The nervous system under capital

I like the idea of "activist neuroaesthetics" - of an aesthetic life being about process rather than product, and focused on the relations between us and our environment. The side benefit? Lowering our cortisol levels.

Lots of reading mentioned in this post for me to follow-up on.

Beauty is contested because it’s a site where capital extracts from the nervous system; the militant version of neuroaesthetics asks us to change our neural functioning not by trying a different morning routine, but through an aesthetic practice that produces nonconventional circuits. Ones that don’t make you a more efficient input. It forms new circuits to connect with people, build resistance, and create an aesthetic practice that resists capitalisation.

[...]

Following the philosophy of Activist Nueroaeshtetics, the function of aesthetic experiences shouldn’t be to lower an individual’s cortisol levels when encountering a designed object. It is to construct, sustain, and transform the relations between bodies, surfaces, contexts, and time. Aesthetic life is a practice, not a product. It is embodied, durational, plural, and located. The design that takes it seriously is a design with, not a design for — practice that is collectively elaborated, that produces capacity in bodies rather than effects on them.

Beauty is not luxurious is half-right — beauty really isn’t a luxury — but the slogan has the wrong subject. It thinks beauty is something happening to you. The militant version knows it’s something happening between you and the world, in time, and that the work is the practice.

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Source: irrationaltechnology.substack.com
Are.na block: ↗
Collection: finds-au723pdfugg