Neuroaesthetics

This review identifies a common thread in the description of color-emotion associations: when colors are represented with light hues and high levels of brightness, they tend to be associated with positive emotions. Furthermore, warm colors are considered more stimulating than cold colors, which are relaxing and less exciting. The studies considered in this papers use mainly qualitative methodologies.

There has been much work on what people appreciate in art, but comparatively little on what feelings of appreciation consist in. What do people feel when they encounter artworks that they value? We propose that the value of art is registered by the emotion of wonder. Departing from some standard approaches in empirical aesthetics, we focus on the appreciation of art as art rather than mere aesthetic preference. Aesthetic preferences can have many different correlates outside the domain of art (as when we select graphically appealing consumer items or judge the attractiveness of people), and preference judgments with respect to art can reflect non-aesthetic considerations and tell us rather little about art appreciation. We argue that when it comes to the appreciation of art as such, wonder plays a special role. We introduce wonder and compare it to other candidates that are discussed in the recent empirical literature, such as beauty, interest, and being moved. We analyze wonder and emphasize three subemotional components: cognitive perplexity, perceptual engagement, and a sense of reverence.

The emergence of local expectations in listeners of music has been occasionally explained by assuming a sort of musical syntax or grammar. While sharing some superficial qualities, music and language structures are working differently: language syntax is organized in a hierarchical system, working only context-sensitively (the applicability of syntactical rules is influenced by the context), whereas musical structures, especially harmonic progressions, emerge mainly out of constructive, context-dependent processes (the context is able to establish completely new structural principles). Collected examples from musical literature of western tonal music across styles and epochs show five main principles of musical structure-building that distinguish musical models from syntactical rules: Constructivity, mappability, contextuality, individuality and contingence. The main influence of frame and context on musical expectations can be especially demonstrated by means of a harmonic progression frequently used in empirical studies as assumed syntactical violation: the neapolitan sixth chord succeeding the dominant. As a consequence, a re-interpretation of the empirical data should consider the specific context of the observed effects: they might be more a result of the introduction of the listener to a redundant stylistic model instead of the application of syntactical rules proper. According to the provided examples, structural expectations of listeners appear to be rather combinations of general familiarity to styles and composition principles, individual preferences and local framing. Based on these historical and systematic arguments, the structure of music seems to be flexible and integrative, and not bound to a syntax system.

This article was edited in several versions from 2008 to 2012 and originally published 2014 in the Research Catalogue at:
http://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/114391/114392

This third volume of The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism
results from the deliberations that took place during two
different symposiums. Firstly, Mark Fisher and myself collaborated
at the Department of Visual Culture, Goldsmiths College,
with a conference entitled The Psychopathologies of Cognitive
Capitalism Part Three: The Cognitive Turn. The second was an
event in March 2015 that I organized in conjunction with the
Goethe-Institut Los Angeles entitled Noise and the Possibility
of a Future. This book fortuitously combines elements of both
programs for reasons that will unfold.

The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism. Part 3: The
Cognitive Turn investigates many of the concepts introduced in
the first two volumes. Here too we explore the early and late
phases of cognitive capitalism, weaving in its effects upon the
psyche. The early phase concerned the new conditions of labor
in the early, heady days of the burgeoning information and
knowledge economies that led through post-Fordism to cognitive
capitalism. It’s worth noting just a few of these conditions:
precarious labor, the importance of communication in the
workplace, flexible specialization and just in time production,
accelerated product innovation, and the complexification of the
supply chain. Additionally, we could speak of the real subsumption of more aspects of life within capitalism, the de-verticalization
of time and space, valorization via cognitive labor
and an increased financialization of capitalism.

The later phase
of cognitive capitalism brings an understanding that the industrial
factory of the 19th and 20th centuries—although still important
sites of production—has been and will continue to be
subsumed by the mind and brain as sites of wealth production.

The Operaist and continental philosophical orientation of the arguments both in the first two volumes and the
current one, add a critique to a quite limited and self-reflexive
argument waged in neuroscientific literature about the effects
of the environment on the brain like the theories of synaptic
stabilization by Jean-Pierre Changeux, Neural Darwinism by
Gerald Edelman, developmental system theory (DST) by Susan
Oyama, niche construction theory by Kevin Leland, neuroconstructivism
by Steven Quartz and Terry Sejnowski, probabilistic
epigenesis by Gilbert Gottlieb, and recently the theory of
Material Engagement proposed by Lambros Malafouris—a
version that is included in this volume. What we began to understand
through this critique was that this epigenesis, the effect
on the environment on brain development, was not only of
neurobiological import but of political importance as well.