The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part One

Hosted by Arne De Boever (ma aesthetics and politics program, calarts), Warren Neidich (the delft school of design, tu delft school of architecture), and Jason Smith (art center).

brings together philosophers/critical theorists, media theorists, scientists and artists to discuss the state of the mind and brain under the conditions of contemporary capitalism, in which they have become the new focus of laboring.

Part One

For the most up-to-date information, please check our website at: aestheticsandpolitics.calarts.edu/conferences

Psychopathologies Cognitive Capitalism:

How do the transformed conditions of labormore specifically the fact that so much contemporary labor is immaterial, affective, and cognitivetransform the role of emancipatory politics and education today? In the switch from the body to the brain/mind as the major sites of normalization and instrumentalization, the machinic intelligence of the assembly line has been transformed from the hardware of industrial production to the workings of the self, through the linking (for instance) of attention with new regulatory conditions such as branding and social networks. Do these new conditions have ramifications for the brain and mind? Did the social, political, economic, psychic and historical conditions which led to the production of the modernist subject create its own psychopathologies like neuroaesthenia and hysteria, which required specific remedies like talk therapy and

dream interpretation? Did these psychopathologies find their raison detre in the conditions of the brains neurobiological architecture? And furthermore, did these changes also produce artistic actions that feedbacked and recalibrated the cultural landscape as a form of therapy? Could the same be said today? Are attention deficit disorder (ADD), panic attacks, and depression a result of the infospheres excess: of the mutating political/social/cultural conditions of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that overtax and overstimulate the worker? What artistic forms, procedures and species of critical thinking have arisen in response? Might the answers to these questions be found in linking these new conditions to the fundamental shaping of the neuroplastic potential of the brain/mind?

California Institute of the Arts

24700 McBean Parkway Valencia, CA 91355

The conference begins on Friday, November 9th at the Goethe-Institute (5750 Wilshire Blvd.) with a keynote address by Franco Bifo Berardi (introduced by Sylvre Lotringer) and continues on Saturday, November 10th and Sunday, November 11th at the West Hollywood Public Library (626 N. San Vicente Boulevard). Speakers will include Jonathan Beller, Jodi Dean, Tiziana Terranova, Patricia Pisters, and Bruce Wexler.
THE PSYCHO-PATHOLOGIES OF COGNITIVE CAPITALISM: PART TWO will take place at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry in Berlin, from Friday, March 8th until Sunday, March 10th, 2013. Thanks to: the Goethe-Institute; Semiotext(e); the City of West Hollywood; and the Ramada Plaza Hotel in West Hollywood. www.ramadaweho.com

THE

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THE OF Friday November 9th

7:30pm 10am-12n

Psychopathologies Cognitive Capitalism

ARNE DE BOEVER teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts, where he also directs the Schools MA Program in Aesthetics and Politics. He has published numerous articles on literature, film, and critical theory and is editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy. De Boevers book States of Exception in the Contemporary Novel was published by Continuum. JODI DEAN is a Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is the author or editor of eleven books, including Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Duke 2009) and The Communist Horizon (Verso 2012). Dean is co-editor of the international journal, Theory and Event. TIZIANA TERRANOVA is Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communications at the Universit di Napoli LOrientale, Italy. She is the author of Network Culture (Pluto Press 2004), a member of the free university network Uninomade and associate editor of the journal Theory, Culture and Society. WARREN NEIDICH is an artist and writer who works in multiple media. He has recently been exploring the conditions of cognitive capitalism using noise music as an inspiration for installations made of speakers, drawings, and videos. Neidich has been exhibited internationally at such institutions as PS1-MOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, the Laguna Art Museum, the California Museum of Photography, the ICA, the Ludwig Museum, and MUKHA. In 2010, he received the Vilem Flusser Theory Award and in 2011, he received the Fulbright Scholar Program Fellowship in Fine Arts. Neidich is a former tutor and artist in residence at Goldsmiths College (2004-2007) and instructor at Southern California Institute of Architecture. He is currently a research fellow at the Delft School of Design, TU Delft School of Architecture. PATRICIA PISTERS is professor of film studies and chair of the department of Media Studies of the University of Amsterdam. She is editor of Necsus: European journal of Media Studies (www.necsus-ejms.eu). Pisters publications include The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory (Stanford University Press, 2003) and Mind the Screen (ed. with Jaap Kooijman and Wanda Strauven, Amsterdam University Press, 2008). Her latest book is The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture (Stanford University Press, 2012). For more info, please consult Pister website at: www.patriciapisters.com BRUCE E. WEXLER is a Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscientist at Yale University. He was a NIH Career Research Scientist and recently was awarded a transformative research award for potentially paradigm changing medical research from the Director of the National Institute of Health. Wexlers research aims to harness neuroplasticity through computerized brain exercises and physical exercises to treat cognitive deficits associated with illnesses. More recently, he and Dr. Jinxia Dong, former national gymnast and now Professor of Sports Science at Peking University, developed an integrated program of brain and body exercises to promote cognitive development in children. The program is used in New York City and Connecticut schools. Wexler has published more than 100 scientific papers. Based on ideas in his book Brain and Culture: Neurobiology, Ideology and Social Change (MIT Press, 2006), he and Ambassador Andrew Young co-founded the non-profit organization A Different Future to reclaim the public idea space from extremists by amplifying the voices of moderates in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. As a consultant for the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, Wexler is conducting a U.S. State Department-funded study of how the other is portrayed in Israeli and Palestinian school books. MANUEL SHVARTZBERG studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and is a registered architect in the UK. He has worked for, among others, OMA/Rem Koolhaas, and was project architect for David Chipperfield in London, leading the design team for the critically FRANCO BIFO BERARDI is a contemporary writer, media-theorist and media-activist. He founded the magazine A/traverso (1975-1981) and was part of the staff of Radio Alice, the first free pirate radio station in Italy (1976-1978). Berardi is the author of numerous books, including Cyberpunk, The Panther and the Rhizome, Politics of Mutation, Philosophy and Politics in the Twilight of Modernity, and The Factory of Unhappiness. He is currently collaborating on the magazine DeriveApprodi as well as teaching social history of communication at the Accademia di belle Arti in Milan. SYLVRE LOTRINGER studied at the Sorbonne and received his doctorate from the cole Pratique des Hautes tudes VIe section, Paris. He has published books with French theorists Paul Virilio and Jean Baudrillard and is the author of Antonin Artaud, Lotringer has also published on Georges Bataille, Simone Weil, L.-F. Cline, Marguerite Duras, and Robert Antelme. In addition, he has written extensively on art and contributed to exhibition catalogues from the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum. As General Editor of Semiotext(e) and of the Foreign Agents series, Lotringer was instrumental in introducing French theory to the United States.

Part One
Moderated by Arne De Boever

The General Intellect is Looking for a Body

Franco Bifo Berardi, introduced by Sylvre Lotringer

Goethe-Institute
5750 Wilshire Boulevard #100 Los Angeles, CA 90036

West Hollywood Public Library

acclaimed Turner Contemporary gallery (20062011). In 2008 Shvartzberg founded the RIBA award-winning experimental practice Hunter & Gatherer, and he has lectured in diverse international institutions on questions of art, architecture, and critical theory. In 2012 he completed the MA in Aesthetics and Politics at CalArts. Shvartzberg is a practicing architect, writer, and teacher currently serving as adjunct faculty at CalArts and Woodbury University. LINETTE PARK was selected, in 2010, to facilitate a workshop on Story-Telling for Women of Color in Activism F-Conference, Sydneys first feminist conference in ten years. She moved back to the Bay Area later that year and held the position of Programs Intern with Oakland Asian Cultural Center. Park has worked with farmers, artists, and political organizers focusing on issues of equity, resource availability, sustainability, and ecology. As a conceptual artist, KUAN HWA works in digital video and cross-disciplinary media to question the paradigms of aesthetics with regard to globalism and historical memory. He often achieves this by reproducing and curating objects or world traditions through a mimetic re-doubling of culture. Not simulacra, nor ready-mades, Hwa situates objects of his practice as studies of the way set-forms and learning processes function in an increasingly global economy of languages. His current academic research focuses on what constitutes art as a separate domain and aesthetic philosophy. Hwa is currently enrolled in the art MFA program at UC Irvine and is concurrently finishing an emphasis in Critical Theory. SETH STEWARTs childhood performances and impromptu backyard excavations led him to a BA in Interdisciplinary Performance and Anthropology from Oberlin College. A former member of NYCs Laboratory Theatre, Stewart moved to California to attend CalArts where he received his MFA in Film Directing in 2007. He returned to CalArts in 2011 for his MA in Aesthetics & Politics. His current preoccupations include dandyism, horror, bad acting, anachronism, and the creation of spaces for what Hannah Arendt describes as the impossible act of willing backwards. Stewarts work has been shown in New York at MoMA, CultureFix, The Tank, The American Living Room Festival, and Dixon Place, as well as The Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Roots and Culture in Chicago; and in Los Angeles at REDCAT, Bedlam at Als Bar, WUHO, and the LA Zinefest. JOHN A. TYSON is a Ph.D candidate in art history at Emory University. He holds an M.A. from Tufts University. During the 2011-12 academic year Tyson was a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies at the Whitney Independent Study Program. He is continuing to reside in New York while writing his dissertation, Hans Haacke: Beyond Systems Esthetics. In his teaching and prior research Tyson has also focused on art of the African diaspora and African art. He recently published an article in Synthesis on the work of the South African artist Anton Kannemeyer. Additionally, Tysons analysis of Haackes negotiations of largescale international exhibitions will appear in an upcoming issue of pros*.

Saturday November 10th

10am-12n 2-4pm

Collective Desire
Jodi Dean

Proletarianization of the Brain

Tiziana Terranova
Moderated by Warren Neidich

Madness, Miracles, and Machines

Patricia Pisters

Neuroplastic Sensitivities and Embodiment of Constructed Realities

Bruce Wexler
Graduate student panel, moderated by Manuel Shvartzberg and Linette Park

West Hollywood Public Library

Sunday November 11th

Moderated by Jason Smith

Attention Capital Violence and the Psycho-Logistics Thereof

Jonathan Beller

4:30-6:30pm

Disrupted Subjectivities and Phronsis in Aesthetic Labor

Kuan Hwa

625 North San Vicente Boulevard West Hollywood, Ca 90069

The Visual Background of the Financial Collapse

Franco Bifo Berardi
JASON E. SMITH is Assistant Professor in the Graduate Art Department at Art Center College of Design (Pasadena). He writes on contemporary philosophy, politics and art, and has published work in Artforum, Critical Inquiry, Parrhesia, and Radical Philosophy, among other places. Smith co-edited and introduced, with Hasana Sharp, Between Hegel and Spinoza (Continuum, 2012) and recently published, with Jean-Luc Nancy and Philip Armstrong, Politique et au-del (Galile, 2010). His translation of and introduction to Alain Badious and lisabeth Roudinescos Lacan, Past Present will be published by Columbia University Press in 2013. JONATHAN BELLER is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and Director of the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute, and a current Fellow of the Barnard Center for Research on Women and Gender. His books include The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Society of the Spectacle, and Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist Struggle and the World-Media System. Bellers current book projects include Present Senses: Aesthetic, Affect, Asia in the Global, and Wagers Within the Image. He is the editor of a forthcoming issue of Scholar and Feminist Online entitled Feminist Media Theory: Iterations of Social Difference.

Digital Dandyism: Narcissism and the Politics of the Facebook Aesthetic

Seth Stewart

Pedagogical Fields of Resistance To the Pathologies of Cognitive Capitalism

John A. Tyson
For the most current information, please visit our website at: aestheticsandpolitics.calarts.edu/conferences

CalArts

School of Critical Studies