Department of Cognitive Dissonance

Straight from the email PR:

"The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part Two"

"Conceptualized by Warren Neidich, TU Delft School of Architecture, and hosted by The ICI Berlin, Villa Aurora, Berlin, and The Office of Artistic Occupation, Los Angeles, “The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism: Part Two will bring together an international array of philosophers, critical theorists, media theorists, art historians, architects and artists to discuss the state of the mind and brain under the conditions of contemporary capitalism, in which these cognitive apparati have become the new focus of laboring."

"This symposium continues to ask many of the same questions posed in Part One held in collaboration with California Institute of the Arts and Art Center College of Design last November, but elaborates upon many of the questions left unattended. Questions such as: What is the future of mind in Cognitive Capitalism? Can a term such as Plastic Materialism describe the substantive changes in neural architectures instigated by this contingent cultural habitus? What about the Unconscious as it known to us in dreams and other implicit psychic phenomena? Is it also modified, mutated and modulated by these evolving conditions of global attention? Is there such a thing as Cognitive Communism, and does it have distinct patterns of pathological enunciation? How has the idea of the Post-Colonial mutated as a result of these conditions?"

"Is parametric design, which is computational and generative, an apparatus of cognitive capital? Is designed space an agent or platform in the production of subjectivity, and is parametrics complicit with its devices? Does architecture have a humane answer to its lack of empathy?; How does artistic research – the methods and practices of artistic production and the knowledge they produce – create new emancipatory possibilities in opposition to the overwhelming instrumentalization of the general intellect in Semiocapitalism?"

Whoops ! Still awake there? Sorry you missed Part I? Maybe you can buy the book. 

Hell, I'm no philistine, but sometimes the Ivory Tower should take a peek outside. 

And whoops, almost forgot the list of sessions. (This goes on for a while, but there seems to be no link for a full list on the web. Sorry).

 
Plenary 1 

Yann Moulier Boutang 
Mental quilombos in production of value. Flights and counter-forms of mania under cognitive capitalism in a postcolonial world. 

Plenary 2 

Abdul-Karim Mustapha 
Antinomies of Flight: Between Cognitive Capitalism and Postcolonialism

Plenart 3 
Ina Blom
Video and Autobiography Vs. the Autobiography of Video. Technicity and subjectivity in the Realm of Realtime.....

How do I get on these lists? Where was I when all this came up?

Didn't they learn anything from the French post-structuralists?  I mean, where is their Oedipal killer instinct? Let's out-ditz Daddy's ditz?

Actually, you read it over three or four times and it all starts to make sense.