So, it turns out that choices are not being made on the base of careful thought. It’s more like consciousness provides alibi’s for choices that are made way beneath the liminal treshold. The brains is it’s own black box. Cognitive neuroscience is experimenting away free will. This notion seems to be on its way to become  part of an operational technology.
At the last UnlikeUs conference,  Bernard Stiegler elaborated on the notion of market driven neuropower – the conceptual descendant and re-booted version of Foucaults biopower. Combine the developments in cognitive neuroscience with the advancements in the algorithmical modelling of consuming behaviour that Amazon, Facebook and Google live of. Extrapolate their current rate of achievement, and in the proximate future looms a fascinating set of probabilities.

I took it like this: those in the know will not only just philosophically explain away the idea of a free-willing individual as an outdated romantic folly. They would  actually be able to develop the technology to program consuming behaviour. If you’d  still be a host to the tired meme of the individual, your purchases would feel as the result of your own agency.  But this is actually only the effect of your semantic capabilites legitimizing your behaviour. Those that have ridden themselves of this meme will have the sensation that the web knows what they need,  even if they didn’t yet know this themselves.

I will be part of what looks like a very interesting conference: United We Organize.   It will explore, among other things, what managerial practice might learn from artistic practice. Cool.

From the blurb: “Art and management appear to have little in common. Art is about questioning and disrupting normality, art embraces complexity, celebrates inconsistencies and welcomes the open-ended. Management works in the exact opposite direction it seems, by favoring all that is rational, structured, simplified, tamed, and so on.”

I will present the workshop ‘A dialogue with the material of organisation’ that I have done with groups of students of the MaHKU and the Rietveld Academy.  The process of this workshop inverts the default logic that steers the development of organisations. It takes a look at the elements of organisation(s) from the perspective of (procedural) aesthetics.

Participants take the various parts and processes of organisation(s) somewhat like game-atoms, or cogs from abstract machines. They are combined and re-ordered in a bricolage kind of process. It crucial to abstain from formulating the goal of the organisation in development until the last steps of the process. Otherwise instrumentality reduces the potential for play.

When the participants are happy with the abstract organisational machine they have made, they may begin to articulate the effects this organisation would have on its surrounding if it would really exist.

Because I can’t help but feeling irritatingly self-conscious at Facebook I thought it would be good idea to revivify (if it ever really lived) this blog. I have only fragmented scraps of explanation for this, but somehow in the wordpress environment  I’m much less bothered by the inescapable having-to-act-like-yourself.

Maybe because I have no idea of who would be reading this ? If anyone ? 31K comments on previous posts combined. All spam.

Anyways. I might even post a link on Facebook.

To my next post, that would be.