![]() ![]() ![]() The brain in its plasticity and inherent ‘sociality’ can be proclaimed and projected as a revolutionary organ – a kind of ‘wonder tissue’ writ in revolutionary, transformative text. Contributors include Ina Blom, Arne De Boever, Pascal Gielen, Sanford Kwinter, Maurizio Lazzarato, Karl Lyden, Yann Moulier Boutang, Matteo Pasquinelli, Alexie Penzin, Patricia Reed, John Roberts, Liss C. It calls for the identification of the causative factors of these psychopathologies as well as attempting to invent the counter conditions with which to thwart their emergence. It is upon these and other similar conditions that this book concentrates. As such new dispositifs of normalization and governmentalization have arisen to, on the one hand, diffuse the attention necessary for multi-tasking, and on the other, to enhance the production of a hyper-attention. For example, as a result of the necessity for an efficient brain-mind to labor in the advanced and constantly accelerating conditions of the knowledge economy highly sophisticated and nuanced forms of attention have become compulsory well beyond what was considered essential in the older regimes of the modern. This leads to the second stream, referred to as “the cognitive turn” in cognitive capitalism. The first part of the book delineates the recent emergence of characteristic psychopathologies of cognitive capitalism, which have resulted from the unique concatenation of socialpolitical- psychological-economic relations that have produced distinct stresses and forms of derangement upon the factory of the brain. What we began to understand through this critique was that this epigenesis, the effect on the environment on brain development, was not only of neurobiological import but of political importance as well. The Operaist and continental philosophical orientation of the arguments both in the first two volumes and the current one, add a critique to a quite limited and self-reflexive argument waged in neuroscientific literature about the effects of the environment on the brain like the theories of synaptic stabilization by Jean-Pierre Changeux, Neural Darwinism by Gerald Edelman, developmental system theory (DST) by Susan Oyama, niche construction theory by Kevin Leland, neuroconstructivism by Steven Quartz and Terry Sejnowski, probabilistic epigenesis by Gilbert Gottlieb, and recently the theory of Material Engagement proposed by Lambros Malafouris-a version that is included in this volume. The later phase of cognitive capitalism brings an understanding that the industrial factory of the 19th and 20th centuries-although still important sites of production-has been and will continue to be subsumed by the mind and brain as sites of wealth production. ![]() Additionally, we could speak of the real subsumption of more aspects of life within capitalism, the de-verticalization of time and space, valorization via cognitive labor and an increased financialization of capitalism. It’s worth noting just a few of these conditions: precarious labor, the importance of communication in the workplace, flexible specialization and just in time production, accelerated product innovation, and the complexification of the supply chain. The early phase concerned the new conditions of labor in the early, heady days of the burgeoning information and knowledge economies that led through post-Fordism to cognitive capitalism. Here too we explore the early and late phases of cognitive capitalism, weaving in its effects upon the psyche. Part 3: The Cognitive Turn investigates many of the concepts introduced in the first two volumes. The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism. This book fortuitously combines elements of both programs for reasons that will unfold. The second was an event in March 2015 that I organized in conjunction with the Goethe-Institut Los Angeles entitled Noise and the Possibility of a Future. Firstly, Mark Fisher and myself collaborated at the Department of Visual Culture, Goldsmiths College, with a conference entitled The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part Three: The Cognitive Turn. This third volume of The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism results from the deliberations that took place during two different symposiums.
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