This symposium endeavors to describe the role of art and artists in cognitive capitalism in which the brain and mind are the new factories of the twenty-first century. We are no longer only proletariats working on assembly lines to create objects but cognitariats (mental laborers) working on screens to produce Big Data which is sold to governmental and corporate entities. This has led authors such as Byung-Chul Han (for example, in his book Psycho-politics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, 2000) to understand that in our moment biopower (Foucault’s power over life as a form of the granular management of life) has transitioned to psychopower, or psychopolitics, in which the mental laborers or cognitariats gladly give up their freedoms without direct coercion—to labor incessantly and overtime to interact with digitality. Han calls this “smart power.”
Yet, we are now on the doorstep of another transition almost as important as that which transformed the agricultural/manufacturing economies into knowledge/information economies. In this coming neural-based economy the material brain and its neuroplasticity become the focus of capitalist commodification—both directly and indirectly; directly through technologies like brain-computer interfaces, nootropics and cortical implants, and indirectly with Big Data, neuroeconomics and neural consumerism. In this neural economy, psychopower has further transitioned to neural power where the material brain is put to work. In psychopower and neuropower, the body’s importance is reduced and subsumed by the brain and mind. The brain, as understood here, is not restricted to the bony carapace of the skull (as cognitivists would have us believe) but is a situated complex that extends into the socio-political-cultural-ecological milieu with which it coevolves. Changes in the external milieu are mirrored in the architectural composition of the brain through a process that Bernard Stiegler referred to as exosomatic organogenesis, a process in which technical rather than genetic evolution is at the core of the liberation and perfection of organ systems, especially the brain. In this model, the brain is a diverse, variable, rhizomatic, intensive, becoming entity in constant transformation. Consciousness is no longer understood as something restricted to, and most elegantly formed in, humankind, but rather is traced into the deep history of inorganic matter and shared with plants and animals in non-hierarchical alignments.
From this starting point, “Art and Cognitive Activism” features artists, architects, art historians, and philosophers using their own practices, materials, histories, and apparatuses to unveil the
mysteries of this becoming brain model. In fact, the power of art is its special alliance with the sensory, perceptual, and cognitive as a source of emancipation, magic, and diversity in contradistinction to cognitive neuroscientific models of aesthetics in which the brain becomes a map or model of data points subject to forms of institutionalization, normalization, and demystification. Here, cognitive activism becomes evident as a reaction and form of dissensus against these conservatisms. Key to this conference is Catherine Malabou’s entreaty that the brain is our work and we have the capacity to make our own brains if we have the fortitude to do so. As Victoria Pitts-Taylor writes in her book The Brain’s Body (2016); “Although it is not framed as such in scientific accounts, the plastic, social brain also reveals neurobiology to be political—that is, capable of change and transformation, and open to social structures and their contestation.”
