The Brain Without Organs: Psychedelic Drugs and Emancipation
Warren Neidich

In this moment of Cognitive Capitalism, the Brain has become a factory for twenty-first-century metaphors of resistance created in early industrial capitalism—rendering these metaphors no longer efficient. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of the body without organs makes this clear – and now the production of the efficient and optimized body has transitioned into the production of an optimized and efficient brain. The Brain Without Organs is a non-specified brain that through such processes as epigenesis, operating upon the brains pluripotential neural plasticity, can become what we want it to be. Essential in this equation is the power of art and drugs to sculpt an emancipated brain in contradistinction to one normalized by institutional regimes that utilize the processes of governmentalization.

Warren Neidich is the founder and director of the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art and Professor of Art at the Kunsthochscule Berlin-Weissensee. He studied photography, neuroscience, medicine, ophthalmology and architecture. He is author of Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part 1, 2 (Archive, 2013), Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noo-Politics (010 Publishers, 2009) and Blow-up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain (DAP, 2003). The third volume of the Psychopathologies series is forthcoming with Archive Books in 2017 alongside Neidich’s collected essays in German published by Merve Verlag. His solo exhibitions in the Netherlands have been held at venues including: Fons Welters Gallery, Amsterdam; Onomatopee, Eindhoven; and SKOR Foundation, Amsterdam. Neidich is represented by the Barbara Seiler Gallery, Zurich.