “crowds, doubtless, are always unconscious, but this very unconsciousness is perhaps one of the secrets of their strength.” 37 For another, technologies of presencing have developed significantly so as to make our mediated interactions feel all the more present and intense; we are interacting with others, not just screens. The experience of flow that overwhelms the conscious experience of self that Turkle finds so threatening, then, might also be understood as a breaking out of the illusion that the individual is and can be a subject of action (rather than a form of enclosure and containment) and a giving over to a crowd. Freud, drawing heavily from LeBon—and by drawing heavily I mean including and positively commenting on large sections of LeBon’s text—notes the obliteration of the “particular acquirements” of individuals in crowds.38 What is distinctive vanishes, what is common appears. Freud observes how immersion in a crowd resembles the “state of fascination” experienced in hypnosis where “conscious personality” is also lost. The crowd manifests the unconscious; the unconscious is the crowd, disenclosed from its individual form. Freud, through LeBon, writes: “We see, then, the disappearance of the conscious personality, the predominance of the unconscious personality, the turning by means of suggestion and contagion of feelings and ideas in an identical direction, the tendency to immediately transform the suggested ideas into actions; 37 Gustave LeBon, The Crowd (1896) (Kitchener, Ontario: Baroche Books, 2001), 6. 38 Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (London: The International Psycho-analytical Press, 1922), 9. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 85 COL LECTIVE DESIR E AND THE PATHO LOGY OF THE INDIV IDUAL 85 these, we see, are the principal characteristics of the individual forming part of a group. He is no longer himself, but has become an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will.”39 The crowd flows through the individual. Hence, there is in the crowd a feeling of invincible power, checked and restrained in the individual. Sentiments and acts spread “to such a degree that an individual readily sacrifices his personal interest to the collective interest.”40 The crowd has a sense of omnipotence, knows “neither doubt nor uncertainty,” desires passionately, demands strength, and respects violence.41 We could also say that the subject is a crowd effect, a spontaneous, destructive, and creative force necessarily exceeding attempts to contain and enclose it. Rupturing the individual form and releasing affects and energies to the common, the crowd “strips away inessentials so that the social subjectivity becomes open to desire.”42 In a critique of Althusser’s account of ideological interpellations, Mladen Dolar writes, “For Althusser, the subject is what makes ideology work; for psychoanalysis, the subject emerges where ideology fails.”43 As a Lacanian, Dolar emphasizes the remainder resisting symbolic idealization, the foreign body decentering the subject designated as objet petit a. We might understand this foreign body as a remnant and sign of the crowd’s repressed persistence as well as of its forced enclosure in the individual form. 39 Freud, 11. 40 Freud, 10. 41 Freud 13-14. 42 Guattari, 43 202. Mladen Dolar, “Beyond Interpellation,” Qui Parle 6, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 1993): 73-96. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 86 86 J ODI DEA N Although I cannot go into it here, such an understanding would involve the examination of ongoing efforts to incite disavowal of belonging to groups (being like others or having things in common with them). How is it that people are induced to detach themselves from sources of strength and see themselves as isolated, vulnerable, and alone rather than conjoined in common struggle and collective strength? Here it might be useful to think differently about castration, in terms not confined to genitals and family. It would also be useful to invert Althusser and analyze how the subject is interpellated as an individual, that is, how demands for and processes of individuation fragment and dismantle collective strength even as collectivity subverts, exceeds, and even employs these processes and demands. Such an analysis would also entail an investigation of techniques and dynamics that install reflexivity, whether via what psychoanalysis refers to as ego-identity (the other before whom I see myself acting and to whom I transpose the experience of fascination), in the form of self-possession, selfpresentation, self-branding, or the more fundamental and uncanny reflexivity of the drives. This kind of an investigation could help answer questions concerning the politics of the crowd. For example, Freud treats the submission to the crowd as submission to a Leader. Even if this is a result of his use of the reactionary LeBon, does not the figure of the Leader suggest the importance of some kind of crowd reflexivity, some other in relation to which the crowd takes form? In this vein, mass media such as cinema made crowds visible to themselves as a unity, providing the crowd with an imaginary collective body. If networked personalized communication media not only dissolve the crowd in ever-accelerating circuits of images, impulses, fragments, and feelings but also reproduce it as an effect of circulation, how does the crowd become more than just an aggregation of effects? Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 87 COL LECTIVE DESIR E AND THE PATHO LOGY OF THE INDIV IDUAL 87 Differently put, how does collectivity come to exceed collective feeling and become a solidarity that can persist through disagreement and override divisions? I have suggested at least part of an answer already. Understood as itself a pathology, the pressures on the individual form suggest that attachments to individuality are as ambivalent as they are intense, fragile, and fleeting, as easily discarded as they are intensely held. Perhaps, then, some of the attachments that undermine organizing in common are loosening, losing their attraction and releasing not just collective desire but desire for collectivity. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:24 PM Pagina 88 88 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 89 ARNE DE BOEVER 89 “All of us go a little crazy at times”: Capital and Fiction in a State of Generalized Psychosis A Crude Question When I organized —with Warren Neidich and Jason Smith —the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism conference in Los Angeles in November 2012,1 we were interested in investigating the pathologies of the mind and the brain that are produced in a situation of contemporary capitalism, where the latter have become the new focus of laboring. Our focus was decidedly on the contemporary: on postfordism, branding, social network culture, finance capital. Here, I would like to open up these very specific and carefully articulated concerns onto what some might perceive to be an overly general and even crude question: what is the effect of money on the human psyche? My aim in the broader research project that I am currently pursuing is to look at how contemporary literature and film have answered this question. What I propose to do in this article, which will take the form of a general introduction, is to (first) move away from the contemporary somewhat to the mid-twentieth century, in order to then show—in a more theoretical discussion leading all the way up to today— how we have gotten from “then” to “now”, and how the issues that I uncover in the recent past have only intensified with time. 1 See http://aestheticsandpolitics.calarts.edu/conferences. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 90 90 A RN E DE BOEV ER So, to “cut straight to the chase” (to recall a phrase from silent film discourse): what is the effect of money on the human psyche? My contention will be, and I am probably not saying anything new here, that money renders the human psyche psychotic. Today, under the conditions of finance capital, we have landed in a state of generalized psychosis that can no longer be avoided. In such a situation, the challenge is to formulate a psychopolitics —or an affirmative noo-politics, to borrow from both Roberto Esposito and Maurizio Lazzarato — 2 that will help us navigate these psychotic conditions. As I see it, such a politics amounts to the creation of what I am calling finance fictions: speculative narratives that provide orientation in a world that more and more people have come to disavow. Put differently, finance fictions are narratives that avow worlds —and often weird ones. As will be clear, desire is a key issue in this configuration: if psychosis (as the basic Freudian definition proposes) is both the destruction of desire (the disavowal of the world) and the investment of desire into another world (substitution of the world by a new one), and if the state of generalized psychosis risks to tip the balance between these two components to the direction of the destruction of desire, it is of vital importance today that the creative, speculative dimension of psychosis be revived as a way to (first) rebalance the situation so as to perhaps (in a second moment) overcome it.3 2 Roberto Esposito, “Biopower and Biopotentiality,” in Bíos:Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 78-109; Maurizio Lazzarato, “The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control,” in Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sørensen, Deleuze and the Social (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 171-190. 3 My use of the term psychosis, as well as of the term psychopolitics, are inspired by the work of Bernard Stiegler. See, for example, my translation of Frédéric Neyrat’s interview with Bernard Stiegler, “From Libidinal Economy to the Ecology of the Spirit,” in Parrhesia, 14 (2012): 9-15. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 91 “A LL OF US GO A L ITTLE C RA ZY AT T IM ES” 91 Who’s Psycho? Let me begin, then, with one of the key narratives of psychosis of the recent past: Robert Bloch’s novel Psycho (1959).4 Inspired by the real-life story of the psychotic murderer Ed Gein, the book caught the attention of Alfred Hitchcock, who turned it into a film (Psycho, 1960). Critics have often pointed out a striking difference between the structure of the novel and the film: whereas the novel begins with Norman Bates (chapter one) and then switches to a chapter introducing Mary Crane (chapter two, which features Mary driving through the rain after her theft, and arriving at the Bates motel), Hitchcock’s film opens with Marion Crane and her lover, meeting at a hotel during Marion’s lunch break. In the film, it is not until much later that Norman enters into the picture. Both novel and film share another striking feature that has received much critical commentary: Marion is killed about 30 minutes into the film, shifting the attention to Norman. In the book, the effect is less striking, given that Norman was our focus from the beginning—but there too, Mary is dead by page 41. The book will continue for another 130 pages. Like the film, the novel follows the logic of a detective fiction, ultimately offering us insight into the mind of the psychotic murderer Norman Bates. This attribution, however— the fact that Norman Bates is the murderer—is not as simple as it seems. As Sam Loomis reports in the penultimate chapter of the novel, Bates is a multiple personality with at least three facets. There was Norman, the little boy who needed his mother and hated anything or anyone who came between him and her. Then, Norma, the mother, who could not be allowed to die. 4 Robert Bloch, Psycho (New York: The Overlook Press, 2010). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 92 A RN E DE BOEV ER 92 The third aspect might be called Normal—the adult Norman Bates, who had to go through the daily routine of living, and conceal the existence of the other personalities from the world. Of course, the three weren’t entirely distinct entities, and each contained elements of the other. Dr. Steiner called it an “unholy trinity.” 5 So who is responsible for the murders that are related in the book? Sam’s diagnosis is striking: “Mother killed her [Mary]”, he insists to Lila, Mary’s sister. Norma killed your sister. There’s no way of finding out the actual situation, but Dr. Steiner is sure that whenever a crisis arose, Norma became the dominant personality. Bates would start drinking, then black out while she took over. During the blackout, of course, he’d dressed up in her clothing. Afterward he’d hide her image away, because in his mind she was the real murderer and had to be protected.6 Steiner’s conclusion is that Bates is psychotic. Of course, Bates alone remains responsible for the murder of his mother and her lover, Uncle Joe Considine. It is only after this murder, due to guilt, that he changes his mind, and wants his mother back. Bloch points out that he “literally changed his mind”: “Norman, or part of him, became his mother.” 7 The final chapter of the book, which features Norman Bates in jail, adds another level of complexity to this already 5 Bloch, 170-71. 6 Bloch, 172. 7 Bloch, 170. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 93 “A LL OF US GO A L ITTLE C RA ZY AT T IM ES” 93 complicated set-up: there, it becomes clear that Norma has taken over, and is in control of Norman now. And she blames everything on the “bad boy” Norman: “The bad man had really committed the murders and then he tried to blame it on her. Mother killed them. That’s what he said, but it was a lie. [...] Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly. [...]” 8 Hitchcock captures this final moment beautifully with a psychotic shot in which mother’s dead, dried up head flickers briefly over Norman’s face. So who’s psychotic? Norma? Or Norman? Earlier on the novel, Norman had already analyzed his mother as psychotic (“Mother was more than sick”, he confesses: “She was psychotic, dangerously so” 9 ). Now, what interests me is that in the novel, Mary’s sister draws from this an impossible conclusion. Now that she understands—now that she can “almost understand”—she realizes that “[w]e’re all not quite as sane as we pretend to be.” 10 Indeed, the book insists on this—this state of generalized psychosis—throughout. Consider, for example, a scene from earlier on in the book where Mary’s sister’s conclusion is anticipated. When Mary, is having a lengthy conversation with Norman after she has arrived at the motel (he has prepared her sandwiches for dinner), she suggests that Norman’s mother is not well in the head, and should perhaps be put in an “institution”.11 Norman responds very strongly: “She’s not crazy!”.12 However,this statement is adjusted by Norman at the end of the same paragraph in which it appears: 8 Bloch, 174-75. 9 Bloch, 115. 10 Bloch, 172. 11 Bloch, 36. 12 Ibid. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 94 A RN E DE BOEV ER 94 “But who are you to say a person should be put away? I think perhaps all of us go a little crazy at times [emphasis mine].”13 We move here from the denial of madness to an assertion of a state of generalized madness. On page 38 of the novel, Norman’s statement recurs, this time in the voice of Mary. She recalls Bates’ statement — “I think perhaps all of us go a little crazy at times” (italics in the original)—and applies it to her own situation (she has stolen $40,000 from her boss, Mr. Lowery): Yes. It was true. All of us go a little crazy at times. Just as she’d gone crazy, yesterday afternoon, when she saw that money on the desk. And she’d been crazy ever since, she must have been crazy, to think that she could get away with what she planned. It had all seemed like a dream come true, and that’s what it was. A dream. A crazy dream. She knew it, now.14 Here we get to the part of the novel (and the film) that I am interested in, and that has received very little, almost no attention: the money. Indeed, critics have insisted over and over again that Psycho is not about the money: Norman does not care about the money. He does not know it is there, it disappears into the swamp with Mary’s body in the trunk of her car. But Norman is only the extreme case. As he, Mary, and Mary’s sister point out: all of us go a little crazy at times— and in Mary’s case, it’s money that pushes her over the edge. It’s money that renders her psychotic. Sam Loomis, too, reinforces the novel’s allusion to a state of generalized psychosis, and money’s role in it. 13 Ibid. 14 Bloch, 38. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 95 “A LL OF US GO A L ITTLE C RA ZY AT T IM ES” 95 In a long paragraph on page 82, he sums up all the people in his town who turned out to have another, hidden aspect to their psychic life: old Tomkins, who ran away from his wife and family with a sixteen-year old girl; Mike Fisher, a lush and gambler who leaves all his money to an orphanage; Bob Summerfield, Sam’s clerk in the store, who tried to beat out his chaplain’s brains with a pistol butt while he was in service. All of these folks appeared normal, Sam muses, “until something set [them] off”: And nobody had noticed. Nice old ladies did away with their husbands after twenty years of happy marriage, meek little bank clerks suddenly upped and embezzled the funds—you never could tell what would happen. It’s worth noting that in two of these cases, money appears to have been involved.15 Sam concludes after this litany of examples that “perhaps Mary did steal the money.”16 The rest of the story is well-known: through the confrontation with Norman, a true psychotic who denies his mother’s madness (first) only to assert (second) a state of generalized madness, Mary comes to realize that she too went crazy “when she saw the money on the desk.” 15 The others involve desire (a sixteen-year old girl; twenty years of happy marriage) and religion (a chaplain). I’ve already acknowledged desire’s important role in the argument I am making here; my quotation, earlier on, of Sam’s reference to Norman’s state of psychosis as “an unholy trinity” introduced a reference to religion that will return throughout this chapter, all the way up to its closing pages. Indeed, belief and disbelief are crucial, as Bernard Stiegler in his work has shown, to the generalized state of psychosis that I am analyzing. 16 Bloch, 82. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 96 A RN E DE BOEV ER 96 In the case of the “normal” person—Mary—, it’s the money that had rendered her temporarily crazy. It is through the conversation with Norman, as critics have pointed out, that her normality is restored, that she “knows” that she is in some crazy dream, and decides to return to reality. She plans to shower, go to sleep, and return to her normal life the day after. But of course, that is not how things turn out. I’m sure I don’t need to rehearse the shower scene here... In the film, Hitchcock draws out Marion’s psychosis beautifully. When she is driving through the night, and is projecting scenarios—conversations—in the aftermath of her theft, there is a genuinely psychotic moment where the voiceover, in combination with Janet Leigh’s facial responses to her thoughts, is truly uncanny: psychotic in the same way that the film’s closing shot is. Bloch does something similar in his novel, using italics to draw out both Norman and Mary’s inner voices so that the reader finds her- or himself both outside and within. Consider, for example, the following interesting shift in the thirdperson narration: He [Norman] could see the dark clouds coming on out of the west, and that didn’t bother him either. He saw the sky darken as the sun surrendered its splendor. The sun surrendered its splendor—why, it was like poetry; he was a poet; Norman smiled. He was many things. If they only knew.17 Something very odd is happening here. We move from the third-person narration—“he saw the sky darken as the sun surrendered its splendor”—to Norman crediting the last part 17 Bloch, 139. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 97 “A LL OF US GO A L ITTLE C RA ZY AT T IM ES” 97 of this line —“the sun surrendered its splendor”—to himself (“he was a poet”). The effect is uncanny: it abolishes the comforting distance of the third-person narration, infecting it with Norman’s own voice. It’s Norman who was already speaking when we were reading the third-person narration: we thought we were outside of him, at a comfortable distance; but all this time, we were in fact intimately with him. Psychosis appears to be written into the very text of the novel here. And it is worth noting that it becomes linked, in these lines, to poetry. There appears to be (as others have noted) a poetic quality to psychosis, a creative quality that is evidenced by Hitchcock’s psychotic cinematic techniques as well. Psychosis thus appears to have a link to both money and poetry, and it’s this double connection that I would like to explore. One of the interesting aspects of the representation of money in Bloch’s novel and Hitchcock’s film is that it has an undeniably material quality about it. Consider how the money that Mary stole is first described in Bloch’s book: She had been standing in Mr. Lowery’s office when old Tom Cassidy hauled out that big green bundle of bills. Thirty-six Federal Reserve notes bearing the picture of the fat man who looked like a wholesale grocer, and eight more carrying the face of the man who looked like an undertaker. But the wholesale grocer was Grover Cleveland and the undertaker was William McKinley. And thirty-six thousands and eight five-hundreds added up to forty thousand dollars. Tommy Cassidy had put them down just like that, fanning them casually as he announced that he was closing the deal and buying a house as his daughter’s wedding present.18 18 Bloch, 17-18. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 98 98 A RN E DE BOEV ER In the next paragraph, Mr. Lowery is described as “scooping up” the money. Money is stunningly real in this passage: it comes in a big, green bundle; it has faces on it of fat wholesale grocers and undertakers; it can be fanned; you can scoop it up. (Try doing that with a credit swap or a derivative!) And yet, the effect this money has on Mary is strangely immaterial: it propels her into what she will later analyze as madness, into a crazy, psychotic dream. Of course, we are not talking about full-blown, clinical psychosis here. But the novel suggests, nevertheless, that there is a relation between Norman’s state and Mary’s, between the psychotic state of Norman Bates and the way in which Mary is effected by money. Now on to my third element, desire: in both cases—and here’s where Hitchcock’s choice for his opening scene begins to make perfect sense—, these states are shot through with desire. Bates has a peculiar—Oedipal, as he himself suggests in Bloch’s novel—relation to his mother. He is shown looking at Mary through a peephole. Marion on the other hand is going through with the theft in part because of her desire to be with Sam. Sam’s relation with Lila—who looks exactly like her sister, so much so that he confuses her with Mary when she arrives at his store at night and kisses her on the mouth—has something of the erotic as well. Tom Cassidy, the man with the $40,000, puts a $100 bill on Mary’s desk proposing to her that they spend the weekend together in the desert... She doesn’t take the leap then, but she will later. Clearly, there is an Id that is raging in all of these situations, and it is money that appears to be the catalyst for the psychotic reality—the totalization of the Id and break with reality—to come about. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 99 “A LL OF US GO A L ITTLE C RA ZY AT T IM ES” 99 A Project Statement So we have here, in 1959, a fascinating configuration: money —still material—intervenes in an already tense situation of desire, by rendering human beings psychotic. Money operates as the catalyst for their destruction of the world, and their creation of a new one. The suggestion in Hitchcock’s film, but especially in Bloch’s novel, is that this framework is a generalized one that effects all of us, without exception: “all of us go a little crazy at times”, as several characters in Bloch’s novel put it—and for many of us, money is what drives us over the edge. Marion, of course, gets punished for that transgression and one ends up wishing that she’d been better equipped to navigate the psychotic conditions— both her own and Norman’s—in which she got caught up. Now, my question—which was partly triggered by Gus van Sant’s dreadful attempt (in 1998) to reshoot Hitchcock’s Psycho scene by scene, but with different actors and in color —is the following: What would Bloch’s novel look like if it were rewritten today? Some would no doubt argue that it would not sound any different. Psychokillers are psychokillers, and there is indeed plenty of fiction that represents them. The Gein affair has had a rich afterlife in popular culture: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (the first film dates from 1974; now in 3D!), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), et cetera. However, my suggestion would be that a true rewrite of Bloch’s novel would need to involve the contemporary world of finance—much more immaterial—to be successful: the money that renders Mary psychotic would need to become financialized in the contemporary version, and Mary would need to be seduced by another kind of capital. In a book project that I am currently working on, and that is tentatively titled Finance Fictions, I am considering a few candidates for such a contemporary rewrite: Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987); Bret Easton Ellis’ American Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 100 100 A RN E DE BOEV ER Psycho (1991)—there is an obvious link here to Bloch’s novel and Hitchcock’s film; Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996)— here too, the link is obvious, as Hitchcock’s film is explicitly mentioned in the book as a point of comparison; Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003); and Robert Harris’ The Fear Index (2012). As the publication dates of these novels reveal, the “contemporary” that I have in mind begins somewhere around the late eighties and ranges all the way to the present. While my focus is clearly on the American (US) finance novel, the list also includes one finance novel—more specifically, a panic novel: it deals with the so-called “flash crash” of the stock market in 2010—that comes out of the United Kingdom. One other thing that is worth noting is that without exception, all of these books have been turned into films (The Fear Index, directed by Paul Greengrass, is set to appear in 2014). The latter is an important point to keep in mind, not only given Jonathan Beller’s argument about cinema and capital in his important book The Cinematic Mode of Production,19 but also given the crossings of my central concerns here— money, psychosis, desire—with what Yann Moulier Boutang has referred to as the “Californian revolution” of capitalism and its relations to Hollywood, Apple, Disney, Silicon Valley, Silicon Beach, et cetera.20 In the conclusion to the book, I plan to present Herman Melville’s scrivener Bartleby, whose story is set on Wall Street, as a “model” for the various psychotic narrators and characters that I will discuss. 19 Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006). 20 Yann Moulier Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism, trans. Ed Emery (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2011), 7. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 101 “A LL OF US GO A L ITTLE C RA ZY AT T IM ES” 101 In Theory By starting my investigation in the late 1980s, I want to make sure that the novels (and a few films and artworks as well) that I will be looking at have thoroughly incorporated the effects of the so-called “Nixon shock”. For this, we need to in fact go back earlier than 1987, to the 1970s. As I see it, the mid-1970s is the moment when money became fully—and unapologetically— symbolic (of course, no one will dispute that had “always already” been symbolic, to use a Derridean phrase). But when Richard Nixon in 1971 because of the high cost of the Vietnam War unilaterally abolished the “gold standard”—thus ending the post-WW II Bretton Woods system of international financial exchange, propelling the world financial system into “shock”— a more extreme version of money’s symbolic value was realized. In 1971, those who did not know it already (or who had forgotten that their self-created illusions are illusions, to echo Nietzsche) discovered the truth about money. Whereas previously, there was still gold backing up paper, from 1971 onwards paper became merely paper. From then on, all money was truly Monopoly money. And yet, we all continued playing the game, and we are indeed still playing it: we all perform, within the rules of the system—and stretching the rules of the system, which is of course much easier to do now that the dollar has become decoupled from the presence of actual gold. Capitalism thus becomes what four contemporary German thinkers in a recent publication call “divine capitalism” (“göttliche Kapitalismus”)21: god is dead (Nietzsche again) and yet we continue to live as if he were still with us. I would argue that it’s the same with gold. (Note the persistence of religion in our argument.) 21 Marc Jongen, ed., Der Göttliche Kapitalismus: Ein Gespräch über Geld, Konsum, Kunst und Zerstörung mit Boris Groys, Jochen Hörisch, Thomas Macho, Peter Sloterdijk und Peter Weibel (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2007). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 102 102 A RN E DE BOEV ER This key moment in the becoming-symbolic or -divine of capital—the Nixon shock—fits neatly in a hackneyed narrative about money that has been told again and again, but that has recently been drawn into question. Consider, for example, the history of money as Adam Smith (to give just one example) summarizes it in his 1776 classic The Wealth of Nations.22 In the chapter “Of the Origin and Use of Money”, Smith suggests that whereas cattle used to be the “common instrument of commerce” (W 25), and people would pay for a commodity with cattle (he also mentions salt, shells, dried cod, tobacco, sugar, and hides as other such instruments), people began giving preference to metals because they were more practical (losing them did not come with a loss of commodities; they were easier to carry around; their value could be more precisely determined). Of course, these metals also had to be weighed and assayed (you needed to know how much bronze there was in a particular piece of metal, for example) and this too was a cumbersome process. So sovereigns took it upon themselves to attach a public stamp to pieces of metal that had been weighed and assayed to guarantee their value. This made the process of exchange—now no longer through capital or unauthorized pieces of metal but through “mints” (W 27)—much easier. However, sovereigns being who they are (as Smith points out), they started “abusing the confidence of their subjects” (W 30) by decreasing the value of the metals while still attaching their stamp of approval to them. Which means that a mint was worth what it said it was “in appearance only” (ibid.), Smith writes. It is at this point, I would argue, that the money business turns into a theatre, that commerce becomes performance—and that money begins to render people psychotic, in an unprecedented way. 22 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 2000). Henceforth parenthetically referred to as W, followed by page reference. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 103 “A LL OF US GO A L ITTLE C RA ZY AT T IM ES” 103 As is by now well-known, the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber has recently challenged this narrative about money’s material origins in his tome Debt: The First 5000 Years.23 However, I do not think that his critique—which is very convincing—challenges the main issue that I uncover: the fact that money renders people psychotic. If Smith’s narrative should not have begun with the exchange of cattle, but with the immaterial notion of a debt that one can never repay, it emphasizes even more that by becoming-symbolic, by becoming-divine, money is only completing a return to something it was from the very beginning. It was never material; its material manifestation always came after the fact. And the fact, interestingly enough, was always fictitious: it was debt. As some have suggested, J.L. Austin’s category of the performative can be mobilized to describe the psychotic kind of economic culture in which we have landed: someone declares that “this piece of paper is worth $100”, and the performative declaration makes it true. It gives a wholly different ring to the notion of the “performance economy” as we know it from economic theory. Christian Marazzi, for example, discusses this idea in his book Capital and Language.24 The tragedy of this situation is, however, that we no longer know how to read this performative, that we no longer perceive it as performative but as true. It is an illusion of which we have forgotten that it is an illusion, to recall Nietzsche once again. 23 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2011). 24 Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy, trans. Gregory Conti (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 33-36. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 104 A RN E DE BOEV ER 104 It should be noticed, however, that Marazzi as well as other thinkers such as Franco “Bifo” Berardi take this argument even further. While Marazzi thinks the notion of the performative is useful to capture the truth about our contemporary economic situation, the nature of contemporary finance capital is reflected not merely in performative utterances but in all utterances, and in language as such. Capital, Marazzi and other like-minded thinkers argue, has become linguistic: it refers to nothing other than itself. Whereas capital, in Karl Marx’ useful formula (taken up again by thinkers like Marazzi and Bifo), comes about through the M-C-M’ cycle, where—importantly—money (M) leads to “money which is worth more money”25 (M’) via the intermediary of the commodity (C), in the world of finance capital M leads to M’ without the intermediary of the commodity. What is traded in the so-called postfordist era are no longer commodities, or goods, but complex financial instruments like swaps or derivatives —immaterial constructs that even professionals have some difficulty explaining, as Michael Moore’s film on capitalism exposes.26 Indeed, even top figures like Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have publicly admitted that they no longer know how the contemporary financial world works, leading Bernard Stiegler to speak of “the proletarianization” of the 1%.27 25 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 257. 26 Michael Moore, directed by Capitalism: A Love Story (Overture, 2009). 27 See Bernard Stiegler, Pour une nouvelle critique de l’économie politique (Paris: Galilée, 2009). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 105 “A LL OF US GO A L ITTLE C RA ZY AT T IM ES” 105 A key term in this kind of capitalism is speculation, or risky investment. Under financial capitalism, one can speculate, for example, on sub-prime mortgage loans (some of which are called NINJA loans—loans given to people with no income, no job, no assets, i.e. people who do not have to undergo a credit check in order to be given a loan), and try to make a profit through buying and selling mortgages. As we now know, it is these kinds of loans that led to the collapse of the housing market and the international financial system in 2008. Bifo speaks in this context of semio-capitalism, of a capitalism that operates through the logic of the sign. “Money and language have something in common,” he writes in his recent book The Uprising: “they are nothing and they move everything.”28 What we are dealing with here is the rise of what Marx in the third volume of Capital called “fictitious capital”: “value, in the form of credit, shares, debt, speculation and various forms of paper money, above and beyond what can be realized in the form of commodities.”29 The concept is discussed on several occasions in the collection Crisis in the Global Economy (which includes contributions by Marazzi, and also by Andrea Fumagalli and Tiziana Terranova).30 Marx’ theory of fictitious capital can be read, I argue, as a version of his theory of commodity fetishism, developed early on in the first volume of Capital—with the psychic condition of fetishism being transformed into psychosis when we are dealing with fictitious capital. 28 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Uprising: Poetry and Finance (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 134. 29 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume 3, trans. David Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1991), 596-597. 30 Andrea Fumagalli and Sandro Mezzadra, Crisis in the Global Economy: Financial Markets, Social Struggles, and New Political Scenarios, trans. Jason Francis Mc Gimsey (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 106 106 A RN E DE BOEV ER Now, it is one thing to understand that capitalism today is a capitalism that operates “like” a language, that is: a semiocapitalism, a capitalism of the sign. Such an approach, however, privileges the term capitalism, and always begins from this side of the equation capital = language. By approaching the issue here from the perspective of literature—one of the privileged realms of signs—I would like to reframe the question from the other side: what happens to language under these conditions? What happens to literature, and to narrative, when their very medium is being saturated by capital? My suggestion, as I discussed earlier on, is that this situation produces a state of generalized disorientation, where the very practices that help human beings orient their lives —language, storytelling, filmmaking, et cetera—become utterly meaningless. Marx captures this situation—though he does not develop it as such—with the term “fictitious capital” (“fiktives Kapital”). Of course, the phrase can read one way, as naming capital’s being rendered fictitious; but the transfer also goes in the other direction: fiction is becoming closely associated with capital here, and it is worth wondering about the consequences of the association from this direction as well (Joshua Clover, for example, has taken up such a project, focusing mostly on poetry’s relation to capital). It’s in this loaded context that I would like to launch my notion of a finance fiction—which reverses the order of the terms in Marx, focusing on fiction rather than capital—as a psychopolitical practice that would help human beings navigate the psychotic realities of the contemporary finance world. As I see it, it’s a question of reclaiming fiction within a financial culture that has produced a state of generalized psychosis to help us navigate this precarious situation. I don’t think this is possible outside of capital; and because capital today is semio-capital, I think language/literature/poetry and other sign-practices (film included) should be the primary sites of action. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 107 “A LL OF US GO A L ITTLE C RA ZY AT T IM ES” 107 In a way, this move reverses the arch of Marx’ career: if he moved from being a poet to being a theorist of capital, we are moving from being theorists of capital to being poets. If this is indeed required, it is because the battleground has shifted from the hardware of industrial production, as we put it in our conference proposal, to the workings of the self.31 To be very clear, my project is thus not to reinstate some kind of distinction between appearance and truth, between performance and reality. There is no authenticity fetish here. Instead, I situate myself squarely within the world of both finance and fiction—the world of fictitious capital, initially —in order to develop a finance fiction that could redistribute the sensible of this psychotic configuration. This also means, at the end of the day, that I am—at least initially—not outside of psychosis. Indeed, “all of us go a little crazy at times”: my point is, rather, how to learn to navigate this madness, so as to ultimately, perhaps, in a second movement, overcome it. 31 I began to approach this problematic in my book Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel (New York: Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2013). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 108 108 A RN E DE BOEV ER Notes From the Field I tried to get some of this general argument across in a workshop on performance where I had been invited to speak recently. Suffice it to say, I turned out to be a bit of a partypooper: everybody was cheering about performance, and there I was speaking about the “performance economy”, implicating the practice that everyone was celebrating into some of the most pressing economic issues of our time. Things turned really ugly when I asked about one particular performance piece that was being discussed, where (if I remember correctly) passersby had been invited to form a human pyramid whose triangular form—narrow tip, broad foundation—supposedly challenged the structure of capitalist society (1% vs. 99%, you know the story!). Participation was supposed to operate as the key political term here: have people participate so as to make them understand what the politics of the performance were about. It just so happened that I was reading Claire Bishop’s collection on participation in contemporary art (titled, quite simply, Participation) next to the Semiotext(e) collection on crisis in the global economy at that time—and that the crisis book too, was all about participation. Except, in the second case it was about how cognitive capitalism solicits our attention, solicits our mind and our brain to participate, thus destroying the right to laziness, unemployment, and “preferring not to” (to recall Bartleby’s phrase). It draws the participation imperative into question, to say the least. Again, I turned out to be a bit of a party-pooper: everyone else appeared to be focused on the “curative” dimension of performance. They weren’t pharmacologists, to use Bernard Stiegler’s language once again. And while I learned something from their enthusiasm—like them, I do think performance is one of those sign-practices where today’s economic Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 109 “A LL OF US GO A L ITTLE C RA ZY AT T IM ES” 109 war is being waged—I don’t think we can any longer blindly engage in those practices without at least a rudimentary awareness of their darker, much more disturbing, underside. Now on to my last, and perhaps most contentious, point. In the coda to his book Post-Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Just-In Time Capitalism, Jeffrey Nealon notes something very peculiar. He writes: The glory years for humanities theory in North America coincided with neoliberalism’s rise. Both theory and neoliberal economics really took off in the US during the Reagan ‘80s and had their full-blown years of flower in the Bush-Clinton-Bush 1990s to early 2000s; likewise, both have begun to struggle somewhat as dominant paradigms in the present.32 And just to be clear: he is not suggesting this is because the one is somehow critical of the other, and emerges in tandem with it due to this critical role, as a reactionary counterpart. No, he goes much further than this: “there’s probably no better description of the notoriously complex financial device known as the ‘derivative’”, he writes, “than what Derrida called, after Benjamin, a ‘messianism without messianism’”. In short, “the dominant logic of economics in the neoliberal revolution years has in many ways been isomorphic—how could it not be?— with the cultural logic of the humanities.”33 32 Jeffrey T. Nealon, Post-Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 171. 33 Ibid., 173. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 110 110 A RN E DE BOEV ER We know—and the commotion around Alex Galloway’s recent Critical Inquiry piece on Alain Badiou, speculative realism, and capitalism illustrated it once more34—how tricky it can be to do argument on the basis of homology.35 What is the implication that is instantiated in a similarity of logics, one might ask? If it is a purely formal one, is there really an implication that is worth speaking of? In Badiou’s case, for example: if the homology between his theory of the Subject and the story of what happened to Saul on the road to Damascus—a story that Badiou explicitly uses in his short little book on Saint Paul36—is merely formal, is there an implication worth speaking of between the theological narrative and the supposedly secular project of Badiou’s philosophy?37 34 Alex Galloway, “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism,” in Critical Inquiry, 39.2 (2013): 347-366. 35 I use “homology” to refer to what Galloway claims to be uncovering in his article, but there is actually some slippage in how he names the “similarity” between the “logic” of contemporary capitalism and realist strands of contemporary philosophy. To refer to this similarity, Galloway uses: “coincidence”, “congruity”, “mimics”, “ventriloquizes”, “cut from the same cloth”, “parallel”, “shares”, “influenced”, “gleaned from”, “underpinning”, “borrows”, “fuel”, “similarity”, “identical”, “intimately intertwined”, et cetera. 36 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 37 Note that Paul has recently been analyzed to be a psychotic. See Evan D. Murray, Miles G. Cunningham, and Bruce H. Price, “The Role of Psychotic Disorders in Religious History Considered,” in Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 24, no.4 (2012): 410-426. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 111 “A LL OF US GO A L ITTLE C RA ZY AT T IM ES” 111 To ask this question in yet another way: when Carl Schmitt notes in the third chapter of his book Political Theology that “all significant modern concepts of the state are secularized theological concepts” and continues by noting that this is so both “because of their historical development” and “because of their systematic structure”,38 one must surely ask about the difference between historical and structural secularization, and about what it might mean to secularize something “structurally”? What would be the effects of such a process on “structure”? Would its logic remain the same? Or would we be talking about two different concepts altogether? In spite of these problems, I am inclined to take Nealon’s point (I also think that Galloway’s is important, even if he appears to have gotten some facts wrong), and it seems to me that it can be continued to today, when theory appears to be on a bit of a rebound. If speculation is what characterizes contemporary financial practices—or the practices that characterize contemporary finance capital—then it is worth noting that the speculative has seen something of a rise in contemporary critical theory as well: I refer to the rise of speculative realism/materialism that, since the eagerly mythologized workshop at Goldsmiths in 2007 (featuring Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux)39 is being presented as “the new thing” in continental thought. What to make of the coincidence of both these speculative moments? Is it merely superficial, triggered only by the fact that speculation is central to both? Or is there arguably more going on here? 38 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 36. 39 See http://www.urbanomic.com/pub_collapse3.php. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 112 A RN E DE BOEV ER 112 Needless to say, I will only be able to address these questions very briefly, in the hope of being able to return to them more fully elsewhere. I will limit myself to some aspects of the perspective that Meillassoux develops in his book After Finitude, and that seem to me particularly relevant to the paradigm of the finance fiction that I am trying to develop. Take, for example, Meillassoux’ notion of ancestrality. “The question that interests us here,” Meillassoux writes in an already famous passage, is then the following: what is it exactly that astrophysicists, geologists, or paleontologists are talking about when they discuss the age of the universe, the date of accretion of the earth, the date of the appearance of pre-human species, or the date of the emergence of humanity itself? How are we to grasp the meaning of the scientific statements bearing explicitly upon a manifestation of the world that is posited as anterior to the emergence of thought and even of life, posited, that is, as anterior to every form of human relation to the world? Or, to put it more precisely: how are we to think the meaning of a discourse which construes the relation to the world—that of thinking and/or living— as a fact inscribed in a temporality within which this relation is just one event among others, inscribed in an order of succession in which it is merely a stage, rather than an origin? How is science able to think such statements, and in what sense can we eventually ascribe truth to them? 40 40 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2011), 9-10. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 113 “A LL OF US GO A L ITTLE C RA ZY AT T IM ES” 113 As Meillassoux partly reveals here, his speculative realism is about what came before; but it is also, as is revealed later in the book, about what will come after. It’s both about the Big Bang and about human extinction (this is why my colleague working on the Cold War is avidly reading Meillassoux…). Ultimately, Meillassoux asks us to imagine ourselves into these moments—before and after—in order to ask, as he puts it quite bluntly in an unpublished paper: “What exactly can thought do?”41 Now, even though I am not a scientist, I feel like I know the kind of discourse that makes statements about this before and after: why, it’s literature, of course, the discourse of fiction! Pasts or futures without people—posthuman pasts or futures— don’t we know those from film? Isn’t Hollywood populated by posthumans? However, Meillassoux insists that this is not what he is talking about: it’s not about “myths, theogonies, and fabulations”42 —all literary/theological products—that explain the world. Instead, he seems to be interested in how these kinds of statements can obtain the status of fact, of truth —in how, in the case of science, they can be stated as true, on the basis of evidence. I read his work as ultimately asking about the grounding for different speculative discourses: the scientific one—and perhaps the economic one could be added here?—is taken as truth, the philosophical or literary ones are rejected as fiction—why? How could it be otherwise? How could philosophy speak speculatively with the realist authority of science? 41 Quentin Meillassoux, “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition: A Speculative Analysis of the Meaningless Sign,” trans. Robin Mackay. I would like to thank Armen Avanessian for making this paper available to me. 42 Ibid., 114. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 114 A RN E DE BOEV ER 114 That this perspective is not entirely separate from literature—indeed, if we accept that literature thinks,43 then the question of what thought can do applies to literature as well—is revealed in several of Meillassoux’ other texts (for example, his recent book on Mallarmé), and perhaps most succinctly in the essay “Metaphysics and Extro-Science Fiction”, which was published as part of the CD-booklet for Florian Hecker’s Speculative Solution.44 Meillassoux discusses there a very specific subgenre of science-fiction as possibly coming close to the perspective that his work develops. However, even the example that he gives there of a speculative realist fiction—an Isaac Asimov story—turns out not to be entirely satisfactory in terms of putting his perspective across. He does list some other examples, making suggestions even for other kinds of fictions that we could produce—and indeed, writers like Reza Negarestani whose voice has been central to the speculative realist movement have eagerly taken up Meillassoux’ work, producing a hybrid new genre that’s come to be labeled “theory-fiction”. As I see it, Meillassoux’ literary inclination—not just his interest in fiction and poetry, but also his very own use of language, the poetic performance of his texts, which is magisterial —is absolutely central to understanding the politics of his work —and within a context that critics of Galloway may not want to consider it. The fact of the matter is that any practice of “speculation” is going to show some homology with other practices of speculation, some of which will be “good”, some “bad”. 43 Stathis Gourgouris has argued this in his extraordinary book Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Anti-Mythical Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). 44 See http://www.urbanomic.com/event-uf13-details.php. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 115 “A LL OF US GO A L ITTLE C RA ZY AT T IM ES” 115 As such, homology of course does not prove anything. However, what it does reveal is what could be called a speculative “field” in which all these different practices of speculation occur.45 Some of them come down, I would suggest, on the destructive side of psychosis—they are destroying the world. Some come down on psychosis’ creative side: they are creating new worlds. The problem is that the destructive side is hegemonizing our psychic life. By insisting on the importance of fiction, and of writing certain kinds of fictions, inventing new ones—speculative fictions, extro-science fictions, whatever you want to call them— I think Meillassoux becomes aligned with the notion of the “finance fiction” that I am putting forth here. Is he working in part under the conditions of contemporary capital, within the limits of fictitious capital? But of course! It would be foolish to claim otherwise. However, with his plea for a speculative fiction—for a speculative realism in fiction—, he is reversing the terms, putting the emphasis on the creation of fiction, and leaving it up to us to write our own. 45 It is probably worth noting here Bloch’s use of the term speculation in his novel. While the term is used twice on page 83 to refer to possible explanations for Mary’s disappearance, the correct speculation about the disappearance is the one that posits she has stolen the money. Thus, the term speculation, used to refer to a possible explanation for Mary’s disappearance, in fact already speaks the truth of her disappearance due to its relation to the world of finance. To find out why she disappeared, one must, indeed, speculate. And this is not where it ends: for she did not disappear because of the money, but because of psychosis: her own, and Bates’. And so, speculation is linked not just to “theory”, but also to “money” and “psychosis”. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 116 116 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 117 JONAT HAN BEL LER 117 Pathologistics of Attention As it turns out, our non-existent “democracies” increasingly rely on automation, and more particularly the automation of psychopathology in order to sustain the irreality necessary to their function. While an overly general term, psychopathology in the modern sense most often results from some dissociation of sensibility, or, in other words, some slippage of the signifier from the signified. While this latter descriptor was correctly grasped by post-structuralism as characteristic of language function generally, a historicization of these emerging insights into the ontological failure of language to image being, understands post-structuralism as itself an inflection point in which this generalized slippage intensifies. While the paradigms of “reality” and “truth” are irrevocably lost, retroactively one sees that the gradual intensification and awareness of this slippage was also the condition not only of structuralism but of the theater of psychoanalysis in toto. Naturally (as it were), this view of signifiers slipping off of no longer fully presentable signifieds in accord with new organizational principles or logistics (drives, fetishes, ideologies, etc.), could be stretched back into historical time to explain the need for hermeneutical analysis (Marxism, Psychoanalysis) as well as the opening of the space (gap) that will give rise to modern literature, abstraction, and visual culture. Here however, I will be interested in what I take to be the increasing automation of this dissociation of sensibility, that is, of psychopathology—if you will, an automation that tends to exceed its psychic dimensions while extensively developing the patho-logical dimensions. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 118 118 JONATH AN BELL ER Though one could pursue the automation of pathologistics of attention from the standpoint of the experience of today’s large-scale psychological afflictions (burn-out, depression, autism, sociopathology, etc.) my interest here will be less in the psychoanalytic aspects of the generalization of mental illness in the twenty-first century and more in the infrastructure of the logistics of attention that organize psychopathology. As any mediological analysis would be aware, these logistics are not only internal to subjects but distributed throughout the mediatic and material forms of the socius itself. To explore the pathologistics of attention requires the following hypotheses: 1) Films are programs of visualization and hence for discourse. 2) Iconic Films mobilize paradigmatic programs. These programs provide the infrastructure for the organization of attention. 3) Psychological aspects of these programs are functional and legible but the logistics are distributed in the organization of bodies and apparatuses—in materiality. 4) Apparatuses automate aspects of formerly human decision and intelligence. 5) Increasingly, sovereignty is moving into the material, which is to say the computational environment. 6) Convergence, ordinarily thought to mean the convergence of various media platforms into the digital medium known as the computer, must also be understood as the convergence of linguistic function and financialization with these others vectors and platforms. This is a tendency, not a fait accompli. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 119 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 119 “Pathologistics of Attention” builds on the claim developed in my book The Cinematic Mode of Production that cinema brings the industrial revolution to the eye. By studying select films made at various moments along the evolutionary path taken by cinema, we may document with some precision the implication of Marx’s idea that “industry is the open book of man’s essential powers, the exposure to the senses of human psychology.”1 However, in this case, our “open book” will be cinema, and cinema as a transitional phase between industrialization and what is understood today as the social factory of digital culture (Post-fordism); and we will be documenting, dialectically as it were, the organization of the psyche itself as well as the modes of attention that correspond to said organization. To this end we may observe that montage, deep focus and the cut, as theorized during the history of cinema thus far, all correspond to neuro- and psycho-logical processes as well as to specific forms of attention. We now know too, that these forms were “destined,” more or less, to be utilized in capital’s emerging regimes of production and monetization collectively termed attention economy or cognitive capitalism. Thus we begin a kind of archeology of forms of attention—neuro-, psycho-, photo-, cinematico-, informatico-, and capital-logical—that have both paved the way to and achieved a culmination of sorts in the capture of the cognitive-linguistic commons by life-destroying modalities for the organization of attention. These include not just acknowledged media platforms, but also (it must be stressed) student-debt, blood computing, drone warfare and the everyday function of representation floating on the surface of an ocean of unrepresented—and in the current conjuncture unrepresentable— suffering of more than two billion people living on less than two dollars per day. 1 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Taylor (New York and London: Norton, 1978, 89). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 120 120 JONATH AN BELL ER This study of the pathologistics of attention, is then necessarily also about the scrambling of the symbolic order, the bankruptcy of sign-function, the de- and re-structuring of grammar, the proletarianization of the senses, the expropriation of the cognitive-linguistic, the installation of the regime of cognitive capitalism over and on top of or adjacent to the persistence of spectacular, industrial and feudal regimes, the mining of attention as an amalgamating means of command-control-production, the current and ostensibly indominatable reign of short-termist thinking, the life-sucking suction of financialization, the acid-corrosiveness of the Wall Street nano-second, the ever-advancing seizure of the commons, and the effect of all these projects in relation to mentality, warfare, global dispossession and planetary collapse. It is also, not entirely incidentally, an effort to explore the following irritant: today, in the neo-liberal West at any rate, the liberal is a fascist who thinks they are a democrat. So, in addition to the breakdown of language function and the re-distribution and/or liquidation of meaning, this paper is unavoidably on the psychopathology and the logistics of perception of contemporary fascism, otherwise to be thought of as the totalitarianism of finance capitalism— a formation that is at once without us and within us. You, my readers, will already have noted that it is only with real difficulty and a certain tentativeness that I can name my object of analysis, a problematic that has everything to do with what I am calling the pathologistics of attention. Expressed in the briefest formulation possible, this formula refers to the dialectic between the expropriation first of labor and then attention on the one side, and the shortcircuiting of the body and then of thought on the other, as the definitive means for the production of the present, such that it is… present.2 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 121 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 121 A First Cut: Gesture, or The Fragments of Machines “Fragments of Machines” is for the temporary, my abstraction of Modern Times, the film. Chaplin’s 1936 film, near silent, but made 9 years after the official end of the silent era juxtaposes the two major filmic modes of the first half of the twentieth century: montage and deep focus. The unforgettable assembly-line sequence, with the Tramp’s wrenches tightening bolts and blouse buttons,the auto-feeder allowing the workers to continue tightening bolts while a machine pushes food into their mouths, and the culminating fall into the machine itself, shows the radical imposition of the standardization and routinization process imposed by the machine on the body. The disciplinary aspect of the assembly-line, in both its corporeal and temporal dimensions is underscored here primarily by physical comedy: Chaplin’s, or at least the Tramp’s, at times involuntary rebellion against the machines strict logic and routinization of gesture. 2 While the shattering of historically and indeed bio-politically established continuities (of the sensory-motor schema, of the temporality of contemplation, of the grammar of sense) through the fragmentation and indeed fractalization of attention by and as media technologies indicates the objective matrix of events that capital-logic has imposed upon the numerous members of our species, the psycho-subjective results of post-fordist digital labor are aphasia, abjection, autism, dyslexia, fear, panic, exhaustion and collapse. In this context of expropriation distributed over the whole social field and of its resultant physical, psychic and metaphysical collapses, it is difficult to identify the real source of our problems. For an excellent account on the emergence and formation of attentional practices see Bernard Stiegler, “Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon,” in Culture Machine, Vol. 13 (2012), available at www.culturemachine.net. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 122 122 JONATH AN BELL ER The Tramp’s inadequacy to the disciplinary regime of industrial production leads him first to a series of nervous ticks, short circuits and conflicts with his fellow workers and finally to the fall into the mechanism itself, and indeed to passing through its system of gears. Only upon his real subsumption, if you will, does the Little Tramp thoroughly become one of the machine’s products and only then does he have a complete nervous breakdown, defiantly oiling people with big black squirts in the face before being carried away in an ambulance. Importantly this nervous breakdown does not lead him to the psychoanalyst’s couch but to a hospital and then through a series of employment mishaps, to jail—a place incidentally, that with its warm, dry bed and three meals a day, he finds infinitely more congenial than the outside world of the industrial city. I stress this, not only because the price of neurological failure for the working machineman is prison, but because the film’s break from montage and utilization of deep focus at certain key points does not employ this important latter technique to psychoanalytic ends, as in, say, Citizen Kane. Rather, in Modern Times it is physical comedy and the power of the body that is given as the heroic response to the fragmentation of space and time by the machine. Chaplin’s brilliance is in large part due to his corporeal abilities to reclaim a body that otherwise is robbed of its gestural capacities and effectively shattered by the machine in the mode of montage. Importantly, this bodily mastery also reunifies space and time. As writer, director and star, Chaplin’s superlative control of the four dimensions (for that, in brief is, or at least, was, cinema) is both analysis of industrial production and a form of vengeance against industrial capitalism. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 123 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 123 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 124 124 JONATH AN BELL ER Of the two or three scenes that can utilize deep focus I want to talk about the skating scene. The extraordinary tension while a blindfolded Chaplin skates backwards with infinite and graceful abandon as if oblivious to a three story drop opened by the broken balustrade behind him, creates a kind of poetry of the body in which the human animal, slated to become a programmable sheep by the industrialized temporality of the machine age, is shown capable of a near supernatural freedom of expressive movement—a form of joy. Not once but many times Chaplin skates in speedy backwards arcs, with one leg in the air, less than an inch from the edge of what could only be a bone-breaking fall. That this movement in the round, in a temporally continuous 3D-space is narratologically inspired by the love of an impoverished couple battling the dehumanization of the industrial city and by the momentary if illicit enjoyment of the luxurious spoils of a bourgeois department store, does not, here at least, diminish the effect.3 For Chaplin, through the cinema, used industrial modes of production to strive to organize body, space, time and attention counter to that self-same industry’s Taylorist re-conditioning of modern man’s neuro-logical function. 3 Nor, I think, does the fact that the scene was created with what was known as a glass shot: “The deep drop-off to the department store’s lower floors was actually painted on a pane of glass, placed in front of the camera and perfectly aligned with the real setting, creating a seamless illusion.” Read the full text here: http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/95926#ixzz2BMTnsk3B Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 125 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 125 A Second Cut: Castration, Or the Fetish Is a Penis (But Not Just Any Penis) This space-time of Realism—which Bazin famously described as a decal or a transfer of reality but is perhaps today better thought of as the realism befitting a certain EuroAmerican trans-national era in a particular media-ecology— is, with Chaplin, far more physiological than psychological. How different it is in a film like Citizen Kane where the journey through a discontinuous set of continuous space-times, what Deleuze calls sheets of past, is entered into as if one were to enter directly into different moments of Charles Foster Kane’s snow-globe, that is, into one of his fetish objects and thus into his unconscious. The multiple entries into spaces through windows and skylights emphasize and thematize this effect. There, in these islands of space-time (but wait, that’s Tarkovsky, so, “sheets”), sealed off by the closure imposed by Kane’s death and the mystery of the fragmentary accounts of who he was, everything is pregnant with meaning, and, as has been observed, the audience plays the role of detective or psychoanalyst. We embark on a search for an explanation of the inner workings of a public and indeed cultic personality, one first introduced to us, it must be underscored, through the montage sequence of the newsreel at the opening of the film. Kane the citizen, the media mogul, the recluse, who was accused by disillusioned paramour Susan—for whom he built an opera house—of “never giving [her] nothing, but only trying to buy [her] love,” has a public identity built through mechanical reproduction’s financially calculated montage effects—that is, through newspaper ballistics that daily sensationalize the famous Kane’s endeavors and shock the modern public into continuously recalibrated modes of recognition. It is noteworthy in light of my scarcely disguised assertion here that newsprint and publicity running on the program of a specific platform function as a form of Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 126 126 JONATH AN BELL ER expanded cinema, that Andre Bazin, the great proponent of deep focus cinema, found montage overly programmatic, saying that montage foreclosed thought. He also accused it of representing things that do not exist. Despite the fact that for Eisenstein the instantiation of a concept or the creation of a conditioned reflex, that is, of a new order of reality, via the montage of attractions, was a good thing, or at least a very useful one in as much as it both expressed the modal power of cinema and could engineer new perceptions (adequate to the times) and thereby foment social change, the programmatic and behaviorist aspects of montage were correctly intuited by Bazin to be on a continuum with the shredding and reprogramming of space-time that was characteristic not only of the cinema–machine but of industrialization more generally. Deep focus, on the other hand, allows for ambiguity according to the author of What is Cinema?, and in Citizen Kane the deep-focus suspension of the determinate meaning of the image is in fact used to probe a montage sequence. The film investigates the newsreel. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 127 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 127 For whatever reason, there is one part of the news reel montage that opens Citizen Kane that I have always likened to that of the stone lion sequence on the Odessa steps in Battleship Potemkin, the paradigmatic splices offered just after Potemkin fires on the Tsarist troops. But in Citizen Kane, instead of having sleeping lion statue, waking lion statue, fully roused on all fours lion statue, we have in the newsreel section the three telegraphic vocal accounts of Kane: “He’s a communist,” “he’s a fascist,” and, in his own words, “I’m an American.” So let’s say the film sets out to contemplate a world in fragments, that is, to find a depth hermeneutic adequate to a world of appearances that suddenly are felt to be but symptoms of a deeper problematic. In short, Wells seeks a psychoanalytic explanation for a mass media produced cultic figure–one who appeared to be sympathetic to the masses and to workers’ struggle, but who was a Cesarist in Gramsci’s sense, that is, a charismatic leader who opportunistically diverted the libidinal investments of mass-based struggles for liberation to build his own image in accordance with the laws of private property and profit. As if rudimentary communism, blatant fascism, and a capitalist media empire somehow culminate in “an American,” and in Kane’s case, in “an American citizen”; and as if this progression, for lack of a better term could be understood upon a proper exploration of the question whose answer is “Rosebud.” This investigation apparently, requires the spatiotemporality of deep focus and the long take. As we know, because Wells told his lawyers to tell the press so, Citizen Kane is not about William Randolph Hearst (or Rupert Murdoch, Gates, Zuckerberg, or Burlesconi) but is based on “dollar book Freud.” Of course a dollar was worth a lot more in 1941 and we certainly should not miss the proximity of psychoanalysis and money in Wells’ riposte. Rosebud, the name on the sled burning in a trashheap revealed in the final scene, we find at long last, is fetish numero uno Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 128 128 JONATH AN BELL ER among a series of fetishes, fetishes that are re-configured in the snow globe and in Kane’s fetishistic acquisition of “the great treasures of Europe,” bought, crated and stored in his palatial Xanadu—never to be seen again. Freud, unsurprisingly perhaps, tells us that the fetish is the penis, but not just any penis. It is, quite specifically, the mother’s penis. It is often associated with the last object seen before the fateful revelation of the mother’s lack. Hence, Freud tells us the fetishes for feet, velvet and fur originate from the moment just before the male child looks up the mother’s skirt. The fetish is a way to simultaneously know and to not know, it preserves the plenitude of childhood while becoming a stand-in for the mother’s penis. Thus it disavows the threat of castration that traumatizes the male child when he sees that that the penis he believed to be there can disappear. This little excursion into the Freudian fetish bears out Wells’ claim, since Rosebud was the last thing the young Charlie Kane enjoyed before his mother’s castration… her symbolic castration of course. The mother domineering in relation to Kane’s father is in charge of family decisions. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 129 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 129 But as the story has it, Kane’s relation to his mother and family is supervened by an inheritance that suddenly makes him one of the richest people in the world. Called over from sledding, little Charlie is informed that he will no longer live at home. Charlie’s new guardian is a bank-appointed custodian of his new fortune. The agency of this fortune, in short, the alienated power of money expressed as the will of the banks, separated Kane from his mother in spite of his childhood protests to the contrary. The rest of his life, we are to understand, which tellingly includes his hatred for his guardians at the bank, will be an effort to recapture the plenitude of the maternal bond. However, the medium for the solicitation of love is forevermore capital and, for Kane, who seeks to make his capital expressive of his own desires, this expression takes the form of the newspaper: mass media itself. However in order to not be castrated as his mother was (her agency was vanquished by the phallic power of the banks) he must prove himself to be more than money, to operate in excess of the explicit logic of money. This turns out to be impossible. The sympathy for the workers’ movements expressed via the very means that would require transcendence for it to be authentic, bank capital and capitalist media, becomes only Kane’s self aggrandizing way of buying love on a mass scale. Charismatically, he promotes himself as a great man of the people, leading the public to what Benjamin would call “a processing of data in the fascist sense.” From now on, love, masculinity, mass media, and capitalist exploitation will be welded together, making each of Kane’s libidinal investments nothing more than an exploit, and indeed an evisceration of the loveobject. Accordingly, Kane, with his horde of hollow treasures meant to signify a humanity he does not possess, will die a great man: loveless, friendless, empty and alone. Freud tells us that all men are great in their dreams. Kane tried to live his as a media capitalist and thus became an exemplary American: neurotic, megalomaniacal, unloving and unloved. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 130 130 JONATH AN BELL ER A Third Cut: The Normal Man: Mobilized Gazes and the Short Circuiting of the Law of the Father We have all too briefly examined the loss first of the capacity to move and then of the capacity to love. Let us continue to survey the damage: Take Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, a film about a man trying to overcome both of these incapacities. Deleuze was not wrong to indicate that each Hitchcock film contains its epistemic schema in the opening. The famed opening of Saul Bass’s cut up credits of Psycho already forecasts the shredding of the symbolic order (both syntagmatically and paradigmatically) and thus of the law of the father…, by cinema. Nonetheless, despite the cuts, the symbols remain legible. Recall Marion Crane, law breaker, soon to meet a fate similar to the other eviscerated birds who one way or another meet their ends at the Bates Motel. Of course Marion is simply trying to extract some pleasure out of capitalist patriarchy, what she wants is only the narrow pay off it holds out to a woman who can make the cut. Marion wants to “marry on” to marry one man, one man named Sam, but the law, and quite literally the (monetary) properties thereof, impoverish this hope, and by cutting her off from her desire, impel her to take a short cut. We first glimpse Marion and Sam in a hotel bed during time stolen from the lunch hour. Glimpsed, it must be admitted… as we voyeuristically peep under the curtain and through the window from ten stories in the air. In fact, it is noteworthy that in the first fifteen seconds of the film we go from a bird’s eye view of the city, to a momentary perch outside a curtained window and then into a sex scene—as the characters, the cinema, and the audience along with these seek their quasi-elicit pleasures and their ends. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 131 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 131 So, with interests thus aligned (we want sex, not psychoanalysis in risqué 1960) we pursue Marion Crane, untamed by the law, take flight, a bird who stole forty thousand dollars, suddenly out of control and haunted, as she drives out of town, by the gaze and the voice of the law—only, as luck would have it, to fall into the trap of the stuttering Norman Bates, a man with his own scopic, linguistic and legal issues, who also happens to be a taxidermist… Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 132 132 JONATH AN BELL ER One could say that film (and I mean film) was above all things (including space and time) about the cut, but such a statement would never be more true than in the case of Psycho. For what else is the cut if not a denial, indeed a radical negation of what is. Let us agree: Marion, whose gaze, mobilized like that of cinematic spectators, finds herself momentarily free to follow her desire, but is then pursued by the law while on her flight to pleasure. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 133 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 133 Paradoxically, this journey to pleasure is cut short by a new law, that of the cinematic cut. This cut is the other side, the dialectical antithesis, if you will, of the mobilized gaze. Indeed it is the film that forces Marion to stop at the Bates Motel. Mobility and the edit: the new grammar of desire and deferral for which the old grammar of the symbolic order and the law of the father must find adequation. This power to fragment and reassemble, it is at once a condition of possibility of and subjugating grammar for an emergent order of desire attendant to modernity. The mode of its containment constitutes the patho-logistical implementation of the gendered organization of pleasure. Not just a violation of the common heritage that is the human body and its thought, not simply the recomposition of space-time, the grammar of the cinema is a mode of and for the mobilization and reorganization of desire. Marion the desiring Crane, empowered by her new role in the workplace, cuts the law, but she is not the only one. In stealing the money and fleeing the poetically named city of Phoenix (the bird reborn from the ashes), she cuts out, but she is also cut out: out of society and even more shocking perhaps, out of the film. Indeed, Hitchcock shocked audiences not with the one act of cutting against Janet Leigh but two in one: by brutally cutting her up as he did in the middle of the film, he thus, against the audience’s expectations, cut the film star out the film half way through the narrative. The second half of the film is the afterlife of both Norman’s and the audience’s fetishistic appropriation and indeed consumption of the female film star. Let us also remember that for Laura Mulvey at least, visual pleasure is generated by a narrative cinema “cut to the measure of [male] desire,” and this is accomplished by the organization of three looks, that of the characters, the camera and the audience. Mulvey describes the exigencies bearing on both woman and the image of woman with a Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 134 JONATH AN BELL ER 134 kind of devastating efficiency: “the function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is twofold: she firstly symbolizes the castration threat by her real lack of a penis and secondly thereby raises her child into the symbolic. Once this has been achieved, her meaning in the process is at an end.”4 As if writing about Marion she adds, “Women’s desire is subjugated to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound; she can exist only in relation to it and not transcend it.”5 And the two sentences immediately following this structural foreclosure of feminine expression almost uncannily describe Norman’s fate at the hands of his mother: “She turns her child into the signifier of her own desire to possess a penis (the condition, she imagines, of entry into the symbolic). Either she must gracefully give way to the word, the name of the father and the law, or else struggle to keep her child down with her in the half-light of the imaginary.” For Norman, as we are to find out, is held down in the half light of the imaginary: the child of a widowed mother whose uncommon agency interrupted Norman’s normal development—Mother’s obsessive control kept her child from achieving full, which is to say “normal” manhood. When after his Father’s early death Mother expresses herself in another way and takes a lover, Norman kills them both, but this murder is not enough to excise the dominion of Mother’s consciousness over his manhood or to overcome his phallic lack. Mother, that is, desiring mother unbound from the name of the Father, is already within him—that’s precisely what makes him a psycho. 4 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 14. 5 Mulvey, 14. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 135 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 135 Norman’s endeavors to become a man under the unquiet image of his mother lead him to engage in acts whose reality must increasingly be denied if he is to remain a good boy. One might say that, for Hitchcock, the diagnosis of modern psychosis is: yes, it’s a structural feature of modernity, but it’s unbound female agency that presents the problem. So Psycho delivers poetic justice in accord with midcentury white American patriarchy. A woman breaks the law for pleasure, cut to her punishment. If it is mildly disproportionate, it is because somewhere else, another woman, in this case Norman’s mother, was seeking her own pleasure in an effort to mean something more than castration and nothing else—at least to herself. But the law of the father, even if it doesn’t function seamlessly, organizes things such that justice is served. It organizes the fragments and the cuts, it organizes the cinema. In the media of patriarchy, one woman’s exercise of agency is shot down by another woman’s exercise of agency. The angel of this justice, the particular medium that provides its deliverance, is first Norman, who, as we know is a psycho, and, not co-incidentally, a voyeur. He also happens to be an embodiment of cinema. Cinema (Psycho is, after all a classic) is thus the second medium of poetic justice here, since, as we shall see more clearly in a moment, Norman’s visual practice is exactly analogous to cinema itself. And psychoanalysis, which, at the conclusion of the film functions as explainer and apologist, provides the discursive analysis of the visual event. Here it is the third medium of patriarchy’s “justice.” Let’s see how this works: Norman is castrated, or at least tortured by the threat of castration. When his male desire wells, he endeavors to take on the role of standard masculinity (he makes Marion sandwiches), but his mother’s overbearing presence (also a result of modern times) won’t allow him the pleasures of manhood—scopophilia is as far as he can go. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 136 136 JONATH AN BELL ER Brilliantly, the peephole into Marion’s hotel room is revealed by Norman’s removal of a small painting “Suzanna and the Elders” (Massino Stanzione), a nude, and a rape. This painting which displays for the viewer Suzanna’s full frontal nudity while she is being assaulted is a well chosen example of Western Art and its long tradition of the objectification of women for masculine purposes.6 Here Norman removes this painting in order to uncover its gaze: the peephole behind it. He is looking at a woman directly through the visual program of the Western tradition. The peephole is both an image of the gaze and the gaze itself—it is also the camera obscura and now the cinema. And there, on the other side of the wall is Marion in her hotel room, literally in camera. A moment earlier, in the very bunker full of stuffed animals for grown-ups, where 6 John Berger comments, “Almost all post-Renaissance European sexual imagery is frontal—either literally or metaphorically—because the sexual protagonist is the spectator-owner looking at it… Men of state discussed under paintings like this. When one of them felt he had been outwitted he looked up for consolation. What he saw reminded him that he was a man.” John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 57. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 137 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 137 Norman’s efforts to rescue his failed manhood are housed, Marion had questioned his masculinity by implying that he was subservient to his mother, adding, “a son is a poor substitute for a lover.” But now, her presence expelled from the den of struggling masculinity, she may be beheld in the cinematic gaze (at this moment in history the culminating technology of dominant Western visual practice), she may, in short, be taken as an object. The viewer’s gaze, now directly aligned with Norman’s puts both in the position that Hitchcock stated he wanted for his audience: “aroused by pure film.” However, unlike the Renaissance figure, Marion is not yesterday’s woman, she is a working woman, newly empowered, technologically mobile, and a law-breaker. She embodies new forms of desire, and access to money and power, and she will have to be treated in the modern mode. In analyzing her treatment, we would do well to recall here the dialectic of the eye and the gaze. According to Sartre, if one sees the eye, the gaze disappears, however, if one falls under the gaze, the eye disappears. Thus seeing the eye, objectifying the body of the other is a way of warding off castration through the repression and negation of the subjectivity of the Other. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 138 JONATH AN BELL ER 138 That is why Lacan tells us that the gaze is also an annihilating gaze. As Mulvey tells us, “Desire, born with language, allows the possibility of transcending the instinctual and the imaginary, but its point of reference continually returns to the traumatic moment of its birth: the castration complex. Hence the look, pleasurable in form can be threatening in content, and it is woman as representation/image that crystallizes this paradox.” 7 Cinema, she explains, has developed various strategies of objectification and identification to manage the image of woman, to tack back and forth between voyeuristic pleasure and reinforcement of the male ego: in brief, the sadistic narrative that unmasks the woman and deprives her of power, and the fetishistic manipulation of her image via the close-up that removes her from 3D-space, cuts-up her body and renders it twodimensional and iconic. In the shower scene, the literal liquidation of Marion’s agency, her life-blood swirling down the drain, gives us a concrete image for the gendered praxis of this gaze as fomented and codified by cinema. As the knife cuts, in a way at once analogous and here simultaneous to the way in which the cinema cuts up the image of woman, the camera continues by following the blood swirling in the water of the bath tub down the void of the drain... only to leave the blackness of the void by exiting out the pupil of Marion’s now dead eye. As the camera zooms out from Marion’s pupil we see her final twitches before she becomes a corpse. Through the sequence of cuts, her subjective (and threatening) gaze has literally been converted into the eye-object. Thus, in abridged form, we have the whole film, both cut to and taking the measure of male desire. 7 Mulvey, 19. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 139 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 139 The shower sequence, which took almost as long to make as the rest of the film combined, is the film within the film that gives us the fundamental relation of the eye and the gaze in an economy of gendered looking circumscribed by patriarchal law. The rest of the material is (a brilliant) elaboration. Famously, again, woman must bear the burden of the look, she is the bearer, not the maker of meaning. While she provokes men, she also embodies the threat of castration. Traditionally speaking then, Norman’s attention to Marion is not properly economic—his attention to her exceeds somewhat his contractual duties as hotel clerk. Indeed, as if to emphasize the extra-economic dimension of Norman’s use of Marion, the forty thousand dollars that Marion stole is buried under the mire in the trunk of the car, still wrapped in Newspaper—in the symbolic order of the business world —and well beyond Norman’s grasp. Norman’s gaze then, from the point of view of our own times, in which we understand that looking is posited as labor, seems atavistic if not exceptional, part of yesterday’s problems and an older regime of looking, as it is not directly productive of value. However, if we take for example Silvia Federici’s critique of Marxism and the labor theory of value seriously (as we must), then we know that women’s work, although unwaged and unrecognized by capitalist modes of valuation (monetization) is none-the-less the bedrock of social reproduction.8 Woman as unwaged, unvalued and un-represented labor not only bears the gendered burden of social reproduction but is here archetypically the bearer of the burden of the look. She bears the burden of the look unto death and thereby serves Norman’s desire to reproduce himself as a desiring subject, in this case a man. 8 Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 140 140 JONATH AN BELL ER With cinematic optics and the mobilization of male and female gazes, however, everything changes somewhat and the law of the father is threatened: Marion is a law-breaker and Norman’s phallic mother (who took another lover after his father’s death thereby breaking with the name of the Father) and kept Norman down in “the half-light of the imaginary” constitute modern industrial threats to masculinity—and the cinematic gaze will have to compensate. Thus Marion serves or rather is served up in camera to foment and sustain the new archetypical voyeur, a psycho. In a famous passage about Hollywood narrative cinema which today we must make rebound to a critique of Marxist poetics as well, Mulvey reminds us that with the image of woman, “her visual presence tends to work against the development of the story line. This is because the narcissistic needs of the male ego are sutured into an identification with the male character: his gaze, his control of the narrative and his organization of 3D-space.” This describes Hollywood’s male lead, but also, we should note, Marx’s figure of Capital. In Psycho, Marion’s act of theft cuts the law of the father and inaugurates a narrative that is used to reveal the logistics of the law, which is to say the forces of normalization under Patriarchy. The law of the father, via a stochastic-cybernetic system of capitalist patriarchy, what a moment ago I ironically referred to as “poetic justice,” re-establishes itself. In the encounter with Norman, modern deviance counters modern deviance as cinematic optics confront the law, but systemically speaking, order is re-established to the cinematically mobilized world through a kind of Norbert Wienerian self-regulating damping effect via the program known as the plot. And, in a restoration of the law (if you remember the end of the film), psychoanalysis makes sense of it all. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 141 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 141 As if to say: “The symbolic order is dead; long live the symbolic order!” Marion short-circuits the law and is herself cut up by a character who would represent patriarchy but who has himself been short-circuited by it by another figure of modernity, the castrating phallic mother. Indeed we might observe that the main character is himself a resultant cut-up of the symbolic order by the very cinematic optics of modernity that both threaten and enable his fantasy: Norman Bates’ very name is in fact the result of a cutting process. As hinted in Saul Bass’ opening credits, his name is a condensation of a phrase that can be reconstructed to reveal both the patho-logical effect of the cinematic cut on the symbolic order and an ordinary truth: “the normal man masturbates.” The normal man masturbates… fine, but in the cinematic world, Norman Bates. Well, if in 1960 the normal man masturbated, what does he do today? What do any of us do? Particularly after half a century of cinema, digitization, visual saturation, and visual financialization? Citizen Kane or Norman Bates? Neurotic megalomania or psychosis? Two programs for subjectivization. In today’s world in which the entire visual field is posited as a site of value extraction, it is no secret that pornography represents 30% of internet traffic at minimum. If we consider that computer energy usage has expanded to account for more than 3% of electricity consumption world-wide, that’s a significant amount of fossil fuels devoted to jacking off. Still if reaching orgasm in order to ward off psychosis were the main use of fossil fuels, the world might be a better place. However, the effects are somewhat more serious than all that: structural violence, systematically deployed, titrated with highly fungible vectors of racism and sexism—are embedded in the technovisualization of everything that appears with the express goal of capturing sensual labor and the consequence of liquidating both subjects and the subjectivity of their objects. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 142 142 JONATH AN BELL ER Bernard Stiegler’s notion of the stripping of the libido and the proletarianization of the senses by what he calls “retentional systems” would be useful here. As is Marcuse’s idea of one-dimensional man. From Kane to Bates to porn we witness the mediatic functionalization of subjectivity and the virtualization of the object world. These three pathways are programmatic compensatory means to ward of the radical disempowerment wrought by programs. More than a tendency, the result is an automation of psychic function by computerized and capitalized apparatuses. But our analysis thus far is only to 1960, and predominantly in the U.S., more specifically, the white U.S. Indeed the forms of neurological and psychic dysfunction and reformation, described herein—people fragmented, castrated, and cut up by money and machines and driven to seek subjectivity by pathological means—are relatively easy to understand, delimited as they are and as compared with the logistics of perception now current. Not to minimize them, since they violently imposed various regimes of the body, psychology, personhood and desire, on subjects as well as upon those who became objects for said subjects, but we must remark here that they are local manifestations specific to a few dominant nations, races and classes in a particular epoch. Nonetheless, their mainstream expression and dissemination makes them valid precursors, if you will, to the (con-)temporary psychosis of today’s mainstream. Yesterday’s white supremacist capitalist patriarchy still configures today’s white supremacist capitalist patriarchy in the U.S. and Europe and beyond—a formation that is symptomatically specific to one class fraction but nonetheless potentially deadly to every planetary denizen (if also to itself) for all that. Admittedly, there are countless other ways to render this analysis, but since my theme was psychopathology I found myself going to these films first. In any case, outing the whiteness of my examples thus far is not to universalize Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 143 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 143 them, but precisely the opposite. For with Fanon, we should also recognize the limits of psychopathologizing discourse, which is to say the limits of psychoanalysis. For Fanon, no talking cure was going to cure the sicknesses of either torture victims or socio-paths, only insurrection and revolution could overthrow the forms of egoism and hatred endemic to colonialism and fascism and thus bring about the needed paradigm shift. So in tracking the white psychopathologies that lead towards the dissolution of their hosts, we are witnessing the implosion, the practical deconstruction of whiteness. By way of moving towards a conclusion, I want to make two final points: one about whiteness and what Anne Anlin Cheng astutely calls the melancholy of race—this will be an additional and indeed constitutive patho-logistical vector that characterizes the operating system of the representational dominant. Then, a second concerning a generalized liquidation not just of particular human beings but of human being and of being itself. Anne Cheng in The Melancholy of Race reminds us that the melancholic is both sad and aggressive. She writes, “Dominant white identity in American operates melancholically— as an elaborate identificatory system based on psychical and social consumption-and-denial. This diligent system of melancholic retention appears in different guises. Both racist and white liberal discourses participate in the dynamic, albeit out of different motivations. The racists need to develop elaborate ideologies in order to accommodate their actions with official American ideals, while white liberals need to keep burying the racial others in order to memorialize them. Those who do not see the racial problem or those who call themselves nonideological are the most melancholic of all because in today’s political climate, as Toni Morrison exclaims in Playing in the Dark, ‘it requires hard work to not see.’”9 9 Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 144 JONATH AN BELL ER 144 Though Cheng will be interested in “the question that Freud does not ask: [namely] what is the subjectivity of the melancholic object?”10 for the moment I want to remark that the canonical cinema of the U.S. can be thought of as a melancholy canon—organized as it is to portray white narratives as universal narratives in a society profoundly structured by racial inequality—organized in other words “to not see.” While bell hooks and many others have commented on “the oppositional gaze” in Hollywood cinema, particularly the oppositional gaze of black spectators watching white films, we must learn to better recognize how whole systems of visualization and thus for the organization of attention are structured around a disavowal of racism or of the existence of racialized bodies, and oftentimes the active annihilation of racialized bodies. Cheng, citing Thomas Mann, who says that “[w]hat we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so”, shows that “it is exclusion rather than loss [that] is the real stake of melancholic retention.”11 Indeed, melancholia approaches psychosis when the lost/excluded object rises up to challenge the melancholic who in truth no longer desires [or can abide by] its return. Take for example Clint Eastwood’s all too convincing portrayal of “Dirty Harry,” a sad cop whose disillusionment and melancholic self-loathing have almost cost him his job on the SFPD. When one of the rare black characters in Hollywood cinema asserts himself, albeit scripted in the most stereotypically racist of ways—black bank robber running from the interpellation of a white man who also happens to be a cop—the line of sight through the peephole of psycho, 10 Cheng, 14. 11 Cheng, 9. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 145 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 145 a masculinity machine if their ever was one, becomes the sight line down the barrel of Clint’s 44 magnum. The title of the sequels, Magnum Force and The Enforcer, are telling, because the psycho does not simply deny reality (the possibility of other ways and practices beyond his ken); he imposes his vision on others, by making them dead, if necessary. Eastwood’s persona from Dirty Harry forward is that of being too much a man for these muddled, liberal and overly tolerant times—his career turns out to be a heroic elegy of his racial melancholia, which is to say the melancholia of his racism. As one blogger appreciatively writes, “Dirty Harry put a bullet in the heart of the flower power generation” and it’s true, psychosis overcame poetry and too many Americans loved him up. Here we can grasp the virility at the end of Peeping Tom’s camera, which he uses to film women as he murders them, in the form of the camera’s bayonet blade extension, and the virility in the extension of Eastwood’s racist gun. These prosthetics of the gaze constitute what we should understand as the working-edge of so-called universal man. Dirty Harry’s melancholia is of a profoundly different order than that of African-American filmmaker Charles Burnett’s characters in his extraordinary Killer of Sheep. That film, which could be read as a kind of black Modern Times in which images of the desultory Watts community in the mid70’s is also metaphorically figured as composed of sheep (and on occasion as killers), but here the machines hardly work. The film is a kind of bearing witness to the lived temporality, disempowerment and affective experiences of racialized exclusion. One finds in this film a distinctive composition that creates an apperceptive space of black knowing which is in certain real ways outside the economy of visual forms and structures proferred at the Hollywood box office (even as it is arguably a partial result of this economy). Following the lead offered in Saidiya Hartman’s work, one might say that the incommunicability and opacity of the Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 146 146 JONATH AN BELL ER legacies of slavery, racism, and Jim Crow are partly the contents of this film. The very difficulty of generating a subject constituting line of sight, image, or fully resolved perspective or representation testifies to a non-hegemonic visuality, an unrealized subjectification, and the presence of counter-histories that mobilize a perceptual mode different from that which will align itself and hence be at once repurposed and devoured by the mainstream. However, the annihilating gazes abstracted and in-formed in Psycho, Dirty Harry, Peeping Tom, etc., are a condensation of a specific mode of white life’s universal application of a violently imposed sexism and racism to the organization of its perception. These “pure gazes” mobilizing racism and sexism on various platforms for the prosumption of post-fordist tramps to the profit of today’s entrepreneurial Citizen Kanes, small and large, are also the legacy of colonialism, of slavery, of imperialism and humanism. Today these vectors of for-profit programmatic annihilation consolidate to form, among other manifestations, the predatory gaze of the drone in a global war to be human. These pathological programs of visualization continue to function in ways that are equally as important as the digital computer. The drone, effecting what Allen Feldman calls a liquid archive, couples all the capacities of computation for aerodynamic navigation, videography, cartography, facial recognition and weapons deployment to create technologically enabled psychosis. Cyber-psychosis. The drone and its melancholic functionaries—its cybernetically incorporated pilots (who will go home to kiss their kids after pulling the trigger on someone else’s family half a universe away) along with their entire staff of statisticians, researchers, and commanders who serve both machine and country— draw on a panoply of mutable, and thus programmable raced and gendered assumptions. As does the press that covers these exploits, and “the nation” that sanctions them. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 147 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 147 In short, data processing can morphologically produce whatever variant of racist/sexist phobic rage is required for any operation. It being understood, of course, that an operation here means the liquidation of the visualized target. The violent and incorporating logistics of this gaze are utterly banalized in the technical rationality of computers, national security, military protocols and the scoops of networked news that together produce the required taxidermic effect on each days’ requisite Other. Thus the drone, as both financial exploit and paradigmatic mode of visualization in the era of mediatic finance capital also represents the full automation of not just visuality but subjectivity. Because all systems (computation, financialization, visualization, militarization, national borders and migration, racialization, aestheticization, etc.) tend towards its logic, subjectivity within these programs is only to be found in the logistics of the annihilating gaze—subjectivity has itself become a program and all outsides are zones of crisis. This subjectification through annihilation is the real meaning of “convergence.” So alongside the regular fare we have war games, war porn, food porn, fashion porn, news porn, reality porn and regular porn. In fact that is the regular fare and it is all part of the attention economy. This all-consuming production by mediated sensual labor functions at a variety of levels from the ratification of a particular screen image to the game, blog, show or channel through to the interface or platform and their advertisers, shareholders, banks, militaries and states. We have the bundling of modes of attention by computerized delivery systems and systems of account. We have, in short, the programmatic simulation of reality, the virtual mise-en-scène of all looking, without the guarantee of any real event beyond that orchestrated by the inexorable logic of advertising and value extraction. That our thoughts and perceptions are programmed, accumulated and capitalized Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 148 JONATH AN BELL ER 148 testifies to the automation and expropriation of the general intellect. The general intellect, distributed across media platforms and automated in various apparatuses is, not just part of the means of production in the industrial sense, it is the means of production of sense perception and knowledge. It has rendered sensuality productive for capital and subjectivity at once automated and fully virtual. Subjectivity is a contingent instantiation (and always was), but the mediatic matrix of its materialization has fully transformed the local conditions of production and it has itself entered into computation. In some brilliant pages of Alex Galloway’s new book The Interface Effect is the following proposition: “The computer, [which Galloway calls a metaphysical medium because it functions through simulation and instantiates its own objects] is not of an ontological condition [as cinema is purported to be], it is on that condition. It does not facilitate or make reference to an arrangement of being, it remediates the very conditions of being itself. If I may be so crude, the medium of the computer is being.”12 Galloway continues, “If the cinema is, in general an ontology, the computer is, in general, an ethic”.13 The distinction, as Galloway tells us, is comparable to that between a language and a calculus. The profilmic event as “referent” versus the program that in object-oriented computing instantiates the very objects it will then manipulate. As evocative and indeed arresting as this formulation is in defining the flight from being as a metaphysical transformation ushered in by the digital computer, it is also partially incorrect, at least if we are going to abide by Vilém Flusser’s notion of the photographic apparatus—a machine that automates forms of thinking by executing concepts in a programmatic fashion. 12 Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (London: Polity Press, 2012), 21. 13 Galloway, 22. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 149 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 149 For Flusser, the technical image, produced by the apparatus known as the camera, is the first post-industrial image, in as much as the camera is already a computer—a programmed apparatus whose function is informed by the linearly written notations of the sciences of optics and chemistry. An apparatus for Flusser is something that automates an aspect of intelligence, and it is no less composed of programs than is a digital computer. Thus, Flusser claims quite convincingly that for nearly two centuries cameras have organized the world for the improvement and proliferation of cameras, such that today everything exists in reference to photography, suggesting that this constellation of programs evolves as the photographic apparatus by subjugating humans to its functions, much as a Darwinian evolutionary vector might transform and then dominate a habitus. Thus one might say that if “computation is an ethic”— the imposition of strict rules upon the emergence and trajectories of entities, then cinema was a mode of computation whose ethos was ontology—at least for a time, the time of Bazin. Indeed we already know that this was only true for a specific modality of cinema, deep focus, as montage with its production of attractions and concepts, already involved a derealization of the profilmic “content” of the image. It’s useful to say things this way because doing so provides a necessary corollary to W.J.T. Mitchell’s notion that “there are no visual media,” that can be used to show that the computer is still fundamentally embroiled in the visual. Mitchell argues that since even the most “purely visual” media rely on other mediatic modes to function—silent cinema for example had its musical score and intertitles, Abstract Expressionism had its critical discourse—no medium is really visual. The corollary, indeed anticipated by Mitchell himself is that they are all visual media, but what’s important, as Mitchell tells us, going back to McLuhan, is the sense ratios. And, we must add, the program. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 150 150 JONATH AN BELL ER For visuality is overrun with programs. Thus we see that while the computer is a break in the mode of informaticization (the way in which worlds are textualized and then treated as information [for it must be remembered that nothing is ontologically information—“information” is itself a conceptualization of what to do with being, and thus a program]), it remains under the sway of the program of visualization induced by the co-function and indeed convergence of visual media, which, emphatically now, are all of them. Already in Antonioni’s Blow-Up and as far back as Eisenstein, the profilmic real was not real, it was, material, raw material organized by semiotic systems. This is no less true with computation, which utilizes abstraction to work on the world. The computer is an apparatus composed of apparatuses, a program composed of programs. For all this, actually existing computing is no less keyed into the visual nor into the pathologistical vectors I have identified here. The alienation of “man” from “his” object, is not alienation 2.0, it is alienation to the google: programmed, weaponized, photographic apparatuses evolving an extraordinary materialist complexity that runs from the atomic to the planetary by siphoning off the sensual activity of human life to the point in which this process has presided over a generalized liquidation of being. Emergent media however, like the species’ enlarging carbon footprint, do not cancel what has gone before but rather develop media-ecologically, that is, in relation to extant energetics, whether considered from the standpoint of thermodynamics, labor or information. No doubt new media are marked by quantitative transformations that precipitate qualitative effects, however we are looking at a transformation that has taken place over several centuries. The ontological categories and ontology itself have been shifting towards a complete liquidation of being—as a category, as an experience or (and here this word ceases to make sense), as a “reality.” Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 151 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 151 This, indeed, is the story of twentieth century philosophy in the West which, taken as a whole turns out to be a theory of the image. Nonetheless, we find it necessary to insist that race and gender based exploitation, systemic encampment, rape, enslavement, national wholesaling of populations, and murder, continues apace with capitalism’s evolving algorithms— inequality and injustice is the substrate of capitalist simulations. Thus we can be sure that while the patho-logistics of capitalism are our common lot, they function on a system of differences. These differences are lived, and contradictorily perhaps, we will claim that these lived differences are real and that they matter. For otherwise love is outmoded and indeed impossible, and there is nothing to non-capitalist values, less perhaps profound naiveté or cynicism. Capitalism, the very image of non-being, the very life of non-life, would remain our conceptual horizon, however, the world that haunts today’s images persists. And it is calling you. It rebels. Paul Virilio, whose inflection of the term logistics I have heavily relied upon here, would agree that there is a crisis, and that the intensifying rhythm of the pulverization and reformation of subjectivity is today endemic to the function of power. In his recent book length interview entitled The Administration of Fear he speaks of the developmental sequence of three bombs, the atomic, the informational and the ecological. “The second is no longer atomic and not yet ecological but informational.”14 This bomb comes from instantaneous means of communication and in particular the transmission of information. 14 Paul Virilio, The Administration of Fear (New York: Semiotext(e), 2012). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 152 JONATH AN BELL ER 152 It plays a prominent role in establishing fear as a global environment, because it allows the synchronization of emotion on a global scale. Because of the absolute speed of electromagnetic waves, the same feeling of terror can be felt in all corners of the world at the same time. It is not a localized bomb: it explodes each second... It creates a “community of emotions,” what Virilio only half-ironically calls “a communism of affects.” “There is something in the [global] synchronization of emotion that surpasses the power of standardization of opinion that was typical of the mass media in the second half of the twentieth century...”;15 and a little later on: “With the phenomena of instantaneous interaction that are now our lot, there has been a veritable reversal, destabilizing the relationship of human interaction, and the time reserved for reflection in favor of the conditioned responses produced by emotion.”16 So rather than deep focus and the time of the long take, Virilio sees us in the thrall of a new order of montage (already dimly visible in the newsreel from Citizen Kane)—what in an earlier work I called the cinematic mode of production. Far more intensive than Eisenstein’s programmatic montage or even the ambient but still cinematic montage of midtwentieth century mass media this digital montage is produced by the continued and near continuous arrival of information and affect bombs all competing, in increasingly self-conscious ways that are feed-back loops of the market, for the capture and expropriation of human attention. Ours is an increasingly impoverished and militarized society, characterized by a total war on the body, on consciousness, and on the senses, but also on equality, on solidarity and on democracy. 15 Virilio, 30. 16 Virilio, 31. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 153 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 153 Today’s attractions rely on sequence, certainly, but also frequency, intensity, channel, repetition and spectrum. Taken together, these “attractions” generate ideas, affects, panics, crisis and swarms: a global impulse network evolved (if that’s the word) to manage and expropriate a world population by revamping its sensory inputs. The cultural ballistics, arguably akin to the sensory deprivation and over-saturation of interrogation techniques designed to force the ego into existential crisis, institute an establishment of fear as a so-called global environment. The expropriation of increasing quantities of subjectivity that might otherwise have been used for purposes other than capitalist production and annihilation is today the condition of and for the continuing intensification of the capitalist media environment—the fragmentation and as has been noted, fractalization, induced by capitalized media machines. But more than that, the induction of fear and prevailing if not permanent psychosis is at once a result and a strategy, a modus operandi, a mise-en-scène. Not just a result of but a condition of production of the reigning administration, it has succeeded in giving us many good reasons to be afraid. But it is also an administration that, as Pussy Riot recently demonstrated subsequently articulated from prison, may fear nothing more than poetry and thus makes every effort to drive it out.17 For it may be that the world making practice of poetics, in all its forms, is what remains to those extrinsic crisis zones: zones, peoples, parts of people, aware of their oppression and refusing to seek liberation through oppression. Otherwise, awash in intentional signals, literally caught in myriad and all pervasive gazes in which seeing and being seen have become 17 “Pussy Riot Closing Statements,” n+1, available at http://nplusonemag. com/pussy-riot-closing-statements. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 154 154 JONATH AN BELL ER one and the same act, everyone, à la Baudrillard, is just sending messages that ratify the dominant codes. We are the media…; We, the media... Everyone, desperate to make words, to make images, that will testify to their existence in an environment of semio-war. But the situation functions as if each and all were suddenly in the position of Borges’ narrator Yu Tsun in “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Each person a nodal point of multiple inheritances seeking agency in a battle for the control of information. Warding off abjection for themselves and for their ancestors in an informatic war, and pressed, to convert another or many others into a sign, by murder, if necessary, if only to flash their own existence on some platform’s program. Let us offer a definition of Psychosis in the contemporary: the instrumental inscription of signs and images on the lives of others, at speeds and intensities that foreclose their being. A final note: for capital, and therefore for capitalists, the human species has become a means to the end that is this very mode of representation and visualization engaging therefore in the practical deconstruction of being itself. The species as a whole has become the means of representation, which is to say, the means of capitalist informatic management. This de-essentializing instrumentalization of the species of course resonates with Debord: “in the spectacle all that was once lived has moved into mere representation.” But now representation is really an end in a double sense. First as the drive to which all human production accedes (Flusser makes a similar argument in Philosophy of Photography), but second, as a new order of alienated production that results for post-fordist workers (and everyone else) in what precisely Marx wrote 170 years ago resulted for the industrial worker alienated from his product, “the loss of reality.” Today, in the near total saturation of mental life by distributed capitalist media, representation is the denial, indeed the negation, and finally the impossibility of reality. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 155 PATHOLOGISTICS O F ATTENTION 155 Its functioning is, in short, the very definition of psychosis. Representation wholesale is now the active production of non-being. Like the state and the banks that are themselves constituted in it, representation, visual and linguistic, is structured by a matrix of pathologistical processes, and is today totally bankrupt. And this bankruptcy unfolds even as it mounts various exploits and derivatives—abstractions—to stave off a final accounting. If in service of the preservation of the historically and now evermore precariously constituted ego, psychosis entails the denial of reality, then speaking at all today may be its number one symptom. Because the reality is that, at least as far as capital is concerned, we do not exist. Shall we prove otherwise? Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 156 156 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 157 PATRICI A PIST ERS 157 Madness, Miracles, Machines: Living in a Delirious World Without Walls “A flickering brain, which relinks or creates loops—this is cinema.” 1 Inspired by this quote from Gilles Deleuze, I will enter the question of the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism through cinema and other media machines.I would like to start with the opening monologue from the film Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, 2007): Michael. Dear Michael. Of course it’s you, who else could they send, who else could be trusted? I... I know it’s a long way and you’re ready to go to work... all I’m saying is wait, just wait, just-just-just... please hear me out because this is not an episode, relapse, fuck-up, it’s... I’m begging you Michael. I’m begging you. Try and make believe this is not just madness because this is not just madness. Two weeks ago I came out of the building, okay, I’m running across Sixth Avenue, there’s a car waiting, I got exactly 38 minutes to get to the airport and I’m dictating. 1 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: The Athlone Press, 1989), 215. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 158 158 PAT RIC IA PI STER S There’s this, this panicked associate sprinting along beside me, scribbling in a notepad, and suddenly she starts screaming, and I realize we’re standing in the middle of the street, the light’s changed, there’s this wall of traffic, serious traffic speeding towards us, and I... I-I freeze, I can’t move, and I’m suddenly consumed with the overwhelming sensation that I’m covered with some sort of film. It’s in my hair, my face... it’s like a glaze... like a... a coating, and... at first I thought, oh my god, I know what this is, this is some sort of amniotic— embryonic—fluid. I’m drenched in afterbirth, I’ve-I’ve breached the chrysalis, I’ve been reborn. But then the traffic, the stampede, the cars, the trucks, the horns, the screaming and I’m thinking no-no-no-no, reset, this is not rebirth, this is some kind of giddy illusion of renewal that happens in the final moment before death. … And then I realize no-no-no, this is completely wrong because I look back at the building and I had the most stunning moment of clarity. I... I... I... I realized Michael, that I had emerged not from the doors of Kenner, Bach, and Ledeen, not through the portals of our vast and powerful law firm, but from the asshole of an organism whose sole function is to excrete the... the-the-the poison, the ammo, the defoliant necessary for other, larger, more powerful organisms to destroy the miracle of humanity. And that I had been coated in this patina of shit for the best part of my life. The stench of it and the stain of it would in all likelihood take the rest of my life to undo. And you know what I did? I took a deep cleansing breath and I set that notion aside. I tabled it. I said to myself as clear as this may be, as potent a feeling as this is, as true a thing as I believe that I have witnessed today, it must wait. It must stand the test of time. And Michael, the time is now. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 159 M ADNESS, MIRA CL ES, M ACH INES 159 These words are Arthur Edens’ (Tom Wilkinson), a top lawyer at a powerful firm that defends multinationals and other big players against law suits for biopolution and other “casualties of capitalism.” He is talking to his colleague and friend Michael Clayton (George Clooney) who is charged with bringing Edens back to reason. In the monologue, Edens describes his “insane” flash of insight: their powerful firm excretes poison into humanity. And instead of taking the usual “deep cleansing breath” and pushing this knowledge back into hidden corners of the mind, he snaps and refuses to respect the norms of hyper capitalism. This is madness as a form of political resistance, and even more fundamentally, a resistance against the destruction of “the miracle of humanity.” As Deleuze and Guattari have argued, schizophrenia, both clinical and critical, deals with the socio-political.2 So is this form of madness indeed a typical psychopathology of cognitive capitalism that we are discussing here today? Or in Giorgio Agamben’s words, is this illness an “out-of-jointness” with the demands of time that indicates what it means to be contemporary, seeing the darkness of our age? 3 2 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (London: The Athlone Press, 1984) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: The Athlone Press, 1988). 3 Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 40. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 160 160 PAT RIC IA PI STER S In my book The Neuro-Image I take Eden’s delirious intelligence as a form of what Warren Neidich calls “neuropower” or “noopolitics” characteristic of the contemporary screen culture of the digital age that is obsessed with the brain, especially in its schizoid characteristics.4 I suggest calling this new mode of cinema after Gilles Deleuze’s movementimage and time-image “the neuro-image.”5 The neuro-image is deeply indebted to Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis, and takes the delirious, hallucinatory and affective dimensions of contemporary screen culture into its neuroscientific, philosophical and political implications. While in the book I focus on the contemporary dimensions of the neuro-image, here I would like to go back in time and look at one of the original moments of modern conceptions of madness by going back to the turn of the twentieth century. To understand our modern psychopathologies I propose to return to one of the first insightful accounts of delusional madness, Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, published in 1903.6 Schreber’s case remains interesting to contemporary audiences for re-evaluating our own madness (and “normalities”), and for re-evaluating our relation to our bodies, brains and machines and the particular assemblages (or apparatuses) in which they are constituted. 4 Warren Neidich, “Neuropower,” Atlantica Magazine of Art and Thought 48/49 (2009): 119-64, 123 and Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich, eds., Cognitive Architecture: From Bio-Politics to Noo-Politics (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010). 5 Patricia Pisters, The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). 6 Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, trans. and eds. Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter (New York: New York Review Books, 2000). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 161 M ADNESS, MIRA CL ES, M ACH INES 161 FIG. 1 Shock Head Soul (Simon Pummel, A Submarine and Hot Property Co-production, 2011). Permission with courtesy of the Artist. In 2011 Simon Pummell made a film based on Schreber’s memoirs, Shock Head Soul and created a related art installation The Sputnik Effect. I will take these two works as starting points for investigating the continuities and changes in the way we conceptualise madness in relation to cultures of cognitive capitalism. I will move (quickly and with terribly big steps for which I apologize in advance) through three historical periods: starting in Schreber’s time, the turn of the twentieth century, making a pause mid-twentieth century, and ending at the turn of the twenty-first century in the “time that is now.” Going back in time to look for the roots of our contemporary madness is also to say that while many things may change, nothing completely disappears in the “flickering” and “relinking” loops of our brain screens that are caught in an eternal return of difference and repetition. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 162 162 PAT RIC IA PI STER S The central assumption in my proposal is that modern conceptions of madness are fundamentally related to media machines —so the words “Modernity” and “Media” could have been tagged on to “Madness, Miracles and Machines”of the title. So media are more than representations of our world. They are fundamentally part of the psychopathological assemblages that I want to sketch out. 1900s Let’s first turn to Schreber’s own time. Schreber wrote his autobiographical account of his mental illness in a period of many modern discoveries, in science, psychiatry but also in art, literature and in new technological communication media. In his recent book The Age of Insight Eric Kandel returns to the intellectual and artistic schools of Vienna around 1900 where he situates the beginnings of what we now have begun to call “neuroaesthetics,” the engagement of the sciences of the mind with the arts, and vice versa.7 More particularly, he focuses on the work of Vienna’s modernist portraitists Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, the novels of Arthur Schnitzler and the Vienna School of Medicine. These Viennese artists and scientists met regularly at the salon of Bertha and Emil Zuckerkandl where they shared a new and modern interest in the inner world and the unconscious, instinctual strivings of people. Each of them developed their own ways of discovering and uncovering these inner worlds: using facial expression and hand and body gestures in their portraits, depicting a flat inward looking sensual world in their style, describing streams of consciousness in internal monologues in writing, uncovering what’s beneath the surface of the body and the skull in a fascination for biology. 7 Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain, From Vienna 1900 to the Present (New York: Random House, 2012). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 163 M ADNESS, MIRA CL ES, M ACH INES 163 Freud, too, was part of this intellectual/artistic circle. He started at the School of Medicine as a neurobiologist, but abandoned his work on the brain to focus on the mind —though he always remained keen on establishing his theory of sexuality as a science (hence his big argument and eventual break with Jung who wanted to move beyond the strict scientific references). By now, we all know the limits of Freud’s main interpretative framework around the Oedipal complex and his unique focus on sexuality, but this does not make him less important for the systematic development of new views of the human mind as irrational (unconscious drives, sexuality, aggression, inner worlds), his emphasis on self-examination (he analysed himself also on a daily basis, thirty minutes each day), and his insistence on the thin line between normal behavior and mental illness. While in his practice Freud never treated any psychotic patients (only neurotic ones, who suffer from repression rather than from delusion), these three aspects (the mind as irrational, self-examination of inner world, and the fluid borders between sanity and insanity) made Freud interested in the Schreber case. In a letter to Jung, who recommended Freud to read Schreber’s memoirs, Freud famously said that Schreber should have been made a professor of psychiatry and director of a mental hospital for the insights into the deranged mind that he provided. As one of the first schizophrenics to write down his experiences of psychotic hallucinations and paranoid delusions from the inside out, Schreber expressed himself with extraordinary clarity. Moreover, as a judge, he took his memoirs to court to fight the decision to keep him in the asylum, arguing that he did no harm to anyone and that he could not be held against his own will for his private religious beliefs (as he called his delusions). He won the case and was released in 1902 after eight years of detention in the asylum. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 164 164 PAT RIC IA PI STER S Schreber thought (felt and knew) that God had chosen him to save the world. The price he paid for this was that his body was remade into that of a woman. Schreber describes how he felt every organ and bone in his body was “temporarily damaged by miracles” that transformed his body, changing his sex organ, removing the hairs of his beard one by one, crushing his rib cage and making him smaller and lighter, turning him into a woman.8 He also felt he was becoming the rays of the sun, and God spoke to him as the sun from the future. At the same time he felt persecuted by God’s all knowingness. In his 1911 analysis based on Schreber’s memoirs, Freud focuses on Schreber’s obsessive relation to doctor Flechsig, the head of the asylum.9 Freud interprets his delusions as repressed homosexuality, related to Schreber’s father, a well-known educationalist “from hell” who invented all kind of machines such as the “Geradehalter” and the “Kopfhalter” to discipline children and make them sit straight that were very popular at the time. Schreber’s arrested libido, according to Freud, expresses itself as paranoid megalomania. The sun is according to Freud a sublimated father symbol. Freud’s insistence on childhood traumas that influence the psyche is still relevant today; and, as Colin MacCabe indicates, his insistence on repressed homosexuality might also have been related to the “coming out” of homosexual desire across Europe. So it might have been more of a socio-political problem than Freud’s theory of sexuality acknowledged. 8 9 Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, 141. Sigmund Freud, The Schreber Case, trans. Andrew Webber and introduction by Colin MacCabe (New York: Penguin, 2002). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 165 M ADNESS, MIRA CL ES, M ACH INES 165 But I do not want to spend much time on the merits and limits of Freud’s analysis. I just want to indicate the context of the emergence of modern forms of madness that was related to an interest in the psychodynamics of modern man that also seemed to be profoundly connected to mediating machines. Let’s go beyond the Freudian interpretation and return to the Schreber case to see how all of this played out there.10 Influencing Machines Schreber’s God had a controlling system at his disposal that he called the writing-down machine, a machine that captured in words everything Schreber ever thought, said or did, even everything that was ever said or thought by any one in any language of the world. At the same time this writing-down machine connected him to God in a divine and cosmic way. This controlling power of machines seems very specific for schizophrenia. In 1919 one of Freud’s students, Victor Tausk, wrote a famous article in which he describes a “Beeinflussungsapparat” (“influencing machine”) that is often at the heart of paranoid delusions as a mind controlling device in schizophrenic patients.11 These machines seem to be modelled on the many media apparatuses that have their origin in Schreber’s time: wireless telegraph, photo camera, telephone, “electrical telescope” (leading to the first television transmissions), radio and the cinematograph are all modern media machines that seemed to have magical powers. 10 11 Colin MacCabe in Freud, The Schreber Case. Viktor Tausk, “On the Origins of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, no. 2 (1919): 519-556. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 166 166 PAT RIC IA PI STER S The invention and popularisation of these machines seem to be related to the emergence and definition of schizophrenia, which did not exist as mental disorder before Kraeplin and Bleuler described its symptoms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.12 As John Durham Peters argues: “With voices vanishing into the void or echoing forever, thoughts and pictures being implanted in or extracted from heads, voices commenting on actions, and ‘influencing machines’ exercising remote control over bodies, psychotic delusions constitute a shadow history of electrical communications in the twentieth century.”13 The technological machine that inspired Schreber’s delusion was informed by early typing machines, such as the writing ball by Rasmus Malling-Hansen, patented in 1870 as the first commercially produced typing machine that was sold around the world. In Simon Pummell’s Schreber film Shock Head Soul, this machine has an important role.14 Pummell combines documentary style, drama and computer animation that are subtly blended to give expression to Schreber’s delusional world. In the documentary scenes psychiatrists, media historians and scientists comment on Schreber’s case. 12 Emil Kraeplin, Psychiatrie: Ein Lehrbuch für Studernde und Aertze (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1899) and Eugene Bleuler, Dementia Praecox oder Gruppe der Schizophrenia (Leipzig: Deuticke, 1911). See for the link between magic and scientific engineering around the invention of television also Stefan Andriopoulos, “Psychic Television,” Critical Inquiry 31 (Spring 2005): 618-637. 13 John Durham Peters, “Broadcasting and Schizophrenia,” Media, Culture and Society no.32, 1 (2010): 132. See also Friedrich Kittler, “Der Gott der Ohren” in Technische Schriften (1984): 130-148. 14 See also www.shockheadsoul.com Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 167 M ADNESS, MIRA CL ES, M ACH INES 167 Dressed in nineteenth century outfits they speak with contemporary knowledge about Schreber’s time. In the fiction parts we see Schreber (played by Hugo Koolschijn) with his wife (Anniek Pheifer), the lonely Schreber in the asylum, and Schreber writing his memoirs. In these dramatized scenes the writing-down machine takes the form of a typewriting ball that seems organic, has somehow magically come alive, the letters on the ball slowly moving up and down (see F I G . 1). Gradually the writing ball multiplies and in a delusional, fully animated sequence these writing-down machines start to float in space, burst open and become like jellyfish with electric tentacles. In this way the film gives expression to Schreber’s description of the dissolving of his body into rays “tying to celestial bodies” connected to the powerful divine writing-down-system: I cannot say with certainty who does the writing down. As I cannot imagine God’s omnipotence lacks all intelligence, I presume that the writing-down is done by creatures given human shape on distant celestial bodies after the manner of the fleeting-improvised-men, but lacking all intelligence; their hands are led automatically, as it were, by passing rays for the purpose of making them write-down, so that later rays can again look at what has been written.15 Shock Head Soul gives a modern account of Schreber’s pathology as a sort of omnipotent surveillance system avant la lettre. Neurological explanations of Schreber’s condition are given by one of the scientists. As are other explanations that go beyond Freud’s famous interpretation mentioned earlier. Besides the traumatic role of the father, there is also the fact that his beloved wife had a sixth miscarriage just before 15 Schreber, Memoir of My Nervous Illness, 123. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 168 168 PAT RIC IA PI STER S Schreber became psychotic. His psychosis also coincided with his appointment as judge at the high court, which would have given him a tremendous responsibility and power. Most importantly, we see in Shock Head Soul how particular machines (a typewriter ball) and particular modern knowledge (about the brain and the nervous system) get transformed into a delusion: the world emanating from God as one big neural network, mediated by the writing down machine. In this way Shock Head Soul adds a new layer to the modernity of Schreber’s madness, extending the path indicated by Freud. Schreber does not only react to his father’s influence: he is also fundamentally dis/connected from/to his time, resisting the authority of the law, and connecting to the miraculous powers of new media machines, wanting to save the world by the miracle of his sacrifice of torturing persecution by the writing down machine that turns him into a woman and dissolves his body and mind into rays of the sun. Schreber as “the mother of all radioheads” presents us a “distorting mirror of the world of early wireless” and is therefore profoundly dis/connected from/to the modernity of his time.16 FIG. 2 Shock Head Soul (Simon Pummel, A Submarine and Hot Property Co-production, 2011). Permission with courtesy of the Artist. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 169 M ADNESS, MIRA CL ES, M ACH INES 169 1950s This modern view on madness and schizophrenia as related to influencing and controlling media machines found another form in the mid-twentieth century. While at the turn of the century the telegraph, radio, telephone, cinematograph, and typewriter were sources of paranoid delusions, by the fifties television and the first satellite, the Sputnik, start to manifest themselves in psychiatric disorders.17 In his installation The Sputnik Effect that he made in connection to the Schreber case in Shock Head Soul, Pummell addresses this Sputnik-related madness when immediately after its launch psychiatric patients started to report on receiving secret messages from the Russian satellite. The installation presents a whole series of variations on the writing-down-balls that appear in the animated sequences in the film, this time photographed and filmed in green-red 3-D technology, which immerses visitors of the exhibition in a 1950s delirious environment. The messages “from God” are now sent from the implied satellite, which is no less a controlling and influencing machine than the writing ball, determined by new technical and political circumstances. So we see here madness in a new historical condition, in relation to new machines and a different apparatus of power.18 16 Peters, “Broadcasting and Schizophrenia,” 132. 17 See also David Hoffman’s documentary Sputnik Mania (2007) http://www.sputnikmania.com 18 Michel Foucault, Madness, The Invention of an Idea, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 170 170 PAT RIC IA PI STER S FIG. 3 The Sputnik Effect (Simon Pummel, 2012). Permission with courtesy of the Artist. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 171 M ADNESS, MIRA CL ES, M ACH INES 171 Besides the Sputnik, the other powerful machine of the 1950s and 1960s obviously was the television. During this period broadcast metaphors become standard in the psychiatric diagnosis of schizophrenia.“Thought broadcasting” becomes a symptom of the delusional mind. As Peters in “Broadcasting and Schizophrenia” explains, thought broadcasting can mean that one’s thoughts are being sent abroad from a leaky brain like a broadcast transmission for all to hear. Less metaphorically —and quite literally—it usually means that actual radio and television stations serve as occult dispersers of one’s thought. Or vice versa, that the television screen sends direct messages to the viewer, commenting on actions or thoughts of the schizophrenic patient, or sometimes giving direct orders. One version of “thought broadcasting” takes the private (thought) as public (broadcasting), the other version takes the public (broadcasting) as private (thought). The delusional mind, shows us the psychotic core of modern media technology in which “faces and voices, sounds and images fly invisible through the air in an overlapping jumble of channels.” 19 It is in this sense that schizophrenics show us a profound truth of a media technology saturated world. As Peters comments: To imagine thought broadcasting as a pathology at all requires us to assume that thoughts are private property enclosed in heads that are opaque to other people. While there are clearly organic factors in mental illness, there is also clearly something quite insane in our culture’s supposition that communication should be personal mental sharing. Perhaps schizophrenics are not the ones who violate the ideal of communication as the sharing of thoughts; they are the ones who take it most seriously. 19 Peters, “Broadcasting and Schizophrenia,” 133. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 172 172 PAT RIC IA PI STER S They show us what it would be to live in a delirious world without walls.20 Having no protective filter against the demands of each era, and in this sense being “out-of-joint,” the schizoid mind sheds a deep and dark light on its particular media dimensions. Moreover, the particular “insane” connections that the satellite and television provoked also have to be seen in both the context of the Cold War and scientific developments, particularly the popularity of behaviorism in psychology. The Sputnik created a true mania and huge anxiety among ordinary Americans, related to the fear of the “Red Menace” and the communist intrusion. And this political fear resonated with certain ideas about mind control in science, the famous stimulus-response experiments by Skinner.21 Skinner took the scientific ideas on conditioning human behavior that were developed around the turn of the century by Ivan Pavlov and John Watson to a more radical level. So the idea of mind control, the political situation and the particular machines of the time form again an assemblage that co-created certain pathological reactions. The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962) is one of the films of the mid-century that brings many of these concerns together. The story begins in 1952 during the Korean War when sergeant Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is captured by communists and is brainwashed at the Pavlov Institute in Moscow. He is sent back home to the US to be used as a sleeper agent and assassin who is subconsciously activated by seeing the Queen of Diamonds playing card. 20 21 Peters, “Broadcasting and Schizophrenia,” 136. See for instance, Burrhus Frederic Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: The Free Press, 1953). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 173 M ADNESS, MIRA CL ES, M ACH INES FIG. 4 173 The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962). The film relates to all the ideas on mind control and political anxiety of the time. It is also a very Freudian film; “the plague” that Freud (as he famously called it himself ) brought to the States in 1909 was still very much around in the 1950s and early 1960s and can be traced in countless classical Hollywood films. The central “influencing machine” in this film is the main character’s mother who controls the television image of her husband who runs for presidency. But clearly in Frankenheimer’s film the sputnik and the television as influencing “thought broadcasters” and mind controllers play an important role in the film, reflecting in this way the conditioned “homo pavlovius” of the Cold War and the particular media machines of the time.22 22 Andreas Killen, “Homo Pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning and the Cold War Subject,” in Grey Room 45 (Fall 2011): 43. This issue of Grey Room is a special issue on The Manchurian Candidate, entitled On Brainwashing: Mind Control, Media and Warfare, eds. Andreas Killen and Stefan Andriopoulos. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 174 174 FIG. 4 PAT RIC IA PI STER S The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 175 M ADNESS, MIRA CL ES, M ACH INES 175 The Divided Self Around the same time very different views on psychopathologies emerge, as counter-movement against the dominant ideas of conditioning and mind controlling television and satellite. R.D. Laing’s famous study The Divided Self has played an important role in the anti-psychiatry movement and the development of new views on madness that want to find ways of escaping the control of both family and cold war society. 23 Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Milos Forman’s One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) could be mentioned here as signs of time as they are films that express critiques to behaviourist conditioning and institutionalized practices that are part of these development in views on psychopathologies. Laing’s patients that he describes in The Divided Self also suffer from persecutions: “There is a plot on foot to steal his brains. A machine concealed in the walls of his bedroom which emits rays to soften his brain, or to send electric shocks through him while he is asleep. The person I am describing feels persecuted by reality itself.” 24 Part of that reality is the controlling machine. And, Laing argues, as a reaction to this persecution, the person becomes a vacuum, divides itself from the world, splits itself up into a dead inner self and an acting body that functions as an empty shell out of protection. Many of the patients that Laing describes report dreams where they are in the back seat of a car or a bus that is driving itself. 23 Ronald David Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (London etc.: Penguin, 1965). See also the episode on R.D. Laing in documentary The Trap (Adam Curtis, 2007) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8-UT3-0_Ms 24 Laing, The Divided Self, 79-80. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 176 176 PAT RIC IA PI STER S Besides the controlling machines (of family, social and political power relations), there is also a shared impression that the whole body becomes machinic. Laing quotes Norbert Wiener who says: “at some stage a machine which was previously assembled in an all over manner may find its connexions divided into partial assemblies with a higher or lower degree of independence.”25 Laing’s patients feel split and fragmented into different assemblages or partial systems that are incoherently reassembled. It is no coincidence that Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus refer often to Laing when they describe their less clinical and more critical or strategic schizoanalytic philosophy in their two books on capitalism and schizophrenia. Their concept of the Body without Organs, for instance, is precisely a body that loses its habitual organic coherence and becomes a machinic assemblage that tries to escape the “normal” confinements of the organism. This Body without Organs as schizoid strategy can be deadly, catatonic or too full of intensities. Or it can be creative.26 So “schizoid” strategies can be said to be both dangerous and necessary, but really the only options we have in order to deal with the (late) capitalist media world. In a similar vein, in After the Future, Bifo argues that in the age of information abundance (“semio-capitalism”) chaos, depression and other “psycho-bombs of cognitive capitalism” not only cause depression and “fog” but also an “infinity of colors, dazzling lights, hyperspeed intuitions and breathtaking emotions. Chaos is the enemy but it can also be your best friend.” 27 25 Laing, The Divided Self, 195. 26 See for instance, Deleuze and Guattari, “How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?” in A Thousand Plateaus, 149-166. 27 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future, trans. Arianna Bove, Melinda Cooper, Erik Empson, Enrico Mecchia, and Tiziana Terranova, eds. Gary Genosko and Nick Thoburn (Edinburgh, Oakland, Baltimore: AK Press, 2011), 6 and 160. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 177 M ADNESS, MIRA CL ES, M ACH INES 177 And therefore it can also function as a defence against the madness of capitalism that increasingly plays on our brain screen. So here we see emerging more explicitly the idea (both in psychiatry and in philosophy in the work of Deleuze and Guattari and contemporary thinkers such as Bifo) that insanity, schizophrenia or the schizoid mind can be a form of “mad but lucid” insight into and resistance against the contemporary world. 2000s The modernity of schizophrenia as a neuropathological form of madness that is fundamentally related to the modern mediated machinic world finds thus its incipience at the end of the nineteenth century when the invention of all kinds of media apparatuses provoked new ways of thinking about communication, transmission and connections of bodies, thoughts and feelings. It is possible to argue that Schreber, in his lucid delusions, foresaw the huge possibilities of the “typewriter” once it would be connected to a larger communications network. And if in the 1950s the Sputnik inspired further and new forms of surveillance and control, connected to the Cold War politics, the numerous satellites that circulate our orbit today potentially intensify this controlling effect. On the other hand it could be argued that the broadcasting connection to machines (related to radio and television) today no longer inspire the same schizophrenic logic. After all, today people can broadcast themselves, twitter their thoughts, accumulate hundreds of “friends” in social networking sites; it is possible to talk in public spaces with an invisible partner without being carried to the madhouse. So, as Peters argues, one way of looking at the contemporary situation is to say that there is no more ground for the schizo-pathologies I have just described for the mid-century.28 28 Peters, Broadcasting and Schizophrenia, 138. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 178 178 PAT RIC IA PI STER S But it is just as well possible to argue that the world has thus become completely schizoid. In earlier conceptions of madness there was always a moment where the mad realizes he/she is “mad” and has to return to normality: Schreber writes his memoirs after his recovery, the Manchurian candidate becomes conscious of his manipulated subconscious and breaks the spell, in many classic films of the mad woman (in the socalled gothic genre) it always turns out that she was wrong in her suspicion.29 But today many of the delirious implications of media machines have become reality: in many ways we quite literally live in a delirious world without walls. And therefore the confrontation with new forms of madness remains important to give us insights “against all odds.” Where Schreber was fighting a fight for his personal right to madness as his own private beliefs, in the fifties madness was clearly much more related to the larger political setting of the Cold War. And so now the question is: what does “sanity and insanity” mean today? What Schreber already showed us, and what Laing, Deleuze and Guattari have elaborated more politically, is that madness can be form of resistance against unbearable structures of life, both private and collective (geopolitical) life. And that, paradoxically, the confrontation with madness expresses a belief in the world, a desire to reconnect to a belief in the world. In Shock Head Soul, one of the most touching elements is the love between Schreber and his wife that remains, and despite all the despair transpires through the images. Returning to Michael Clayton, we can now see that, although part of Arthur Edens’ madness remains neurological, there is a deep social truth in his delirium. 29 See for instance Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) for interesting analyses on classic films in this genre such as Caught (Max Ophüls, 1949) and Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1939). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 179 M ADNESS, MIRA CL ES, M ACH INES 179 One must be mad to break through the screens and media machines of contemporary corporate capitalism. One must be mad to resist, while being completely implicated, from within the system. There is no safe and objective moral position from which to judge. As Edens, surrounded by countless city screens and many other technological devices at display in the film experiences, resisting is a mad and individual act, but deeply connected to the collective, to the socio-political. Homeland Something similar can be said about the modern madness of Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) in the television series Homeland (Showtime, 2011-). As a CIA agent in counterterrorism she is the only one who does not believe sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) who returns from Iraq after several years of imprisonment to be a hero. 30 In fact, Brody could be considered as a contemporary “Manchurian candidate.” However, there are telling differences that might give insight into contemporary psychopathological mechanisms. Where in the 1962 film the returning war hero was manipulated by an external mind controlling device (be it the Sputnik or the Pavlov Institute of behaviorism), Brody seems to have made a more or less conscious choice—in a very different political (and “noopowered”) environment of terrorism, counter-terrorism, and contemporary findings about the brain as a complex embodied and embedded system. 30 See http://www.sho.com/sho/homeland/home Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 180 180 PAT RIC IA PI STER S In any case he is not simply hypnotized but has developed an emotional connection to his enemy. He converted to Islam, developed a bond with Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban), one of the Al Qaeda leaders and grieved over the loss of Nazir’s son by an American drone attack. All this made him see and feel from the other side, and much of the suspense in Homeland is based on his double and conflicting allegiances that cross any traditional Good-Bad opposition. But even more interestingly the person who discovers the Manchurian candidate’s madness also has a different mind-set. Major Ben Marco (Frank Sinatra) in the Manchurian Candidate has a nightmare, a dream that puts him on the undisputed discovery trail of sergeant Shaw’s brainwashing. Carrie Mathison in Homeland on the other hand is a manic-depressive (which is partly related to a Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome from her war experiences during the Iraq War, and partly to a hereditary condition from her father). She is on anti-psychotic medication and her judgment is always questioned by most of her CIA superiors, to the point where she is really declared mad at the end of Season One. Even though she undergoes electric shock therapy (again out of her own will, no involuntary Cuckoo’s Nest situations), it is highly significant that in Season Two the narrative seems to acknowledge the revelatory powers of her insane insights. Moreover, unlike the transcendental moral superiority of 24 agent Jack Bauer, the Homeland agent is more immanently connected to the case, developing a confusing bond to her “object of investigation” that starts the moment she has to investigate him. Before she meets Brody, she has seen him on televised images and especially on the surveillance screens of hidden cameras in Brody’s private house that she watches in her private home. Contemporary madness seems to be a truly insane and affective engagement with the world. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 181 M ADNESS, MIRA CL ES, M ACH INES FIG. 5 Homeland Title Sequence (Showtime, 2011-). 181 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 182 182 PAT RIC IA PI STER S The opening credits are very telling about the ambiguity of those borders between the personal and the collective, the sane and the insane.31 The sequence is composed of fragmented shots, in black and white, overlaid with color flashes.We see a small blond girl (Carrie) sleeping. Eerie and mesmerizing jazz music accompanies the images, intercut with audio fragments of the voice of Ronald Reagan’s 1986 speech announcing an attack on Qaddafi facilities, while the image flashes to other scenes: the girl sitting on the floor in front of a television screen, while we hear a radio voice announcing the Lockerbie crash that happened in 1988. While the jazz music continues, we see the girl practicing her trumpet in her bedroom, then Louis Armstrong plays the trumpet. The next moment the girl stands in a labyrinth wearing a lion mask. Images of television addresses by George Bush, Sr., Bill Clinton and Colin Powell. We also hear the voice of George W. Bush. “This was an act of terrorism” (Clinton’s words) is clearly audible among in all the sea of aural announcements that merge with news images, veiled women, people running in New York City. Then the girl is older, looking into the camera, a television screen of Obama, first upside down, than adjusted, addressing the nation: “We must, we will remain vigilant around the clock.” Airport surveillance images. Arabic voices. The labyrinth again, where Brody appears. Brody and Carrie each at a different place in the labyrinth. Then she is running in an Arab street, headscarf and cell phone. Carrie’s eye opening in close-up. Her voice: “I missed something that day, I won’t, I can’t miss it again.” Another voice: “It was ten years ago, everyone’s missed something that day.” And Carrie’s voice” “Everyone’s not me.” Carrie listening and watching surveillance material. Brody watching the White House. Helicopters. The image and sounds are abruptly cut. 31 See the opening credits at http://vimeo.com/37322770 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 183 M ADNESS, MIRA CL ES, M ACH INES 183 As the above description of the opening credits shows, the influence of the broadcasting screens still seems to be very relevant in the twenty-first century. But in combination with all the different screens that we have today (surveillance camera’s, mobile screens, all networked in complex and hard to grasp ways invading both private and public space) there is less One Manipulating Machine as we saw in the previous historical periods of modernity. It is the network, the “flickering machines and screens”, which “create loops that become our brains” and that show us the volatile and complex psychopathological dimensions of cognitive capitalism. So when Simon Pummell returns to the Schreber case in Shock Head Soul, it is to rediscover the hidden truths in his account of modern madness in its relation to machines. While the Freudian interpretation that made his case famous may have lost some of its force, the power of communicating machines, and the combination of individual circumstances and world political concerns (not yet so strongly politicised in Schreber’s account) have found new translations throughout the history of science and media technology and moved into the in the age of cognitive capitalism with particular insight force. While Schreber seemed megalomaniacal and very alone in his miraculous saving of the world, contemporary psychopathologies, in all the loneliness they still imply, seem to have a much more grounded insane mission: seeing through the smoke screens of capitalism, restoring a belief in the world in order to save the miracle of humanity. And as we know from Deleuze, in cinema as elsewhere, this implies a confrontation with madness.32 32 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 201. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 184 184 PAT RIC IA PI STER S Being contemporary therefore implies this confrontation with the particularly “mediated” forms of madness of cognitive capitalism. There is something beautiful and tragic about this insane contemporaneity. As Agamben argues, it is “a question of courage, because it means being able not only to firmly fix your gaze on the darkness of the epoch, but also to perceive in this darkness a light that, while directed forward us, infinitely distances itself from us. It is like being on time for an appointment that one cannot but miss.” 33 When after the broadcasting of a suicide video in Homeland the world finally believes that Brody is not a hero but a terrorist, Carrie sees things yet again differently. But who would believe her in a media-saturated world that operates its own mad and maddening logic? Perhaps Schreber was right. Perhaps we need a miracle indeed. 33 Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, 46 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 185 BRUCE W EXLER 185 Neuroplasticity, Culture and Society 1 Introduction The most fundamental difference between the human brain and those of other mammals is the greater extent to which development of its structure and function is influenced by sensory input. This sensitivity to the environment rests on four features common to all mammals and one unique to human beings. First, neurocognitive capacity increases across the phylogenetic hierarchy primarily through increases in the overall number of brain cells and their interconnections. Second, cells require sensory input from the environment to maintain their vitality and functionality. Third, cognitive functions such as perception, memory and thinking arise from the integrated activity of multi-neuronal systems involving multiple brain areas and are not properties of a specific anatomical location dedicated to a specific cognitive operation. 1 Editors’ Note: Another version of this article, titled “Shaping the Environments that Shape Our Brains: A Long Term Perspective”, was published in Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich, Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics: Architecture and Mind in the Age of Communication and Information (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 186 186 BRUC E WEXL ER Fourth, neurons activated by sensory input develop connections with other neurons and thus constitute the multi-neuronal systems; environmentally induced activity thus shapes both the structure and function of the brain. Fifth, only human beings shape the environments that in turn shape their brains. Neuroplasticity refers to change in neural structures and is usually the result of activity-dependent change in the interconnections among cells that constitute the structures. Enduring changes in structure result from repeated activation of some cells and pathways more than others, following the principle that neurons that fire together wire together. The neuroplastic potential of the human brain is greater than that of our nearest primate cousins due to changes in two parameter settings in pre and post natal neurodevelopment. One is a further increase in the number of neurons. The second is increased length of time after birth during which interconnections among neurons are easily shaped by environmental input. These two changes make it possible for environmental input to create more elaborate and powerful neural functional structures. The changes in parameter settings are the result of Darwinian biological evolution, but together with the fact that humans alter the environment that provides the formative sensory stimulation, they provide the foundation for cultural evolution. Cultural evolution differs from Darwinian biological evolution in several important ways. Cultural evolution creates more rapid, more incremental, and more widespread population variability. Cultural and biological evolution also differ in the way information is stored so as to provide continuing influence on function. In biological evolution, information is stored in the largely stable base sequence of DNA molecules. In cultural evolution, the information is stored in the minds and behavior of adult members of society; in cultural artifacts such as books, architecture, and works of art; and in social institutions including laws, customs, and schools. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 187 NEUROPL A STICITY, C ULTURE AND SOCI ET Y 187 In biological evolution the information is stored in identical and complete form in many individuals. In cultural evolution, the information is distributed in different and incomplete form across many individuals and artifacts. The extent of our neuroplasticity, and our associated ability to alter the ways our minds and brains work by altering the environment that shapes them, has only recently become known to human beings. Attention to the implications of this for ethics is even more recent. Indeed, Judeo-Christian influences on contemporary Western thinking about morality and ethics have included the view that all aspects of human biology, including our minds and brains, were designed or created more or less in their adult form by the active hand of an external almighty. Both codes for ethical behavior and human characteristics and capabilities were largely given to us by a power external to us and much more powerful than we are. Debates about good and evil, and human responsibility and free-will have taken place within this conceptual field. The first major challenge to this posed by biological science was Darwin’s theory of evolution. It was hotly contested by church authorities when first introduced, and continues to be hotly contested by some religious communities today. The fact that human nature has arisen from single cell organisms through random mutation and selective pressures from an environment that is itself also contingent, reframes the discussion about ethics, accountability, responsibility, good and evil. In this context, some have gone so far as to suggest that ethical behavior, and most important aspects of human thought, have evolved through these same Darwinian processes, although such views are increasingly at odds with current thinking about brain functional organization and their proponents are unable to ascertain the type of data necessary for real scientific inquiry. The new science of neuroplasticity provides the second major change in the terms of ethical considerations introduced by biological sciences. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 188 188 BRUC E WEXL ER Understanding the centrality of neuroplasticity in human brain development, and the power of cultural evolution that rests upon it, provides a new biologically based understanding of the relationship between human beings and the environment. The first phase of that relationship is the aforementioned trans-generational dialectic between human capabilities, human actions, and human-created expectations based on the influence of the human-made environment on neurocognitive development. In this phase, developing individuals have limited ability to act on the environment but are profoundly affected by it. A homology is created between the external environment and internal structures because the brain shapes itself to the recurring features of the specific environment in which it develops. By young adulthood, however, there is a fundamental shift in the relationship between the individual and the environment. The powerful neuroplastic processes in the developing brain are replaced by the less powerful ones of adulthood, and now established internal structures are self-maintaining. Individuals are now able to act on the environment and do so to make the environment match established internal structures. They feel and function better when there is a match between internal and external. As a result, there is a “neurobiological antagonism to difference.” 2 These processes are central to what it means to be a human being rather than any other animal on earth, and they frame the discussion of human responsibility and free will in a different way than it was before and after application of Darwinian insights to considerations of ethics. This chapter will review the neuroscience of neuroplasticity in human beings and other mammals. It will 2 Bruce E. Wexler, Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology and Social Change (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 212. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 189 NEUROPL A STICITY, C ULTURE AND SOCI ET Y 189 present a contemporary neural systems view of brain functional organization, review evidence on the importance of sensory input to maintain neuronal viability, and describe studies that demonstrate that the nature of that input influences brain structure and function. The centrality of socially generated stimulation will be discussed through citation of the work of Harlow and Mears with infant monkeys, more recent work in rats identifying epigenetic changes in DNA structure leading to life long effects of early maternal behaviors, and the work of the Russian developmental psychologist Vygotsky and early 20th century psychoanalytic ego-psychologists on the role of interpersonal interactions in creating internal mental structures. The next section will present brain-imaging studies that have demonstrated the effects of environmentally induced activity on human brain structure and function. The final section will describe some of the ways established internal structures act on the environment to make it match those structures. The overall goal is to lay the groundwork for a broad-ranging consideration of the issues raised and their implications for politics and ethics. Part One: A Contemporary Neural Systems View of Human Brain Function There are 100 billion neurons in the human brain each directly connected to over 1,000 other neurons. Consistent with this massive interconnectivity, learning simple associations between stimuli leads to altered responses in millions of cells distributed across wide expanses of cortical territory.3 3 E.R. John, Y. Tang, A.B. Brill, et al., “Double-labeled metabolic maps of memory,” in Science, 233 (1986): 1167-75. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 190 190 BRUC E WEXL ER When people perform simple cognitive operations, multiple brain areas in both cerebral hemispheres become more active, and others decrease their activity.4 Moreover, when even simple tasks are repeated minutes or hours later, there is a different pattern of task-related regional activation changes, with 5 or without 6 deliberate efforts to teach or learn the tasks. In real life, most of the things we do we have done before, so that the brain activations associated with them have been different at different times. As people get older, there are also common changes across individuals, so that the same tasks are done by different combinations of brain areas at different ages.7 Furthermore, if the same component cognitive operation is performed as part of different overall 4 M. D’Esposito, “From cognitive to neural models of working memory,” in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London – Series B: Biological Sciences, 362 (2007): 761-72. 5 R.A. Poldrack, V. Prabhakaran, C.A. Seger, C.A., et al., “Striatal activation during acquisition of a cognitive skill,” in Neuropsychology, 13 (1999): 564-74. 6 C. Kelly, J.J. Foxe, and H. Garavan, “Patterns of normal human brain plasticity after practice and their implications for neurorehabilitation,” in Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 87 (2006): S20-9; I. Loubinoux, C. Carel, F. Alary, et al., “Within-session and between-session reproducibility of cerebal sensorimotor activation: a test-retest effect evidenced with functional magnetic resonance imaging,” in Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism, 21 (2001): 595-607. 7 W.D. Gaillard, L. Hertz-Pannier, S.H. Mott, et al., “Functional anatomy of cognitive development: fMRI of verbal fluency in children and adults,” in Neurology, 54 (2000): 180; G.T. Stebbins, M.C. Carrillo, J. Dorfman, et al. “Aging effects on memory encoding in the frontal lobes,” in Psychology and Aging, 17 (2002): 44-55. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 191 NEUROPL A STICITY, C ULTURE AND SOCI ET Y 191 cognitive functions, the pattern of regional brain activation associated with that component operation is different.8 These relatively recent observations are consistent with the notion of cerebral functional systems described by the early twentieth-century Russian neuropsychologist A.R. Luria.9 Luria noted that localized injuries rarely affected only one cognitive operation, but usually affected multiple. He also noted that individual cognitive operations were affected by injuries in multiple different areas of the brain. He concluded that while groups of cells in a specific anatomic location might collectively have some elementary tissue function, such functions do not correspond to mental functions like perception, memory or cognition. Mental operations are instead properties of multi-component functional systems. Like other systems, cerebral functional systems perform constant functions through means or components that vary from instance to instance. Functions are properties of a system and not of a specific anatomic location. Most contemporary views of the functional organization of the human brain are based on such systems. This modern view contrasts with nineteenth-century concepts of phrenology and related twentieth-century concepts of modularity.10 Phrenology and modularity posit that specific 8 K.J. Friston, C.J. Price, P. Fletcher, et al., “The trouble with cognitive subtraction,” in NeuroImage, 4 (1996): 97-104.; B.E. Wexler, “Using fMRI to study the mind and brain,” in R. Shulman and D. Rothman, eds., Brain Energetics and Neuronal Activity (West Sussex: John Wiley and Sons, 2004), 279-94. 9 A.R. Luria, The Working Brain, trans. B. Haugh, (New York: Basic Books, 1973); L.S. Vygotsky, Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978) 10 (see Wexler, 2004, 2006) Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 192 192 BRUC E WEXL ER cognitive operations are performed at circumscribed, localized anatomic sites, and that the function of these sites is the specific cognitive operation. In contrast, the twenty-first century systems view posits that ensembles of cells at different locations have different characteristics like different letters of an alphabet. Cognitive functions emerge from combinations of different local units just as words emerge from combinations of letters. In addition, there may be a few localized units in the systems model that are also stand alone modules for simple cognitive operations; perhaps operations that evolved prior to the primate, or even the mammalian line. Like the single letter words “a” and “I”, such modules could serve both as free standing cognitive modules and as components of larger systems. The dynamic systems view helps explain the striking fact that when one hemisphere of the brain must be surgically removed in very young infants, their subsequent cognitive development is largely normal and all cognitive operations are performed with the remaining hemisphere.11 Even when the left or language hemisphere is removed, near-normal language function is supported by the right hemisphere. As with the other examples of developmental neuroplasticity discussed below, these relocations and reconfigurations of brain functional architecture are more easily understood in the systems/emergent property view than in the phrenology/ modularity view. 11 J.A. Ogden, “Phonological dyslexia and phonological dysgraphia following left and right hemispherectomy,” in Neuropsychologia, 34 (1996): 905-18; R. Werth, “Visual functions without the occipital lobe or after cerebral hemispherectomy in infancy,” in European Journal of Neuroscience, 24 (2006): 2932-44. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 193 NEUROPL A STICITY, C ULTURE AND SOCI ET Y 193 Part Two: Sensory Stimulation and Neuronal Viability and Growth The brain requires sensory stimulation to maintain structural integrity. Information-processing structures along afferent pathways from peripheral sensory receptors to cortical processing centers atrophy without sensory input. The number of ganglion cells in the retina that carry excitation from photoreceptor cells in the eye to the first relay station in the brain, is decreased to 10% of normal in dark reared chimpanzees;12 after dark-rearing, cats and rats have smaller than normal ganglion cells;13 and rod and cone photoreceptor cells in the eyes of chicks are morphologically abnormal after four weeks with opaque coverings of the eye.14 Both the number and size of cells are reduced by as much as 30-40% in the lateral geniculate of cats and monkeys deprived of visual input during the initial weeks of life.15 12 E. Rasch, H. Swift, A.H. Riesen, et al., “Altered structure and composition of retinal cells in dark eared animals,” in Experimental Cell Research, 25 (1961): 348-63. 13 Ibid. 14 H. Liang, D.P. Crewther, S.G. Crewther, et al., “A role for photoreceptor outer segments in the induction of deprivation myopia,” in Vision Research, 35 (1995): 1217-25. 15 (e.g., D.H. Hubel, “Deprivation and development,” in Eye, Brain and Vision (New York: Scientific American Library, 1988), 191-217; D.H. Hubel and T.N. Wiesel, “The period of susceptibility to the physiological effects of unilateral eye closure in kittens,” in Journal of Physiology, 206 (1970): 419-36; T.N. Wiesel and D.H. Hubel, “Effects of visual deprivation on morphology and physiology of cells in the cat’s lateral geniculate body,” in Journal of Neurophysiology, 26 (1963): 978-93; C. Kupfer and P. Palmer, “Lateral geniculate nucleus: histological and cytochemical changes following afferent denervation and visual deprivation,” in Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 194 194 BRUC E WEXL ER The effects continue along the information input pathway to the visual cortex where the number, size, and density of connections among cells are decreased and the organization of cells is altered.16 Studies of olfactory deprivation have yielded a similar picture.17 Effects of sensory deprivation on structural integrity can be decreased by injection Experimental Neurology, 9 (1964): 400-9; S.M. Sherman, K.P. Hoffman, and J. Stone, “Loss of a specific cell type from dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus in visually deprived cats,” in Journal of Neurophysiology, 35 (1972): 532-41; S.M. Sherman and K.J. Sanderson, “Binocular interaction on cells of the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus of visually deprived cats,” in Brain Research, 37 (1972): 126-31; M. Tigges, and J. Tigges, “Parvalbumin immunoreactivity in the lateral geniculate nucleus of rhesus monkeys raised under monocular and binocular deprivation conditions,” in Visual Neuroscience, 10 (1993): 1043-53. 16 e.g., G.K. Aghajanian, and F.E. Bloom, “The formation of synaptic junctions in developing rat brain: a quantitative electron microscopic study,” in Brain Research, 6 (1967): 716-27; B.G. Cragg, “What is the signal for chromatolysis?” in Brain Research, 23 (1970): 1-21; E. Fifková, “Changes of axosomatic synapses in the visual cortex of monocularly deprived rats,” in Journal of Neurobiology, 2 (1970): 61-71; A. Kumar, and R. Schliebs, “Postnatal laminar development of cholinergic receptors, protein kinase C and dihydropyridine-sensitive calcium antagonist binding in rat visual cortex. Effect of visual deprivation,” in International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience, 10 (1992): 491-504; A. Kumar, and Schliebs, R., “Postnatal ontogeny of GABAA and benzodiazepine receptors in individual layers of rat visual cortex and the effect of visual deprivation,” in Neurochemistry International, 23 (1993): 99-106; P. Rakic, I. Suner, and R.W. Williams, “A novel cytoarchitectonic area induced experimentally within the primate visual cortex,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 88 (1991): 2083-7; S. Robner, A. Kumar, W. Kues, et al., “Differential laminar expression of AMPA receptor genes in the developing rat visual cortex using in situ hybridization histochemistry: Effect of visual deprivation,” in International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience, 11 (1993): 411-24. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 195 NEUROPL A STICITY, C ULTURE AND SOCI ET Y 195 of nerve growth factor into the cerebral spinal fluid within the brain during the period of deprivation.18 This naturally occurring substance is produced and released by cells stimulated by sensory input, thus providing further evidence of the association between neuronal activity and neuronal viability and growth.19 17 T.E. Benson, D.K. Ryugo, and J.W. Hinds, “Effects of sensory deprivation on the developing mouse olfactory system: a light and electron microscopic, morphometric analysis,” in Journal of Neuroscience, 4 (1984): 638-53; J. Najbauer, and M. Leon, “Olfactory experience modulated apoptosis in the developing olfactory bulb,” in Brain Research, 674 (1995): 245-51; L.C. Skeen, B.R. Due, and F.E. Douglas, “Neonatal sensory deprivation reduces tufted cell number in mouse olfactory bulbs,” in Neuroscience Letters, 63 (1986): 5-10. 18 N. Berardi, A. Cattaneo, A. Cellerino, et al.,“Monoclonal antibodies to nerve growth factor (NGF) affects the postnatal development of the rat geniculocortical system,” in Journal of Physiology-London, 452 (1992): 293; N. Berardi, L. Domenici, V. Parisi, et al., “Monocular deprivation effects in the rat visual cortex and lateral geniculate nucleus are prevented by nerve growth factor (NGF). I. Visual cortex,” in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B251 (1993): 17-23; G. Carmignoto, R.Canella, P. Candeo, et al., “Effects of nerve growth factor on neuronal plasticity of the kitten visual cortex,” in Journal of Physiology-London, 464 (1993): 343-60; L. Domenici, A. Cellerino, and L. Maffei, “Monocular deprivation effects in the rat visual cortex and lateral geniculate nucleus are prevented by nerve growth factor (NGF). II. Lateral geniculate nucleus,” in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B251 (1993): 25-31; T. Pizzorusso, M. Fagiolini, M. Fabris, et al., “Schwann cells transplanted in the lateral ventricles prevent the functional and anatomical effects of monocular deprivation in the rat,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 91 (1994): 2572-6. 19 L. Domenici, A. Cellerino, and L. Maffei, “Monocular deprivation effects in the rat visual cortex and lateral geniculate nucleus are prevented by nerve growth factor (NGF). II. Lateral geniculate nucleus,” in Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, B251 (1993): 25-31. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 196 196 BRUC E WEXL ER Effects of sensory deprivation on development of brain functional organization follow from these effects on cell viability and growth. Neurons at each stage of processing compete for connections with neurons at each subsequent stage, with neurons that fire more often gaining territory. These effects were investigated systematically in Hubel and Wiesel’s Nobel Prizewinning studies of kittens and monkeys.20 Recording electrical activity from hundreds of cells in the area of the brain that receives visual information, they determined that in animals raised under normal conditions most cells respond to inputs from both eyes (approximately 85% in the kitten, 65% in the monkey). Many of these responded somewhat more frequently to input from one eye, with such eye preferences divided evenly between the eyes. Similarly, of the monocularly responsive cells, half responded exclusively to the right eye and half to the left. However, when an eye was sutured closed shortly after birth and then reopened 10 weeks later, 85% or more of cells responded preferentially to the previously non-deprived eye, and few if any cells responded exclusively to the previously deprived eye. Responses to stimulation of the previously deprived eye were slow to start, decreased in amplitude and easily fatigued when present at all. Hubel and Wiesel also demonstrated two additional features of the effects of sensory-induced neuronal activity on the development of brain structure and function that are of particular relevance to cultural evolution. When visual input to the deprived eye is restored, the altered pattern of cortical cell sensitivities persists despite the fact that both eyes are now receiving unobstructed visual input. As long as neurons from the previously non-deprived eye remain active, they are able to maintain their abnormally acquired hegemony. 20 Hubel, “Deprivation and development,” 191-217. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 197 NEUROPL A STICITY, C ULTURE AND SOCI ET Y 197 If, however, the previously non-deprived eye is occluded while the animal is still young enough, the abnormal response pattern can be normalized or reversed in favor of the previously deprived eye.21 The first conclusion of particular interest in relation to cultural evolution is that socially generated activity can create unusual structures that alter the interaction with the environment so as to maintain themselves. In this case, when the eye was occluded, cortical structure changed so as to be unusually responsive to input from only one eye. When the occlusion was removed and input was available to both eyes, the brain still registered input almost exclusively from only one eye. The neural resources necessary to process input now available from the previously occluded eye were absent. They had been appropriated by the active eye during the period of unilateral occlusion, and the active eye maintained the extra resources because it kept those resources actively engaged in processing input within the systems that had appropriated them. This situation could be reversed by occluding the previously open eye, demonstrating that the plastic potential remained, that the brain could be shaped or normalized by corrective intervention, and that without such active intervention the normal pattern could not reassert itself even in a normal situation. The second conclusion of particular interest is that active intervention to normalize or reverse the effects of the initial unilateral occlusion was only effective in young animals. After a certain stage in development, often referred to as the critical period, there is a higher degree of stability in established neural structures, in part because neurochemical mechanisms that support neuroplasticity are less powerful in older individuals. 21 Hubel, “Deprivation and development,” 191-217. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 198 198 BRUC E WEXL ER In further work, Hubel and Wiesel demonstrated that altering the nature or content of the visual stimuli changes the functional organization of the visual cortex even when the stimuli are viewed normally by both eyes. For example, some cells in the visual cortex respond selectively to moving objects, with each cell having maximum sensitivity to movement in a particular direction. Other cells respond selectively to lines (i.e., object edges), with each of these cells having maximum sensitivity to lines of a particular orientation. Kittens raised in strobe light that prevents appreciation of movement have decreased numbers of motion sensitive cells.22 Presumably cells that would have been specialized for movement detection became selectively responsive to some other aspect of visual information instead. Kittens raised in dark except for exposure to stripes moving from left to right have a marked increase in the proportion of cells selectively responsive to left/right rather than right/left movement.23 Similarly, kittens exposed to vertical black and white stripes for a few hours each day, but otherwise reared in darkness, have cortical cells with vertical line orientation preferences, but none with preferences for other orientations.24 Kittens raised wearing goggles that allowed them to see only vertical lines in one eye and horizontal lines in the other, have fewer than the normal number of cells that respond to oblique lines. 22 M. Cynader, N. Berman, and A. Hein, “Cats reared in stroboscopic illumination: effects on receptive fields in visual cortex,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 70 (1973): 1353-4; M. Cynader, and G. Chernenko, “Abolition of direction selectivity in the visual cortex of the cat,” in Science, 193 (1976): 504-5. 23 F. Tretter, M. Cynader, and W. Singer, “Modification of direction selectivity of neurons in the visual cortex of kittens,” in Brain Research, 84 (1975): 143-9. 24 C. Blakemore, and G.F. Cooper, “Development of the brain depends on visual experience,” in Nature, 228 (1970): 477-8. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 199 NEUROPL A STICITY, C ULTURE AND SOCI ET Y 199 Moreover, cells responsive to vertical lines are active only with stimulation of the eye that had been exposed to vertical lines, and cells responsive to horizontal lines are active only with stimulation of the eye that had been exposed to horizontal lines.25 The extent of neuroplastic potential in the developing mammalian brain is remarkable. In adult rats that had an eye removed at birth, stimulation of their whiskers led to electrophysiological and metabolic activity within the visual cortex.26 Apparently neurons in what is normally a visual processing area came instead to respond to input from the whiskers when deprived of input from the eye. In perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of plasticity, the optic nerve in one-day-old ferrets was rerouted to provide visual rather than auditory input to what is normally the auditory cortex. The auditory cortex developed a functional organization of ocular dominance columns highly similar to the normal visual cortex rather than its usual tonotopic structure, and the ferrets saw with what would normally have been the auditory regions of the brain.27 The studies summarized in this section provide evidence that mammalian brains (and minds) develop concrete perceptual structures, capabilities, and sensitivities based on prominent features of the rearing environment, and then are more able and more likely to see those features in the sensory mix of new environments encountered subsequently. Or to turn it around, mammals have limited ability to see even prominent features of a new environment if those features were absent from their rearing environment. 25 H.B. Hirsch, and D. Spinelli, “Visual experience modifies distribution of horizontally and vertically oriented receptive fields in cats,” in Science, 168 (1970): 869-71. 26 J. Toldi, I. Rojik, and O. Feher, “Neonatal monocular enucleationinduced cross-modal effects observed in the cortex of adult rat,” in Neuroscience, 62 (October 1994): 105-14. 27 J. Sharma, A. Angelucci, and M. Sur, “Induction of visual orientation modules in auditory cortex,” in Nature, 404 (2000): 841-7. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 200 200 BRUC E WEXL ER Part Three: Social Interactions as the Source of Early Environmental Stimulation The class mammalia is named on the basis of the presence of mammary glands. It is defined on the basis of nourishing young with milk and a series of physical features including a chain of small ear bones, four optic lobes in the brain, a particular mandibular structure, a muscular diaphragm separating the lungs and heart from the abdomen, only a left aortic arch, warm blood with red blood cells lacking nuclei, and viviparous reproduction. In studies of infant monkeys and wire mesh surrogate mothers, Harlow and Mears provided a radical correction to this definition, adding another central feature that in many ways is more important than all the others. Infant monkeys were separated from their mothers and raised in cages with access to both a wire mesh and a cloth surrogate mother. Both surrogate mothers were kept at the same temperature as normal monkey mothers. One-half of the monkeys received milk from the wire mesh mother and one-half from the cloth mother. Both groups spent much more time on the cloth than the wire mesh mother. The differential was greater by only a small amount when the cloth mother was the source of milk. The preference for the cloth mother became greater over time in both groups, the opposite of what would be expected from a food/hunger reduction conditioning model which would predict increasing preference over time for the food-providing surrogate mother. Harlow and Mears concluded that “the disparity [in favor of selecting the cloth mother independent of which mother provides milk] is so great as to suggest that Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 201 NEU ROPL A STICITY, C ULTURE AND S OCI ETY 201 the primary function of nursing as an affectional variable is that of ensuring frequent and intimate body contact of the infant with the mother.” 28 In other words, instead of the provision of milk being the end goal of mother infant interaction in and of itself, it is a means of ensuring contact between the mother and the infant because this contact is essential for provision of sensory stimulation necessary for brain development, and for production of population variability through variability in that stimulation. Real living mothers and other parenting figures vary in the ways they stimulate their infants and children. Naturally occurring differences in these parenting behaviors have life long and specific effects on the brains and behavior of their offspring, and changes in DNA structure that mediate these effects have been identified in studies of rats.29 Mother rats differ in the amount of time they spend licking and grooming their pups, and the in the ways they position themselves for nursing. Michael Meaney and colleagues found that adult rats that had been licked more as pups had decreased behavioral and hormonal responses to stress, and greater spatial learning abilities—a capacity in which areas of the hippocampus play an important role.30 28 Harlow, H.F. and Mears, C., The Human Model: Primate Perspectives (Washington: V. H. Winston & Sons, 1979), 108. 29 I.C.G. Weaver, N. Cervoni, F.A. Champagne, F.A., et al.,“Epigenetic programming by maternal behavior,” in Nature Neuroscience, 7 (2004): 847-54; I.C.G. Weaver, J. Diorio, J.R. Seckl, et al., “Early environmental regulation of hippocampal glucocorticiod receptor gene expression: characterization of intracellular mediators and potential genomic sites,” in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1024 (2004): 182-212. 30 Weaver, et al., “Early environmental regulation of hippocampal glucocorticiod receptor gene expression,” 182-212. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 202 202 BRUC E WEXL ER Examining brain chemistry and structure, they found greater levels of specific types of messenger RNA that carry the information from the DNA to parts of the cells that synthesize the glucocorticoid receptors important in regulating stress responses and the NMDA receptors important in promoting neuroplasticity. Direct examination of the hippocampus revealed that offspring of high licking mothers had longer neurons with more branches and interconnections (FI G.1 ) 31 . Direct examination of the DNA identified actual changes in the genes associated with stress response as a result of the degree of maternal licking. Shortly after birth, the surface of DNA is largely covered by small chemical complexes called methyl groups. These methyl groups limit access to the DNA and thereby limit activation or expression of genes. Experiences during the first weeks of life can lead to selective removal of these methyl groups, making some genes more active. The effects of experience on methylation are much greater during the first three weeks of a rat’s life than thereafter, and changes induced by experience during this critical period usually remain relatively unchanged throughout the rat’s adult life. Maternal licking initiates a series of neurochemical processes that selectively demethylate genes that produce the glucocorticoid receptors in the hippocampus and frontal lobes that turn off the stress response. 31 D.L. Champagne, R.C. Bagot, F. van Hasselt, F., et al.,“Maternal care and hippocampal plasticity: evidence for experience-dependent structural plasticity, altered synaptic functioning, and differential responsiveness to glucocorticoids and stress,” in Journal of Neuroscience, 28 (2008): 6037-45. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 203 NEUROPL A STICITY, C ULTURE AND SOCI ET Y 203 F I G . 1: Apical (blue) and basal (green) dendritic branching in adult rats who received lower (left) or higher (right) amounts of licking and grooming as infants. Stained neurons are pyramidal cells from the hippocampus. The study found significantly more branching in the rats who had received more licking and grooming. This is also visible in the photographs of branching points along the axonal spine shown on the right. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 204 204 BRUC E WEXL ER To ensure that these observations were due to the differences in maternal behavior, and not to genes that high licking mothers passed on to their offspring, Meaney and colleagues had pups born to low licking mothers raised from birth by high licking mothers, and vice-versa.32 When these rats became adults, their stress responses and the methylation of their DNA (FIG. 2 ) 33 were both consistent with the type of mother that reared them and not with the type of their biological mother. Two other aspects of this work are also of relevance to cultural evolution. First, when given learning tests in high stress environments, adult rats raised by low licking mothers out performed rats raised by high licking mothers. This demonstrates the adaptive value of the population variability induced by cultural evolution. Second, some of the persistent neurochemical and behavioral effects of maternal care of female infants affect the way the infant functions as a mother herself when she becomes an adult. Females that had been separated from their mothers when they were infants, showed lower than normal gene expression in areas of the brain associated with maternal behaviors when they themselves became mothers.34 32 I.C.G. Weaver, N. Cervoni, F.A. Champagne, et al., “Epigenetic programming by maternal behavior,” in Nature Neuroscience, 7 (2004): 847-54; I.C.G. Weaver, J. Diorio, J.R. Seckl, M. Szyf, et al., “Early environmental regulation of hippocampal glucocorticiod receptor gene expression: characterization of intracellular mediators and potential genomic sites,” in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1024 (2004): 182-212. 33 Weaver, et al.,“Epigenetic programming by maternal behavior,” 847-54. 34 A.S. Fleming, G.W. Kraemer, A. Gonzalez, et al.,“Mothering begets mothering: the transmission of behavior and its neurobiology across generations,” in Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior,73(2002): 61-75. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 205 NEUROPL A STICITY, C ULTURE AND SOCI ET Y 205 FIG. 2: Cross-fostering studies that maternal care and not maternal genes alter methylation and expression of the section of the genome that promotes expression of genes that code for the proteins that constitute neuro-receptors that regulate the stress response. The left side of the figure show low methylation (greater activity) in rats raised by high-licking grooming mothers if their biological mothers where high (H-H) of low-licking grooming (L-H) mothers, and high methylation (lower activity) in rats raised by low-licking grooming mothers with either high- (H-L) or low- licking grooming (L-L) biological mothers. The absence of such effects in another region of the DNA (right side of the figure) demonstrates specificity of the link between this aspect of maternal behavior and methylation of the part of the DNA associated with production of neuro-receptors regulating stress responsivity. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 206 206 BRUC E WEXL ER They also licked and crouched over their pups less often than other mothers,35 and their generally decreased ability to maintain attention and increased response to stress have been hypothesized to further compromise their maternal competence.36 Such intergenerational effects are potentially self-propagating and even self-amplifying. Moreover, since litter size 37 and food availability 38 can influence the amount of licking and other behavioral interactions between mother and infant, a variety of environmental factors can influence maternal behaviors and their impact, across generations, on a range of individual and group behaviors. All this depends on the post-natal sensitivity of the mammalian brain to sensory stimulation, and the proximity of mammalian infants and mothers ensured by nursing. 35 A. Gonzalez, V. Lovic, G.R. Ward, et al., “Intergenerational effects of complete maternal deprivation and replacement stimulation on maternal behavior and emotionality in female rats,” in Developmental Psychobiology, 38 (2001): 11-32. 36 Fleming, et al.,“Mothering begets mothering,” 61-75. 37 Ibid.; J.E. Jans, and B. Woodside, “Effects of litter age, litter size, and ambient temperature on the milk ejection reflex in lactating rats,” in Developmental Psychobiology, 20 (1987): 333-44. 38 D.M. Lyons, H. Afariana, A.F. Schatzberg, etal.,“Experience-dependent asymmetric variation in primate prefrontal morphology,” in Behavioural Brain Research, 136 (2002): 51-9. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 207 NEUROPL A STICITY, C ULTURE AND SOCI ET Y 207 Part Four: The Human Rearing Environment Human rearing behaviors are more complex and more varied than those of other mammals, and include massive social components and influences from extended families, communities, and nation states. The extra-familial influences include schools, mass media, arts, laws, and customs. The human social and economic environments also affect the states of mind, time, and energy of the parents, thus affecting their interactions with their offspring in a manner analogous to the effects of food supply on rat maternal behavior. And although beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss, the huge role of language — spoken and written—in facilitating the influence of the human-made environment on the development of children must be noted, along with the fact that the latter is itself clearly a product of cultural evolution and it seems increasingly probable that the former is in large part as well. At birth, human infants can distinguish their mother’s language from other languages based on stimulation received in utero.39 Within hours of birth they show a selective interest in looking at the human face, with the interest greatest for the full face as experienced in social interactions rather than for the face in profile. 39 J. Mehler, P. Jusczyk, G. Lambertz, et al., “A precursor of language acquisition in young infants,” in Cognition, 29 (1988): 143-78. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 208 208 BRUC E WEXL ER Within days they prefer their mother’s face and voice to those of others.40 Within this context, parents provide objects of play and structure interactions and activities. As Kenneth Kaye has remarked, “social interference in the object-directed activities of babies is such a commonplace occurrence that few authors have remarked on its absolute uniqueness to our own species.” 41 The brains and minds of human infants and children develop while closely linked to the minds and brains of their biobehaviorally mature caregivers. The characteristics of the adults shape the stimulation that shapes the growing brains of the children through the small details and general rhythms of the child’s experiences. The child integrates input from progressively larger circles of direct interaction, beginning with primary care givers and growing to include extended family members and then members of the community and society more broadly. While some of the social input is actively shaped and provided by others, much is just absorbed through essentially constant imitation. Within two days of birth, infants will stick 40 G. Carpenter, “Mother’s face and the newborn,” in New Scientist, 21 (1974): 742-4; W.P. Fifer and C.M. Moon, “The role of mother’s voice in the organization of brain function in the newborn,” in Acta Paediatrica (Suppl.), 397 (1994): 86-93; C.C. Goren, M. Sarty, and P.Y.K. Wu, “Visual following and pattern discrimination of facelike stimuli by newborn infants,” in Pediatrics, 56 (1975): 544-9; A. MacFarlane, “What a baby knows,” in Human Nature, 1 (1978); J. Mehler, P. Jusczyk, G. Lambertz, et al., “A precursor of language acquisition in young infants,” in Cognition, 29 (1988): 143-78; Mills, M. and Melhursh, E. “Recognition of mother’s voice in early infancy,” in Nature, 252 (1974): 123-4; R. Spitz and K. Wolf, “The smiling response: a contribution to the ontogenesis of social relations,” in Genetic Psychology Monographs, 34 (1946): 57-125. 41 K. Kaye, “Organism, apprentice, and person,” in E. Tronick, ed., Social Interchange in Infancy: Affect, Cognition, and Communication, (Baltimore: University Park Press, 1982), 183-96. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 209 NEUROPL A STICITY, C ULTURE AND SOCI ET Y 209 out their tongues and move their heads in imitation of an adult doing so.42 From infancy on, children learn how to do things simply by watching them done. They imitate the goals of action even by different means and imitate a parent’s affective response to new stimuli.43 Mirror neurons fire when people (and monkeys) watch an act being done, and many times these same neurons are then active when the individual performs the action previously observed.44 Similarly, looking at someone else in pain activates the same regions of the brain as are active when the observer experiences pain him or herself.45 42 A.N. Meltzoff and M.K. Moore, “Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates,” in Science, 198 (1977): 74-8; A.N. Meltzoff and M.K. Moore, “Imitation in newborn infants: exploring the range of gestures imitated and the underlying mechanisms,” in Developmental Psychology, 25 (1989): 954-62. 43 K. Kaye, The Mental and Social Life of Babies: How Parents Create Persons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); M. Klinnet, R.N. Emde, P. Butterfield, et al., “Social referencing: the infant’s use of emotional signals from a friendly adult with mother present,” in Developmental Psychology, 22 (1986): 427-32. 44 M. Iacoboni, R.P. Woods, M. Brass, et al., “Cortical mechanisms of human imitation,” in Science, 286 (1999): 2526-8; G. Rizzolatti, L. Fadiga, V. Gallese, et al., “Premotor cortex and the recognition of motor actions,” in Cognitive Brain Research, 3 (1996): 131-41; M.A. Umilta, E. Kohler, V. Gallese, et al.,“I know what you are doing: a neurophysiological study,” in Neuron, 31 (2001): 155-65. 45 X. Gu and S. Han, “Attention and reality constraints on the neural processes of empathy for pain,” in NeuroImage, 36 (2007): 256-67; P.L. Jackson, A.N. Meltzoff, and J. Decety, “How do we perceive the pain of others? A window into the neural processes involved in empathy,” in NeuroImage, 24 (2005): 771-9; T. Singer, B. Seymour, J. O’Doherty, et al.,“Empathy for pain involves the affective but not sensory components of pain,” in Science, 303 (2004): 1157-62. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 210 210 BRUC E WEXL ER The earlier cited work of Hubel and Wiesel demonstrated that environmentally induced neuronal activity shaped the development of cerebral functional structures, following the principle that neurons that fire together wire together. In human development, active parental and community interventions and nearly constant imitation of what is seen and heard produce intensive and repetitive firing of neuronal ensembles and circuits. This environment-induced neural activation shapes brain development to be consistent with the largely human-made rearing environment. Well before the relevant neuroscience research, psychologists were aware of the role of the social environment in shaping mental development, describing the processes in language remarkably similar to what would be suggested by the subsequent work of Hubel, Wiesel, Meaney and others. Writing in 1926, Fenichel states that “changes in the ego, in which characteristics which were previously perceived in an object [usually an important person] are acquired by the perceiver of them, have long since been familiar to psychoanalysis.”46 Freud described identification as “the assimilation of one ego to another one, as a result of which the first ego behaves like the second in certain respects, imitates it and in a sense takes it up into itself.” 47 Greenson stated that “identification with an object means that... a transformation of the self has occurred whereby the self has become similar to the external object... 46 O. Fenichel, (1926), “Identification,” in G. Pollock, Pivotal Papers on Identification (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1993), 57-74. 47 S. Freud, (1933), “Excerpt from Lecture XXXI: The dissection of the psychical personality,” in G. Pollock, Pivotal Papers on Identification (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1993), 47-52. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 211 NEUROPL A STICITY, C ULTURE AND SOCI ET Y 211 one can observe behavior, attitudes, feelings, posture, etc., which are now identical to those characteristics belonging to the external object”,48 and that at early stages of development “perception implies transformation of the self.” Reich explained that “the child simply imitates whatever attracts his attention momentarily in the object... normally these passing identifications develop slowly into permanent ones, into real assimilation of the object’s qualities.” 49 Writing from a different cultural and intellectual context, the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky described the process: “In the early stages of development the complex psychological function was shared between two persons: the adult triggered the psychological process by naming the object or by pointing to it; the child responded to this signal and picked out the named object either by fixing it with his eye or by holding it with his hand. In the subsequent stages of development... The function which hitherto was shared between two people now becomes a method of internal organization of the psychological process. From an external, socially organized attention develops the child’s voluntary attention, which in this stage is an internal, selfregulating process.” 50 48 R.R. Greenson, (1954), “The struggle against identification” in G. Pollock, Pivotal Papers on Identification (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1993), 159-75. 49 A. Reich, (1954), “Early identifications as archaic elements in the superego,” in G. Pollock Pivotal Papers on Identification, (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1993), 177-95. 50 A.R. Luria, The Working Brain, trans. B. Haugh, (New York: Basic Books, 1973) Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 212 212 BRUC E WEXL ER Part Five: Brain Imaging Demonstrations of Environment-Induced Brain Organization in Human Beings Brain imaging studies have now demonstrated changes in brain structure and function that result from unusual motor activity or sensory input during childhood and persist into adulthood. One set of studies has examined differences in brain structure and function as a result of practicing a musical instrument during childhood. A socially and culturally created and induced activity on multiple levels, intensive practice of string instruments leads to selective increase in volume of the right somatosensory and motor areas associated with the rapid, fine motor movements of the fingers of the left hand that provide intricate and fast moving sequences of pressure to the strings. The changes in the brain are greater in adults who practiced more hours and began practicing at younger ages.51 Figure 3 shows this bulked up motor cortex in the right hemisphere of string players (the increase in volume is actually visible to the naked eye!) and bilaterally in piano players who practice with both hands.52 The second set of studies looked at brain activations in the normal visual areas of the brain in adults who were blind at birth or shortly thereafter, or the normal auditory areas of the brain in adults who were deaf at or shortly after birth. 51 G. Schlaug, “The brain of musicians: a model for structural and functional adaptation,” in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 930 (2001): 281-99. 52 M. Bangert and G. Schlaug, “Specialization of the specialized in features of external human brain morphology,” in European Journal of Neuroscience, 24 (2006): 1832-4. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 213 NEUROPL A STICITY, C ULTURE AND SOCI ET Y 213 Expansion of sensori-motor cortex unilaterally (right side) in long-time players of string instruments and bilaterally in long-time piano players. These changes in brain structure result from many hours of music practice during childhood and are evident to the naked eye. Only the left sensori-motor cortex in string players is not affected by the practice since it controls the bowing (right) hand which makes many fewer and simpler movements than does the left hand. Thus, the left sensori-motor cortex in the string players serves as a reference that demonstrates the increase in size of the other sensori-motor cortexes. FIG. 3: Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 214 214 BRUC E WEXL ER Directly analogous to the selective sensory deprivation experiments of Hubel and Wiesel, the findings were also analogous. In early blind subjects, the area of the brain that is normally the site of early visual processing is activated instead by auditory and tactile stimulation (FIG. 4 ) 5 3 , and is also more active during language processing tasks than is the case in sighted people.54 Apparently, when the normal sensory input to the area was absent, other sensory input and cognitive operations moved into the territory. Moreover, among the blind individuals, memory performance was higher in the individuals who made more use of the “visual” areas during the memory task. The results of these new imaging studies in humans are what is expected based on the studies in animals, the increased plasticity of the human brain and the very active structuring by human adults of the rearing environment and developmental experiences of their offspring. As mentioned above, a 1994 study showed that if one eye of a rat is removed at birth, stimulation of their whisker when they are adults activates cells in what is usually visual cortex.55 The demonstration of similar activation in the humans who are blind from early life, then, is no surprise. The demonstration of changes in brain morphology as a result of practicing a musical instrument extends things a bit beyond the animal studies in that practicing music is clearly a socially 53 K.E. Weaver and A.A. Stevens, “Attention and sensory interactions within the occipital cortex in the early blind: an fMRI study,” in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19 (December 2007): 315-30. 54 A. Amedi, N. Raz, P. Pianka, et al., “Early ‘visual’ cortex activation correlates with superior verbal memory performance in the blind,” in Nature Neuroscience, 6 (2003): 758-66. 55 J. Toldi, I. Rojik, and O. Feher, “Neonatal monocular enucleationinduced cross-modal effects observed in the cortex of adult rat,” in Neuroscience, 62 (October 1994): 105-14. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 215 NEUROPL A STICITY, C ULTURE AND SOCI ET Y 215 Areas of the cortex that usually respond to visual sensory input are shown here to respond to auditory stimulation (white) and tactile stimulation (black) in individuals who were blind at birth or became so shortly after. FIG. 4: Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 216 216 BRUC E WEXL ER constructed human activity, and it is impressive that the environmentally induced changes can be seen with the naked eye when data from multiple individuals is averaged together. But the demonstration of changes is at a gross anatomic level and does not reveal more fine grained changes in structure and function. These studies, however, are important in the workman-like effort of science to test assumptions and build bridges that link different sets of data. We do not yet have methods and data in people to enable us to demonstrate effects of parental actions on axonal branching in the hippocampus, as Meaney and colleagues have done in rats, but by linking the data and theory from animal studies to human beings with the above cited imaging studies, scientists complete an evidentiary loop and increase confidence in the application to human beings of principles based on the data from animals. Summary and Conclusions Functional properties of individual neurons in the human brain differ little from those of individual neurons in the brains of other primates. The large differences in function between the human brain and other primate brains result instead from the increased number of cells and interconnections among them, the extended period after birth during which the brain is highly susceptible to shaping by environmentally induced neuronal activity, and the fact that humans alone alter the environment that produces the neuronal activity that shapes the brains of their offspring. Together these factors constitute neuroplasticity and cultural evolution. Cultural evolution produces changes in human capabilities, desires and expectations much more rapidly and through very different mechanisms than does Darwinian biological evolution. It is a cross generational and social process which shapes individual actions, and these actions then in turn contribute to the social and cross generational influences that shape other individuals. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 217 NEUROPL A STICITY, C ULTURE AND SOCI ET Y 217 We humans are not handed a set of fixed capabilities, developed desires and inclinations, and standards for ethical conduct. All three of these critical aspects of human being are in dynamic interplay through human history; such is our neurobiological relationship with our natural and human-made environments. Our ability to shape our environments, and through that to shape our minds, brains, and behavior, begets complex responsibility, promising opportunity and political contestation. While political process may have been seen as contests between communities of established interests and positions, or between candidates each attempting to persuade people they are the candidate that best represents their interests and opinions, it now must be seen as fundamental in creating the positions it seeks to represent or adjudicate. When we turn for guidance to ethical traditions and principles, we must understand that there is as much tradition as principle. Solid ground is difficult to identify in the dynamic interplay of socially constructed or cultured brains, and the human-made culture in which our brains develop, live and function.56 Marxist and post-Marxist theory has been clear that human constructed, and historical rather than natural, social and economic structure and process heavily influence the way people understand their own self-interest and think more broadly. But while this powerful perspective provides precedent and vocabulary for approaching the interplay between brain and culture, it requires further consideration of the more radical reformulations of neuro-plastic science.57 56 W. Neidich, Blow-up Photography, Cinema and the Brain. (DAP/UCR/California Museum of Photography, 2003). 57 W. Neidich, “Pointings” in Lost Between the Extensivity/Intensity Exchange, (Eindhoven: Onomatopee 25, 2009), 65-72. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 218 218 BRUC E WEXL ER Organized religion has had deep disagreement with Marxism in the past, as it has had with evolution science. Implications of new neuroscience challenge the scope and assumptions of both theology and existing social theory. What directs the course of human development? What is better and what is worse? Are there criteria for judgment? Can the transgenerational and multifactorial processes be rationally and consensually directed? Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 219 WARREN NEIDICH 219 Neuropower: Art in the Age of Cognitive Capitalism A closer look shows that while on the one hand there has been a reduction in machine-commanded time separate from the worker’s body, on the other hand there has been an explosive increase in the linguisticcommunicative-relational time of living labor, the time that in the New Economy involves inter-subjective communication or value-creating cooperation.1 Neuropower constitutes the new focus of biopower to administer difference and sculpt a homogenous people. It consists of three key ideas. First and foremost, neurpower acts upon the neural plastic potential of the brain in a living present, especially during what is referred to as the critical periods of development, all the while being guided by the desire to produce a conscripted and enrolled individual of the future. Secondly, it redirects the armamentarium of power from a focus on distributions of sensations in the natural and designed world to the distributions 1 Christian Marazzi, Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 54. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 220 220 WA RR EN N EIDIC H of the working memory, which are called up in the process of making future decisions.2, 3 Thirdly, neuropower is the latest stage of an ontogenic process beginning with the disciplinary society, as outlined by Michel Foucault, followed by the society of control, as developed by Gilles Deleuze, and proceeding towards Maurizio Lazzarato’s noo-politics.4, 5, 6 After a discussion of two concurrent complementary theories of developmental neurobiology, Neural Darwinsim and Neural Constructivism, each of which attempts to script out the ways and means that the experience of the world is inscribed in the neural network architectures of the brain, I propose to map out a theory of art production that competes for a limited neural space with the hegemonic triumpharate of cognitive capitalism: sovereignty, spectacular culture elaborated through creative software programs like After Affects and CAD, and cognitive neuroscience, in particular consumer neuroscience. 2 “I call the distribution of the sensible the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. […] The distribution of the sensible reveals who can have a share in what is common to the community based on what they do and on the time and space in which this activity is performed. Having a particular ‘occupation’ thereby determines the ability or inability to take charge of what is common to the community; it defines what is visible or not in a common space, endowed with a common language, etc.” Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (New York and London: Continuum, 2004), 12-13. 3 The primary visual cortex is located in the occipital lobe of the brain and is the initial site in the cerebral cortex where information streams originating in the retina of the eye are processed. 4 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” in October 59 (Winter 1992): 3-7. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 221 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 221 To conclude, I want to use a question posed by Walter Benjamin in Illuminations—how might human sense perception change with humanity’s entire mode of existence?—as a way to approach the underlying conditions of the conference “The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism.” Could the effect of the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, which (as Benjamin states) “developed not only an art different from that antiquity but also a new kind of perception” be a model with which to understand the effect of information technologies upon our society and ourselves today?7 Could it be that they instigate “new kinds of perception”? Moreover, might these changes bring about new cognitive dispositions as well? Could these new epistemological tools build new forms of thought and understanding, in addition to misunderstandings, confusions and misinterpretations? Could the new tools, apparatuses, forms of sociability and networking in the information age, in smooth time and space, and in their internalized mental forms, destabilize the foundations of the neural architectures of the brain constructed 5 Ibid., 3-7. The passage from the disciplinary society to the society of control and noo-politics, that is to say the administration in the closed and wide-open spaces, previously focused on the condition of the individual and the dividual in relation to the past and the present. They described the focus of power as that which organized the interruptions and undulation of flows of time and space in the disciplinary society and society of control, respectively, in the context of a “present condition of the now,” even if, for instance, in the society of control Deleuze suggests future kinds of gadgets of control, such as an “electronic card that raises a given barrier.” 6 Maurizio Lazzarato, “Life and the Living in the Societies of Control,” in Deleuze and the Social, eds. Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sørensen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 186. 7 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations:Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1987), 222. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 222 222 WA RR EN N EIDIC H through an interaction with modernist repetitive spaces and regulated organized time? Could these new smooth forms of time and space regulated by Rheimian and Einsteinian algorhythms instead of Euclidian and Newtonian equations in fact prompt a re-sampling and consequent remapping of the brain’s genetically prescibed diverse population of presuppositions and pre-perceptions, ultimately reconfiguring the forms and images that are associated in ephemeral, emerging neural network configurations and the thoughts they elicit? These questions echo propositions highlighted by Gilles Deleuze’s review of Gilbert Simondon’s L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique: 8 namely, that these new reroutings of neural energies might, as a result of different weighted valencies, and based as they are upon intensive patterns of cultural saliency rather then extensive ones, stake out stable network territories in degenerate networks, thus reconfiguring meaning and understanding anew. I would like to consider the causes of the psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism, for example of panic disorders and attention deficit disorder, beyond those of overstimulation and feeble attention, and look at them instead as the leftovers of the incomplete process of the normalization of the plasticity of the brain and the imperfect instruction and superimposition of the real and imaginary upon the frontal lobes of the brain. 8 “Doubtless this is because he does not restrict himself to the biological determination of individuation, but determines increasingly complex levels of individuation; thus there is a properly psychical individuation that arises precisely when the vital functions are not sufficient to resolve the problems posed to the living, and when a new charge of preindividual reality is mobilized within a new problematic, within a new process of solution (cf. a very interesting theory of affect). In its turn, the psychic opens upon a “transindividual collective.” Gilles Deleuze, “Review of Gilbert Simondon’s L’individu et sa genèse physico-biologique (1966),” in Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 12 (2001): 43-49. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 223 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 223 The Intimacy of Neuropower and Neuroplasticity: The Para-Psychology of the Financialization of Capital First and foremost, neuropower acts upon the neural plastic potential of the brain in a living present, especially during what are referred to as the critical periods of development, all the time being guided by the desire to produce a conscripted and enrolled individual of the future.9 Critical periods are temporal windows in which the nervous system is especially sensitive to the effects of the environment mediated, for the most part, by parental influences early in life through a process described by the great Russian psychologist L.S. Vigotsky as the internalization or the internal reconstruction of a formerly external activity.10 The acquisition of language is a case in point and is internally reconstructed and coupled to a process called epigenesis, in which even local cultural influences can play an important role in sculpting the pluripotential of the brain. Epigenesis is defined as the means through which the unfolding of the genetically prescribed formation of the brain is altered by its experiences with the environment whether that be the milieu of the brain itself or the world. Neural plasticity delineates the means through which the components of the brain—that is, its neurons, their axons, dendrites, synapses and neural networks (refered to as its firmware)—, in addition to its dynamic signatures, like temporal binding, allow distant parts of the brain to communicate and be modified by experience. 9 Warren Neidich, Lost Between the Extensivity/Intensivity Exchange (Eindhoven: Onomatopee 25, 2009), 65-69. 10 Lev S.Vygotsky, Mind in Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 56. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 224 224 WA RR EN N EIDIC H As Christian Marrazzi quoting Felice Cimatti states “the environment of the human animal is language itself; the human animal is adapted to language, is made for and by language.”11 For instance, the immature brain has the capability of learning over 6,700 different language variations, even if it chooses to learn one or a few. The Japanese child growing up in London can learn English perfectly without the trace of an accent, in the same way that the English child growing up in Tokyo can learn Japanese. Each child is subjected to very different language environments reflecting very different scripted enactments between themselves and their parents acting as agents for their culture with very different results.Once the journey to a specific language acquisition is underway, other languages are closed off to perception. Six months after learning Japanese, the English R is imperceptible to the Japanese speaker.12 11 Marazzi, Capital and Language, 30. 12 “Human infants have special cognitive abilities that are built for exactly this cultural variation. For example, in the realm of vowel sounds, infants of just six months have been shown to restructure their auditory space according to the local language: the space becomes systematically and irreversibly distorted. […] The end result is a range of spectacular biases in our auditory perception, which make adults unable to even hear the difference between sounds that are fundamentally distinct in some other language.” Stephen C. Levinson, “Introduction: The Evolution of Culture in a Microcosm,” in Evolution and Culture, eds. Stephen C. Levinson and Pierre Jaisson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 14. Note that the words “cultural variation” are used to refer to language learning. 13 “The essential feature of the cerebral organization, which may explain the genesis of subjective experience—not only sensory perception and what is commonly called thinking, but also feelings and emotions—is the architecture of the brain’s cellular and molecular network and the activities that occur with this network. Developed over the course of biological evolution, and established during embryogenesis and postnatal development, this neuronal architecture supports capacities that are peculiar to the human species and allow it to learn, to store information, and to test truthfulness of the knowledge it has acquired...” Jean-Pierre Changeux, The Physiology of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 9. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 225 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 225 Man used to lived in nature, which provided the stimuli and experiences to alter brain’s architecture.13 Today, as more and more people move to the designed spaces of the city, it is culture, as it is inscribed in the designed space of the urban environement, that sculpts what is referred to as the neural plasticity of the brain. Language in the form of street signs, kiosks, billboards (painted, audiovisual, and banners), as well as new conscripted forms of information found in the infosphere on the internet, mobile phones and their apps, tablets and so forth, play an important ancillary role in this neural sculpting, in particular when they are coupled to historical cultural markers. “Agencies of repression were used to force the conscious organisms to submit to the State’s rhythm without rebellion. Now political domination is internalized and indistinguishable from the machine itself. [...] In the biosocial age, the machine is informational: an internalized process of linguistic modeling, logic and cognitive automatisms.”14 The Normalized Subject in Future Memory Neuropower redirects the armamentarium of power from a focus upon distributions of sensations (as elaborated by Jacques Rancière), with its concomitant forms of bottom-up processing through which abstract concepts are built from concrete sensation, to one that is focusing on top-down processing. Abstract concepts centered in the forebrain and pre-frontal cortex modulate future actions and behaviors by affecting the downstream sensorial and perceptual systems to which the brain is connected. These abstract concepts are formed in the working memory. 14 Franco “Bifo” Berardi, After the Future (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011), 23. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 226 226 WA RR EN N EIDIC H Today, it can be advanced that mechanisms or apparatuses of power have increasingly found ways to intervene in the working memory, and do so through the rearrangement of its contents. The working memory refers to long- and short-term memories called up and held briefly in the mind, assembled for the accomplishment of a particular task to be achieved in the future. Important in this regard are the conditions of new forms of machinic intelligence and competence in the age of immaterial labor, alongside a notion of general intelligence prescribed by tertiary economies in which worker-communication and decision-making in the face of competing laboring options are encouraged. The frontal lobe is essential, for instance, in what is referred to as free-choice situations, according to which one must decide how to interpret an ambiguous situation. “Dealing with inherent ambiguity is among the foremost functions of the frontal lobes. In a sense, whether you are decisive or wishywashy depends on how well your frontal lobes work. Studies have shown that patients with frontal lobe damage approach inherently ambiguous situations differently from the way healthy people do. The loss of the ability to make decisions is among the most commons signs of early dementia. Damage to other parts of the brain does not seem to affect these processes.” 15 In this regard the new focus of power is not only on the false reproduction of the past—analogous to manipulating an archive; the effects of power have moved to the reconstitution of the working memory, elaborated by the forebrain in implicit decisionmaking processes utilized to form a plan or make a product choice. In other words, the new territory of neuropower is not past memory but future memory. 15 Elkonon Goldberg, The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes in a Complex World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 79. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 227 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITALIS M 227 Can the new burgeoning fields of consumer neuroscience, in which decision-making areas of the brain are probed in order to provide information concerning how product designers might intervene in the working memory itself, provide the new apparatuses of cognitive capitalism? In other words, is it possible for marketers to bypass the conditions of the distributions of sensibility and directly activate areas such as nucleas acambens in the ventral striatum to affect choice and decisions? 16 In light of these questions, the recent success of the film Inception (2010) may very well be understood as a response to our collective anxieties about the possibility of memory espionage and lack of free choice. Is resistance futile? These frontal lobes as opposed to the senses are the new focus of power. Mutatis mutandi, they thus constitute a new object for the theory of power. While acknowledging the importance of the theories of Rancière, some of which are built upon here—specifically his ideas describing the distribution of the sensible, its policing and the artist’s role in rearranging it—I would nonetheless like to note the diminished role that such an analytic may play in the future. Instead, I call for the deep understanding of the development of a designed post-phenomenology, in which sensation and perception are bypassed. It advances that it is the intervention in the re-organization of working memory during the production of a plan—and not straightforwardly memory itself—that constitutes the new site of administration. 16 Mirja Hubert and Peter Kenning, “A current overview of consumer neuroscience,” Journal of Consumer Behavior, Volume 7 (2008), 272-292. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 228 228 WA RR EN N EIDIC H From Noopolitics to Neuropower Neuropower is the latest stage of an ontogenic process beginning with the disciplinary society, as outlined by Michel Foucault, followed by the society of control as developed by Gilles Deleuze and proceeding onward to Maurizio Lazzarato’s noo-politics. He defines noo-politics as “the ensemble of techniques of control that is exercised on the brain. It involves above all attention, and is aimed at the control of memory and its virtual power.”17 Neuropower distinguishes itself from noopolitics in two important ways. First, it is not about the modulation of the attentive networks in the real present cultural milieu. Instead, it is about the rerouting of the long-term memories into working memory according to gradiants of intensive affective flows, energy sinks, phase transitions, basins of attraction and stochastic and random resonances. This is the key to its link to the performative conditions of labor in the new economy. The machinic intelligence is not in the apparatuses of production as they once existed in the assemblyline of factories. Rather, it is within us as contemplative circuits mimicking the flows of new labor. Secondly, neuropower is not about the production of a real object. Instead, it is exerted through a modification in the neurosynaptologics of the brain. In cognitive capitalism, neuropower works to produce changes in the material logics of the brain by affecting the brain’s neurons and synapses—its firmware—as well as its dynamic properties such as binding and reentry. 17 Lazzarato, “Life and Living,” 186. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 229 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 229 Each epoch as it is defined, for instance, by new forms of social, political, economic, psychological and technological relations, requires new forms of dispositifs to administer the people. Think for the moment how differently the regimes of Fordist labor and Post-Fordist labor necessitate and script different styles of architecture. “Where modern architecture was informed through the logics of industrialization, including mass production, mass standardization, and a Fordist attitude to the workforce, parametric architecture is now informed through computation, customization, individuation, and a postFordist attitude to the work place.” 18 Architecture is a mirror through which we can reflect upon the changes in the culturally inflected landscape of designed space, and of individuation and subjectivity as well. For it is proposed here that the brain is analogously changed by the same generational and epochal relations that modify architecture, design, the plastic arts, literature and so on and so forth. The condition of the brain/mind condition, as they are embedded in this sea of generational cultural changes, as well as the cultural memory that results from this, reflects these changes as analogously scripted changes in the brain’s modifiable plastic tissue. Such an account is, however, not to be interpreted as crudely positivist and linear; on the contrary, the process is full of bushwacking and backtracking. There are examples that show the extent to which the disciplinary society is still important today, although the human eye may have been replaced by the surveillance camera and the time schedule opened up to a more spontaneous and individual kind of daily planning. Moreover, one can discover traces of neuropower in the past, such as the brainwashing role of the Catholic, Jewish and Islamic religions in the early eduction of their followers’ children. 18 Ingeborg M. Rocker, “Apropos Parametricism: If, In What Style Should We Build?” Log 21, Winter (2011), 92. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 230 230 WA RR EN N EIDIC H In the new information economy-charactized as it is by semiocapitalism, in which the production of objects has been superseded by the production of psychic effects and new powerful tools such as software agents that trace our choices and calibrate the level of our desire, the ability of neuropower to map institutional paradigms upon the materiality of the wet, mutable organic surface of the brain itself is being realized. According to this gamble, new labor as it journeys closer to becoming performance, even as praxis and poetics merge, does in fact leave a trace. More on this later. The Other Side of Neuropower The present text does not afford me the opportunity or space to expound on the variety of political outcomes of neuropower. Instead, I would like to elucidate some of the above concerns through an explanation of the other side of neuropower. Similar to what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have contributed in their complexification of biopower, we must also consider that there exists another side to neuropower.19 The role of art production as a means to counterbalance and challenge this power of the sovereign in the age of neoliberal global capitalism—especially in the latter’s transitions into neoliberal 19 “The general right to control its own movement is the multitude’s ultimate demand for global citizenship. This demand is radical insofar as it challenges the fundamental apparatus of imperial control over the production and life of the multitude. Global citizenship is the multitude’s power to reappropriate control over space and thus to design the new cartography.” Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 400. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 231 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 231 cognitive capitalism, in which the labor of thought itself provides, on a global scale, the new territory for capitalistic adventurism—will form the subtext to what follows, keeping in mind the subsumption of artistic production as a model for Post-Fordist labor recently elucidated by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism and Pascal Gielen’s The Murmering of the Artistic Multitude.20, 21 It is my contention that artistic practice, through its direct and indirect effect upon the cultural field deforms or elaborates upon its displaying of cultural memory in an existential and meta-existential way. In the case of institutional design and architecture, for instance, artistic practice mutates built space and thus changes its ability to act as a platform for organizing human attention. This is especially true in our attention economy, where what is dispayed most intensely and most often is what we tend to remember. This rerouting of attention according to a system of other rules and syntagma produces other paradigms of truth that have the potential to activate and resonate with other noninstitutionally contrived combinations of variable neural prerepresentation with different results.22 20 Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005), 419-482. 21 Pascal Gielen, The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Memory, and Post-Fordism (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2009), 24-25. 22 “These changes are the result of genetically delineated spontaneous activity which generates a variable host of what are referred to as pre-representations upon which environmental stimulation is superimposed through resonance. A precise matching of evoked and endogenous activity leads to increase synaptic strength and selective storage.” Jean-Pierre Changeux, Physiology, 61. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 232 232 WA RR EN N EIDIC H In its most utopian guise, it can emancipate the virtual contingencies locked up in the pluripotentiality of the preindividual self, itself a result of the tremendous variation of the neurobiologic substrate, producing a multiplicity of inter-subjective difference and heterogeneity rather than a homogenous people. In other words, I would like to challenge the idea of immaterial labor and suggest that cognitive labor —both affective and symbolic—produces real changes as modifications in the neurosynaptologics of the brain in the form of long term and short term memories.23, 24 To understand the true emancipating power of art in our moment of cognitive capitalism, we must understand it in its neuromodulating capacity. In the next section, I would like to lay the groundwork for this argument by delineating two complementary theories through which artistic objects, events, and experiences might leave a trace.25 Two important aspects of noise “music” give us a unique opportunity to do this. First of all, noise as a disruptor of resonance and synchronicity has immediate affects upon the symbolic and the affective through a process of delinking cultural available networks of sensations from their corresponding neural correlates in the present. Second, noise as a transgenerational modifier. Using the example of John Cage’s now famous 4’33”, I would like to script out the ontogeny of how a disdained and incomprehensible form of sound art has recently been embraced by a new generation of musicians and listeners. 23 Dave Beech, Art and Value, Historical Materialism Book Series, forthcoming (personal communication). 24 Sean Sayers, “The Concept of Labor: Marx and His Critics,” in Science and Society, Vol. 71, Number 4 (October 2007): 431-454. 25 I use the word “event” here after Alain Badiou. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 233 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 233 The Neural Constructivist/Neural Darwinism Linkage Model There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked to deal. But they were trapped. Conservative talkers on Fox and talk radio had whipped the Republican voting base into such a frenzy that deal-making was rendered impossible. How do you negotiate with somebody who wants to murder your grandmother? Or—more exactly —with somebody whom your voters have been persuaded to believe wants to murder their grandmother? I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters —but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead.26 But how is the development of brain and mind linked to the history of objects, abstract knowledge, and to the production of the subject in the context of neoliberal cognitive capitalism with its emphasis on immaterial labor and knowledge industries? In order to formulate a theory of resistance, one must address the conditions of this all-pervasive system. In what follows, I would like to use ideas emanating from two sources that propose very different theories about how the process of environmentally directed neuromodulation —what we have been calling epigenesis—takes place. 26 Tobin Harshaw, “Can ‘No’ Revive the Republicans?” in The New York Times, (March 26, 2010). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 234 234 WA RR EN N EIDIC H First, I shall engage the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection or Neural Darwinism as formulated by Gerald Edelman; then, I will turn to an exposition of the Theory of Neural Constructivism as formulated by Steven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski.27, 28 I shall argue that these ideas, often considered contradictory, can be understood as complementary. Together, they can help shed light on the new contingencies of cognitive capitalism. Edelman’s theory and that of Quartz and Sejnowksi ask a basic question: what are the determinants of neural development both intrauterine and post-natal? Is it, as Neural Darwinism would suggest, an unfolding of a prescribed neurobiological process, in which a stochastic, intrinsically non-deterministic, genetically contrived exuberant growth of neural elements is followed by a period of epigenetic pruning and regression called apoptosis or programmed cell death? A process in which, through a Darwinian survival-of-thefittest paradigm, a seemingly chaotic overabundance of neural elements becomes sculpted by various constant and pervasive environmental contingencies into a finely tuned sensorialperceptual-cognitive machine? This theory has the benefit of parsimony and mimics in certain ways the concrete genetic and immunological systems already in place. 27 Gerald Edelman, The Remembered Present (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1989), 44-49. 28 Steven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski, “The Neural Basis of Cognitive Development: A Constructivist Manifesto,” Brain Sciences, 1997, 14-17. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 235 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 235 According to Quartz and Sejnowski, the weakness of this theory lies in its dependence on the notion of prespecification. The theory necessitates, for instance, that the network must build in the problem of the diversity of the world domain a priori. They contend that the world that human beings live in is constantly changing and, even though neural Darwinism might work in a laboratory where all the conditions can be specified, the real world is in flux. Genetically prescribed variability can never live up to the task of coding for the everchanging conditions of the world-picture or cinema. Neural constructivism proposes that instead of simply a regression of neural elements after their period of exuberant growth, development is rather “a progressive increase in the structures underlying representational complexity” and these changes depend on an “interaction with a structured environment to guide development.”29 Furthermore, “dendritic development fulfills important requirements for a non-stationary learning mechanism, suggesting how dendritic development under the influence of environmentally derived activity conforms to schemes for the construction of mental representations.” This answers the problem of concept drift. The statistical properties of the target variable, which the model is trying to predict, change over time in unforeseen ways. This causes problems because the predictions become less accurate as time passes. The Theory of Neural Constructivism can adjust to these changes, whereas Neural Darwinism can not.30 29 Ibid, 30 Ibid, 6. 6. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 236 236 WA RR EN N EIDIC H In other words, in a changing cultural environment, such as one defined now by intensive rather than extensive milieus, a constructivist organized brain can be modified according to the mutating conditions it confronts with a concomitant mutation of itself.31 For the present argument, it is important to understand that neither theory has complete hegemony in the realms of speculative and theoretical developmental neurobiology. We should think instead of how each model or theory might help us elucidate the mechanism through which nature or designed space plays an important role in the production of corresponding neural architecture to be used in thought. Of importance for us here is that both these theories agree on the significance of the environment in sculpting or scripting the neural plastic potential of the brain. The theory of neuronal group selection, the hallmark of neural Darwinism, is made up of three components. Simply stated, there is the primary repertoire that is a product of developmental selection; the secondary repertoire that is produced by experiential selection; and reentry which stabilizes and elaborates upon the secondary repertoire. 31 Could that be one explanation for the now-accepted theories of distributed networks and gradients as models for brain organization having replaced hierarchical organization and grandmother neuron theories? Yes, we have conceptual tools for understanding new forms of organization through our experience with the conditions of the internet and world wide web. Neuroscientific explanations have always profited from technological models like the steam engine, hologram and computer to guide them to new understandings of brain function. But could there be another explanation for this remodeling of the theoretical contingencies? That the brain of a theorist living and breathing is sculpted in a specific moment of history defined by the changing political, economic, psychological, spiritual and sociologic relations? That like the material history of objects and relations the brain, too, undergoes material changes relative to this mutating zeitgeist? Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 237 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 237 The primary repertoire describes the condition of the initial variability of the anatomy of the brain at birth that is produced by a process called developmental selection. First, it relates to the variation that results from the combination of the DNA contributed by the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg as two very diverse genetic heritages. Secondly, it relates to the history of the species itself in its evolutionary journey, and to the conditions of the genes that reflect that history. Finally, it is the result of events that take place during the pregnancy. For example, the effects of smoking, drinking or cocaine use on the condition of the developing foetus’s brain are well-known. The combined effect of these three processes is the production of the neurobiologic common from which the brain-mind will later emerge in its engagement with culture. The neurobiological common is the entire, genetically inscribed repertoire of possible excitatory, inhibitory, resonant and dissonant neural relations as they are tethered to their intrauterine experience. Together, they create the neurobiologically variable pluripotentiality of the brain. Even the brains of identical twins at birth differ remarkably. Although the primary repertoire is to a certain degree pre-specified by genetic programs, which produce the heterochronic events of its neural development, it also contains within itself tremendous amounts of variation and diversity. This variation is a result of the evolutionary experiments (leading to the human nervous system) that are still subsumed in the human genome and that under certain environmental stresses can become expressed.32 32 “Even so, the human race is distinguished from other species by its remarkable ability to learn and conserve stable traces of past experience. In the course of evolution, this aptitude has grown to an extent unrivaled in the living world. Moreover, vestiges of man’s evolutionary past are still perceptible in the early stages of the brain’s development.” Changeux, Physiology, 184. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 238 238 WA RR EN N EIDIC H It is the degree of this variation in its primordial and plastic state that makes the primary repertoire relatively unspecified and to which “unspecified” and “stochastic” conditions of a changing cultural milieu can hail. I would like to call attention to the primary repertoire as the site of what is referred to as neural biodiversity, and of what I would like to refer to as the neurobiologic common or neurozoon. The neurozoon embodies the full extent of the possibilities of a human brain and contains within itself all the evolutionary steps that make up its ontogenesis, some of which are now suppressed and not expressed at the level of the chromosome. It awaits the moment of its unfolding not as a natavist series of heterochronous events emblazoned in the codon of the genome a priori, but rather as an unfolding or becoming in the context of designed culture. This neurozoon emerges as a subset of the zoe, which is then sampled to become the neurobios. The neurobios is the secondary repertoire with all the political implications contained therein. “Biodiversity is a composite term used to embrace the variety of types, forms, spatial arrangements, processes, and interactions of biological systems at all scales and levels of organization from genes to species to ecosystems, along with the evolutionary history that led to their existence.” 33 Neural biodiversity by analogy is first of all a species-specific condition that delineates the specific a priori variability of neural elements, including their physical and chemical idiosyncrasies, and the neurobiological apparatus that allow for the neuroplastic potentiality to express itself. It is a condition of the evolutionary history of that species and contains its complete history of neurobiological adaptations that were required in its ascendance as/to that species. 33 Robert J. Scholes et al., “Toward a Global Biodiversity Observing System,” in Science, 321 (2008), 1044. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 239 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 239 Evolution is not the precise knife-carving of an organism into a finely adapted machine. It sculpts grotesque figures more like Jonathan Meese’s Metabolism. No Zen in the Bronxen, You Atomic Human Toy (2008) or paints feverently, as in William De Kooning’s Woman (1949). Both works depict bodies that are not formed perfectly, but contain many imperfections. Yet, they are still discernable as figures and, as a result, they elicit multiple readings. They are parabolic forms. Evolution sculpts variations, but it maintains a pool of variation for its “other” self-fulfilling prophecies. I would like to contend that neuropower is in fact directed towards this neural biodiversity, attempting to limit its potential. In other words, just as global biodiversity is currently under siege by various factors affecting the conditions of global capitalism (including, pollution, over-fishing, and the encroachment of habitat, effecting as it does the diversity of flora and fauna), so too do other conditions of this same world-system strangle difference to produce a homogenization of the cultural field and limit epigenetic, neural biodiversity. Neoliberal global capitalism, of which neoliberal cognitive capitalism is a subset and recent developmental stage, provides the precise mechanisms for this process of specified differentiation. For instance, it is feared that in a century, one half of the 6,700 languages now active on earth will disappear. The effect of this language depletion in the context of language ecologies and indigenous peoples has been recently written about by K. David Harrison in his book The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the Worlds Most Endangered Languages.34 34 David Harrison, The Last Speakers: The Quest to Save the World’s Most Endangered Languages (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Press, 2010). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 240 240 WA RR EN N EIDIC H The next term elucidated by Edelman is the idea of the secondary repertoire, which is the direct result of epigenesis and neural plasticity during a process called experiential selection. The term repertoire often relates to musical performance and designates the full scope of a performer’s abilities. In fact, Gerald Edelman, one of the founders of neural Darwinism, is himself a musician. The obvious connection to new labor as a virtuoso performance and its association with a number of possible activities that link labor and politics, and that have repercussions for the material of memory, interests us here.35 As we already suggested, neuropower posits that the virtuoso performance does in fact leave a materialist residue. Rather than the industrially formed products characteristic of secondary economies, performances leave lingering memory traces that have the potential to mutate the conditions of the neurobiologic architecture. In tertiary economies, the results of its production are the new memory sculptures and architectures of the brain. Coupled to the new cultural dispositions that emerge through immaterial labor, these neural compensations and de-compositions — remember the neural changes can be additive and subtractive —generate the conditions for thinking itself. A neural constructivist account could also make this argument. However, instead of resulting from a regression and deletion of neural elements, the secondary repertoire in this explanation is the result of a productive complexification and intensification. As we noted earlier, epigenesis refers to the process by which the environment affects the patterns of stimulation and communication in the neurons and neural networks of the primary repertoire. 35 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For An Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (New York: Semiotext(e), 2004), 70. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 241 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 241 Hebbian theory, which states that neurons that fire together wire together, is operative in the primary repertoire where spontaneous electrical activity stimulates genetically prescribed a priori networks. “When an axon of cell A is near enough to excite a cell B and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or both cells such that A’s efficiency, as one of the cells firing B, is increased.”36 In the secondary repertoire, Hebbs’ cell assembly hypothesis is even more relevant as such electrical activity is joined by that which is generated by objects and object relations in the world, both real and abstract, and, in the case of our world, the conditions of information and its distribution as dynamic codes in the real-imaginary-virtual interface. The probability that neurons synchronize their responses both within a particular area and across areas should reflect some of the Gestalt criteria used for perceptual grouping... Individual cells must be able to change rapidly the partners with which they synchronize their responses if stimulus configurations change and require new associations... If more then one object is present in a scene, several distinct assemblies should form. 36 Georgy Buzsáki, Rhythms of the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 159. Hebb’s cell assembly is a transient coalition of neurons, much like the dynamic interactions among jazz musicians. Members of the cell assembly are brought together by Hebb’s synaptic plasticity rule, on the basis of temporal relations among them. As a result of this plasticity rule, information reverberates within the formed assembly and the direction of flow is determined by the synaptic strengths among the members. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 242 242 WA RR EN N EIDIC H Cells belonging to the same assembly should exhibit synchronous response episodes whereas no consistent temporal relations should exist between the discharges of neurons belonging to different assemblies.37 In an intensive information culture defined by hubs, energy sinks in a distributed field. It is these dynamic codes that have become most important. An implication of Hebbian dynamics and neural Darwinism is that those assemblages of neurons most intensely and repetitively stimulated, develop firing potentials that are selectively reinforcing to each other, whereas those not as stimulated undergo a process termed apoptosis and die out or manage to form connections with neurons in the network that is favored. Consequently, in the battle for limited neural space, the stimulated neurons and their networked condition replace those that have receded. It is not a difficult intuitive leap to understand how branding and other tools of the global economy could create new Gestalt relationships necessary to stimulate cell assemblies. We can all imagine how the hot touch of the branding iron on the backside of cow’s hide is replaced by the buzz of the information age soldering networks together. “Semiocapital, in fact, is not about the production of material goods, but about the production of psychic stimulation. The mental environment is saturated by signs that create a sort of contiuous excitation, a permanent electrocution, which leads to the individual, as well as the collective mind, to a state of collapse.”38 37 Wolf Singer, “Coherence as an Organizing Principle of Cortical Functions,” in Selectionism and the Brain, eds. Olaf Sporns and Giulio Tononi (San Diego: Academic Press, 1994), 158. 38 Berardi, After the Future, 94. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 243 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 243 The development of ocular dominance columns of layer IV of the primary visual cortex is a case in point. Ocular dominance columns, anatomical structures that appear like columns in microscopic examination, are found in the visual cortex and are anatomically defined regions of input from one eye or both eyes.39 They contain a number of genetically defined cell types simple, complex, and hypercomplex cells that are arranged in a columnar structure. They are stimulated by the visual fields preferentially and utilize different strategies for the processing of visual information like, the orientation of a light.40 As a unit, they are important in processing visual information and they are driven by one eye or the other. In experiments by Hubel and Weisel, enucleation of one or the other eye created disruptions in the normal columnar structure with those neural elements coding for the non-enucleated eye displacing those cells formerly driven by the now enucleated eye. As Antoni and Stryker note, “two hypotheses regarding their development have been suggested. One, conforming to selectionism, emphasizes two phases in the right eye development: a period of exuberant growth followed by selective axonal pruning. The other, more constructivist, hypothesis emphasizes the general expansion of axon collaterals alongside selective pruning.”41 This theory promotes neural development as a system that is said to be regressive and subtractive. 39 Semir M. Zeki, “Cells Responding to Changing Image Size and Disparity in the Cortex of the Rhesus Monkey,” Journal of Physiology 242 (1974), 827. 40 Charles Robert Noback et al., The Human Nervous System: Structure and Function (Totowa, New Jersey: Humana Press Inc., 2005), 340. 41 Quartz, S.R., The Neural Basis, 17. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 244 WA RR EN N EIDIC H 244 Neural constructivism interprets this Hebbian mechanism as favorably exciting those neurons most apt to be stimulated, thus promoting their further development and producing increased synaptic numbers and dendritic spines. Where “representational features of the cortex are built from the dynamic interaction between neural growth mechanisms and environmentally derived neural activity... this growth is a progressive increase in the representational properties of the cortex.” 42 These mechanisms are important in understanding the brain’s development, but most essential for our purposes here is the transformation of an immature neurobiological substrate into a finely tuned environmentally and contextually driven machine. What then is the effect of living in a networked society with the internet, cell phones, Facebook, and Twitter? We are all spending more and more time in linked environments and these linked social anatomies are finding expression in the modifications of designed built space. The Alishan Tourist Routes of Reiser and Umemoto, Toyo Ito’s Taichung Metropolitan Opera House and The Island City Central Park Gringrin, and Zaha Hadid’s Hungerburg Funicular are cases in point. How do these new spatial and temporal contingencies effect experiential selection? And what of the perceptual and cognitive habits that they elaborate? Although we have defined the primary repertoire and the secondary repertoire separately, they are part of the same overlapping and interdependent process. The genetic instructions continue to unfold throughout life, in particular in the context of learning, the critical period for language learning, for example, and this learning changes the conditions of the brain itself. Learning a language changes the conditions of interacting with the world and thereby changes the brain’s selection of material relevant to “its” attention. 42 Ibid, abstract. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 245 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 245 What we pay attention to greatly “informs” what we learn and what neural networks will be activated and amplified. Unlike natural selection in evolution, which occurs as a result of differential reproduction, experiential selection comes about through differential amplification of certain neuronal populations. Those neurons, neural networks, and distributed neural mappings that are most frequently and intensely stimulated by, for instance, advertised toys that appear and reappear in real and televised environments, or by movie stars whose images adorn multiple platforms synchronously on billboards, laptops, movie screens, and televisions, will develop more efficient firing patterns or become progressively more phase-locked—synchronously tethered together—giving them selective advantage over those that are not. A third tenet of the theory of neuronal group selection is called reentry. Reentry is defined as the recurrent parallel exchange of neural signals between neuronal groups or maps taking place at many different levels of brain organization: locally within populations of neurons, within a single brain area, and across brain areas. The importance of reentry as a mechanism of neural integration has been realized.43 The anatomically distinct areas of the brain, the primary sensory areas like the visual cortex as well as the more modern associative cortices consist of distinct areas that code for different information. For instance, the research of Semir Zeki and others has shown that the visual cortex is made up of functionally segregated areas that code for specific attributes like the form and color of a visual object. 43 Giulio Tononi, “Reentry and Cortical Integration,” International Review of Neurobiology Volume 37, 1994, 127–152. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 246 246 WA RR EN N EIDIC H They are linked by what are referred to as cortico-cortical and thalamo-cortical connections, because they connect regions of the visual cortex together and the thalamus, a subcortical structure, to the cortex. In some ways, each of these areas samples and produces maps of the world based on their specific biased apparatus. For instance, area V4 of the occipital cortex samples the world according to color. That is: its cells are wavelength selective, while those of V5 are moti.on selective.44 But we don’t see the world as disjointed patterns of color and motion but rather as a seamless whole. Why is this? It is through reentry that these disparate regions are linked together in register-producing an integrated picture/image. It is through this process, which is referred to as binding, that these different registers are bound together. We also know through experience that several such sensory areas can work together. When eating an apple you are using taste, smell, and vision as well as coordinating various tactile and motor repertoires, as the apple is adjusted to bring it in register with the mouth and tongue. Reentry is one way that these maps are integrated together. Superimposed on these primary areas are meta-representations coded for in association areas and linked to corresponding areas of other parts of the brain such as the frontal lobe, hippocampus, cingulated gyrus, and so on. Eating an apple is a planned event that rehearses other already registered memories of former interactions with the apple and the satiation of hunger, and so on and so forth. Reentry also plays a role in binding these regions as global mappings, as it refers to the whole brain activated at the same time. 44 Semir Zeki, ed., A Vision of the Brain, (Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1993), 126. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 247 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 247 “This suggests a close relationship between consciousness and binding. It seems that only those results of the numerous computational processes that have been bound successfully will enter consciousness simultaneously. This notion also establishes a close link between consciousness, short-term memory and attention.”45 An understanding of binding may be a key to phenomenologic immersion—the feeling that when you are reading a book, watching a movie, or are actively engaged in a virtual reality program, you are actually taking part in the action of the movie, book, or virtual reality program. Binding is not a process only occurring in the brain but in the world of objects, their relationships, and, today in the abstract real relations that now capture our attention in the informational economy. Binding in the brain is not a constantly elaborated phenomenon, but one that is immanent. In the binding by synchrony model, convergence of connectivity is no longer the main variable of feature extraction: rather, it is the temporal synchrony of neurons, representing the various attributes of objects, that matters. The different stimulus features, embedded in the activity of distributed cell assemblies, can be brought together transiently by the temporal coherence of the activated neurons, which oscillated at gamma frequency.46 As we have seen, in tertiary economies the once physical object of production has dematerialized and instead has been substituted for non-material abstract conditions. 45 Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 67. 46 Buzsáki, Rhythms of the Brain, 260-61. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 248 248 WA RR EN N EIDIC H Binding in tertiary economies no longer “only” binds various aspects and points of view of the object, but rather the myriad of stories and relations that create its meaning today. Through the elaboration of a set of epistemologic trajectories, neoliberal cognitive capitalism creates fields of bound signifiers in the form of brand alliances that call out to the brain-mind of its subjects, producing synchronous discharges in the neurobiological architectures that are its correlates.47 In neoliberal cognitive capitalism, synchronous machinic assemblages of culturally bound abstract architectures tuned together as dispositions resonate with prescribed spontaneous autonomous neural excitations to form analoguously inscripted neural plastic facsimiles. A social group or culture can share these dispositions. This process may result in the formation of a people who share similar perceptual and cognitive ideas about the world. 47 Ibid., 238-239. The concept of synchronicity was born through the analysis of the dreams of physicist Wolfgang Pauli by Carl Jung. After analysis of over 400 dreams, Jung defined synchronicity as “the coincidence, in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same or similar meaning...” Synchronicity describes some striking and apparently inexplicable “meaningful coincidences” or “significantly related patterns of chance” when, for example, the contents of a dream are paralleled in a pattern seemingly unconnected to external events. In their use of the term, synchronicity corresponds to “‘a causal connecting principle’ as opposed to causality.” The neurophysiologic definition is somewhat more complex. First, it relates to a discrete temporal window determined by a neuron or a group of neurons. “This period can be defined by the time within which some trace of an earlier event by one input is retained, which then alters the response to a subsequent event to other inputs. ... The relevant temporal window for integration is the time within which a unitary postsynaptic potential, brought about by one input, decays back to baseline. Events that occur beyond this window are deemed non-synchronous, because the earlier event does not have any impact on the later response.” Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 249 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 249 Thus, intra-cerebral binding that occurs underneath the skull, within the boundaries of local maps, and those occurring throughout the brain as global maps can be “extended” beyond the brain/skull to engage as inter-cerebral binding in the social context. Thomas Metzinger, alluding to the work of Antonio Damasio, notes: We mentally represent ourselves as representational systems, in phenomenological real-time. This ability turned us into thinkers of thoughts and readers of minds, and it allowed biological evolution to explode into cultural evolution. The Ego is an extremely useful instrument-one that has helped us understand one another through empathy and mind reading. Finally, by allowing us to externalize our minds through cooperation and culture, the Ego, has enabled us to form complex societies.48 The epistemological apparatuses embedded in culture facilitate these conditions of mind-reading and other-mind knowledge. It is to these apparatuses that the contemporary sovereign directs its attention in the production of a unified people. 48 Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel, 67. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 250 250 WA RR EN N EIDIC H Warren Neidich, The Noologist’s Handbook, Ljubljana, 2011, C-print Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 251 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 251 Warren Neidich, The Noologist’s Handbook, Ljubljana, 2011, C-print Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 252 252 WA RR EN N EIDIC H Warren Neidich, The Noologist’s Handbook, Ljubljana, 2011, C-print Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 253 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 253 Warren Neidich, The Noologist’s Handbook, Ljubljana, 2011, C-print Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 254 WA RR EN N EIDIC H 254 Art Power: Resistance is Fertile Deleuze describes the brain as a relatively undifferentiated mass in which circuits aren’t there to begin with: for this reason, creating new circuits in art means creating them in the brain too. The cinema does more than create circuits, though, because, like a brain, it consists in a complexity of images, imbricated and folded into so many lobes, connected by so many circuits. While cinema can simply reiterate the facile circuits of the brain, appealing to arbitrary violence and feeble eroticism, it can also jump those old grooves, emancipating us from the typical image-rhythms… opening us to a thought that stands outside subjectivity.49 “Cultural Creatives”—in all their many forms as visual artists, poets, dancers, musicians, cinematographers, and so on—are able to play a role in the production of resistant cultural regimes. Such practices have important implications for thinking the mechanism through which the fruits of artistic labor might compete for the brain-mind’s attention, thereby leading to reactions and effects in the molding of the neural plastic potential. The power of art, in its most utopian sense, is to create or recognize externalities existing at the margins of cultural milieus, in order to release a cultural potential. Artists using their own materials, practices, histories, critiques, spaces, and apparatuses can create alternative distributions of sensibility —or redistributions of sensibility—that call out to different populations of neurons and neural maps, potentially producing different neurobiological architectures. Some examples are necessary to make this tangible. 49 Gregory Flaxman, The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 31. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 255 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 255 Think here for a moment about the relationship between Mozart’s Sonata for two Pianos in D Major—associated with producing the “Mozart effect” and that of noise, free music or improvisation. In 1993, Gordon Shaw and a graduate student, Frances Rausher, showed that listening to the first ten minutes of this composition produced an increased ability for spatialtemporal reasoning.50 He later states as a conclusion that the “symmetry operations that we are born with and that are enhanced through experience form the basis of higher brain function.” Finally, “[p]erhaps the cortex’s response to music is the Rosetta Stone for the code or internal language of higher brain function.”51 Even so, Shaw and company are forgetting an important consideration: we still don’t know how first audiences responded to this music. Maybe instead of music it initially sounded like noise. Perhaps the first audiences who listened to this work by Mozart responded in a similar way as audience responding to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony for the first time. As chronicled in Nikolas Slonimsky’s perversely wonderful Lexicon of Musical Invective, even the most comfortable and cherished staples of our current repertoire, including Brahms, Chopin, Debussy and Tchaikovsky, had been condemned by contemporary esthetes in the very same way. Even Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, now the most popular classical work of all, was damned as “odious meowing”—and not music— decades after its premiere.52 50 Gordon L. Shaw, Keeping Mozart in Mind (San Diego: Elsevier Academic Press, 2000), xxii. 51 Ibid., 108. 52 Guttmann, Peter, “The Sounds of Silence,” copyright 1999, http://www.classicalnotes.net/columns/silence.html. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 256 256 WA RR EN N EIDIC H Like those modernist observers discussed by Fredric Jameson, who experience the postmodern space of the Bonaventure Hotel 53 or the scandalous reception of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) in the exhibition Society of Independent Artists of the same year, earlier audiences listening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony for the first time had not developed the perceptual habits to understand and integrate its rhythms and melodies. These artworks were sublime, because they and beyond the cognitive capabilities of their neurobiologic apparatuses to make sense of them. But what does this have to say about noise or free music or improvisation? Rather than enlisting circuits already on hand or parasitizing already existing cerebral rhythms, noise and its bedfellows, both improvisation and free music, operate, in fact, through their attempt to delink themselves from these already present patterns, creating instead resistances and emancipatory gestures. Anthony Isles, quoting Edwin Prevost, focuses on the crucial condition of improvisation and free music with particular attention to leading jazz musicians such as Ornette Coleman. Examining how they come into being and how they are made, he notes that instead of practising a written score and matching it, “musicians train, developing their musical capacities through a process of ‘de-skilling’ and ‘re-skilling.’ What these musicians are developing ... [is] the ability and attention necessary to be able to respond to their co-players, to a situation and to an evolving musical time/space.”54 Each instrument plays its own score adapted to its own proclivities and idiosyncrasies. 53 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logics of Late Capitalism (Duke University Press Books, 1990), 38. 54 Anthony (2009), 19. Isles, “Introduction: Noise and Capitalism,” in Kritika 02 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 257 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 257 This idea of learning to pay attention to a set of gestures occurring in time, an anatomy of signs in a confined social space in which nothing is certain, produces ruptures and asynchronies. How different, however is the following quote to the views voiced by Gordon L. Shaw which we encountered above: “And this musical space relates to another musical time, freed from the score and freed from repetition, by neither having a set time nor tempo allotted, improvised music breaks with linear cumulative time and narrative historicization.”55 One might then ask how noise and improvisation become sensible? Referring to Csaba Toth in the same collection of texts, Isles refers to noise “as the other side of music and everything outside the discipline, literally encompass(ing) what hasn’t been discovered as music yet.”56 What was it like for an audience to first hear a John Cage performance 4’33”(1952)? 4’33” (pronounced “Four minutes, thirty-three seconds,” or, as the composer himself referred to it, “Four, thirty-three”) is a three-movement composition by American avant-garde composer John Cage (1912-1992). It was composed in 1952 for any instrument (or combination of instruments), and the score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece, that is, throughout the three movements. For those not familiar with this work, a description of its first performance by pianist David Tudor will lay the framework. First setting himself at the piano he then opened the keyboard lid and sat silently for thirty seconds. He then closed the lid once and then quickly reopened it. There he sat motionless for a full two minutes and twenty-three seconds. He then closed and opened the lid one more time, sitting silently for one minute and forty seconds. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 258 258 WA RR EN N EIDIC H Finally he closed the lid one final time and walked off the stage. One can find another version of the work on YouTube in which the piano is originally open and where Tudor rests a pocket watch on the lid of the piano to accurately monitor the time. Although commonly perceived as “four minutes thirty-three seconds of silence,” the piece actually consists of the ambient sounds of the environment that each listener hears while it is being performed and the continued sense of unease directly following. The piece pushes each of the listeners outside his or her presumed concert space to sample their own combination of ambient sounds. Noises such as a pencil dropping, the breathing and coughing of others, one’s own heartbeat as a result of one’s own intimidation, a baby’s cry all become the score of an internalized and individually created composition. More importantly, this work follows Cage’s more general investigation into time. By stripping the music of its musical score and laying bare its temporal underbelly, he conflates time. Time is stretched and without its musical bearing the audience’s appreciation of time is disrupted. As early as 1937 in his now famous essay “The Future of Music: Credo,” Cage laid out some important considerations of the reception of noise. “Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.” 57 Listening to a hardcore noise band in a venue like, for example, Staalplaat in Berlin’s Neukölln district or at Jabberjaw in Los Angeles is for some a revelation and for others a cacophony. For others still who are willing to linger there, a learning curve is embarked on as one’s initial fascination with a dissonant barrage of totally nonsensical sounds becomes understandable and indeed pleasurable. 57 John Cage, “The Future of Music: Credo,” Silence (Wesleyan University Press, 1961) 3. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 259 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 259 According to Gyorgy Buzsáki, “what makes music fundamentally different from (white noise) for the observer is that music has temporal patterns that are tuned to the brain’s ability to detect them because it is another brain that generates these patterns.”58 But noise as well as free music and improvisation are not sensible for everyone, even though another human brain has made it. For some, what is noise will always remain so. But for others a form of adaptation does seem to occur. Are there differences between people as to their underlying cerebral circuitry and the degree to which that circuitry is modifiable? We all know older people who are very open to new things and trends, and who like nothing better than to hang out with teenagers better than their own age group. Are these individuals part of a subpopulation who have a more supple and adaptive nervous system, one which thrives on the multiplicity of connections? Moreover, do these changing musical tastes imply more flexible dynamic organizations that, for instance, are linked to unabated neural plasticity that might accommodate dynamic reorganizations into later life? The appreciation, in its day, of noise and improvisation is at first localized for a limited and select population. Nonetheless, today this population has grown, with noise gaining wider recognition in mass music culture. Individuals pay money to see bands perform, visit the venues where such performances can be found, and buy and exchange CDs or MP3 audio by their favorite artists— even though noise music remains conspicuously absent on both popular mainstream radio stations and MTV. 58 Buzsáki, Rhythms of the Brain, 201. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 260 260 WA RR EN N EIDIC H Certain artists like John Wiese, in his recent album Circle Snare, are breaking this pattern and are adapting noise and mixing it with punk to engage mainstream audiences.59 Perhaps noise, more than simply being a form of resistant experience, coheres around a population of brains whose perceptual habits have been formed according to a different logic, one based on an immanent field of dissonant patterns that linger in the pluripotential cultural field as disjointed externalities orbiting small foci of meaning and that have yet to join the contemporary cultural Zeitgeist. Just as the brain uses miniscule portions of its temporal coding potential, culture’s similarly underutilized potentiality is also the reason of its continual experimentation at the margins of temporal experience. Perhaps those who are the vanguard and thus the first to appreciate noise music are a group of individuals who favor dissonant and distressed aesthetics, like those marching to a different drummer, who prefer to cross a grassy knoll diagonally rather than follow the man-made stone pathway. Or maybe our culture has itself tuned its pattern recognition capabilities towards the images and sounds of interactive medias, photographic-video hybrid apparatuses that create typologies of topologies of disconnected patterns produced by images of incomplete bodies appropriated by the fashion industry to capture a younger generation’s attention as they are assembled on billboards framing public spaces. Such patterns that are implicitly activated in, for example, the slow motion, uncoordinated falling of a recently checked hockey player-replayed over and over again on cable TV screens or monitors at sport bars—and, to offer a further example, in the particulate diffusion of spectacular light seen 59 Discussion Los Angeles. with Andrew Berardini at Café de Leche, Highland Park, Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 261 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 261 in the explosion of a building videotaped and which is then edited in Adobe After Affects CS6 as action, stop action, further repackaged as a QuickTime movie downloadedable on YouTube, a video-clip which can even be played in reverse! On the other hand, home video editing programs on laptops like Final Cut Pro and iMovie allow everyone and anyone to be a filmmaker. Everyone is an artist, since contemporary technologies have made once difficult skills easier to learn and widely available. Think for a moment of how the profession of photography has become democratized. I remember how difficult it once was with analogue cameras and films to document one’s installations especially in mixed light situations. Today, with the proper camera settings and software computer programs, great results are easily managed. Most radical filmmaking techniques and gestures, like the montaged effects found in such movies as Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Eye (1924), are commonplace motifs of MTV-type music videos made by amateurs and found on YouTube; they also appear into more corporate structures like the special effects and fast feed forward editing found on ESPN or the foregrounding of trucage and special effects in movies like Time Code (2000), in which the screen is divided in four so as to depict different stories unfolding simultaneously; or even in Inception (2010), in which special effects create the look and feel of video games. Special effects have overwhelmed other aspects of film and TV such as plot and character, driving viewers into movie theaters as the tremendous success of Avatar (2009) and Inception (2010) would suggest. These methodologies are directed towards a new generation of viewers who have incorporated the resulting new temporalities of the fast cut and reverse motion of the moving image into their cognitive regimes. In today’s image-based culture, knowledge of these grammars of image-regimes is essential for determining what’s new and in and cool. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 262 262 WA RR EN N EIDIC H In advertisements for products this is the new language of collage, where fast cut is indexical for youth culture. As such, it participates in the avant-garde of mass consumerism. What is most important here is the way that these images capture the attention of a specific generation of subjects whose brains have been sculpted by these novel cultural landscapes. Brains cultivated in semiocapitalistic environments are primed for what Paul Virilio has called phatic signifiers. In our present day world, these phatic signifiers have been bound together as branded networks of phatic signfiers which couple to similary bound global neural networks, those networks that are connected throughout the cerebral cortex to link to the brainstem pleasure centers, in the brain. In fact, these shared neurobiologic conditions produce the reification to produce our tastes, and these techniques of mass consumerism invent the new criteria by which to judge a new product. This knowledge is essential as it is neural selective or constructive and might even lead to a form of sexual selection. If you are hip to the new fashions, and perfumes, which are signified by these video styles, you may be more popular which in turn might lead to gaining increase status as well as an advantage in mate selection. If cool girls or guys with this same knowledge and taste is what you are after! Such cognitive regimes thus constitute what Pierre Bourdieu refers to as habitus: a unique synthesis of one’s genetic endowment, circumstances of birth and upbringing, and subjective experience of the social and cultural environment in which one has grown up. Are these then the new dynamic cultural signifiers determined by Hollywood and Madison Avenue as the attention attractors for a new generation? Perhaps it is an anaesthetics of decay and destabilization that is now drifting through a population of psychic vampires hungry for new forms of sensuality and entertainment but which in the end create new systems of neural networks that in their totally combinedal condition feedback on self-reflection itself and producing the new conditions for thought. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 263 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 263 Conclusion During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well. The fifth century with its great shifts of population, saw the birth of the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, and there developed not only an art different from that antiquity but also a new kind of perception… They did not attempt—and perhaps, saw no way—to show the social transformations expressed by these changes of perception. The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present. And if changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura, it is possible to show its social causes.60 The above quote goes to the very heart of the discussion explored here, which has ramifications for the production of subjectivity and its horrors. How does human sense perception change with humanity’s entire mode of existence? Is human sense perception and cognition linked to the changes occurring in social, political, psychological, spiritual, and economic relations which inflect themselves through aesthetic objects, non-objects, performances, spaces, non-spaces that together form the semio-linguistic and cultural landscape? 60 Benjamin, Illuminations, 222. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 264 264 WA RR EN N EIDIC H A landscape that embodies, we should note, those very material historical conditions that were responsible for its becoming, and that are then coupled to various material and immaterial neurobiological relations and their mental productions, like synaptic stabilizations and prunings as well as dynamic mappings, which effect the operations of our perceptual-cognitive apparatuses. If the fifth century with its great shifts of population produced the birth of the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, promoting not only an art different from that antiquity but also a new kind of perception, then what of our own epoch as it leaps through the hoops of modernist extensive linear productivity of the assembly line into a post post-modern condition of intensive networks and nonlinear anywhere any place on-time productivity of on-line prosuming and crowdsourcing? Antonio Negri sums this up in the following statement: We can no longer interpret these according to the classic labor theory of value that measures work according to the time employed in production. Cognitive work is not measurable in those terms: it is even characterized by its immensurability, its excess. A productive relation links cognitive work to the time of life. It is nourished by life as much as it modifies it in return and its products are those of freedom and imagination [...]. Of course, work still remains at the center of the entire process of production [...] but its definition cannot be reduced to a purely material or labor dimension. This constitutes the first element of the caesura between modern and the Postmodern.61 61 Antonio Negri, The Porcelain Workshop: For a New Grammar of Politics, trans. Noura Wedell (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2008) Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 265 NEUROPOWER : A RT IN THE A GE OF COGN ITIVE CA PITA LI SM 265 What kind of new perceptual capabilities might this caesura engender? Is it a mimetic condition that is analogically superimposable or a collage in which bits and pieces form a larger whole? Is the transition then a soft shift from one world picture or cinema to another? And the subjectivities that are as a result formed—do they follow suit? Is the changeover from one subjectivity to another smooth and consistent or are there fits and starts and spasm, schisms and general incommensurabilities—and is it in this gap of non-register that we discover the space for the evolution of physical and psychologic pathologies? For instance, did the conditions of the nineteenth century produce the great spasms of ideas that led to the invention of photography and cinema? Can they be linked to similar and analogous disruptions in the history of art found in Impressionism, Post-impressionsim and Constructivism? Were they both mirrors of changes in the brain of subjectivities that required new technologies and forms of representation to present the evolving conditions of brain, mind and world? One could also ask: how did changing conditions of laboring and the machinic intelligence which revolutionized the very conditions of attention feedback upon the web of possibilities to make the representation of the world and consciousness different? Certainly Benjamin intuited this when he wrote, “To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose ‘sense’ of the universal equality of ‘things’ has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.”62 62 Benjamin, Illuminations, 222. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 266 266 WA RR EN N EIDIC H That a form of fantastic and phantasmic thinking, whose habits have been formed in environments of mass reproduced images, has now taken over to to an unprecedented extent is evident from the fact that even real objects seem reproduced or are seen as aura-less. Therefore, one could also ask if analogous conditions to those of mass reproduction were taking place in other spheres of knowledge and great functional systems. One might then ask if the specifically nineteenth century psychopathologies like neuroaesthenia and hysteria were pathologic manifestations of similar tsunamis of mass reproduction as they occurred in the social, political, historical, spiritual, and sociologic fields. Importantly, new regimes of philosophy and mental treatments like psychoanalysis, conceived in this context, needed be invented to treat them. Government too heeded the call of these new conditions by utilizing, for instance, mass media as normalizing and homogenizing machines. Are the atrocities of the Second World War examples of mass reactions to this contemporary decay of the aura on a mass scale? Importantly, what might this say about our own time in our moment of extreme technological, social, cultural, and psychological shifting brought on by the revolution in informatics? I wager that new theoretical approaches, like for example the idea of neuropower—linked as it is to semiocapitalism and cognitive capitalism—may provide the epistemic apparatuses to engage with these questions to think them anew. Benjamin’s intuitions are just as true today as they were then: “The conditions for an analogous insight are more favorable in the present.”63 63 Ibid., 223. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 267 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 268 268 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 269 BIOG R AP HIES 269 JONATHAN BELLER is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and Director of the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute, and a current Fellow of the Barnard Center for Research on Women and Gender. His books include The Cinematic Mode of Production:Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, and Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle and the World-Media System. Beller’s current book projects include Present Senses: Aesthetic, Affect, Asia in the Global, and Wagers Within the Image. He is the editor of a issue of Scholar and Feminist Online entitled Feminist Media Theory: Iterations of Social Difference. FRANCO “BIFO” BERARDI is a contemporary writer, media-theorist and media-activist. He founded the magazine A/traverso (1975-1981) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976-1978). Berardi is the author of numerous books, including Cyberpunk, The Panther and the Rhizome, Politics of Mutation, Philosophy and Politics in the Twilight of Modernity, and The Factory of Unhappiness. He is currently collaborating on the magazine DeriveApprodi as well as teaching social history of communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan. ARNE DE BOEVER teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts, where he also directs the School’s MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics. He has published numerous articles on literature, film, and critical theory and is editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy. De Boever’s book States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel was published by Continuum. JODI DEAN is a Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is the author or editor of eleven books, including Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke, 2009) and The Communist Horizon (Verso, 2012). Dean is co-editor of the international journal, Theory and Event. v Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 270 270 BIOG RAPHIES WARREN NEIDICH is an artist and writer who works between Berlin and Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited internationally. Selected exhibition venues include: Museum Ludwig, MOMA PS1, Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, ICA London, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California Museum of Photography, Riverside and MAK,Vienna. His recent awards include: American University Cairo, Cairo, Egypt, 2013, The Murray and Vickie Pepper Distinguished Visiting Artist and Scholar Award, Pitzer College, 2012, The Fulbright Scholar Program Fellowship, Fine Arts Category, Faculty of Fine Arts University “Ss. Cyril and Methodius” – Skopje 2011 and the Vilém Flusser Theory Award, Berlin, 2010. Monographs and books include: American History Reinvented, Aperture, 1989; Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain, DAP, 2002; Earthling, Pointed Leaf Press, 2006; Lost Between the Extensivity-Intensivity Exchange, Onomatopee, 2009 and Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noo politics, 010 Publishers, 2011. PATRICIA PISTERS is professor of film studies and chair of the department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam. She is editor of Necsus: European journal of Media Studies. Her recent publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford University Press, 2003) and Mind the Screen (with J. Kooijman and W. Strauven, Amsterdam University Press, 2008). Her latest book is The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford University Press, 2012). For more info, please consult her website at www.patriciapisters.com JASON SMITH is Assistant Professor in the Graduate Art Department at Art Center College of Design (Pasadena). He writes on contemporary philosophy, politics and art, and has published work in Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Parrhesia, and Radical Philosophy, among other places. Smith co-edited and introduced, with Hasana Sharp, Between Hegel and Spinoza (Continuum, 2012) and recently published, with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philip Armstrong, Politique et au-delà (Galilée, 2010). His translation of and introduction to Alain Badiou’s and Élisabeth Roudinesco’s Lacan, Past Present will be published by Columbia University Press in 2013. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 271 BIOG R AP HIES 271 TIZIANA TERRANOVA is Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communications at the Università di Napoli L’Orientale. She is the author of Network Culture (Pluto Press, 2004), a member of the free university network Uninomade and associate editor of the journal Theory, Culture and Society. BRUCE WEXLER is a Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscientist at Yale University. He was a NIH Career Research Scientist and recently was awarded a “transformative research” award for potentially paradigm changing medical research from the Director of the National Institute of Health. Wexler’s research aims to harness neuroplasticity through computerized brain exercises and physical exercises to treat cognitive deficits associated with illnesses. More recently, he and Dr. Jinxia Dong, former national gymnast and now Professor of Sports Science at Peking University, developed an integrated program of brain and body exercises to promote cognitive development in children. The program is used in New York City and Connecticut schools. Wexler has published more than 100 scientific papers. Based on ideas in his book Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology and Social Change (MIT Press, 2006), he and Ambassador Andrew Young co-founded the non-profit organization A Different Future to reclaim the public idea space from extremists by amplifying the voices of moderates in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. As a consultant for the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, Wexler is conducting a U.S. State Department-funded study of how the “other” is portrayed in Israeli and Palestinian school books. Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 272 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 273 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 274 We would like to acknowledge California Institute of the Arts, The Goethe House, Los Angeles, The West Hollywood Public Library and the Office of Aesthetic Occupation for their support in the production of the first Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism conference held in Los Angeles (November 10th-11th, 2012). Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 275 Book small final.e$S_book 6/24/13 10:25 PM Pagina 276 FORTH COMING TIT LES In the same series The second volume of the series will be released in 2013 and will collect the papers that were presented during the second part of the conference. Edited by Warren Neidich Authors: Armen Avanessian Ina Blom Pascal Gielen Deborah Hauptmann Tom Holert Abdul-Karim Mustapha Sanford Kwinter Maurizio Lazzarato Karl Lydén Yann Moulier Boutang Matteo Pasquinelli Alexei Penzin Sarah Rifky John Roberts Hito Steyerl Wassilis Tsianos Liss C. Werner Charles T. Wolfe and others More information on the website www.archivebooks.org NEW SERIES Book small final_book 6/15/13 9:06 AM Pagina 2 Book small final_cover new 6/15/13 9:19 AM Pagina 1 This book collects the papers that were presented at “The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part One” conference in Los Angeles in November 2012. The conference brought together an international array of philosophers, critical theorists, media theorists, art historians, architects, and artists to discuss the state of the mind and the brain under the conditions of cognitive capitalism, in which they have become the new focus of laboring. How have emancipatory politics, art and architecture, and education been redefined by semiocapitalism? What might be the lasting, material ramifications of semiocapitalism on the mind and the brain? 1 The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part One is part of a series that will pursue these and other questions. What is the future of the mind under cognitive capitalism? Can a term such as plastic materialism describe the substantive changes in neural architectures instigated by a contingent cultural habitus? What about the unconscious under these conditions? How might it be modified, mutated, and modulated by the evolving conditions of global attention? Is there such a thing as cognitive communism, and what might be its distinctive pathologies? How does artistic research—the methods and practices of artistic production and the knowledge they produce—create new emancipatory possibilities in opposition to the overwhelming instrumentalization of the general intellect under semiocapitalism? Edited by Arne De Boever and Warren Neidich JONATHAN BELLER FRANCO “BIFO” BERARDI ARNE DE BOEVER JODI DEAN WARREN NEIDICH PATRICIA PISTERS JASON SMITH TIZIANA TERRANOVA BRUCE WEXLER ARNE DE BOEVER is Assistant Professor of American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. He is the author of States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel and Narrative Care. WARREN NEIDICH is an artist and writer who works in multiple media. He is currently a research fellow at the Delft School of Design, TU Delft School of Architecture. ISBN 978-3-943620-04-7 15.00 EUROS 9 783943 620047 A B ARCHIVE BOOKS