Cognitive Architecture. from Biopolitics to Noopolitics
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Cognitive Architecture. From Biopolitics to Noopolitics. Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information Delft School of Design Series on Architecture and Urbanism Editors Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich Series Editor Arie Graafland With contributions by Andreas Angelidakis, Lisa Blackman, Ina Blom, Editorial Board K. Michael Hays (Harvard University, USA) | Ákos Moravánszky (ETH Zürich, Switzerland) Felicity Callard, Suparna Choudhury, Jordan Crandall, Elie During, Michael Müller (Bremen University, Germany) | Frank R. Werner (University of Wuppertal, Germany) Gerd Zimmermann (Bauhaus University, Germany) Keller Easterling, Lukas Ebensperger, Boris Groys, Janet Harbord, Deborah Hauptmann, Patrick Healy, Maurizio Lazzarato, Daniel Margulies, Markus Miessen, Yann Moulier Boutang, Warren Neidich, John Protevi, Cognitive Steven Quartz, Andrej Radman, Philippe Rahm, John Rajchman, Patricia Reed, Gabriel Rockhill, J.A. Scott Kelso, Terrence Sejnowski, Elizabeth Sikiaridi, Jan Slaby, Paolo Virno, Frans Vogelaar, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Bruce Wexler, Architecture. Charles T. Wolfe From Biopolitics 010 Publishers Rotterdam 2010 to Noopolitics. Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information 8 Acknowledgments I Plasticity and Potentiality 10 Introduction: Architecture & Mind in the Age of 64 Movement Paolo Virno 78 The Politics of I Can Patricia Reed Communication and Information Deborah Hauptmann 90 Comrades of Time Boris Groys 100 The Neural Basis of Cognitive 46 Noopolitics, Life and Architecture Sven-Olov Wallenstein Development: A Constructivist Manifesto Steven Quartz & Terrence Sejnowski 116 Metastable Mind J. A. Scott Kelso II Epigenic Reconfigurations 142 Shaping the Environments that Shape Our Brains: A Long Term Perspective Bruce Wexler 168 Deleuze and Wexler: Thinking Brain, Body, and Affect in Social Context John Protevi 184 From Spinoza to the Socialist Cortex: Steps Toward the Social Brain Charles T. Wolfe 208 Other Minds, Other Brains, Other Worlds Patrick Healy 232 Designing the Lifeworld: Selfhood and Architecture from a Critical Neuroscience Perspective Lukas Ebensperger, Suparna Choudhury & Jan Slaby III Administering Attention V Capitalism and the Mutating 250 Disposition Keller Easterling 266 Loose Coexistence: Technologies Intellect of Attention in the Age of the Post-Metropolis Elie During 454 Mutations in Contemporary Urban Space and the Cognitive Turning 284 ScreenSpaces: Can Architecture Save You from Facebook Fatigue Point of Capitalism Yann Moulier Boutang 470 A Specter is Haunting Andreas Angelidakis 302 Technologies of Mediation and the Affective: Globalization Gabriel Rockhill 488 From a Politics of Nostalgia to A Case-study of the Mediated Environment of MediacityUK Lisa Blackman a Politics of Change Markus Miessen 502 ‘Exiting Language,’ Semiotic & Janet Harbord 324 The Industrious Subject: Cognitive Neuroscience’s Systems and the Production of Subjectivity in Félix Guattari Maurizio Revaluation of ‘Rest’ Felicity Callard & Daniel Margulies Lazzarato 522 Idensity Elizabeth Sikiaridi & Frans Vogelaar 538 From Noopower to Neuropower: How Mind Becomes Matter Warren Neidich IV The Noo-Sensorium 348 Deleuze’s Time, or How the Cinematic Changes Our Idea of Art 582 Contributors Biographies John Rajchman 368 Spectacle versus Cinematic Sociality: Art and 588 Credits the New Media Architecture Ina Blom 386 Edible Architecture Philippe Rahm 402 Movement, Agency, and Sensing: A Performative Theory of the Event Jordan Crandall 430 Figure, Discourse: To the Abstract Concretely Andrej Radman Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without the support of the Faculty of Architecture at Delft University of Technology. In 2008 my coeditor and I held a symposium entitled Architecture in Mind: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics, sponsored by the Delft School of Design. Several contrib utors to this volume were present at this conference and this volume owes much to their enthu siasm and dedication to the issues raised during these proceedings. Thus I would like to extend special thanks to the following contributors: Andreas Angelidakis, Yann Moulier Boutang, Jordon Crandall, Keller Easterling, Scott Kelso, Markus Miessen, John Protevi, Bruce Wexler and Charles Wolfe. I would also like to extend my appreciation to AbdulKarim Mustapha, a partici pating member of the conference who elegantly summarized the proceedings in closing remarks, and who later contributed greatly to the early formulations of this volume. Of course, developing the issues addressed at a conference into a volume of the scale of Cognitive Architecture entailed no small task: a task that would have been insurmountable without the intel lectual efforts and accumulated knowledge of my coeditor, Warren Neidich. For over a decade, Neidich has been critically engaged in the discussions that underpin this volume. I believe that he has worked persistently and tirelessly, both within his art work and his theoretical contributions, to the discourse we here identify as noopolitics, what Neidich in his own work develops as neuro power. Finally, I would like to thank all the contributors to this volume as they have helped us to navigate the vague terrains of what to our mind remains very much a burgeoning discourse. The academy can be very unforgiving when its members are perceived to stray too far afield from the accepted boundaries of their socalled legitimate research. And thus I remain extremely grateful to the scholars and scientists who, coming from such varied disciplines, have agreed to support us in our transdisciplinary approach with their contributions to this volume. Deborah Hauptmann Rotterdam, November 2010 9 Introduction: Cognitive Architecture begins with the basic premise that in a world increasingly populated by technologies of information and communication, the analysis on biopolitics must be expanded to Architecture & Mind in the Age include thinking on noopolitics. While the former acts on body, or populations of bodies, and inscribes habits and practices specific to life (bios), the latter operates on mind (nous), on general of Communication and Information intellect and mental disposition. Here the concept of noopolitics is broadly posited as a power Deborah Hauptmann exerted over the life of the mind, including perception, attention, and memory. This volume will posit questions and put forward ideas pertaining to the conditions through which world, body, brain, and mind are coupled, influenced by, and inflected through contemporary forms of material and immaterial production and processes such as those found in our current communication and information age. The Foucauldian discourse on biopolitics and power has for decades been considered a corner stone of theories (throughout numerous disciplines including architecture) that address the for mations of society and culture in relation to economy and politics in all their permutations. It is important to retain the distinctions that have been made between biopolitics and biopower; primarily the distinction between the integration and stratifications of forces by institutions and various agents, organizations, and the constellations of power, singular or multiple, as a set of rela tions of forces acting on forces outside what some might refer to as the bodypolitic itself. Equally relevant is to recall that these socalled institutions of organization do not solely generate various sources of power, but in fact themselves stem from these relations of power.1 Furthermore, as readers of the work of Foucault will recognize, underpinning his entire discourse is the concern with the power to exercise freedom and the creative power of resistance. Which, to our mind, also remains as a central concern to what we are here discussing under the terms of noopower and the subsequent forms that the production of subjectivities (considered both positively and negatively) take in within noopolitical frameworks of what have become highly distributed networks of forces and organization. Perhaps we should point out that we do not believe that the prefixbio with respects to politics or power can simply be supplanted by the prefixnoo. Nor would we wish the reader to feel we have collapsed (or conveniently ignored) the mindbody problematic which, according to Fredric Jameson – who refers to this as the raw nerve of metaphysics – runs through the dualisms of Cartesian and Spinozan philosophy ‘all the way down to base and superstructure if not the mechanicalmaterial ist mirage of the cognitive brain itself.’2 We do, however, consider the issues raised in this volume to be less ideologically related to the (Marxist) subject/labor paradigm, or the subjugation of pop ulations through integration and capture within the order of reproduction, and more dynamically related to modalities of power as a relation between ‘forces acting on forces’ through integration and differentiation, which within an order of invention create sublime and complex conditions of 1 Of course this is taken up extensively in Deleuze’s work Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1986). 2 See: Fredric Jameson, ‘Critical Response: How not to Historicize Theory,’ Critical Inquiry 34 (Spring 2008). 11 control and resistance. Maurizio Lazzarato has developed the importance of produce practices that allow for the exploration of remote territories, like the paranormal, non these distinctions in his wellknown essay ‘Life and the Living in the Societies linear, psychic, and insensible,