The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism

An international array of philosophers, critical theorists, media theorists, art historians, architects, and artists discussed the state of the mind and brain under the conditions of contemporary capitalism, in which these cognitive apparati have become the new focus of labouring.

Like its predecessor ‘The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part I’, this conference investigated how the conditions of ‘semiocapitalism’ and ‘cognitive capitalism’ have transformed the conditions of labour – specifically the fact that so much contemporary labour is immaterial, affective, and cognitive – and as a result détourned the role of emancipatory politics, art/architecture, and education today. Might these new conditions also have lasting material ramifications for the brain and mind?

The conference elaborated upon many of the questions left unattended in Part 1. Questions such as: What is the future of mind in cognitive capitalism? Can a term such as ‘plastic materialism’ describe the substantive changes in neural architectures instigated by this contingent cultural habitus? Is there such a thing as ‘cognitive communism’? Is designed space an agent or platform in the production of subjectivity and is parametrics complicit with its devices? How does artistic research create new emancipatory possibilities in opposition to the overwhelming instrumentalization of the general intellect in semiocapitalism?