Planetarity and Neural-Digital Instrumentalization

We are currently engaged in a transition to late-stage cognitive capitalism in which the brain's neural plasticity and variation are at risk. The combination of increased screen time (particularly post-COVID in which online shopping and streaming have brought new meaning to the term couch potato), the rise of techno-optimism and far right accelerationism, alongside the development of neural based technologies like ChatGPT, brain-computer interfaces and optogenetics, means that technology will increasingly directly and indirectly engage with the brain’s materiality. Together these have the potential to create a new form of Gestellen, or standing reserve in which human beings are determined through a process of neural-digital instrumentalization. Not unlike earlier developments in colonialism, one might understand this as a new form of extractivism where, instead of raw materials of the earth like gold and oil, the natural resources of the brain, like its neural plasticity, are at stake.

Tiziana Terranova’s lecture, “The Technoliberal Brain” will explore the tensions that arise when neuro-scientific and neuro-philosophic images of the brain are put into relation with concepts and perspectives originating from critical theory such as political rationality, ideology, onto-epistemology, and sociogenesis. As French Afro-Caribbean psychiatrist and political philosopher Frantz Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), there is phylogeny (evolution), ontogeny (development), and also sociogeny; we are born biologically human, but we can only experience ourselves in the context of sociological and linguistic structures. As Jamaican philosopher and essayist Sylvia Wynter states in Towards the Sociogenic Principle (2001), sociogeny is, “the information-encoding organizational principle of each culture' s criterion of being/non- being, that functions to artificially activate the neurochemistry of the reward and punishment pathway, doing so in the terms needed to institute the human subjects as a culture-specific and thereby verbally defined, if physiologically implemented, mode of being and sense of self.” This is even more true for the becoming neural plastic brain in which algorithmic sociologic and linguistic techne developed
by techno-liberalism are instrumental in creating new forms of automated government that will inevitably prune neurons during sensitive periods of development in the end shaping the brain’s architectonics or by means of exosomatic organogenesis, as characterized by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, in which the evolution of technics play a role in generating new cerebral organs like the frontal lobe.

Yves Citton’s lecture, “Planetary AI and the Atomization of Montage” compares the early twentieth century analogue techne of montage (as it was first elaborated in the cinematic practices of Soviet filmmakers Dziga Vertov and Sergei Einstein) and its twenty-first century digital and non-human counterpart, Generative Pretrained Transformers (GPTs). While our classic view of filmicmontage assumes that what is edited are elements of "first-articulation" endowed with "meaning" (shots, scenes, images,sentences, words, etc.), the statistical induction on which GPTs operate is based are sub-semantic/a-signifying units (probabilities for a pixel/letter to neighbor another pixel/letter) which leads to an "atomization of montage.” With algorithmic recommendations playing a new role, GPTs does not so much substitute the classic role of the "editors" but works in collaboration and competition with them. In our contemporary world, in which the virtual is competing with the real for our attention, we ask what this will mean for our memory formation and its reformulation as dreams and scenario visualizations. Could these new forms of media and prosthetic memories pose significant risk for our ideal of truth as they are brought to play in the imagination of the mind’s eye used in scenario visualizations and self-reflection.

Tiziana Terranova is professor of Cultural Studies and Digital Media at the Università di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’, Italy. She is the author of Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Pluto Press 2004); After the Internet: Digital Networks between Capital and the Common (Semiotext(e), 2022) and the forthcoming: Network Social: Technoliberalism and the Reconfiguration of the Social in the post-Digital Age. Her research on digital technologies operates at the intersection of cultural and media studies, post-workerist Marxism, and critical theory. She is a co-founder and member of the Technoculture Research Unit (www.technoculture.it), CRITT (Transnational Technocultures Research Centre), the Euronomade free university network (www.euronomade.info) and the Critical Computation Bureau (https://recursivecolonialism.com/)

Yves Citton is professor in Literature and Media at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis, member of the Institut de France and co-editor of the journal Multitudes. He recently co-directed with Enrico Campo the volume Politics of Curiosity. Alternatives to the Attention Economy (Routledge, 2024), after having published Altermodernités des Lumières (Seuil, 2022), Faire avec. Conflits, coalitions, contagions (Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2021), Générations collapsonautes (Seuil, 2020, in collaboration with Jacopo Rasmi), Mediarchy (Polity Press, 2019), Contre-courants politiques (Fayard, 2018), and The Ecology of Attention (Polity Press, 2016). His articles are in open access on his website www.yvescitton.net.