Hosted by Arne De Boever (MA in Aesthetics and Politics, CalArts), Warren Neidich (The Delft School of Design, TU Delft School of Architecture), and Jason Smith (Art Center), The Psycho-Pathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part 1 will bring together philosophers/critical theorists, media theorists, scientists and artists to discuss the state of the mind and brain under the conditions of contemporary capitalism in which they have become the new focus of laboring. How do the transformed conditions of labor--more specifically the fact that so much contemporary labor is immaterial, affective, and cognitive--transform the role of emancipatory politics and education today? In the switch from the body to the brain/mind as the major sites of normalization and instrumentalization the machinic intelligence of the assembly line has been transformed from the hardware of industrial production to the workings of the self, through linking (for instance) attention with new regulatory conditions such as branding and social networks. Do these new conditions have ramifications for the brain and mind? Did the social, political, economic, psychic and historical conditions which led to the production of the modernist subject create its own psychopathologies like neuroaesthenia and hysteria which required specific remedies like talk therapy and dream interpretation? Did these psychopathologies find their raison detre in the conditions of the brains neurobiological architecture? And furthermore, did these changes also produce artistic actions that feedbacked and recalibrated the cultural landscape as a form of therapy? Could the same be said today? Are attention deficit disorder (ADD), panic attacks, and widespread depression a result of the Infospheres excess: of the mutating political/ social/ cultural conditions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries that overtax and overstimulate the worker? What artistic forms and procedures and species of critical thinking have arisen in response? Might the answers to these questions be found in linking these new conditions to the fundamental shaping of the neuroplastic potential of the brain/mind? S a u l O s t r o w
*Critical Voices* 21STREETPROJECTS La Table Ronde 162 West 21 Street NYC, NY 10011 [email protected] www.21stprojects.org
