Cover of Lost Between the Extenisity-Intensivity Exchange

In the publication Lost Between the Extensivity-Intensivity Exchange published in 2008 by Onomatopee I brought forth the notion, through diagramatic and textual displays, that the inauguration of the 21st century could be described as a time of cultural torpor resulting from free floating anxiety, ambivalence, and wavering. The causes for this condition were many, but two stood out. First and foremost was the condition, suggested by the title, that of being lost in the ‘in-between zone’ of extensive and intensive labor and two evolving partially incommensurable world views, the local (tribal) and global (cosmopolitan) or the nation-state and the Earthling, merged. Superimposed upon this unstable frame of reference was, and still is, the disparity in epistemology encountered by the subject in the urban designed space of the city and its rural counterpart, although this difference is being quickly eroded away with the advent of fast connection internet and cheap hand-held browsing devices. Could the gridlock in the American Congress and David Cameron’s recent veto against the European Community be a result of this ensuing torpor, representing a clash between those of us who want to embrace a world view and those of us who want to recede into smaller more homogenous communities characteristic of the past? The question then needs to be reframed as: is this appropriate in today’s world that requires solutions to global issues like global warming, workers’ rights, and international terrorism? How, on one hand do we preserve local cultures and practices from global homogenization, while at the same time giving people all over the world the benefits of a global society like antibiotics, education for woman, and better sanitation – just to name a few. How do we soothe the needs of those who require familiarity and constancy with the requirements of those who want to move forward into cosmopolitanism or the idea of the ‘world citizen’?

Warren Neidich, Respekt, London, 100x 50 cm, Type C-print, 2005, (From: Earthling Series, 2004-2007)

It is to these conditions that I would like to direct this essay in the hope of finding a way out of this languor by creating a more productive rhetoric, a trans-thinking vocabulary that does not heed the restrictions of a language rooted either in the humanities or the sciences but a mixture of the two. By trans-thinking I want to address a state of mind that is free floating and unencumbered by contrived barriers constructed in thought itself. As will be argued shortly, we are moving out of a condition of strict neoliberalism; a ‘cognitive turn’ has taken place. Ideas around the brain and mind are playing more and more of a role in investment strategy and political policy. Anyone regularly reading the New York Times will be impressed by the frequency and range of articles concerning mind and brain recently published. In the month of December alone, eleven articles have been published. These articles have ranged from advice on how exercise benefits the brain, to a critique of the limits of neuroscience when researching works of art to a bevy of articles concerning traumatic injuries to the head in ice hockey and soccer.

With the advent of the Internet and the explosion of images created by new media, issues of attention have also become more and more important and with it, maladies like Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) due to the lack of the ability to focus. In our attention economy, in order to be an adequate consumer, you need your skills of attention to be at their peak. Lack of or easily disrupted attention in the 21st century is a disability that needs to be treated, and the pharmaceutical companies have been all too happy to invent a pharmaceutical menagerie to do so. ADD as well as Depression, according to Franco Berardi, are part and parcel of a whole host of disabilities particular to our time. (1) “The other side of the new economy is naturally the use of psycho-stimulant or anti-depressive substances…How many, among new economy operators, survive without Prozac, Zoloft or even cocaine…When economic competition is the dominant psychological imperative of the social consortium, we can be positive that the condition for mass depression will be produced. This is in fact happening under our eyes.” (2) It is here upon this playing field that a new ethics must be formed and refusing a lexicon of humanism or science just won’t do. Furthermore, the idea of free market unencumbered by political restrictions and decisions is an idea that has no merit today, for cognitive capitalism is focused on the new territory of the mind and brain, specifically its decision-making processes which skews any reference to free choice which neo-liberalism requires. Consumer neuroscience itself is a wild card in the hand of neo-liberalism. (3)These issues would seem to be a far cry from any discussion of artist residencies. But artist residency programs are, in fact, the perfect site in which to explore a variety of arguments concerning notions of tribalism vs. cosmopolitanism; extensive and intensive labor; the representation of the other in a world of mass immigration and transnationalism; and free choice in neo-liberalism. By their very nature artist residency programs are forms of temporary settlements in a worldwide nomadic movement of peoples and ideas, and as a result, they embody notions of cultural contamination and semiocapitalism. ‘The rise of post-Fordist modes of production, which I will call Semiocapitalism, takes the mind, language and creativity as its primary tools for the production of value.’ (4) Just as Gilles Deleuze had to create a different language to redefine Michel Foucault’s ideas of ‘the disciplinary society’ with his term the ‘society of control’, today we need to redefine other concepts, such as the artist-in-residence, to make them relevant in contemporary discourse. (5)

Warren Neidich

Each epoch, driven by novel sets of immaterial social, political, psychological, and spiritual relations, must devise new linguistic modifications to capture the essences of these mutated cultural environments, so too must we understand that the artist-inresidence operates in a very different discursive field today than it did, say, in the late 19th century and early 20th century when patrons of the arts created the Corporation of Yaddo. In our moment of a network transnational society, other cultures with other languages and other ideas become essential to the production of a complex point-of-view that has the potential to produce complex brains. I want to show how the artist-inresidence might play a role in this, first by concentrating the cultural capital of the other and secondly by activating this ‘otherness’ with the marginal and dissociative apparatuses of aesthetic production. I want to invoke it as a place where the power of art might flex its muscle.

The essay is divided up into a number of sections. Section 1, entitled The building without a program or how the physical condition of the space of the residency might be mutated, sketches out the potential of the residency as a cultural modifier acting to release its innate plasticity, potentiality in reserve. Utilizing the idea invented by Deleuze of the ‘body without organs’ as a metaphor, the residency is likened to a body that is no longer subjected to the despotism of the a priori genetic plan and is released to express another side of itself. For instance, surrealism and its instigator Freudian psychoanalysis were understood as tools in the elaboration of a new organization of the cultural landscape in early modernism. As such, this essay outlines the ways in which it, through the rules of its practices, mutated the complex contingencies of the aesthetic-cultural landscape of its time. Thus, it elicited alternative reactions from the brain’s attention centers, creating, in response, elaborate changes in the materiality of the neurobiological substrate that might be registered as memory architectures. These restructurings and neural modulations are then shown to have resonance for a model of sculpting of the phantasmagoric relations of the phantom limb and its phenomena of remapping. This plasticity metaphor, in this case cultural plasticity, is also utilized to understand architecture as a malleable space in which the regulation of social and intellectual flows that determine a residency, could be unlocked to affect and mold the surrounding cultural landscape in which it is embedded, with the potential to produce novel circuits in the brain/mind complex that make sense of it. Section 2 Cultural Pluripotentiality and Neuroplasticity: Parallelactic Continuity and Discontinuity further develops this idea. Cultural pluripotentiality refers to the relation of the dominant culture to the minority cultures that orbit around and through it. Healthy cultures are continually in flux. Metaphorically speaking they are a multiplicity of instructional and informational resonances vibrating at different frequencies that are tethered together in time as a meshwork or network phenomena. The sum total of these significations gives rise to that culture’s identity and quality. Whether you are looking at the micro-cultural context of
the tribe, clan or nation-state, or molar condition of the transnational empire, one cultural referendum usually predominates. This dominant culture controls the center of the network of relations and is thus involved in dominating that portion of the network’s activity, as all of its resonances eventually move through the center. At the margins this is less true. Although the dominant culture controls the character, principles and general intelligence of a particular tribe, nation state or transnational entity under moments of destabilization due to war, natural disasters, economic downfall or extreme paradigm shift, the network’s disposition might change. In this moment, the marginal culture might have the chance to express itself more intensely. For instance, these moments of destabilization might de-center the network making what was peripheral and marginal more central. I think this is what happened after Catherine David’s, Documenta X and Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta XI as together, one could argue, they were partly responsible for the cultural turn in art history. This process of destabilization and restabilization as something else is essential for the concept of cultural pluripotentiality as a form of cultural plasticity that constitutes a culture resiliency in times of change by allowing for the establishment of different intensities. In this moment of cognitive capitalism – delineated by immaterial labor and new forms of distributed general and machinic intelligence – the redistribution of the network’s capacity and the rearrangement of its immanent nodal identity is more important than ever. This cultural pluripotentiality is coupled to the conditions of the brain’s neural plasticity. As such, this cultural-neurobiologic plasticity complex, as I would like to call it, provides a mechanism for continued natural selection and survival.

Section 3, entitled Neurobiopolitics: The Mind’s Eye as a Place of Political and Social Contention, explores the notion of biopolitics of the mind. Biopower, as defined by Michel Foucault, constitutes the methods through which sovereignty constitutes docile and productive bodies and organizes life through the modulations of affect, for example, pleasure. (6) In cognitive capitalism, the brain and mind are the focus of sovereignty’s
desire to normalize the subject’s gnostic potential in order to produce a ‘like minded’ people. This constitutes one of the conditions of neurobiopolitics. When neurobiopolitics focuses specifically on the neural plastic potential of the brain especially in the frontal lobes where it is most abundant, the term ‘neuropower’ is used. In tertiary economies it has been argued by the likes of Poalo Virno that the virtuouso performance leaves no trace. (7) It does not produce any material product. Through my project The Noologist’s Handbook (2008-2011), I argue that in late capitalism a trace is, in fact, left in the form of complex memory structures in the mind’s eye. Secondly I argue that this space of the mind’s eye is one of political contention and political determination. I then explain how a ‘residency without walls’ adapts to the rubric of the early 21st century and embraces this idea of the immaterialization of architecture as a mechanism by which to unhinge regimes of oppression that attempt to debilitate it as a cultural and neurobiological modifier. In Section 4, The Cultural Capitalism/Cognitive Capitalism Ratio and its Relation to Cerebral Complexity, I define my concept of the Cultural Capitalism / Cognitive Capitalism Ratio and tether it to cultural complexity. As opposed to the usual definition of cultural capitalism proposed by Pierre Bourdieu, in which cultural capital refers to those factors that include the cultural habits and dispositions inherited from the family and which are fundamentally important for a child’s success in school and therefore society, I put forth an alternative position in which cultural capital is seen as the degree to which artistic practices create other resistant possibilities for the mind by neural modulation. (8) I would like to expand Bourdieu’s position because it is not broad enough and does little to examine the emancipating aspects of cultural capital. I am extending it to include the idea that these same resources form the fundamental epistemological context that later inform the practices of those children that become artists and architects. This specialized knowledge becomes the fundamental platform though which they produce novel intellectual products and discourses, especially in the cognitive regime, to interact with those conditions of cognitive capitalism in order to mutate them. Beyond the definitions of cognitive capital currently circulating in the public’s eye as espoused by a group of Italian political philosophers such as Maurizio Lazzarato, Matteo Pasquinelli, Titziana Terranova and Christian Marrazzi, I would like to
add the following: cognitive capitalism refers to a recent accentuation of an ongoing historical process in which the territory of the mind and brain is the focus of capital investment. Most importantly, cognitive capital organizes its apparatuses of power upon the brain’s neuroplasticity in the hope of producing a future passive and normalized human being. This, as we saw above, is called neuropower and will be elucidated later. I then proceed to explain what I call the ‘Cultural Capital/Cognitive Capital Ratio’, where a high ratio delineates an open society whilst a small value connotes a repressive one. In the following section called Further Elucidation of the Cultural Capital / Cognitive Capital Ratio and Neuromodulation, I investigate how this ratio could serve as indices for predicting how the neuroplasticity of the neural tissue is sculpted and modulated within specific political cultural environments. After a detailed discussion of neuroplasticity and its relation to epigenesis, I go on to discuss its link to cultural production. In this respect I tether this ratio to the concept of complexity both in culture and in the brain. The coupling of cultural complexity to what is referred to as degeneracy forms the final discussion in this section. Cultural complex environments that embrace high levels of cultural capital produce degenerate networks in the brain that give that brain a greater capacity to think creatively and improvisationally.

Excerpt

“I am proposing the notion that we are here in the presence of something like a mutation in built space itself. My implication is that we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution: there has been a mutation in the object unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject. We do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace, as I will call it, in part because our perceptual habits were formed in that older kind of space I have called the space of high modernism…The newer architecture therefore – like other cultural products I have evoked in the proceeding remarks – stands as something like an imperative to grow new organs, to expand our sensorium”.

Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson.

The question that Jameson poses in the above quotation is the question I would like to take up in reference to the question of curating as an act of cross-generational reiteration. I would like to consider anew the impulse to re-enact the archive in the present moment of our event culture, where performance and labor are quickly becoming indistinguishable. I want to understand this in reference to ontogeny; as a culturally inflected development of the human organism. Finally I want to look at how destructive impulses, as they are utilized in art and curatorial practices, create new languages for those practices and, as a result, the imagination. The power of art will ultimately be understood as neuro-modulatory.

A.

«The diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe, but it is also a germ of order or rhythm. It is a violent chaos in relation to the figurative givens, but it is a germ of rhythm in relation to the new order of the painting. As Bacon says, it “unlocks areas of sensation”.»

Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Gilles Deleuze

«The diagram or abstract machine is the map of relations between forces, a map of destiny, or intensity, which proceeds by primary non-localizable relation and at every moment passes through every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another.»

Foucault, Gilles Deleuze

What has happened since 1964, when Study for an Exhibition of Violence in Contemporary Art was first curated by Roland Penrose, and today in 2011 as it is ‘rendered’ again, first at the David Roberts Art Foundation, London and now reassembled again as Studies For a  Catalogue – A Study for an exhibition of Violence in Contemporary Art (Reprise 1964/2011) at Flat Time House, London? For one thing, the curator and many of the artists in the new publication have been born. Not an insignificant fact. A new generation of subjects has has been produced, no longer bound to the logics of modernism, but who have instead formed their habits of perception in the fluid, dynamic, non-linear, networked world of the post-modern, or whatever you want to call it. A new generation has emerged who have substituted the chart and the list, with its hierarchical structure, for the diagram, in which layers of intensity in flux are superimposed; whose perceptual habits, continuing with reference to Jameson’s above quote, have been reconfigured through active engagement and the event rather than passivity and stasis.

Plastic sociological, political, spiritual, economic and historical relations, as they interact with and are embodied by these novel cultural equivalences are spat out as architecture, painting, sculpture, installation and performance. In the end these changes affect the visual, auditory, haptic and kinesthetic topography of the cultural habitus, its distributions and, as a result, its subjectivities, especially the brains and minds, which operate inside them.

In this expanded field of distributed networks, time and space are reconfigured, reappraised and reconnected according to evolving, variable intensities, resulting in hubs and energy sinks that couple to our reflection and attention. These then produce the urgency alluded to by Jameson; changes that create the imperative to grow new organs of perception and provide the pressures, according to present day neuroscience, to sculpt the neurobiological substrate and architecture, giving it new potential to perceive and cognate the formally sublime space of post-modernism. How this might happen neurobiologically is beyond the scope of this essay, but for those interested I refer them to my recent essay «From Noopower to Neuropower: How Mind Becomes Matter» contained in the volume Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noo-Politics, edited by myself and Deborah Hauptmann, 010 Press, Rotterdam, 2011.

B.

Space, its topographies and topologies, holds inside itself real material conditions but also possibilities. In cultural terms its ability to be described at any time is a product of known and unknown factors that together contribute to its inherent pluri-potentiality. The word pluri-potentiality, as its roots imply, signifies many or several meanings or possibilities that still remain latent, awaiting the proper set of cultural circumstances in which to become real or instantiated. I am using this expression to delineate the conditions of space, both expressed and unexpressed, that are articulated by a particular context and that are coupled to similar but different relations existing inside the subject who operates in that space. The brain, by its virtue to adapt to constantly evolving habitats, is also pluri-potent and its power resides in its ability to change to fit the social, political, economic, historical and cultural conditions it is born into and in which it must operate.

The brain of humans, especially the outer shell called the cerebral cortex, contains an excess of pluri-potentiality at birth referred to as neuroplasticity. The brain has the potential, for instance, to learn any of the 6,700 languages presently existing on this earth, although each of us learns just a few. But the potential is there, especially for the child, to learn any of them. Concepts themselves are pluri-potent, responding to the mutating linguistic and cultural milieu over time, resulting in new surfaces presented to our understanding. Even the white cube, with its anonymity and starkness, holds infinite possibilities to become. Many artistic interventions have attacked its surface and attempted to destroy it in order to reconfigure it and, as a result, provide new surfaces, some of them rough and contorted, in order to make new statements about the condition of art and its container. Liz Larner’s, Corner Basher, 1988 performed at 303 Gallery in New York comes to mind.

C.

The history of exhibitions is a history of the traces of that mind in a state of becoming. Is this, in fact, the story of A Study for an Exhibition of Violence in Contemporary Art, an exhibition that has been reconstituted at different times and in different spaces, continually shifting its presentation to fit its specific context? That history is reflected as cultural memory in relation to the facts of this roving nomadic exhibition: the ICA, David Roberts Art Foundation and Flat Time House present different discursive contexts and problematics through which the exhibition can be redefined. First, at the ICA, the exhibition was categorized into different frames of reference using panels, like one might do for a card catalogue in a library. Linearly distributed, they followed  the course of the ICA’ s interior architecture and they were each labeled, from one to thirty. One might have experienced this exhibition as one might read a book, page by page. As each page is turned, new content unveils itself to the eyes, body and mind, arranged as a narrative displaying different categories of violence and destruction.

For instance, Panel 1 concerns itself with introductory remarks and is illustrated by reproductions of Van Gogh’s Willows at Sunset, 1888, and Pablo Picasso’s Woman and Dead Child, 1937. (Few actual works of art were included in the original installation at the ICA, most were represented in photographic reproduction. These works of art illustrated the categories used. I will not recite the full list of works, as I am more interested in the arrangement of topics.) Panel 2 sets the stage for ‘Violence Observed: Nature’ which is divided into Panel 2, ‘Landscape’, and Panel 3, ‘Animals’. Panel 4 is the beginning of ‘Violence Observed: Human Behavior’ and is subcategorized into ‘Sex’ and ‘Sport’. The next panels continue this category: Panel 5, ‘War’, Panel 6, ‘Fighting’, ‘Murder’ and ‘Torture’, Panel 7, ‘Suicide’, ‘Hysteria’ and ‘Madness’, Panel 8, ‘Anguish’ and ‘Anger’ and Panel 9, ‘Birth’ and ‘Death’. At Panel 10 the exhibition takes another turn with ‘Violence Imagined: Symbolic Violence’. It is made up of ‘Religion’ and ‘Myth’ and continued in Panel 11 with more about myth. Panels 12, 13 and 14 follow with the categories of ‘Dreams’, ‘Sex’, ‘Obsessions’ and ‘Signs’. At Panel 15 another abrupt switch is made under the grand category ‘Creative Violence: New Styles- New Conceptions’. These panels read as a history of art in the twentieth century. Panel 15, ‘Colour: Fauves’, Panel 16, ‘Significant Distortion’, ‘Expressionism’, Panel 17, ‘Movement: Futurism’ and, ‘Optical’, and finally Panel 18 and 19, ‘Irrational: Surrealism’ and Panel 20, ‘Exuberance’. Panel 21 introduces another category ‘Violence as a Weapon’ with the subcategory ‘Anti-society’ followed by Panel 22, ‘Anti- Religion’, Panel 23, ‘Anti-Art Dada’, Panel 24, ‘Anti-War’, Panel 25, ‘Anarchy’, Panel 26, ‘Polemical’, and finally Panel 27 ‘Irony and Humour’. ‘Direct Expression’ is the final major heading and includes Panel 28, 29 and 30 under the subcategory, ‘Action’.

The works of art that are subsumed by these categories act as forms of proof for the suppositions provided by their respective panel headings. They are rigorously incarcerated by the discursive logistics of the overall plan that controls their spatial coordinates and restricts their pluri-potentiality. They are physically contained by their designated panel assignments, unable to jump beyond their physical and metaphysical confines into another category or to fill in at another location. Of course, each painting could be used to reference many different topics, but in this arrangement they are allowed just one. One is reminded here of the conditions of Michel Foucault’s term ‘disciplinary society’ in which architecture itself becomes biopolitical. The installation affects the minds that regard it, instituting hierarchies with which to form basic understandings.

D.

My purpose here is not to recount the content of the catalogue of the exhibition, you can go online for that, but rather to make two important points that relate to my original conjecture. That, in fact, the mind formed inside modernism finds the post-modern space sublime. The corollary being that the mind formed in Post-Modernism is characterized by habits of perception and cognition that refer to alternate forms of neurobiological distributions which provide it with the ability to understand these sublime spaces. These alternative, materialized dispositions also have the potential to create new forms of cultural materialization. I am arguing that the brain/mind of Mathieu Copeland is, beyond its individual character, sculpted according to the logics of his generation. He is a standin for his generation, who share common neurobiological materializations in the form of  memories, coded and summated as the activity of millions of synaptic switchings. As such, he is an agent for the production of cultural forms that instantiate those generational proclivities, for example, the post-modern. I argue that his brain/mind is sculpted very differently than that of his predecessor, Roland Penrose, whose brain was sculpted in the space and time conditions of modernism; indeed, that the different epochal, culturally derived habits of perception and cognition lead to very different installation formats, produced for very different generational audiences accustomed to varying readings of space and time.

The mind of Roland Penrose that decided the order of the original content of the ICA exhibition and administered its design, was attempting to make sense of a bevy of existing original materials, randomly distributed over time and topics, that dealt in a haphazard fashion with the idea of destruction and violence in art. I quote from his preface from the show, “Violence is an elemental force which can not be neglected and the arts have traditionally claimed their share of the emotional excitement it provides. Martyrs, battles, catastrophes, murders and rapes have been the motif for colouring many masterpieces with blood. It flows as freely in the ritualism of Italian Primitives as in the realism of Goya, Gericault and Delacroix.» By using an outline or chapter heading form of classification he was hoping to produce a taxonomy, or natural history, of violence in art, to use an expression found in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, in hopes of removing the hitherto obfuscation that surrounded the topic. The cataloguing of forms of violent expression as they appear in the arts was the first impulse to arrange this information. It was followed by a second-order rearrangement, within the catalogue, with its different rules of formatting. (Don’t forget there were no InDesign programs at this time.) The secondorder rearrangement, or meta-arrangement, I would suggest is a second order cataloguing or re-cataloguing. This manifestation, as it existed formally as text choreographed and styled on printed page, was entombed in the ICA archive at the Tate in London until the curator plucked it from its shelf and gave it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

The act of exhuming this content, buried deep and for so long, allows us to understand the power of this original, classical model for creativity; one that lit the way for the Enlightenment, but which now seems antiquated and anachronistic. Even within its hierarchical constraints, the possibility emerges for ‘Creative Violence’ to produce ‘New Styles – New Conceptions’. It is here that violence acts as a generative force, breaking up that which is known and understood into a thousand pieces, in order to be reassembled in a new construction of the known in order to create a new territory of the unknown. This is a continuous cyclical phenomenon. Violence, and its cohort destruction, punch holes in institutional logics in order to create new territories for the imagination to operate within. Are these methodologies of destruction a key to understanding the formal adaptations necessary to make the contents of the catalogue real again? Will violent curatorial methodologies be necessary to exhume the catalogue and re-enact it in a revitalized threedimensional space, inhabited not by dust particles and the faintest of light, but by living, breathing human beings rummaging through scopic regimes and haptic kinesthetic logistics of the 21st century? A public used to watching fast editing on Music Television Videos, reverse action replays on sports television, and distressed photographs that portray partial body parts with their need for assumptive pattern recognition. A new public and viewership privy to new forms of viewing, who witness the simulacra of the work deposited anew, almost sixty years later, in the pluri-potential white cube structure of the David Roberts Art Foundation.

E.

But the story does not end here. For, as a witness of the exhibition installation downstairs at the David Roberts Art Foundation and a futuristic voyeur of the installation at Flat Time House, what becomes quite apparent is that the modulated context has pressured the installation to emerge as something quite different.

When one reviews the documentation from the David Roberts Art Foundation, what is evident is that the curator has thrown off his cloak as a disinterested observer attempting to clear away the detritus of unmeaning in order to rehabilitate a common understanding. Instead, following in the footsteps of the great Harald Szeemann, he has become an artist himself. Or, should I say, he has gone native. He has contaminated the original presentation at the ICA by reneging on its original cataloguing and refutes the linear, extensive, arboreal logic of his predecessor(s), instead reinstituting the logic of the salon as diagram or rhizome. Images are assembled as they might be on an i-photo library source page or, even better yet, a Final Cut Pro browser window displaying its clips.

At the David Roberts Art Foundation there was a nod to the original catalogue, but it was almost invisible, especially for those not privy to the original installation format. The topic headings were still there but were less obvious, not inscribing an entire panel but inserted into a stream of similarly processed information. Photocopies hung on the wall, one subdivision followed immediately by the next, blurring the boundaries between each. What was more apparent and attention grabbing were the incongruities created by the original works, borrowed from the David Roberts Collection and hung on the wall, which stuck out like gorgeous sore thumbs. Instead of flat photocopies these works were uncharacteristically large and either framed or resting on pedestals, causing the eye to change its course rather spastically. They made the whole installation unbalanced and odd. They broke up the original, ordered rhythms and created jumping-off points for the eye, which was averted from its normal path, as well as creating junctions for the dissemination of information between now coalescing information streams.

Take for instance the framed Lichtenstein work entitled Brushstroke, 1965, which butted against both Bridget Riley’s Fragment 1, 1965, on its left and a photocopy of Ben Shawn’s Sacco and Venzetti, 1931-1932, on its right. The Lichtenstein stretches from panel 20, ‘Exuberance’ where the work resides, all the way to Panel 17, ‘Optical’, where the Riley sustains itself, and finally connects the whole ‘inter-panel complex’ to Panel 21 where the Shawn lays waiting, ready to proclaim ‘Violence’. Of note is that the Bridget Riley was a substitution for ‘Disfigured Circle’, 1965, which was not in the collection, whilst Fragment 1, 1965, was. This kind of substitution occurred, according to Copeland, 10-15 times. Inter-panel complexes dot the surface of the wall. They are the essential entity that makes inter-panel readings and communications possible. They are the dispositifs of the exhibition and demand a post-modern reading, with its call for distributed information and networking rather than that which was originally allowed for under the strict rationality of high modernism. The display set up here was somewhat analogous to words and images displayed on computer screens with hypertext that allow the viewer to jump fields of attention from one webpage to another. Hubs of interest, where intense flows of information congregate and upon which the observers’ eyes rest in order to resample continuities based on personal biases rather then institutional prerogatives. This microdistribution of the sensible, the arrangement of the images in the gallery and the political conditions that this aesthetic presentation implies, has been mutated according to the logics of the information society with its web designs, computer games, internet and online  discussions. (I am not implying by this reference to technology that technology is the most important force for near-modulation. I am actually saying that the changing conditions of the neurobiological architecture give the mind new forms of mechanic intelligence with which to think and that, in fact, new technologies are the result of that imaginative thinking. New technologies are produced in order to give the mind a new means to reflect upon itself in order for it to understand the new evolving self-condition.) The installation of the works mimicked these conditions, giving them a renewed freshness, at the same time alluding to the revivified productive labor of the cultural worker whose mind has been selected by these new contingencies. The apparatus of the exhibition is the mimic of the conditions of the epistemological reframings caused by modulated neurobiological apparatus and architectures of the brain molded in the information age.

F.

Space is defined not only by its material basis, its walls, windows and ceilings, but as well by the discussions that ensue about it. Buildings and the spaces they hold, as Patrick Schumacher has intoned, have become discursive events. As such, buildings become part of linguistic performances. In tertiary economies, according to Paolo Virno in The Grammar of the Multitude, in which performance and labor become indistinguishable, immaterial linguistic events that leave no traces are the new contingencies for the formation of capital. ‘Gossip networking sites’ like Facebook attest to this. I am arguing however that these new linguistic forms do have a material presence; that they inscribe messages of sorts upon the wet, mutable pluri-potentiality of the brains and minds of the audience, gathered to view the performance. (http://www.artbrain.org/) As we move towards Neo Global Cognitive Capitalism with new technologies at hand, like software agents and social network sites, like never before it is the mind and brain which constitute the new territory for dominating strategies of international capitalism. This power to inscribe upon the masses perceptual and cognitive habits is not new. Benjamin was hip to these possibilities and in his Work of Art essay he describes how works of art in the hands of the Third Reich were used to produce an ‘organic community’ (the German People or nation) as a work of art itself.

The exhibition, like the architecture, visual art and film mentioned above, is also a mirror to self-reflect upon the conditions of the changing relations of the epochal generationally sculpted neurobiological mindedness. This in itself provides for the potential for political expression. Most importantly, in the context of this text, the act of exhibition production is always in one way or another a political act.

G.

“This is why this return of what is never simply itself. What returns is the movement through which something other is inscribed within the same, which, now no longer then the same, names what is always other than itself.” Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser.

The history of curating is a history of the reading of the mutating conditions of the culturally constructed zeitgeist as it is manifest in trends of artistic production. Artists are the selfdescribed agents of that. Curators reading artistic works in the way that critics read texts find emerging patterns in the plethora of artistic bricolage that clutters the zones of cultural production. They, as cultural workers, come to the cultural field with different forms of procedures, apparatus and discourses to read the ensuing mutations of that landscape. They use artists’ works as their palette, constructing a meta-language through which to  understand the new emerging patterns. (Patterns that, like ready-mades, can emerge from the noise of the uncommon, disordered and ensuing destruction of information itself.) They decode and disseminate those changes to the culture at large.

The recent resurgence of re-enactment as a conceptual tool, most readily illustrated by Marina Abramovic in her exhibition The Artist is Present, is now spilling over into the field of curating. Interest in historical ready-mades as a means to understand our own contemporary culture has sent artist and curator alike scurrying into the archive to mine the rich fertility of the past. Sometimes, as is the case here, to find original books and catalogues from which to build contemporary productions from memories of exhibitions as they are documented in words and pictures. The reasons for this interest are multitudinous. From the condition of the eternal return itself, to the need to reread works of the past with a contemporary perspective post 9/11 and internet, to the unveiling of the pluri-potential nature of these early works, which contain inside themselves multiple readings not yet interpreted and that require contemporary subjects who have, like Jameson intimated, grown new organs of perception to untangle them.

Part 1.

“…The most extensive modification to take place in human brain evolution – the disproportionate expansion of the cerebral cortex, and specifically of the prefrontal cortex – reflects the evolutionary adaptation to this intensive working memory processing demand imposed by symbol learning. So the very nature of symbolic reference, and its unusual cognitive demands when compared to non-symbolic forms of reference, is a selection force working on those neurological resources most critical to supporting it. In the context of a society heavily dependent on symbol use-as is any conceivable human society, but no nonhuman societies-brains would have been under intense selection to adapt to these needs. …This, then, is a case of selection pressure affecting the evolution of a biological substrate (the brain) and yet which is imposed, not by the physical environment, but ultimately from a purely semiotic realm.” (1)

“From the perspective of distributed cognition, this sort of individual learning is seen as the propagation of a particular sort of pattern through a community. Cultural practices assemble agencies into working assemblages and put the assemblages to work. Some of these assemblages may be entirely contained in an individual, and some may span several individuals and material artifacts.” (2)

Today more then ever it is culture that has replaced nature as the primary force of epigenesis. Epigenesis is defined as the means by which the unfolding of the genetically prescribed formation of the brain, is altered by its interaction with the environment. When one considers brain function in this context the term neural plasticity is used. Neural plasticity refers to the ability of the components of neurons, their axons, dendrites and synapses plus their extended forms as neural network systems, to be modified by experience. The neurobiologist Marcus Jacobson defined neural plasticity as a process through which the nervous system adjusts to changes in the internal and external milieu. Adjustments in the internal milieu can occur after brain injuries. For instance, a child is able to recover function of language production and reception after trauma or stroke to the left language hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere, not normally an active part of that system, is capable of being modified so as to assume these language functions with little deficit if the onset of left hemisphere dysfunction occurs at an early enough age. Adjustments can also be in response to changes in the external milieu. The heterochronous unfolding of the genetically determined neurobiological time table creates what are called critical periods of development in which certain regions and systems of the neurobiological substrate are extremely sensitive to the conditions of, for instance, the linguistic-cultural milieu, which predispose it to language acquisition during a particular time window. But the bigger question then becomes what language. The child’s brain has the potential to learn any of the 6,700 languages in the world. Which one is actually learned is dependent upon the close coupling of the childs brain-mind to his or her linguistic field. (3) As we will see in what follows it is this condition of neural plasticity that will be key in understanding the rapprochement of Rancière’s distribution of the sensible and its concomitant regulation of the pluripotentiality of the brain’s neural plasticity. I will argue that the “ institutional stabilization” of the distribution of sensibility, which is what policing that field is all about and defines the new conditions of power, fulfills the necessary conditions to restrict the potential heterogeneity implicit in the pluripotent character of the neurobiological substrate resulting in the production of a people. When we focus our attention on the microcultural context of the work place and understand it as a form of restricted distribution of sensibility, as a controlled space to perceive in action, we begin understand its historical effect on neuromodulation. (4)

As we advance historically from primary economies of extraction to those described as secondary, involved with manufacturing, to those involved in services defined as tertiary we also move through different assemblages of sensational fields. (5) When the conditions of the information economy predominate, as they do in Northern European countries and the United States, and the emergent forms of general intelligence that result are expressed as conditions of networked and distributed systems defined as intensive, the possibility for intensive neural sculpting is great. Let us look deeper into the reasons why.

Two conditions have implications for how we might understand the idea of general intelligence. In the Fragments on Machines, Marx understands the idea of general intelligence as a machine intelligence. In the transition from artisanship to mechanized production of the assembly line the unitary consciousness necessary for the crafting of the unique object is now linearly distributed throughout an assemblage of laborers who function in concert to produce the replicated object now reproduced ad infinitum. This is extensive labor as it produces a similar product over and over again. The laborer is simply a cog in the wheel of production and is subsumed by the machine as simply conscious linkages between the machine’s mechanical organs. “But once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labor passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.” (6) Their labor is fetishized into a series of partial acts that together produce the object and the machine is what binds all their minds together diachronously and synchronously. Together, as a single entity, they produce similar objects as long as the machine functions correctly. However things can go wrong as comically dramatized in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, where, while working on an assembly line he becomes accidentally consumed by the machine. In the transition to a post-Fordist condition this assemblage of individuals and the architecture that reflects it breaks up and is dispersed horizontally, distributed across multiple times and spaces and the products that emerge are singular and unique. The reflective machine intelligence is therefore of a different kind; it is intensive. Today the general intelligence, the machines and apparatuses that bind people together and the social processes thus engendered are invisible, non-hierarchical and distributed, and the information they produce reflect the conditions of this production. Hence, the collectivity of the human intellect is ultimately also evident in the machine. Machines “are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.” (7) As we will see in the age of information and mass intellectuality it is,in fact information itself that sculpts neural plasticity. General intelligence here is is then defined as information produced by these mutating conditions of labor accessible to any population, which are also the new conditions of neuromodulation. These conditions of distributed information are powerful attractors that can act as powerful regulators of attention and memory and thus are sites of what Maurizio Lazzarato calls Noo-power. (8) This Noo-power is what forms the basis for Neuropower in which the brain’s neural plasticity and its pluripotentiality to become, are the sites of power’s interrogation. It is in this context that the sculpting of the neural plasticity, through assemblages of trajectories of attention, subsumed in the regulatory patterns of built space with its implicit temporality and representational and presentational rationality, can occur. Whereas Noo-power concerns people in the present, Neuropower concerns the production of people in the future.

In the conditions of intensive culture the representation of an object as something real is substituted by its branded value where what determines its nature are the stories that orbit around it and the complex conditions of its brand equity. The cereal in a box of cereal is not what creates its value but rather the way that the information on the box design excites a concomitant “considered” neural architecture sculpted over time by a complex assemblage of a previously designed context that the individual has experienced and into which the box is inserted. The cereal box is reinstalled ad infinitum into a system of recategorical memory that creates an active site for its infinite retrieval in the minds eye as both real and imaginary. Rather than linear equivalence that organized and delineated the ecology of objects in an artisan economy and began to dissolve in a Fordist one, what defines the post-Fordist landscape of cultural objects is a non-linear condition of value that is formulated by conditions of communicative labor as it functions along the distribution channels of media and hypermedia. As we will see shortly, general intelligence according to the model I would like to develop is a condition of the ratio between the apparatus of Cognitive Capital and Cultural Capital. Different cultural contexts allow different expressions of each which have implications for the production of a people or multiplicity. Cognitive Capital being defined as that “information distribution and production system” centered around knowledge and utilized by sovereignty and the conditions of the administration of normalcy which produces a system of homogenized thinking. Cultural Capital, was first designated by Pierre Bourdieu, but is used here in the context of the ways and means through which artists using their own materials, practices, histories, apparatuses, critiques, performances, spaces and non-spaces produce objects, non-objects and activities which, when assembled in the cultural landscape, mutate the conditions of that landscape and produce resistant paradigms. It is at the intersection of these mutating conditions expressed as a resultant cultural referendum, that the brain and mind are called out to by different attentional concoctions activating different attentional neurologic tool-boxes. Thus the relationship between Cognitive Capitalism and Cultural Capitalism has implications for how the brain itself will be formed and I would like to suggest its possibilities for thought. It is at the crossroads of competition and cooperation – between these two systems of abstract knowledge production – that the brain-mind is produced.

Part 2.

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 …

Tobin Harshaw, Can ‘No’ Revive the Republicans, nytimes.com, 3/26/2010

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 Neo-liberal 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 use ideas from The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection as formulated by Gerald Edelman as well as Neural Constructivism, formulated by Steven R. Quartz a1 and Terrence J. Sejnowski. (9) (10) (11) The basic question that these two theories ask is what are the determinants of neural development. Is it, as Neural Darwinism would suggest, an unfolding of a prescribed neurobiological process, in which a stochastic exuberant growth of neural elements is followed by a period of pruning and regression that through a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest regime becomes sculpted by various environmental contingencies into a finely tuned sensorial-perceptual-cognitive machine? This theory has the benefit of parsimony and mimics in certain ways the concrete genetic and immunological systems already in place. Alternately, according to Neural Constructivism, instead of simply a regression of neural elements, 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.” (12) 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 cognitive schemes for the construction of mental representations.” (13) My argument is that each theory provides a theoretical foundation for us to understand how nature or designed space, might play an important role in the production of the neural architecture to be used in thought.

As we saw above, while Neural Darwinism uses Darwinian paradigms of selection in the face of niche contingencies, Neural Constructivism recounts the ways and means by which age related cognitive improvements are the result of neural networks becoming increasingly inter-connected, functionally more specialized and sometimes progressively complex through the brain’s relationship with the stimulating conditions of complex representational matrices. In this way Neural Constructivism is more Bergsonian. (14, 15, 16)

For our purposes here, both theories and perhaps the two together operate well as a heuristic model as well as being compatible with a post-structural theoretical model I would like to elucidate. Cultural conditions are evolving and they produce veracity and verification. The subunits of culture may evolve together or separately and these bound and synchronized cultural conditions produce and sculpt conditions of mind and brain to which they become coupled. These assemblages or props are historically derived and are embedded in the distributions of sensibility as cognitive gestalts hybridized to planned trajectories of thought. Along with the sculpted internal cognitive loops to which they are coupled the cultural external circuit component completes the organic-inorganic assembled network. This is the building block of a complex field of such loops. When these loops are tethered together a hundred or thousand fold and as result of their proximity and overlap form assemblages, their dynamic and emergent intensive conditions begin to be realized.

It matters little whether one takes Neural Darwinism or Neural Constructivism as your model in the argument laid out here. For both in the end rely on the conditions of epigenesis, and in this case a cultural epigenesis, to produce or sculpt the neurobiological substrate into the neurobiological architecture – to change the skin of brain into the flesh of mind. “ Plastic human brains may nonetheless learn to factor the operation and information-bearing role of such external props and artifacts deep into their own problem-solvng routines, creating hybrid cognitive circuits that are themselves the physical mechanisms underlying specific problem-solving performnaces. We thus come to what is arguably the most radical contemporary take on the potential cognitive role of of nonbiological props and structures: the idea that, under certain conditions, such props and structures might count as proper parts of extended cognitive processes”

(Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind, Oxford, 2008. Pg. 68).

As you will see I view Neural Selectionism as the dominating force early on and Neural Constructivism more important later, keeping in mind that Darwinian forces may still play a role. All agree that a phenomenon of excessive growth of neurons in the early years of life is characteristically followed by a reactionary depletion. What happens after that is an answer that Neural Constructivism attempts to answer. ( 18)

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 Re-entry which stabilizes and elaborates upon the Secondary Repertoire. I will cover Developmental and Experiential Selection now, leaving Re-entry for later.

This 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 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 fetus’s brain are well known. The combined effect of these three processes is the production of the Neurobiologic Common from which the brain/mind emerges through its engagement with culture.

I would like to call attention to the Primary Repertoire as the site of what is referred to as neural biodiversity and what I would like to refer to as the Neurobiologic Common or Neurozoon. The Neurozoon embodies the full extent of the possibilities that a human brain can become and awaits the moment of its unfolding not as a natavist series of heterochronous events emblazoned in the codon of the genome but rather an unfolding or becoming in the context of a duet between itself as the inherent structural conditions and apparatic conditions of brain in the context of nature or as I am arguing today, 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.

“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.” (19) 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 thereinits complete history of the neurobiological adaptations it required in its ascendance as that species.

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, those that strangle difference to produce a homogenization of the cultural field and limit epigenetic neural biodiversity. For instance it is feared that in a century half of the six thousand seven hundred languages which are now active on our earth will be deleted. Furthermore design culture affects not only the early depletions and pruning of neural arborizations like for instance a topiarist who clips the branches of thick bushes to produce wonderful fantastic shapes but also choreagraphs and guides the regrowth of the branches along prescribed pathways to produce specific shapes and forms. Neural Darwinsim would be the topiarist but Neural Constructivism would be the choreagrapher. Further on I will show how the homogenization of the cultural field by for instance the international style or franchise architecture, both conditions of the global economy, restricts variation and as a result produces a crisis of neural network diversification leading to a crisis of the imagination. Therefore Neuropower is not simply about past evolutionary history but of its history in the future.

The Secondary Repertoire is a result of epigenesis and neural plasticity during a process called Experiential Selection. The word repertoire is very often related 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 as well. 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 which have repercussions for the material of memory interests us here. (20) One could say that this term could also be used in a Neural Constructivist account. However instead of being the result of a regression and deletion of neural elements the secondary repertoire in this account is the product of a productive complexification and intensification. 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. Hebbian theory, which states that neurons that fire together wire together preferentially, is operative in the Primary Repertoire where spontaneous electrical activity stimulates genetically prescribed a priori networks. ( 21) In the Secondary Repertoire that 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 (RIVI). (22) In an intensive culture it is these dynamic codes that have become most important. Hebbian Dynamics and Neural Darwinism state that those neurons most intensely stimulated develop firing potentials that are selectively reinforcing where as those not as stimulated undergo a process termed apoptosis and die out or manage to form connections with networks that are favored. Consequently, in the battle for limited neural space the stimulated neurons and their networked condition replace those that have receded.

The development of ocular dominance columns of layer IV of the primary visual cortex is a case in point. Ocular dominance columns are anatomical structures that appear like columns in microscopic examination found in the visual cortex and are anatomically defined regions of input from one eye or the other. They contain a number of different cell types that utilize different strategies for the processing of visual information like simple, complex and hypercomplex cells which all share a common visual field. As a unit they are important in processing visual information and 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 hypothesis 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.” (23) This theory promotes neural development as a system which is said to be regressive and subtractive. 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…. and that this growth is a progressive increase in the representational properties of the cortex.” (24)

Again the mechanism is important to consider in order to understand the brain’s development, but for our purposes an immature neurobiological substrate in both cases is transformed into a more finely tuned environmentally and contextually driven machine. What then is the effect of living in a networked society with the internet, cell phones, face book 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 Metroploitan Opera House and The Island City Central Park Gringrin, and Zaha Hadid’s Hungerburg Funicular are cases in point. What then is the effect of these new spatial and temporal contingencies on experiential selection? What then of the perceptual and cognitive habits, which 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, the critical period for language learning being a case in point, in the context of learning and this learning changes the conditions of the brain itself. Learning a language changes the conditions of interacting with the world and what becomes relevant to attention changes. What we pay attention to is key to what we learn and what neural networks will be activated and amplified.

Experiential Selection does not, like natural selection in evolution, occur as a result of differential reproduction, but rather 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 movie stars whose images adorn multiple platforms synchronously on billboards, lap tops, 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. Let us examine this relationship more deeply.

Recently an image of a Pepsi Cola can occurred recurrently all over New York City on billboards of different sizes placed strategically for maximum visibility. The advert, not surprisingly, was effectively designed for maximum and rapid perception by both a pedestrian and auto driven public. (Traffic jams slow automobile traffic to a crawl.) The color and design of the advert interestingly used strategies first found in the pop paintings of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert Indiana. The advert was designed with a specific context in mind in which other products advertised and within the same visual milieu reverberated together producing a network of stimulation. In other words the advert itself and its relation to other similarly designed adverts in combination produced an intense effect upon the viewer. It is these individual forms and their combined effect in the network in which they are embedded that produces correlational learning resulting in temporal coincidence at pre and post-synaptic membranes in local and global cortical mappings that strengthen synapses in the brain. But this advert also occurred on multiple platforms distributed repeatedly on television screens, computer laptops throughout the planet simultaneously. In other words we, as members of the planet earth are stimulated by the same franchised sensations that know no national boundaries. These new contingencies provide the new affordances of the planetary urban environment, to use a Gibsonian term. Those neurons that code for these newly engineered affordances are coupled with these intense stimuli and are therefore more apt to be favored over other neurons and neuronal networks in future encounters with those stimuli. These conditions of Neoliberal Capitalism makes future encounters probable!

These stimuli can also be grouped together into larger ensembles of stimulation that are persistently aligned in the environment and thus are always coded together as a form of cultural mappings. Cultural mappings are intensive, delineated by a multiplicity of immanent social, historical, psychological, economic and psychic relations that are collaged together forming a superstructure though which they can produce understanding. Architecture and designed space, understood as both the physical conditions of built space and the immaterial virtual spaces of the internet, house and support these elaborate amalgamations tethering them to learned activity trajectories, whether they are in the form of walking or driving or surfing the web.

There is an ecological logic to the forms of immanent distributions that are produced. (25) Branded environments are one such example where through corporate agreements Nike Shoes, Post Grape Nuts, Hertz Rent Car, Airberlin, and Sony Music appear together in the commercial landscape of billboards and airline magazines. The Institutional Understanding and sovereignty for which it does its bidding is empowered by this network of cultural signifiers. What Paul Virilio had formerly referred to in the representational and extensive era as Phatic Signifiers today become Fields of Phatic Signifiers embedded in the intensive logics of emerging meaning produced by the new apparatus of global culture.

3.

Each brand is made up of its brand equity and its externalities that together compete with other assemblages for the attention of the market place. (26) Brand equity is explicit; it is a real entity that can be quantified based on market studies, while externalities are implicit and in the process of becoming. They are ineffable and incalculable.

Externalities can under certain conditions become explicit. Vans shoes were originally just tennis shoes to be worn all day. Their appropriation by skate boarders and their resultant popularity could never have been imagined. It was a result of a burgeoning skate culture in Southern California that added to its explicit brand equity when later they were understood and advertised as skating shoes.

They are overlaid or superimposed or embedded in already existing networks of cultural signifiers and as such inflect upon diagrams of attentional flow. They form selective pressures, which are coupled to analogous selective pressures in the brain/mind. The conditions of cultural intensivity integrate dynamic flows of hierarchical distributions together with folded rhizomatic distributions of sensibility that these branded environments are instrumental in producing.

Already existing oscillatory potentials, important for the production of the dynamic environment of the brain, transmitting information throughout it, are piggy backed by dynamic gestalts and rhythms at play in the cultural environment and onto which branded equities are imbricated. It is these dynamic potentialities as they are phase locked in ensembles synchronously and diachronously that create intense branded networks. These stimulate networks in the brain/mind that first pay attention to them and then memorize them as a result of registering them preferentially, in the end having affects on the overall architecture of the brain/mind. In the competition for neural space during critical periods of development, neural networks selected for by these branded environments will out-compete those that are not selected for, which either wither away or are incorporated in other assemblages where they can continue to play a role and be stimulated.

Branded networks work directly and indirectly on the child’s mind, which is especially malleable. Directly through sophisticated marketing techniques in which advertisements specifically engineered with the child’s mind in mind are transmitted cross-culturally during Saturday morning cartoons. These specially designed advertisements are analogous to “babyese,” in which parents prolong and exaggerate certain key phonetic distinctions coupled to the child’s immature brain. The same is true of childhood advertisement. Bright colors, fantastic talking cartoon animals, speaking in “babyese,” which the child already knows from Saturday morning cartoon programs, create an indistinguishable set of signifiers in a child who is as yet unable to distinguish himself/herself from others. This is where the Society of Control really begins in the inside/outside of the child’s mind.

But there is another way that the conditions of capitalism are transmitted to the child and that is indirectly through the parents. As I mentioned in the introduction Neuropower is focused on the planning and attention capacities of the frontal lobe. Adults assist children in the routines of their daily life that are beyond the capabilities of their immature brain. At first through such activities as pointing adults are indispensible in the early process of object learning and then symbolic language formation. Later when these activities involve planned action, for instance, parents extend their children’s abilities by acting as and being agents of their frontal lobe. (27) They are there to help them plan beyond the hear and now. This coupling of adult and child is a necessary condition of the early neural sculpting of Neuropower. The parent is at the service of the institutional understanding, acting as its agent of neuromodulation. But perhaps in the future with more sophisticated computer interfaces and software agents the parent won t even be necessary as the following quote from Andy Clarks Mindware might suggest. “Imagine that you begin using the web at age 4. Dedicated software agents track and adapt to your emerging interests and random explorations. They then help direct your attention to new ideas, web pages and products. Over the next 70 years you and your software agents are locked in a complex dance of coevolutionary change and learning, each influencing and being influenced by, the other. In such a case, in a very real sense, the software entities look less like part of your problem-solving environment then part of you. The intelligent system that now confronts the wider world is biological-you-plus-the-software-agents. These external bundles of code are contributing rather like the various subpersonal cognitive functions active in your brain.” (28)

Bibliography and Notes.

1. Multilevel Selection and Language Evolution, Terrence Deacon in Bruce H. Weber and David J. Depew, eds., Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003)

2. Edwin Hutchins, Distributed Cognition, IEBS Distributed Cognition, page 5

3. Marcus Jacobson, Developmental Neurobiology, (New York: Plenum Press, 1991) page 26.

4. Alva Noe, Action in Perception, Bradford Book, MIT Press, 2004, page,1.

“ I argue that all perception is touch-touch like in this way: Perceptual experience acquires content thanks to our possession of bodily skills. What we perceive is determined by what we do…”

5. A.R. Luria, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social Foundations, Harvard University Press, 1976

“It seems surprising that the science of psychology has avoided the idea that many mental processes are social and historical in origin, or that important manifestations of human consciousness have been directly shaped by the basic practices of human activity and the actual forms of culture.”

6. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundisse/ch13.htm-page 692) quoted in Gerald Raunig, A Few Fragments on Machines, http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/raunig/en)

7. Ibid., Raunig, 2005, page 3.

8. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Life and the Living in the Societies of Control,” in Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sorensen, eds., Deleuze and the Social, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006) page 186.

9. Gerald Edelman, The Remembered Present, (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1989) 10. Jean-Pierre Changeux and Stanilslas Dehaene, “Neuronal Models of Cognitive Functions,” in Mark H. Johnson, ed., Brain Development and Cognition, (New York: Blackwell, 1993) pages 363-403.

11. Steven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski, The Nerual Basisi of Cognitive Development: A Constructivist Manifesto, Brain Sciences 20(4) , 1997, page 6.

12. Ibid. Quartz and All, 1997, page 6.

13. Ibid. Quartz and All, 1997, page 6.

14. Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson, Dover, 1998, page 102.

“ Just so as regards the evolution of life and the circumstances through which it passes-with this difference, that evolution does not mark out a solitary route, that it takes directions without aiming at ends and that it remains inventive even in its adaptations.”

15. Ibid, Bergson, Dover, page 104.

“Evolution is not only a movement forward; in many cases we observe a marking-time, and still more often a deviation or turning back. It must be so, as we shall show further on , and the same causes that divide the evolution movement often cause life to be diverted from itself, hypnotized by the form it has just brought forth. Thence results an increasing diorder. No doubt there is progress, if progress means a continual advance in the general direction determined by a first impulsion; but this progress is accomplished only on the two or three great lines of evolution on which forms ever more and more complex, ever more and more high, appear; between these lines run a crowd of minor paths in which, on the contrary, deviations, arrests, and set-backs, are multiplied.”

16. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Francisco J. Varelan, Evan T. Thompson, MIT Press, 1991.

One must also remember the contribution of Francisco Varela’s ideas of Enactive Embodied Cognition based as it is on affordances, diversity and natural drift, which could well help us make the intuitive leap to better understand the means through which the mutating conditions of culture at the margins can become the center.

17. Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind, Oxford, 2008, pg. 77

18. Ibid, Quartz and Sejnowski, 1997, pg. 36 The evidence we have examined demonstrates that the popular view of development as largely a regressive event must be reconsidered. We suggest that regressive events are simply the consequence of reduced neural specificity, as indicated by the counterevidence to Sperry’s chemoaffinity hypothesis. Any theory, whether selectionist or constructivist, that rejects a strong view of neural specificity will thus need to posit regressive events. If cells do not bear nearly unique molecular addresses, then stochastic sampling mechanisms must be posited. These will by their very nature introduce some structure into a system that will later be eliminated. Neural constructivism allows these sampling mechanisms to be directed, but they are still stochastic. Structural elimination, or error-correction, are likewise required, but this does not mean that error-correcting processes are the only developmental mechanisms, or that developmental selection occurs only among intrinsically generated structures. Rather, selection is only one kind of process in a dynamic interaction between environmentally derived activity and the neural growth mechanisms that activity regulates.)

19. R.J. Scholes et al., “Toward a Global Biodiversity Observing System,” Science, Volume 321, page 1044.

20. Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude, page 70. In this idea of Neuropower the virtuoso performance does leave a materialist residue. Rather then a formed product it leaves memory traces which have the potential to mutate the conditions of the neurobiologic architecture.

21. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebbian_theory

Hebbian theory concerns how neurons might connect themselves to become engrams. Hebb’s theories on the form and function of cell assemblies can be understood from the following:

“The general idea is an old one, that any two cells or systems of cells that are repeatedly active at the same time will tend to become ‘associated’, so that activity in one facilitates activity in the other.”

“When one cell repeatedly assists in firing another, the axon of the first cell develops synaptic knobs (or enlarges them if they already exist) in contact with the soma of the second cell.”

Gordon Allport posits additional ideas regarding cell assembly theory and its role in forming engrams, along the lines of the concept of auto-association, described as follows:

“If the inputs to a system cause the same pattern of activity to occur repeatedly, the set of active elements constituting that pattern will become increasingly strongly interassociated. That is, each element will tend to turn on every other element and (with negative weights) to turn off the elements that do not form part of the pattern. To put it another way, the pattern as a whole will become ‘auto-associated’. We may call a learned (auto-associated) pattern an engram.”

22. Wolf Singer, “Coherence as an Organizing Principle of Cortical Functions,” in Olaf Sporns and Giulio Tononi, eds., Selectionism and the Brain, (San Diego: Academic Press,1994) page 158. “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. 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.”

23. Ibid, Quartz and Sejnoazki, 1997, page 17

24. Ibid, Quartz and Sejnoazki, 1997, abstract

25. Giulio Tononi, “Reentry and Cortical Integration,” in Olaf Sporns and Giulo Tononi, eds., Selectionsim in the Brain, (San Diego: Academic Press 1994) page 129. “Two of the main tenets of this theory are that neurons act together in local collectives called neuronal groups and that they communicate with each other and correlate their activity by a process called reentry.”

26. I was first introduced to the idea of externalities and their relationship to Cognitive Capitalism in a lecture by Yann Moulier Boutang given at the conference I helped organize with Deborah Hauptmann called “The Mind in Architecture” at TU Delft School of Architecture in 2008. A related text will be published in Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noo-power, 010 Press, 2010.

27. Bruce Wexler, Brain and Culture, page 108-9. “Given the prolonged postnatal physical maturation of these structures in human beings, lasting until or beyond puberty, it is not surprising that adults must provide these functions if they are to be present in the behavior of infants and children. Essentially, then, the frontal lobes of parents are functionally linked with the lower brain centers and the sensory, motor and association cortices of their infants and children. While the child’s frontal lobes are developing, the parents’ brains provide frontal lobe functions for the child.”

28. Andy Clark, Mindware, Oxford, 2001, pg. 115

Resistance is Futile/Resistance is Fertile 2020

Is Resistance Futile? In this moment of Neo Liberal Global Capitalism powerful corporate consortiums and NGOs constitute the instrumental logic of what is referred to these days as Cognitive Capitalism. I would like to expand the definition of Cognitive Capitalism beyond its capacity as the accumulation of assets related to the information economy as it pertains to intellectual rights, the production of soft and hardware for computer programs and surfing the net and its privatization and therefore its restriction of the intellectual commons. I would also like it to include all forms of enterprise that profit from the conditions of thought and its administration and would suggest that it is the future territory that capitalism will attempt to conquer or should I say colonize. Drug companies produce and will continue to make new and ever more powerful mind altering drugs some of which affect attention (Adderall) and memory (Phenserine). Co-opted post-production companies continue to create more and more powerful phatic images, as Paul Virilio has described them, with adobe photoshop and aftereffects that compete with each other for subjective attention and in total constitute fields of meta-attention on billboards, TV screens, computer and Video Walls that adorn designed space that most of us experience in the places we now live. Computer games and virtual simulation environments have proved effective in learning the real world skills used on the battlefield (See Military Simulation and Serious Games by Roger D. Smith, Model Benders Press, 2009.) More recently Neuro-imaging techniques have become an essential new form of marketing called Neuro Marketing and will continue to be so, where the patterns of neural excitation become registers for desire driven commodified decision-making processes used by product designers/makers and advertising firms alike. (Editorial, “A Manifesto for Neuromarketing Science,” Journal of Consumer Behavior, Volume, 7, Issue, 4-5, pages 263-271.) Finally through such official proclamations such as the Bologna Declaration, the university system itself more then ever is under siege as it is now administered to create curriculums that refine what knowledge can be taught and to what end. Together these form the new conditions of instrumental logic in the age of information. When furthermore this information is sculpted to concur with preexisting and learned conditions of brain and mind, for instance the way that synchronized dynamic functional connectivity elicits attention and as a result memory I refer to it as Cognitive Ergonomics. (Wolf Singer, Binding by Synchrony, 2007, Scholarpedia)

Cognitive Ergonomics is an insidious apparatus of Cognitive Capitalism and has global effect. (Here I mean both in the sense of Global Networks in the brain and Global Networks of the Empire.) Recently Neuroscience has been exploring the very decision making processes used in future determinations by focusing its attention of the workings of the frontal lobe. This has created a switch from its past interest in what was called bottom-up processing to what is known as top-down processing. Instead of organizing how sensations are organized into larger more abstract bundles and concepts the focus today is rather on abstract thinking itself that indirectly affects how sensations emanating from the world are routed in the circuits of the brain. (Engel, A.K. et al., “Dynamic Predictions: Oscillations and Synchrony in Top-Down Processing,” in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, October, 2001, page 704.) This as we will see is a condition of Neuropower to be explained a little later. Cognitive Ergonomics is now the conditions of advanced information societies in which the information produced is designed to silently and invisibly co-opt the energy distributions of the brain to affect thought itself. Neo-liberal Cognitive Capitalism directs its energies towards the production of information that in the end is cognitively ergonomic and thus with increasing effectiveness enters the hierarchical and non-hierarchical conditions of mindedness more efficiently. As such it creates the new conditions of the distribution of sensibility or should we call it the distribution of insensibility because the information networks themselves are sublime. No new laws need to be passed and less and less government is needed as the machinic intelligence of this constituted general intelligence does it all. Resistance is Futile as the Borg said.

But maybe Resistance is Fertile! Sure Artists and Art professionals are at times instrumentalized themselves by the power of neoliberal global capitalism and who is to blame them. In fact the system pushes artists to brand themselves in order to be constituted not as a human being but instead a calculated auratic impulse weightlessly distributed according the non-linear logics of the media networks. The fame machine reinvented and elaborated by Warhol, the global stardom of the art fair insinuated as one is in the international gossip networks of famous collectors in the VIP lounges of the Basel Art Fair, the chance to appear on the cover of global art and fashion magazines such as Artforum and Vanity Fair are incredibly intoxicating. As such the financial rewards can be great for a select few. Cognitive ergonomics and cognitive capitalism, as I am introducing the concept here, makes no distinctions between artist and non-artist. But the power of art in its most utopian sense is a powerful agent of change when understood and embraced by artists and the community that they constitute.

How might this be? We are all born with a pluripotential brain constituted as it is by a widely varying population of nervous elements, called neurons which is constituted by its axons, dendritic spines and synapses. These neurons and the connections they form differ from each other in the amount and type of energy as information that they can absorb and elaborate. The degree to which this energy effects neural efficiency at the synaptic junction will effect the sustainability of that connection or the network it constitutes and affects the degree to which for instance the dendritic spine(s), can survive, propagate and form alliances. The neuron with its axons and dendrites is a form of matter of the brain and that matter is transformed in different ways by, for instance, different spatial and temporal frameworks some of which culture plays a role in producing. (Quartz, S. & Sejnowski, T.J. (1997). The neural basis of cognitive development: A constructivist manifesto. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20 (4): 537-596.)

Different cultural dispositions organize, for instance, the visual cultural field in such a way that different neurons and assemblages of neurons are differentially called out- to which has implications within limits for what forms of neural architectures can be produced. This is what since 1997 I have called the “Cultured Brain Model”. The variation of the population of neurons, the degree to which they can be modified by either internal or external inputs and their resultant pattern of connectivity is referred to as its neural plasticity. It is towards this neural plasticity that the energies of sovereignty are directed. The sculpting of this neural plasticity or neural potential is the aim of the administration of the subject in the quest to form an obedient people. I call this “Neuropower” and understand this to be a recent manifestation of biopower coming as it does on the heals of such ideas such as the disciplinary society (Foucault), the society of control (Deleuze) and Noo-politics (Lazzarato). Extending them beyond their focus upon the administration of man in the present to that of the production of the future man or woman. It is also towards and upon that variation that cultural capital, here I mean in the sense of Bordieu, as a cultural/environmental modifier produces subjects whose Eye has been educated in very special other ways. Ways that if nurtured allow them to look at and make things that defy that which is constituted by the instrumental logic.

What effect might this have? Artists using their own histories, apparatus, processes, materials, logics produce works of art and non-art that populate the visual auditory and kinesthetic landscape and thereby mutate the conditions of the distribution of the sensible producing what I have referred to before as the Redistribution of the Sensible. This constitutes the flip side of Neuropower as artists create images static and dynamic that compete effectively for the minds attention and therefore have power to produce a population of neural connections that along side those already elicited by the powers of instrumentalization constitute the image of thought. They are in fact part of the history of the production of the subject. The ratiomatic relationship between the amount of cultural and cognitive capital affective at any particular moment and their concomitant power to produce a variety of epigenetically contrived neural architectures is the essence of the history of the thought image. What a difference it is to walk through a gridded city constituted as it does by a mathematical and preformed logic then that based on the conditions of a city built and designed according to the illogic’s of Situationism with its dérive, chance encounters and network of psycho-geography. What effect does living in such a city have on the growing child whose brain and mind are open and responsive during what are referred to as critical periods for learning? Do different forms of neural architecture emerge as a response to this wide variety of conditions that have the potential for different thoughts,that respond to different networks of attention and different immanent gestalts that move like the wind through distributions of sensibility. As such does this artist’s brain have the potential to create sublime objects, corrupted and abnormal forms of movement, unthinkable thoughts that are beyond the general intelligence of the police to monitor. That, like the scandal of Marcel Duchamp’s work of 1917, a urinal signed R. Mutt or the apathy experienced in the context of the first presentation of The Barcelona Pavillion, 1929, of Mies Van der Rohe, remain beyond the radar of the self-policing conditions of, in these cases, Modernism until the seismic shifts they created that originally presented themselves as rumbles became earthquakes in the realm of the sensible and produced mutations in the distribution of time and space. Earthquakes that I might add create what Carl Schmitt would describe as “States of Emergency”. For the new State of Emergency in the eyes of the sovereignty are constituted by changes in the state of the normalizing distribution of sensibility and the apparatuses that tether that distribution together in order to produce a people who share a common Neuro-architectonics constituted by the experience of a controlled homogeneous world picture/cinema. The state of emergency concerns the future generation whose pluripotential brain with all its variability might be sculpted by very different conditions of the distribution brought about through the magic of the sublime object(s), idea(s), movement(s) produced by those who have cultural capital. This is the power of art! Because it is this State of Emergency that in fact elicits the State of Exception when government itself goes into a seizure that suspends itself. The history of art and political change can, therefore can be seen as a generational and epochal production of a succession of states of emergency and the response to them.

Neuropower

Section 1. Introduction

In the words of Maurizio Lazzarato, “In the societies of control, power relations come to be expressed through the action at a distance of one mind on another, through the brain’s power to affect and become affected, which is mediated and enriched by technology…The institutions of the societies of control are thus characterised by the use of technologies acting at a distance, rather than of mechanical technologies (societies of sovereignty) or thermodynamic technologies (disciplinary societies).”1 The implications of this statement go to the very core of the biopolitical questions that I would like to address in what follows. I will develop three lines of thought. First, in the transition from the Disciplinary Society to the Society of Control and onward to what Lazzarato refers to as noo-politics, the focus of power and the technology at its disposal is not directed toward the materiality of the body but, instead, its psychic life, particularly its memories and attention, recognising that the mind and the body are inextricably linked through voluntary and involuntary, somatic and autonomic, striated and smooth conditions.2,3 Secondly, I would like to extend this idea of noo-politics to include a new focus of sovereignty: that of neural plasticity itself and its potential as a generator of fields of difference that are moulded according to the new conditions produced by post-Fordist deregulation, especially its effect upon a distributed and delimited workplace, defined as it is by a dilated time-space continuum. In the end, this new situation creates new possibilities for the conditions of the brain/mind. I would like to suggest that the reconfiguration of the brain/mind is actually the site of the performative gestures of the non-productive labour of the communicative virtuoso. “Let us consider carefully what defines the activity of virtuosos, of performing artists. First of all, theirs is an activity which finds its own fulfillment…in itself, without objectifying itself into an end product, without settling into a ‘finished product’, or into an object which would survive the performance. Secondly, it is an activity which requires the presence of others, which exists only in the presence of an audience.”4 This necessity of an audience or a social mind as a roving, wet, mutable, organic interface, where the inscription of the oral history or memory of that performance is inscribed in the static and dynamic conditions of the material brain, is the key to what follows. Finally, I will propose that the multitude is an adequate description of, and metaphor for, the way that these new forms of the social as a multiplicity, formulated in the conditions of post-Fordist labour, produce the conditions of the dynamic, manifold, and metastable brain and mind. These new conditions of the workplace leak into the world beyond, transforming it, with the help of artistic and architectural interventions, according to the changed dynamic contingencies, for instance, of the anyplace, anytime, whatever. These new conditions are then coupled to a plastic brain/mind. Paolo Virno eloquently elaborates this when he says, “The potential for working, bought and sold just like another commodity, is labour not yet objectified, ‘labour as subjectivity’”.5 Labour as a series of performative gestures is continually evolving and is delineated as a form of cultural plasticity that produces new forms of subjectivity. On the one hand, I will look at the regulation of the rhythms of the brain, especially its synchronous firings, as the very conditions through which sovereignty directs the Institutional understanding, coupling it to the minds of its constituents. On the other I will look at the means through which art and architecture deregulate and uncouple these dynamic potentials, rearranging them according to another logic.

Untitled, 2002

Constancy, and the regulated, synchronous, dynamic conditions that help to define it, form one of the basic conditions that the institutional understanding utilises to administer bodies and minds to produce a people. As we will see shortly, what is constantly repeated, linked together, and then magnified, for instance by the technologies of neo-liberal global capital, becomes the object of attention and subsequently selection in the brain and mind. Art and architecture, as experimental practices, can discover the latent and hidden variability inherent in a metastable world, in order to constitute new forms of temporal binding as artworks and built space. John Cage’s interest in noise and dissonance is one such example of works that produce other rhythms and syncopations. Recently, artistic and architectural experiments with time-based media in video and film, performance art, and social and kinetic sculpture have been a means to make real the immanent conditions of time. Through the use of distributed, mediated circuits such as television and the Internet, formerly unrecognised concepts of time diffuse into mainstream culture, where personal and cultural effects are possible.

Thus the brain’s potential is sculpted as a result of changes not only in its static elements, the neurons and neural networks with their axonal flows, myelination, synaptic neurochemicals and tight junctions, but in the dynamic apparatus of coordinated oscillation potentials and temporal signatures as well. The dynamic flows of the world in their infinite variability, some of which are produced naturally and others that are invented or discovered by art and architecture, are sampled as a DJ samples music, and, when possible, coupled to an assortment of frequencies that the brain has at its disposal in order to encode them. This coupling process has implications for how the brain is sculpted by cultural experience. Constancy and repetition, especially when globally distributed, are intense directors of attention. Shock and the new are features of modernist cultural excess, and are the artistic rebuttal destabilising and uncoupling institutionalised dictates. Recently, shock has found its way into the institutional armamentarium and is now being used as a way to administrate affect.9 This is the very recipe of emergent behaviour. I would like to elaborate the way that art and architecture have adapted to the new contingencies of our interconnected and networked world with new labour practices and results. Art and architecture, in their most utopian sense, reconfigure the distribution of the static and dynamic contingencies of the sensible and its virtual. They redistribute sensibility to compete with the institutional conditions of the mind’s eye. Art power and neuropower are part of the same equation.10

Section 2. Branding the Mind: Not witha Hot Iron but with Invisible Traces

Attention, 2007

Red, White and Blue, 2007

It may be that the memory capacity of an intensive network is much greater than that of an extensive network. Hierarchical memory systems are limited forms of memory representation tied to a single or maybe a few readings. Think, for instance, of the hierarchical taxonomy established by Carl Linnaeus, an 18th century Swedish naturalist. The hierarchy established by Linnaeus and his followers is the following: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. A species is classified according to a specific pathway within certain distributions that does not allow for much flexibility but has the advantage of consistency. When film storyboards are set up in the same way, the possibility for variability in the plot is also limited to a specific pathway following specific actions and responses. This is a characteristic of classic film according to Gilles Deleuze. A non-hierarchical, diagrammatic representation, on the other hand, can store far more information, since its non-narrative character and distributed format allow for a plethora of readings, interpretations, and memories. Recent DVD formats that allow viewers to choose other sequences of chapters and endings have expanded these potentials. This can also be seen in the improvisational jazz of Miles Davis, or the Building Without a Plan of Jonah Friedman, or the social sculptures of Joseph Beuys. In embracing the pluripotentiality of a physical and discursive space, these works increase the potential for different readings and interpretations. This is just the point. The very nature of the multiple pathways of information flow circulating through intense nodal points in a diagram makes possible what is called degeneracy in geometry and quantum theory. This theory has also recently been applied to neural networks, in which the same network can participate in an unlimited number of other networks, both local and global. A social network can operate similarly, and a single network can have different roles in different social contexts. Unlike the limited number of readings inherent in linear or hierarchical knowledge, degenerative intensive networks allow for a multiplicity of readings. Thus intensive networks carry the potential for more information generation and storage. A brain/mind that could parasitise such a network would be able to extend itself into richer sources of information and, through the process of memory, instantiate those networks into itself as intensive memories. When that brain/mind moulds itself as the result of epigenesis to the contingencies of that non-linearity and excess, its capabilities are greatly enhanced. When these mechanisms are tethered to what is referred to as the Baldwin Effect, the brain/mind, rather than simply adapting to these conditions, becomes these conditions.18But there is still more to this story, as we begin to look at branding in the larger context of the changing conditions of immaterial labour and general intelligence. Initially, as just we saw, the brand was still focused optimally on a target audience, but it also has a greater potentiality, through stochastic nomadologies, for instance, of conversation mappings such as gossip or word search engines on the Internet, to reach audiences indirectly. The true power of post-Fordian network conditions is in the production of new forms of general intelligence; the commodification of what are referred to as externalities, submerged intensive networks that form the once secret relations of brand equity. The rhizomatic unconsciousness of the brand equity now creates value in unseen and unknown ways that are now made real. They now become real abstractions, as these once unrecognised factors form complex collaged loopings inside their own distributions and assert themselves as constant and repeatable norms that can be commodified with an assigned value, generating future profits as a part of predetermined budgets. As such, the contingencies of their value, which might have once been taken for granted, now, with the help of new intensive computer calculations, can be specified, analysed, and depended upon. This commodification of externalities is the new definition of immaterial labour and general intelligence.19 These different parts of the branding networks intensify their desire quotient and the degree to which their products capture and produce new audiences.

Each brand has its own network of users, who form nodes and become sites of attraction for other brand networks with which they form brand allegiances. Through the direct and indirect sharing of this product loyalty, branding networks produce social networks. The primary network acts to link together in time secondary and tertiary immanent networks. When the target audience is stimulated by, say, an ad for dishwasher powder, this has a ripple effect that energises all other networks with which the target audience has allegiances—networks related, for example, to the dishwasher they are using to clean dishes, to the water softening agent, to the type of glassware they may wash, to the number of dinner parties they might have, and so forth. As this is also true for others, the production of externalities and their overlapping in distant cultural fields has the indirect result of a migration of desire in a roundabout trajectory throughout the social and cultural field. Unlike a normal feedback loop that is a moment-to-moment register of stimulation and effect along a single channel, think here of a thermostat: branding and the externalities it generates result in a manifold dynamic stimulation, both synchronous and diachronous, direct and indirect. The end effect registered varies according to the synchronicity or lack of convergent discharges affecting the original brand equity. In such branded systems, collective strategies become each other’s potential markets. In a sense, every time a commercial or ad appears for one product, a current affects all the other networks directly or indirectly associated with it. As such, their affect and effect are emergent.

Section 3. The Distribution and Redistribution of the Sensible

Study for Infinite Regress, 2007

Art, 2005

Section 4. FromNoo-powerto Neuropower

In order to examine the redirection of control from the external and material to the mental and neurological mentioned at the beginning of this text, I would like to start with a quotation from Maurizio Lazzarato, a second generation “Operaist”, who recognised this new biopolitical dimension as defined by such terms as “mass intellectuality”, “immaterial labour”, and “general intellect”. These concepts are recontextualised in terms of the new nature of productive labour and its living development in society. “In order not to name such different things with the same word, one could define the new relations of power, which take memory and its conatus (attention) as their object… noo-politics. Noo-politics (the ensemble of the techniques of control) is exercised on the brain. It involves above all attention, and is aimed at the control of memory and its virtual power.”25

Neuroaesthetics, 2006

“The general intellect is social knowledge turned into the principal productive force; it is the complex of cognitive paradigms, artificial languages, and conceptual clusters which animate social communication and forms of life. The general intellect distinguishes itself from the “real abstractions” typical of modernity, which are all anchored to the principle of equivalence.”30 Enlisting the communicative industries, pharmaceutical corporations, military-industrial complexes, and scientific community, sovereignty has produced sophisticated, machine-like assemblages to organise the distribution of the sensible to comport with the new conditions of the general intellect and the mind. These assemblages are free-floating and no longer anchored to an object. I refer to this development as cognitive ergonomics, because the contingencies of the real and “potential space” of the brain’s cognitive apparatus, its neural plasticity, have been elaborated to meet the demands of the constructed hegemonic social/cultural dynamis with a maximum of efficiency.31

Section 5. Cultural Difference and the Sampling of Neural Biodiversity

Drawing for Neuroaesthetics Conference, 2005

Neural plasticity refers to the ability of neurons, dendrites, and their synapses to be modified by experience. The famous neurobiologist Marcus Jacobson defines neural plasticity as a process through which the nervous system adjusts to changes in the internal and external milieu. Those adjustments can come in response to changes in the external environment mediated by the senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch and by the autonomic sense.33 Here, we see an analogy with Rancière’s distribution of the sensible, especially in the inclusion of the autonomic system, which includes of the emotional and affective subsystems. Secondly the nervous system can adjust to internal changes, such as those that occur after focal brain injuries, in which the brain may recover as long as that injury occurs before puberty. Language production and comprehension can also be affected by plasticity. Most lesions affecting the language areas of children are due to strokes that occur in the perinatal period. The language areas of the brain are represented in early life in both the right and left hemispheres of the brain. By the age of nine or just before puberty, a process occurs called lateralisation, which stabilises the area in and around the anterior left temporal lobe of the left hemisphere, designating it for language understanding (reception) and production. Children who sustain a stroke in the perinatal period do not suffer serious speech defects because the brain is able to adapt. Even children who suffer a stroke, or, worse, a brain tumour in the left hemisphere requiring surgery on the speech area, are able to recover almost all of their language abilities, since the right hemisphere can take over the function with only partial deficit. Adults suffering from stroke in the same area develop either receptive or motor aphasias, illnesses of speech comprehension or production, depending on what part of the language area is affected.34 What this implies is quite interesting in the light of this essay. If the region of the brain specialised for language is destroyed, other, very different, regions, in the right hemisphere in right-handed individuals, may take over its function. The fact that sometimes language is represented bilaterally and that, in some left handed people, language is lateralised to the opposite hemisphere suggests that there is a pluripotential neurobiologic capacity to be unmasked in an area of the brain not normally engineered for a given purpose. What is important is that up to the age of approximately nine years of age, the brain retains the potential to be modified by a linguistic, interpersonal, cultural environment. “Once language exists in the interpersonal, cultural environment, the more general power and tendency of the human brain through imitation and related mechanisms to shape its growth around recurring features of the environment in which it finds itself allows the capability for language to develop in the absence of the areas that many thousands of years ago provided the functional characteristics that allowed human beings and human societies to first develop languages.”35 The same could be said for language acquisition. A child born to Japanese parents living in London learns to speak English without an accent. The same could be said for the English child living in Tokyo who learns to speak Japanese fluently. Second language acquisition is more difficult after the age of nine than before. This model for neural plasticity and language acquisition is also good for understanding the effects of the information economy upon the brain/mind.

Section 6. Sculpting the Brain, And I Don’t Mean Rodin

Today more than ever, it is culture that modifies the brain. I would like to show that, in fact, when the conditions of the information economy and the concomitant general intelligence are expressed as conditions of intensive networks of real abstraction, real intensivity, the possibility for this sculpting emerges and becomes very powerful. I am utilising the theory of neuronal group selection as formulated by Gerald Edelman, not forgetting the important contributions of Jean Pierre Changeux, for what follows.36,37 Permutations of this theory may evolve over the coming years that will eventually replace it. They may not so much prove it wrong as more accurately reproduce the conditions of the ever-evolving nature of the world for which a new model of brain and mind development might need to be adapted. The theory of neuronal group selection, or neural selectionism, is made up of three components. Simply stated there, is the primary repertoire, which is a product of developmental selection; the secondary repertoire, produced by experiential selection; and reentry, which stabilises and elaborates upon the secondary repertoire. I will cover developmental and experiential selection first, leaving reentry for later. The primary repertoire consists of the initial variability in the anatomy of the brain at birth, which 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 the genes that reflect that history. Finally it is the result of events that take place during gestation. For example, the effects of smoking, drinking, or cocaine use on the developing foetal brain are well known. The combined effect of these three processes is the production of the neurobiologic common, from which the brain/mind emerges through its engagement with culture.

I would like to call attention to the primary repertoire as the site of what is referred to as neural biodiversity. “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 organisation from genes to species to ecosystems, along with the evolutionary history that led to their existence.”38 Neural biodiversity, by analogy, is, first of all, a species-specific condition that refers to the natural variability of neural elements, including their physical and chemical idiosyncrasies and the neurobiological apparatus, which allows for the neural plastic potentiality to express itself. It is a condition of that species’ evolutionary history and contains therein the history of the neurobiological adaptations that were required by that species’ ascendance.

Sampling the Light Fantastic, 2005

The secondary repertoire is a result of epigenesis and neural plasticity during a process called experiential selection. 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. Hebbian theory, which states that neurons that fire together wire together, is operative in the primary repertoire, where spontaneous electrical activity stimulates genetically prescribed built-in networks. In the secondary repertoire, that electrical activity is joined by what is generated by objects and object relations in the world and, in the case of our world, the real-imaginary-virtual interface (RIVI).39 The RIVI, as used here, is made up of the following: real objects, natural and produced, of which cinematic projections are included; images and facts that are projected onto these objects from our unconscious, dream, and drug induced states; those made by artists in response to other unconscious provocations; and virtual objects and relations as they exist in the internal architecture of the computer or the Web and as they become e-verted for designed products, architecture, or the city as a plan. Although we have defined the primary repertoire and the secondary repertoire separately, they are part of the same overlapping and interdependent process.

What is key to these changes is that experiential selection, unlike natural selection in evolution, occurs as a result, not of differential reproduction, but rather of the differential amplification of certain neuronal populations. What this means is that those neurons and neural networks that are most frequently and intensely stimulated by, for instance, advertised toys that appear and reappear in real and televised environments, or objects which are repeatedly pointed out as significant by the parents, will develop more efficient firing patterns or become progressively more phase locked, synchronously tethered together in time, which gives them a selective advantage over those that are not.

In other words, these neurons are apt to be more likely favoured over other neurons and neuronal networks in future encounters with those stimuli. These stimuli can be grouped together into larger ensembles of stimulation that are persistently aligned in the environment and thus are always coded together.40 Branded environments are one such example, where, through corporate agreements, Nike Shoes, Post Grape Nuts, Hertz Rental Car, Air Berlin, and Sony Music appear together in the commercial landscape of billboards and airline magazines. The institutional understanding and the sovereignty whose bidding it does is empowered by this network of cultural signifiers. What Paul Virilio had formerly referred to in the representational and extensive era as phatic signifiers today become fields of phatic signifiers, embedded in the intensive logics of emerging meaning produced by the new apparatus of global culture. As we have seen, these networks are supplemented by a field of direct and indirect externalities that produce intensive socialised networks.

Each brand is made up of its brand equity and its externalities that, together, compete with other assemblages for the attention of the market place. These selective pressures are coupled to selective pressures in the brain/mind. The conditions of intensivity integrate dynamic flows into the distribution of sensibility that these branded environments are instrumental in producing. (One might argue here, as an aside, that, in the transition from the Disciplinary Society to the Society of Control, the conditions of this intensivity and this integration of dynamic flows, as they jump the normal perceptual mechanism and direct themselves to the brain itself, might instead be called a distribution of the insensible.) Dynamic contingencies play a role in their fit and value. Repeated gossip, for example, differentially stimulates networks that make up the externalities that surround brand equity. The more a certain externality is stimulated, the more it comes to play a direct and constant role in the recognition of the product by the public and the more it indirectly stimulates other related networks. In the end, these externalities evolve to become commodified real factors that are now considered as a direct influence. The same is happening in the brain. These intense branded networks stimulate networks in the brain/mind that register and act on them preferentially, in the end having effects on the overall architecture of the brain/mind. In the competition for neural space during critical periods of development, neural networks selected for by these branded environments will out-compete those that are not selected for, which either wither away or are incorporated in other assemblages where they can continue to play a role and be stimulated.

Field of Phatic Signifiers, 2003–2007

Section 7. Time Never Won or Never Lost

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 taking place at many different levels of brain organisation: 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 recognised. The anatomically distinct areas of the brain, the primary sensory areas such as the visual cortex as well as the more modern associative cortices, consist of distinct areas that code for different information.42 For instance, the visual cortex, as the research of Semir Zeki and others has shown, is made up of functionally segregated areas that code for specific attributes such as the form and colour of a visual object. These areas 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 sample and produce maps of the world based on their specific biased apparatus. For instance, area V4 of the occipital cortex samples the world according to colour—that is, its cells are wavelength selective—while those of V5 are motion selective.43 But we don’t see the world as disjointed patterns of colour 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 a picture/ image that is integrated: this is referred to as binding. 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, the satiation of hunger, and so forth. Reentry also plays a role in binding these regions as global mappings, since it refers to the whole brain as it is activated at the same time.

Section 8. Brainweb: Hierarchical vs. Distributed Networks

Sketch for Fabrication, 2001

There are two basic theories of the solution to the problem of integration in the brain. The first model is essentially hierarchical, in which there is a progressive increase in the specificity of the neurons as you move from the peripheral to the more central areas. Diverse processing streams achieve confluence at higher layers, finally reaching what is referred to as a master area. Such a master area has not been found, although feed-forward convergence is an important anatomical feature of the cortex.

An alternate model, which has broad implications for our understanding of the brain as a multiplicity, is the reentrant model of integration. The two main tenets of this theory are that neurons work together in “neuronal groups” or local collectives and that they correlate their activity through reentry. “As we have already discussed, reentry leads to the synchronisation of the activity of neuronal groups in different brain maps, binding them into circuits capable of temporally coherent output. Reentry is thus the central mechanism by which the spatiotemporal coordination of diverse sensory and motor events takes place.”46

Earthling drawing, 2006

Proceptive Self-Reflexive System, 2006

Neuro-Biopolitics, 2006

Section 9. Perception in Action: Neuropower

From the Common Infinitum to the Neurobiologic Common, and Everything In-Between, 2008

A new model called situatedness has posited a much more adaptive and action-oriented system.52 This model assumes that cognition is not built on context- invariant percepts but instead must adapt itself to the continually changing environment; that of the moving subject imposing himself or herself on a nervous system in action. Cognitive functions are now being appreciated more in terms of top-down strategies rather than the bottom-up strategies of classic neuroscience, although bottom-up strategies are still understood as playing an important role. These top-down strategies have shifted the concept of perception away from reflex-driven systems of reactivity toward systems that are driven by expectations derived from previous experience.53 This new shift towards expectation has implications for models of neural systems in the information age, because perception is now “dominated” by intrinsic factors such as attention, memory, and anticipation. “The data reviewed indicate that top-down processing is in many instances, associated with modulation of the temporal structure of both ongoing and stimulus evoked activity. In a wider sense, top-down influences can be defined as intrinsic sources of contextual modulation of neural processing. Obviously, top down factors include the activity of systems involved in goal definition, action planning, working memory and selective attention.”54

Shaping the Negation of the Negation, 2008

Political Art in the 60’s was about Delineation Political Art is Today is About Differentiation

Grey Matters, 2008

Notes and Bibliography

1 Maurizio Lazzarato, “Life and the Living in the Societies of Control,” in Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sorensen, eds., Deleuze and the Social (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), page 186.

2 Lazzarato, ibid., page 186. The modulation of memory would thus be the most important function of noo-politics.

3 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), page 30: “The productivity of bodies and the value of affect, however, are absolutely central in this context. We will elaborate the three primary aspects of immaterial labour in the contemporary economy: the communicative labour of industrial production that has newly become linked in informational networks, the interactive labour of symbolic analysis and problem solving, and the labour of the production and manipulation of affects.”

4 Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude (New York: Semiotext, 2004). page 52.

5 Virno, ibid., page 83.

6 This explanation is not reductionist or deterministic in the traditional sense. In this model, the human brain has only a finite number of prescribed and ready-to-use neural networks at birth. In addition, however, it has a series of potentialities and apparatus that are inherited, such as neuroplasticity and the ability to generate, for instance, oscillatory potentials, give it the ability to become reorganised within a set of many possible environmental contingencies.

7 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, page 400: “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.”

8 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo-avant-garde and the Culture Industry (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), page xxi. Three further considerations must be kept in mind. First of all, art and architecture are not immune to the conditions of the institutional understanding, because large architectural projects require considerable funding, and artists in some circumstances must participate in art fairs. Second, it is not only that which is sensible that is essential, but also how the underlying conditions that produce the dynamics of the conscious and unconscious, the actual and virtual: how in fact they interrelate to mutate the flow of sensorial dispositions or are subsumed in a matrix of as yet unrecognised and sublime percepts. Finally, capitalism utilises a process that I am here referring to as the institutionalised alternative to modify, absorb, and limit the cultural implications of the new and different. Janis Joplin’s song of resistance, “Mercedes Benz” (1970), becomes a sound track for a Mercedes Benz commercial of the late 1990’s. Different people from a cross-section of British culture perform, lip-synching the song while a Mercedes Benz maneuvers its way through the city. Just as empire dependends on the multitude’s need to move for its access to the labour streams that power its engines, capitalism must not restrict the ingenuity of the avant-garde’s movements too much. The radicality of new forms of knowledge produces the fissures and eruptions necessary to expose the new surfaces and territories that capitalism can use as an inspiration to invent new products and markets. Benjamin Buchloh’s remarks are pertinent here. “This type of installation art and photoconceptualism now produces a techno-lingo of the image that can pride itself in being the first to have fully absorbed the very technologies that made the culture of the spectacle and the production of advertisement imagery a monolithic global power. Such affirmative mimesis makes it seem inescapable that artistic practices would, if not actually pave the way for, at least finally succumb to the powers of spectacle culture to permeate all conventions of perception and communication without any form of resistance whatsoever. It implies that even mere thought and the slightest gesture of opposition appear dwarfed and ludicrous in the face of totalitarian control and domination.”

9 Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007).

10 Boris Groys, Art Power (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008), page 12: “Thus the question of the autonomy of art seems to me the central question in the context of any discussion of the relationship between art and resistance. And my answer to this question is: Yes we can speak about the autonomy of art; and, yes, art does have an autonomous power of resistance.”

11 Manuel De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2002) pages 59-61.

12 Warren Neidich, “Resistance is Futile: The Neurobiopolitics of Global Consciousness,” in Sarai Reader 06: Turbulence, (Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2006) page 226.

13 Scott Lash and Celia Lury, Global Culture Industry (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007) page 5.

14 Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers, “The Extended Mind”, Analysis 58:10-23, 1998. Reprinted in The Philosopher’s Annual, vol XXI (P. Grim, ed.), 1998.

15 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), page 38.

16 http://forgefx.com/casestudies/ggs/deicing-training-simulator.html

17 Andy Clark and David J. Chalmers, “The Extended Mind”, page 5.

18 David. J. Depew, “Baldwin and His Many Effects,” in Bruce H. Weber and David J. Depew, eds., Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), page 10: “In recent years, a number of evolutionary theorists have spoken well of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century idea that since the nineteen fifties has gone by the name of “the Baldwin Effect.” The general thrust of the idea is to urge that, under some conditions, learned behaviours can affect the direction and rate of evolutionary change by natural selection. In such cases, cultural inheritance of a learned behaviour across an indefinite number of generations creates a ‘breathing space’ in which inherited factors favourable to the adaptive behaviour in question that either already exist, happen to crop up, or can be stimulated by the change in question —there is some dispute about this— will move along the channel already cut by culture, thereby converting learned behaviours into genetic adaptations or, alternatively, supporting learned behaviours by related genetic adaptations. In either case, natural selection will have ratified evolutionary vectors that learning began.” (page 4).

19 Yann M. Boutang, “Mutations in Contemporary Urban Space and the Cognitive Turning Point of Capitalism, Transactions”, from the conference Trans_Thinking the City, The Mind in Architecture; From Biopolitics to Noos-Politics, (Delft: Delft School of Architecture, October, 2008.).

20 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2004) page 85.

21 Gabriel Rockhill, quoted in Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, page 1: “[I refer] to what Rancière himself has called the distribution of the sensible, or the system of divisions and boundaries that define among other things, what is visible and audible within a particular aesthetico-political regime.”

22 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, page 12.

23 Gabriel Rockhill, quoted in Jacques Rancière, page 4.

24 Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude, page 70.

25 Maurizio Lazzarato, “Life and the Living in the Societies of Control,” in Deleuze and the Social, page 186.

26 Bruce Wexler, Brain and Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), page 102: “These mechanisms permit relatively rapid and selective direction of attention to objects at a distance as well as those close at hand, and allow parental influence over infant perceptual (and related cognitive) activity as well as motor activity. Through such means, adults influence what in the continuous stream of sensory input infants are most aware of, become most familiar with, and think most about. The corresponding effects on brain activity are pronounced making internally concrete the invisible connection between a pointed finger and an attended object.”

27 Peter R. Huttenlocher, Neural Plasticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), page 5: “While neural plasticity probably exists in the nervous systems of all species, it appears to be most marked in specific regions of the human cerebral cortex, in areas that subserve the so-called higher cortical functions, including language, mathematical ability, musical ability and ‘executive functions’. Regions of the cerebral cortex that subserve voluntary motor activity and primary sensory functions, such as visual and auditory information processing, appear to be less malleable.”

28 Jean-Pierre Changeux, “Genes, Brains, and Culture: From Monkey to Human,” in Dehaene et al., From Monkey Brain to Human Brain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), page 83: “Even less understood is the expansion of the cerebral cortex that took place in the course of vertebrate brain evolution, in particular from monkey to man. The number of neurons per cortical column is rather uniform throughout the vertebrates. Thus the surface area of the cortex, i.e. the number of columns, appears as the primary target of the evolutionary changes. The gestation lasts 21 days in the rat, 165 in the macaque and 280 in humans, and the rapid phase of synaptogenesis (which starts two months before birth in macaque and four to five months after birth in man) lasts 136 days in macaque and 470 days in humans. One may further speculate that the fast expansion of the frontal lobe and parietotemporal areas, which contributed to the evolutionary origins of Homo sapiens’ brain, resulted from the exceptionally prolonged action of some still unidentified developmental process.”

29 Paolo Virno, The Grammar of the Multitude, page 79.

30 Virno, ibid., page 87.

31 Warren Neidich, Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain (Los Angeles: D.A.P., 2003).

32 Gilles Deleuze, quoed in Gregory Flaxman. ed., The Brain is the Screen, Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), page 41.

33 Marcus Jacobson, Developmental Neurobiology (New York: Plenum Press, 1991), page 26.

34 Peter R. Huttenlocher, Neural Plasticity, page 140.

35 Bruce Wexler, Brain and Culture, page 121.

36 Gerald Edelman, The Remembered Present (New York: Basic Books Inc., 1989).

37 Jean-Pierre Changeux and Stanilslas Dehaene, “Neuronal Models of Cognitive Functions,” in Mark H. Johnson, ed., Brain Development and Cognition (New York: Blackwell, 1993), pages 363-403.

38 R.J. Scholes et al., “Toward a Global Biodiversity Observing System,” Science, Volume 321, page 1044.

39 Wolf Singer, “Coherence as an Organizing Principle of Cortical Functions,” in Olaf Sporns and Giulio Tononi, eds., Selectionism and the Brain (San Diego: Academic Press,1994), page 158: “The probability that neurons synchronise 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 synchronise their responses if stimulus configurations change and require new associations…If more than one object is present in a scene, several distinct assemblies should form. 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.”

40 Giulio Tononi, “Reentry and Cortical Integration,” in Selectionism in the Brain, page 129: “Two of the main tenets of this theory are that neurons act together in local collectives called neuronal groups and that they communicate with each other and correlate their activity by a process called reentry.”

41 Bruce Wexler, Brain and Culture, page 108-9: “Given the prolonged postnatal physical maturation of these structures in human beings, lasting until or beyond puberty, it is not surprising that adults must provide these functions if they are to be present in the behaviour of infants and children. Essentially, then, the frontal lobes of parents are functionally linked with the lower brain centres and the sensory, motor and association cortices of their infants and children. While the child’s frontal lobes are developing, the parents’ brains provide frontal lobe functions for the child.”

42 Giulio Tononi, “Reentry and Cortical Integration,” page 129.

43 Semir Zeki, ed., A Vision of the Brain (New York: Blackwell,1993), pages 122-129: “Here, then, was a visual area which, like V5 and V3, received its input from V1, but had properties which were remarkably different from those of V5 or V3. It seemed difficult to avoid the conclusion that there must be a division of labour among the visual areas of the prestriate cortex, with different areas undertaking different tasks in parallel.” (page 126).

44 Manuel Castels, The Rise of the Network Society (New York: Blackwell, 2000), page 492.

45 Francisco Varela et al., “The Brainweb: Phase Synchronization and Large-Scale Integration,” Neuroscience, Volume 2, April, 2001.

46 Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, Consciousness, How Matter Becomes Imagination (London: Penguin Books, 2000), page 85.

47 Giulio Tononi, “Reentry and Cortical Integration”, page 144.

48 Francisco Varela et al., “The Brainweb: Phase Synchronization and Large-Scale Integration,” pages 229-239.

49 J.A. Scott Kelso, “An Essay on Understanding the Mind,” Ecological Psychology, 20:194, 2008.

50 Giulio Tononi, “Reentry and Cortical Integration”, page 148.

51 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo-avant-garde and the Culture Industry, page xxiv: “Therefore I would suggest that only at this time did a radically different basis for critical interventions in the discursive and institutional frameworks determining the production and the reception of contemporary art become established, generating propositions of audience reception, distribution form, and institutional critique that were distinctly different from the critical models invoked by Burger.”

52 Engel, A.K. et al., “Dynamic Predictions: Oscillations and Synchrony in Top-Down Processing,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, October, 2001, page 704.

53 Wolf Singer, “Binding by Synchrony”, Scholarpedia 2007 http:www.scolarpedia.org/article/binding_by_synchrony: “These indicated that synchronised oscillatory activity is not only stimulus driven but does occur across widely distributed networks of interconnected cortical areas in anticipation of an attention demanding discrimination task. This observation led to the hypothesis that self-generated oscillatory activity in the beta and gamma frequency range could be a correlate of an executive subsystem required for the execution of the anticipated task.”

54 A.K. Engel, et al., “Dynamic Predictions: Oscillations and Synchrony in Top-Down Processing,” page 714.

55 Ibid, page 714: “A crucial ingredient of the model is that synchrony can be intrinsically generated (not imposed on the system by external stimuli) and modulated by intrinsic signals that reflect experience, contextual influences and action goals.”

56 Editorial, “A Manifesto for Neuromarketing Science,” Journal of Consumer Behaviour, Volume, 7, Issue, 4-5, pages 263-271.