Cognitive Capitalism

Facing the question of the universality of philosophy, more specifically, about the universality of symbolic thought, we stop at the question of the diversity of human knowledge, arguing that the superiority of Western knowledge is a caused effect, and not an inherent characteristic of the thought systems. We emphasize in the actual systems of knowledge production, to show that its institutionalization in the academy, makes unequal relationships between different kinds of knowledge. To do this, we attend three main spots that indicate 1) The systems of production and legitimation of knowledge, 2) The cognitive capitalism  as the current form of knowledge production, and 3) the several alternatives presented until today about the different inter- epistemic relations.

This article addresses cultural techniques of cognitive capitalism. The author argues that to understand the full implications of the notion of cognitive capitalism we need to address the media and cultural techniques which conditions its range and applications. The article offers an expanded understanding of the labour of code and programming through a case study of 'metaprogramming', a software related organisation practice that offered a way to think of software creativity and programming in organisations. The ideas from the 1970s that are discussed offer a different way to approach creativity and collaborative and post-Fordist capitalism. The author brings together different theoretical perspectives, including German media theory and Yann Moulier Boutang’s thesis about cognitive capitalism. The wider argument is that we should pay more attention to the media archaeological conditions of practices of labour and value appropriation of contemporary technological capitalism as well as the cultural techniques which include 'ontological and aesthetic operations' that produce cultural, material situations.

Para entender la negación de la multiplicidad discursiva, es necesario comprender la producción del conocimiento no como ejercicio natural y libre del espíritu humano, sino como toda una serie de códigos y reglas de formación que normalizan la producción de los discursos. Para comenzar se abordarán los planteamientos de Foucault a propósito de los procedimientos de control del discurso. A partir de éstos se entenderá la forma como son ordenados los sujetos de conocimiento, las epistemes, los discursos de las sociedades en el planeta; asimismo, se remitirá a algunos argumentos de los estudios poscoloniales latinoamericanos para mostrar que la jerarquía discursiva instaurada por el pensamiento occidental permitió jerarquías raciales, sociales y culturales con base en las cuales se produjeron y facilitaron procesos de dominación en todo el mundo. En este marco se introducirá la categoría de “colonialidad del saber” con el propósito de definir la forma como fue controlada la producción del conocimiento en el sistema colonial –que aún opera. Esto llevará a definir la “geopolítica del conocimiento” que propone Mignolo, presentando en este sentido el capitalismo cognitivo como una determinación geopolítica de la actual producción del conocimiento.

[instead of an abstract : live blog on the talk]

Oliver Lerone Schultz from the Post-Media Lab in Lueneburg, Germany spoke next. Schultz’s approach to theory is unique due to his history in traditionally non-academic spaces which generate and approach theory in fundamentally different ways.  He is committed to a conception of media that is not fettered by technological media. At its core, Schultz’s presentation sought to assert a conceptual schema, an epistemology to address questions of the visual. He reminds us how questions of the image and the visual have emerged as a specific point of irritation in contemporary theory and have come to represent an unsolved problem or anomaly. Schultz utilises a paradigm of globalisation to grapple with this dilemma.

Schultz asks us how is globalisation visualized? What does it mean to map out globalisation? Schultz reviews relevant literature on the visual domain establishing that a visual is a representation of something that cannot be represented in the first place without efforts to visualise it. Following this, we can recognise that globalisation is presented as a diagnosis of our times, but it is also the object which is being diagnosed. His project is an attempt to locate and establish a visual politics which is not only visual to map, characterise and critique globalisation. He draws the audience’s attention to a series of images and asks: to what extent can you see globalisation?

Schultz’s presentation raises important questions on the efficacy of visual analyses and frameworks. Participants agree that the visual turn is in crisis, and yet why do we still insist on reading the visual? Nishant and Akansha pushed the debate further suggesting that globalisation can be viewed as a series of images. More than the visual itself, it is the stack of visuals that are important. As Nishant reminds us, we need to de-stabilise the visual as the only form that needs to be read. We must read it, but not see it as central.

The most important point that emerged from Schultz’s presentation is that like any other network, globalisation is a diagnosis of the contemporary, but it is also the malady and the cure.

The political economy of the information machine is discussed within the Marxist tradition of Italian operaismo by posing the hypothesis of an informational turn already at work in the age of the industrial revolution. The idea of valorizing information introduced by Alquati (1963) in a pioneering Marxist approach to cybernetics is used to examine the paradigms of mass intellectuality, immaterial labour and cognitive capitalism developed by Lazzarato, Marazzi, Negri, Vercellone and Virno since the 1990s. The concept of machinic by Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 1980) is then adopted to extend Marx’s analysis of the industrial machine to the algorithms of digital machines. If the industrial machine can be described as a bifurcation of the domains of energy and information, this essay proposes to conceive the information machine itself as a further bifurcation between information and metadata. In conclusion, the hypothesis of the society of metadata is outlined as the current evolution of that society of control pictured by Deleuze (1990) in relation to the power embodied in databases.