The architectonics of the mind’s eye in the age of cognitive capitalism

Abstract

This essay will use what in 1995 under different political conditions I referred to as a neuroaesthetic argument in order to investigate the recent cognitive turn in cognitive capitalism (Neidich 2013). In the present context I am using this term as it moves beyond its historic meanings embedded as they are in precarious laboring, valorization of capital, and communicative capitalism, and emphasize instead how the knowledge economy and immaterial labor script of a story of neural material engagement made explicit in, for instance, the cooption of neural plasticity and the production of remodeled dynamic neural architectures, so-called neuronal recycling (Dehaene & Cohen 2007). In those first lectures on neuroaesthetics, held at the School of Visual Arts, New York City, I emphasized its anti-cognitivist and ontological conditions in order to de-emphasize its other face as ' neuroesthetics,' in which a neural-based cognitive unfolding of a prescribed a priori genetic inscription determines the perceptual and cognitive abilities of the brain, which then produce its cultural artifacts (Zeki 1999). Instead I sought to emphasize a fluid dialectic relationship between cultural plasticity and neurobiological plasticity, or what I would like to refer to as bidirectional becoming-material engagement, in order to emphasize its dynamic and interactive quality.