Terms for Cognitive Activism

The new model of the brain progressively elucidated by modern neuroscience emerges in a particular context: it co-occurs with a radical modification of the economic and social environment. Much like neuronal cohesion, contemporary corporate economic and social organization is not of a central or centralizing type but rests on a plurality of mobile and atomistic centers, deployed according to a connectionist model.

Do we possess a“neo-liberal” brain? Does our brain impose its model on our socioeconomic organization or, inversely does a change of the global economy system create a conceptual change of the brain? What we read from scientific papers on neural plasticity is that the brain can be continuously made more efficient. One notes that plasticity is in fact unconscious justification of a flexibility without limits.

But we must not forget that plasticity is a mechanism for adapting, while flexibility is a mechanism for submitting. By being conscious of the plastic mechanisms forming our personality and the socio-political mechanisms devastating our collectivity, we give ourselves the means to say no, to refuse to submit to the influences of the milieu.

Terms for Cognitive Activism link the developments of neoliberalism with the recent neurologic turn in which the action of capitalism is directed to the brain’s neural plasticity. We must formulate a new body of understandings with which to confront the new spirit of capitalism. The brain itself needs to be imported into the very apparatuses of resistant thought against an economic, political and mediatic system that promotes hyper-connective flexibility and obedience. Refuse hyper connectivity in favor of collectivity!