The Manifesto of Activist Neuroaesthetics

by Warren Neidich

1. Every person on planet Earth has the right to fully develop their neural plastic potential. This manifesto of activist neuroaesthetics is a call to arms against engineered present and future neural optimization. Activist neuroaesthetics seeks to produce fully developed, singular entities constituting a multiplicity whose differences in neural architectures (their neural diversity) are embraced. This variety results from an entanglement of a variable, diverse, and constantly changing social-cultural milieu with that of an inherently emerging and changing population of neural elements and their connections presented at birth. Activist neuroaesthetics suggests that artists play a key role in producing this variation. As Catherine Malabou writes in What Should We Do with Our Brain?: “Humans make their own brain, but they do not know it.”¹ Nor do they understand the very power they have access to – if they would only embrace it!

2. Neural plasticity refers to the ways and means by which the brain’s structure and function are modified by experience throughout life, although more so in youth and across generations. The intracranial brain’s materiality—the brain that is inside the skull, both its gray matter consisting of neurons, dendrites, and synapses as well as its white matter composed of myelinated axons called tracts – are modified in this process. In addition to normal training and experience, recent evidence has drawn attention to injury-induced functional and structural plasticity as well as that involved in learning new skills. This intracranial brain is entangled and co-evolves with the extracranial brain characterized by socio-technological-cultural plasticity, which is indeterminate and in a constant state of becoming. Activist neuroaesthetics embraces this entanglement between neural plasticity and cultural plasticity as a political tool and a means for change, resistance, and emancipation against the powers of neural capitalism, which aim to normalize it by sculpting its potential into something supple and easily controlled. As Catherine Malabou states: “Flexibility is plasticity without its genius.”² While flexibility encourages supplication to power by unquestionably taking on its form, plasticity counters its power by inventing and creating its own form.

3. The brain is a variable and plastic interface consisting of adjustable populations of neural elements and undetermined and labile potential synapses. According to the neuroscientist Gerald Edelman, this neural material arrangement is described at birth as the primary repertoire and is transformed by the evolving socio-political-cultural array (with which the human being interacts) into the secondary repertoire.³ Edelman was a pianist and his use of the word “repertoire” is a helpful metaphor in our moment of cognitive capitalism, in which material labor has been replaced by immaterial labor. Immaterial labor and virtuosity are now the significant modulators of these predisposed neural relations. In this sense, immaterial relations are made material in the neural synaptic logics of the becoming mind-brain. In this variation and noise of the nervous system resides its capacity for freedom and emancipation against new hegemonic forms of digital governance of what I call the Statisticon. The Statisticon is the most recent example of a form of power and governmental regulation that eclipses what Michel Foucault called “disciplinary society”⁴ and Gilles Deleuze labeled the “society of control.”⁵ As its name implies, it is linked to the functional regularities found in data (especially those produced by Big Data) and has led to a new form of surveillance that Shoshana Zuboff has called the Big Other.⁶ Key to the Statisticon is the process of voluntary auto-exploitation and the resulting difficulty in the production of solidarity and comradeship, which makes resistance to the dictatorship of capitalism almost impossible. Most importantly, with the combined assistance of imminent wired-brain technologies like Neuralink, the brain’s activity could become linked to the World Wide Web, virtual reality, and the internet. The Singularity marks the moment when machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, but it could also mark the moment when the Statisticon, as a form of governance, seamlessly subsumes human intelligence. The Statisticon will provoke a form of neural subsumption where our thoughts and the brainwave patterns they conjure will be harnessed toward the production of new forms of accelerated labor and data production. In other words, it will mark a transition from real subsumption to neural subsumption where, as Bill Gates has addressed, business happens at the speed of thought.⁷ We immediately need to become aware of this threat and create the means to counter its potential for cognitive abuse. Artists and creatives working with digital tools must be at the forefront of this struggle against metadata and reclaim the future of the future. As a form of mental hacking, art can provide an escape from this imminent disaster – if only we have the consciousness and courage to do so!

4. Human intelligence, in its broad definition as linked capacities including reasoning, planning, problem-solving, and abstract thinking, is not something that resides totally inside the brain. Instead, it is distributed, enacted, and extended throughout the body and an entire host of evolving, externalized technics and social formations embedded in various cultural, social, economic, and political networks. These external material and immaterial relations coevolve with the brain’s internal material ones in ways described by Bernard Stiegler as epiphylogenesis and sequential exteriorizations.⁸ Epiphylogenesis is dependent upon neural plasticity and epigenesis, and refers to the way technics (or tools) become entangled with the brain’s materiality, in the end changing it. As such, technical attributes are inscribed and re-coded transgenerationally in analogous templates emblazoned in the mutable neural architectonics. Technological inventions like fire, spearpoint production, decorating and burying the dead, and mass migration have (according to Daniel Lord Smail) been important in promoting concomitant morphogenetic changes in the brain over the past two million years.⁹ These changes include the enlargement of the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes – processes that are still active and ongoing today!

5. Art’s power resides in its capacity to destabilize the authorized designed gestalts and affordances (named the distribution of the sensible by Jacques Rancière¹⁰) operating in the existential field of lived, politically entangled sensible experience and, as a result, to deconstruct and reformat the brain’s mutable architecture. This can be understood as a condition that transforms what Giorgio Agamben has called the zöe into a specialized form of bios. Here I am referring to the transformation of the neural zöe into a neural bios or politicized material brain (also referred to as the xeno-materialist, alternative brain) constituting and constituted by the ever-evolving techno-linguistic-data environment.

6. In cognitive capitalism, the brain and the mind are the new factories of the twenty-first century and the intellect is the primary source of wealth. In fact, the general intellect is no longer constituted as machinic and scientific know-how. It is, instead, part of living labor. However, living labor does not mean what is already crystallized, but what is to come. The performing body – either the dancer or the cellist – does not just have to play a score but can invent the score: that is the true definition of virtuosity. It is this periodic rejuvenation of the image of thought and its expression that constitutes our hope. In the recent past, feminism, post-colonialism, and conceptualism created the discursive and linguistic heterotopias that reconfigured the social and semiotic material relations that made up the postmodern and post-human “distributions of the sensible.” An example of this process can be appreciated by examining what Laura Mulvey called “avant-garde feminism” in film, especially as it emerged in the 1960s.¹¹ These films reacted against the meaning of femininity assigned by patriarchy to assert a counterinsurgency through a new language called countercinema. In the postmodern and post-structural environment of that moment, this language was able to ripple out from its specific film medium into generalized fields of cultural production, estranging and rupturing the omnipresent and pervasive patriarchal distributions of the sensible and semiotic habitus of semiocapitalism. Yet, “distributions of the sensible” are not just conditions of the extracranial brain (the transgenerational output of socio-political cultural relations) but rather also a condition of the intracranial brain. Mutated networked relations in the real, imaginary, and virtual landscape at odds with semiocapitalism create analogous changes in the brain that have repercussions for the memory work of the mind’s eye. Text and image are their currency. Mind and consciousness are meta-phenomena erupting from the dynamic relations of the situated body as an intra-articular agency interfacing the extra- and intracranial brain as a complex. The power of art in its utopian guise is found in its capacity to provoke deregulation and redistribution of the now networked sensible, as well as its power to cause analogous and concomitant mutations of the neural network configuration of the brain with which it is entangled.

7. The human being is the only animal we know of that has the capacity to change its environment with the sole purpose of explicitly changing its own brain. The intra-extracranial brain complex is a contested battlefield where different ideologies are engaged and rage. Today, our environment is both static and mobile and exists on many platforms, from printed matter to mobile phones to virtual reality, simultaneously. It is not simply the hardware of built physical space, but its theatrical, social, and performative spaces of speaking, singing, dancing, and writing. Together, they make up the rigorous counter-heterodoxy operating in opposition to so-called precarious, valorized, and financialized economies.

8. The intricate relationship between the socio-cultural-technological milieu and the brain is related to the sources and compositions of produced regularities, repetitions, distributions, synchronicities, and their pervasiveness, which together concretize, construct, and compose the plastic neural-biological substrate. On the one hand, reactionary governments attempt to limit cultural experience, promoting adherence to unchanging and crystalized essences in order to minimize complexity. On the other hand, progressive governments promote diverse cultural experiences that are variably heterodoxic and aleatory. Conservative dominions aim to generate neurotypical subjects who are easily governed. The defunding of artistic education in the United States and elsewhere (in favor of a more technical education like the STEM curriculum) is a product of this desire for the neurotypical. Art education can be seen as a force against culturally determined, asymmetrical power relations that conservative regimes generate. Activist neuroaesthetics understands the consequences of art production for the material brain and aligns itself with progressive approaches. It celebrates and embraces the neurally diverse (including those on the functional autistic and attention deficit spectrums), rather than restricting them.

9. Positivist neuroscience and positivist neuroaesthetics link with neoliberal neural capitalism to form a conservative dominion. Positivist neuroaesthetics frames art as an assemblage of non-changing essences that can be experimented with to produce neuroscientific insights (rather than artistic ones) subsumed by the vast scientific universe with its own determinant rules and ideas of truth: rules at odds with artistic methods that do not require peer review and repeatable results subject to statistical investigation. Positivist neuroaesthetics’ understanding of art minimizes the liminal and the role of the unconscious. What positivist neuroaesthetics misses is the intentions of the artist as a provocateur of the social, political, economic, or cultural becomings that provide the context of the work’s production – for example, in Russian Constructivism and agitprop. For positivist neuroaesthetics, the notion of an artwork as a reaction to previous art movements with which it is historically and conceptually aligned is considered unimportant. An MRI machine cannot account for art’s capacity to be realized as an idea through immaterial labor. Positivist neuroaesthetics’ account of art is bereft of a language to consider instances of contingency and unpredictability such as found in the work of Fluxus. A single artwork like Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) or Niki de Saint Phalle’s Shooting Picture (1961) can alter the history of art. Positivist neuroaesthetics refutes the importance of emergence. It attempts to reduce the magic of art and its specters in a capitalist attempt to codify and commodify that which has not already been codified and commodified, in order to recuperate art’s divergent actions. Along with neural consumerism and neuroeconomics in this first stage of neural subsumption, positivist neuroaesthetics contributes to the production of the perfected cognitariat, a digital laborer working on virtual platforms connected by the World Wide Web to produce mentally derived data. Positivist neuroaesthetics attempts to link neural efficiency to the digital marketplace in ways similar to how Taylorist management improved the surplus value generated by Fordist labor. Positivist neuroaesthetics is at the service of the digital dominion and doesn’t even know it.

Unlike its positivist counterpart, activist neuroaesthetics is not linked to a criterion of functionality because its underlying purpose is to explore (dis)functional solutions in order to disclose and reveal new paradigmatic landscapes of alterity. In this way, activist neuroaesthetics entangles the brain’s variation at birth (its dendrites and axons with different tuning capacities) with ever-expanding cultural variations in the space and time with which it is linked. The focus of activist neuroaesthetics, therefore, is this cultural variation, and it emphasizes that the political power of art and culture is to promote the neural diversity that results. Its aim is to replace the unitary subject of humanism and its patriarchal and Eurocentric roots with that of a complex, non-binary, polyvalent, and relational one. As Victoria Pitts-Taylor has written in the introduction to her book The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics (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.”¹² Activist neuroaesthetics is attuned to left-leaning accelerationist ideas in which a sharing economy predominates postcapitalist models and restages tragic Landian nihilism as a comedic urban romance with technology.¹³ In their “Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics” (2013), Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argue that Land confuses “speed with acceleration” and misses an understanding of “an acceleration which is also navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility.”¹⁴ Could an accelerated technology, one which proposes a glitch aesthetic and noisy atmosphere be up to the task of deregulating capitalist exploitation and recuperation?

10. Activist neuroaesthetics promotes the idea that the brain is a brain without organs. The brain without organs is a phrase based on the idea of the body without organs (BwO) originating in the writings of Antonin Artaud and expanded by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: “The body is the body. Alone it stands. And in no need of organs. Organism it never is. Organisms are the enemies of the body.”¹⁵ In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari expand this idea to understand that the body without organs is based on a rhizome structure which, unlike roots or branches of trees, connects any point in the body to any other point: “The rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight.”¹⁶ Like the rhizome, the body without organs is an “acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states.”¹⁷ According to Deleuze and Guattari, the problem of the organism is to make an alternative body without organs which unleashes its unformed, “unstable matters, by flows in all directions, by free intensities, or nomadic singularities, by mad or transitory particles.”¹⁸

Like the body without organs, the brain without organs (BrwO) must free itself from imprisoning intensities and deterritorialize the strata that lock singularities into prescribed systems – in other words, systems that are acts of God. In cognitive capitalism, in which the brain and the mind are the new factories of the twenty-first century, cognitive labor has subsumed manual labor. Bodily labor situated on the assembly line is replaced by mental labor performed on keyboards in front of computer monitors and the radicalizing effects of the body without organs are diminished. The synchronous and contiguous movements of the laboring body, once directed by Taylorist management techniques and styles of performance that the body without organs had been directed against, have lost their effectiveness as “dispositifs” of dissensus. The transition of the proletariat to the cognitariat requires new techniques to manage cognitive labor. Hebbianism, named after the Canadian neuropsychologist Donald O. Hebb has replaced Taylorism.¹⁹ Hebbian theory, often paraphrased as “neurons that fire together wire together,” forms the basis for our current understanding of neural network efficiency and sculpting at the heart of theories of surplus value of end-stage cognitive capitalism.²⁰ The brain without organs is necessary to confront these new forms of state and stateless corporate digital governance.

11. Activist neuroaesthetics questions what neuro-enhancing drugs, new technologies like brain-computer interfaces that link the brain to the internet, and the overwhelming influence of artificial neural networks, artificial intelligence, and deep learning will have upon our sense of self and freedom. Activist neuroaesthetics is against positivist neuroaesthetics’ engagement with the industrial/military/media complex represented by DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency). In other words, activist neuroaesthetics believes that brain-computer interfaces and memory-disrupting technologies like optogenetics are not to be embraced, but critiqued. They are not necessarily being invented to help humankind or to cure disease, as reported in the mainstream media; instead, they constitute a front for a diabolical scheme toward a future of subjectivation and neural enhancement. Funded by government agencies and major corporations, these technologies establish the infrastructure of neural capitalism. Neural capitalism consists of a range of neural technologies and interfaces (such as Big Pharma, brain-computer interfaces and optogenetics, virtual environments, the Internet of Everything, and Deep AI linked to online sites like Facebook) in which the brain’s somatic and affective disposition is subsumed into its intricate networked metabolism. Artists are visual and auditory experts whose knowledge runs the creative machinery of the mediated knowledge economy. We must therefore first educate ourselves and raise the consciousness of others to these new and evolving conditions, and then we must plan and produce contraptions of resistance. We have the power to modify the reality neural capitalism is producing only insofar as we understand that power and how it modulates the machinery of thought itself. In other words, we don’t have to live in a world of Black Mirror.

12. Art’s utopian promise is not made with the market in mind. Activist neuroaesthetics calls for art practices to reject their relation to the neoliberal art market as a liquid commodity that emphasizes art’s economic fungibility and exchange value on the valorized global marketplace, where artworks become inherently fetishized and commonplace. Instead, activist neuroaesthetics calls on all art practitioners to engage directly with the cultural milieu in order to mutate it, in the hopes that their concerted actions will indirectly transform the conditions of the material brain. Activist neuroaesthetics is against the branded artwork as a signifier to engage the collector’s attention. Rather, it emphasizes artistic practices with diverse outputs that are hard to recognize and to assign to specific brands. It promotes works that disrupt the capitalist art market ecosystem. Cultural value transcends market value! Entrepreneurial artists who work for a neoliberal system give up their greatest agency: to activate and engage the neural plasticity of the brain in order to increase its neural diversity and promote its material becoming.

13. Activist neuroaesthetics understands that our capacity to consciously and directly affect our complex environment of evolving relations through artistic interventions is key to its importance and value as an emancipatory ethics. By consciously refunctioning and estranging the environment, we are also indirectly estranging and refunctioning our material brains as a result of engaging with the brain’s neural plastic potential. This is what I refer to as cognitive activism, and it forms the basis of an activist neuroaesthetics that resists new forms of subjugation at work in neural capitalism. Activist neuroaesthetics is more than simply an aesthetic response; it is a way of re-engineering what aesthetics, as a philosophical concept, means. As such, activist neuroaesthetics proactively forms a counter-hegemony against the tactics of the neural economy, which attempts to privatize and normalize the neural commons and, as a result, free thought.

1
Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain? (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 2.
2
Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain?, 12.
3
Gerald M. Edelman, Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (New York: Basic Books), 1989.
4
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).
5
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter, 1992): 3–7.
6
Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology 30 (2015): 75–89, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1057/jit.2015.5.
7
Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1999).
8
Bernard Stiegler, Nanjing Lectures 2016–2019, trans. Daniel Ross (London: Open Humanities Press, 2020).
9
Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
10
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
11
Annette Michelson, On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017)
12
Victoria Pitts-Taylor, The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics (Duke University Press, 2016), 5.
13
See Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth/New York: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011).
14
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams “Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” Critical Legal Thinking, May 14, 2013, http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/.
15
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 158.
16
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21.
17
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21.
18
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 40.
19
Warren Neidich, ed, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part Two (Berlin: Archive Books, 2014).
20
Donald O. Hebb, The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory (New York and London: Wiley and Sons, 1949).

1
Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain? (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 2.
2
Malabou, What Should We Do With Our Brain?, 12.
3
Gerald M. Edelman, Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (New York: Basic Books), 1989.
4
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977).
5
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter, 1992): 3–7.
6
Shoshana Zuboff, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology 30 (2015): 75–89, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1057/jit.2015.5.
7
Bill Gates, Business @ the Speed of Thought: Using a Digital Nervous System (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1999).
8
Bernard Stiegler, Nanjing Lectures 2016–2019, trans. Daniel Ross (London: Open Humanities Press, 2020).
9
Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
10
Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
11
Annette Michelson, On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017)
12
Victoria Pitts-Taylor, The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics (Duke University Press, 2016), 5.
13
See Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987–2007, ed. Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier (Falmouth/New York: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2011).
14
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams “Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” Critical Legal Thinking, May 14, 2013, http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/.
15
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 158.
16
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21.
17
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 21.
18
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 40.
19
Warren Neidich, ed, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part Two (Berlin: Archive Books, 2014).
20
Donald O. Hebb, The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory (New York and London: Wiley and Sons, 1949).