[p2p-research] Neurocapitalism

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: Neurocapitalism via
3quarksdaily by Robin Varghese on 4/13/10
Ewa Hess and Hennric Jokeit in Merkur, translated in Eurozine:
Today, the phenomenology of the mind is stepping indignantly aside for
a host of hyphenated disciplines such as neuro-anthropology,
neuro-pedagogy, neuro-theology, neuro-aesthetics and neuro-economics.
Their self-assurance reveals the neurosciences' usurpatory tendency to
become not only the humanities of science, but the leading science of
the twenty-first century. The legitimacy, impetus and promise of this
claim derive from the maxim that all human behaviour is determined by
the laws governing neuronal activity and the way it is organised in the
brain.

Whether or not one accepts the universal validity of this maxim, it is
fair to assume that a science that aggressively seeks to establish
hermeneutic supremacy will change everyday capitalist reality via its
discoveries and products. Or, to put it more cautiously, that its
triumph is legitimated, if not enabled, by a significant shift in the
capitalist world order.

There is good reason to assert the existence, or at least the
emergence, of a new type of capitalism: neurocapitalism. After all, the
capitalist economy, as the foundation of modern liberal societies, has
shown itself to be not only exceptionally adaptable and
crisis-resistant, but also, in every phase of its dominance, capable of
producing the scientific and technological wherewithal to analyse and
mitigate the self-generated "malfunctioning" to which its constituent
subjects are prone. In doing so – and this too is one of capitalism's
algorithms – it involves them in the inexorably effective cycle of
supply and demand.

Just as globalisation is a consequence of optimising the means of
production and paths of communication (as Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels predicted), so the brain, as the command centre of the modern
human being, finally appears to be within reach of the humanities, a
field closely associated with capitalism.




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