The figure of today’s threat is the suddenly irrupting, locally self-organizing, systemically self-amplifying threat of large-scale disruption. This form of threat, fed by instability and metastability, is not only indiscriminate, it is also indiscrimin able; it is indistinguishable from the general environment. The figure of the environment shifts: from the harmony of a natural balance to the normality of a generalized crisis environment so encompassing in its endemic threat-form as to connect, across the spectrum, the polar extremes of war and (...) the weather. Michel Foucault characterizes the dominant contemporary regime of power, coincident with the rise of neoliberalism, as ‘environmental’: a governmentality which will act on the environment and systematically modify its variables. Its actions, he emphasizes, are not standardizing since the shift in the figure of the environment has moved it out of reach of normalization. Given the indiscriminateness of the environment’s autonomous activity, environmentality must work through the ‘regulation of effects’ rather than of causes. It must remain operationally ‘open to unknowns’ and catch nonlinear, transversal phenomena before they amplify the stirrings to actual crisis proportions. What systematicity is this? And: does power’s becoming-environmental mean that, politically, we are dealing with natural subjects? Where Foucault’s question ends is where, today, we must begin, in light of how the recomposition of power whose dawning he glimpsed in 1979 has since played out. In the context of Foucault’s theories of power, the question amounts to asking: is this still ‘biopolitics’? (shrink)

There are now many important contributions to the scientific study of the brain-mind continuum. These results come both from research into non-ordinary states of consciousness and into the brain's intrinsic, largely unconscious mechanisms. The larger potential of such investigations consists precisely in making the parameters of our cognitive system apparent. But they also reveal the socio-cultural uses to which these parameters are currently, or in the foreseeable future, being applied. This article wrestles with that fact. Specifically, it examines the implications (...) for those of us interested in the dynamics of visual awareness and the structural and phenomenological aspects of noticing. Because some of the key characteristics of consciousness are so ingrained that we are usually blind to them, it is all the more important to understand how and why we pay attention to certain features of our environment. Subjective consciousness pertains to the realm of inner experience as well as focusing on the external world. What Daniel Dennett terms `intentionality' or directedness towards an object is a sign of our connectedness to the outside world. Beyond connection, I am interested in how complex works of art help us cognize, confer reality, or have knowledge of what lies before our eyes. I will argue that this calibration of the agent's experience and her perception of the world is under threat today. (shrink)

Draft 13 April 2007. Under review at Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.