Noöpunk is an aesthetic movement that sees the universe as a landscape of nested and entangled cognitive assemblages, or minds. Minds, according to noöpunks, are distributed across organisms, ecosystems, dynamic material processes, socio-technical networks; they are innate in nature, latent in living and nonliving systems and activated wherever sensemaking processes discover loops of self-regulation. In that carnival of diverse intelligence, noöpunk experimentalists search out new connections, new assemblages, new edges of mutual coherence, discovering as well as constructing minds. For a century this has taken many forms: sound art, cinematic or literary explorations, various underground approaches to cognitive ethnography, biohacking or biosemiotics; here I argue that, in order to consequentialize those journeys, bring them fully into our shared epistemology, we must elevate them to the realm of economic exchange: a noöpunk economic life of the many minds. [1]
The noöpunk movement has many births. One of them is Edward Hutchins 1995 paper “How a Cockpit remembers its speeds.” In it, Hutchins argues for the existence of cognitive systems in exotic substrates: “the classical cognitive science approach can be applied with little modification to a unit of analysis that is larger than an individual person. One can still ask the same questions of a larger socio-technical system that one would ask of the individual.” Such socio-technical systems, Hutchins argued, “may have cognitive properties in their own right that cannot be reduced to the cognitive properties of individual persons” The approach, known as distributed cognition, or cognitive ecology**,** cracks open the humanist paradigm to reveal a host of social agencies in the panorama - no mere metaphors, but distinct creatures. [2]
As Arthur Koestler would say, we are all holons in the interparticipatory social cognitive fabric. And, as Lynn Margulis conveyed to the public in her work with Dorion Sagan, we emerge from the milieu of cognitive creatures that make the human body a symbiotic superorganism, a temporary treatise of heterogenous minds with different prerogatives. As we ride the scales, Hutchins’ cockpit becomes more and more crowded: James Shapiro announces that “All Living Cells are Cognitive”; Michael Levin studies the diverse capacities of basal cognitions in lab settings, finding “surprising competencies” that hint at even more exotic forms, agential, disembodied minds in a non-physical, “latent” space. (The cockpit is haunted, too.)
Aside from these empirical and peer-reviewed blasphemies of the cogito, two pairs of thinkers stand out as founding figures of the noöpunk sensibility: the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, and the Chilean biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana.
Having already rose to notoriety from a series of monographs on figures in the history of philosophy, Deleuze was challenged by the events of May ‘68 and his meeting with the antipsychiatrist and psychedelic user Felix Guattari to make his writing more dialogical, more intersubjective, more anonymous. Introducing their second collaboration, A Thousand Plateaus, they write:
The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. … Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.
The two-volume Capitalism and Schizophrenia series identifies “machinic assemblages,” potent with desire, organized into complex, entangled embodiments, capable of nondual states and experiences of “pure immanence” that cut across and reconfigure the plane of organization spontaneously. Responding to Vladimir Vernadsky’s (decidedly unpunk) noösphere, they posit a “mechanosphere,” dynamic atmospheric schema not of a single rationality but of the many rationalities in their convergence (not at telos, but at base - swimming in the soup of difference and process).
(One way to think about noöpunk is this subversion of and resistance to the totalizing pretentions of the noösphere, mutating the Omega Point from a rational apocalypse into the explosive initiation of an infinite game, a potent and creative disunity. As punk aesthetics have always known, the One is not some future event, but our founding condition in difference.)
In Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (published the same year as A Thousand Plateaus), Varela and Maturana gave us a versatile enough definition of life-as-cognition to cover the whole stack, all the assemblages: cognitive systems, they argue, are autonomous, structurally coupled with their environment, and sense-making. With this empirical standard, we could now ask ourselves - without regard for traditional substrates like brains - can we identify a Markov Blanket to delimit this system? does it have some mechanism for memory and internal coherence? Does it respond to its environment, does it process signals from the environment in one or a variety of operational hierarchies? [3]
Varela went on to establish the field of “neuro-phenomenology,” a methodology for coupling exotic phenomenological states and subjective self-report with neurobiological data feeds to produce new models of (human) mind. Guattari later argues in Chaosmosis that Varela’s cognition is not open ended enough, that intelligence may be a latent characteristic of material dynamics that produces autopoetic closure and subjectivity. [4] One can imagine xenocognitive phenomenological projects of collective or atmospheric cognition, where the experimentalist produces - by way of LLMs or signal bundling - protosubjective read-write heads that grow in representational cognizance even as they are modeled.
Such exotic flights shouldn’t obscure the foundations of noöpunk - radical empathy and enthusiasm for the many forms that life, broadly considered, can take. First and foremost is curiosity about the interior lives, preferences and cognitive potential of animals - Donald Griffin contra Thomas Nagel is great noöpunk lore - and outrage for the systems that try to instrumentalize them into mere objects for consumption. When creatures are seen not just as thinking and feeling, but embedded in larger cognitive systems, their behavior becomes an open question, the plasticity of their minds foregrounded. What cognitive assemblages could be built that would socially activate and amplify the neuroplastic potential of animals? Once done, where else can we take it? Fuck the descriptivist taxonomies of the institutions - a noöpunk empiricism is participatory, its portrait of nature a germinal vex, and it sees in all its displays of cognition arrows into the future.
The investigation of cognition - empirical always, sometimes scientific/instrumental, sometimes Goethian, sometimes psychedelic, artistic, ecstatic, empathic, weird - is the aesthetic source and spiritual center of noöpunk. It need not be - and rarely is - directly endorsed by any academic tradition. Its cutting edge is a practical and open-ended empiricism, the surprise and delight at the utter contingency of what minds can do.
Information from noöpunk experiments is often pre-representational, aural or spectral, tactile in difficult to pin down ways (resonance, vibe, field). The music world has always been advanced - field recordings from Bernie Kraus, Hildegard Westerkamp, the curious cybernetics of Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète, Michael Prime; today Jana Winderen and Holly Herndon, play resonance games with minds and selves across the nature/culture binary. Sound art has a natural cognizance of the nested and intertwined harmonies of nonhuman agents. Grateful Dead, Funkadelic, Sun Ra were all great ambassadors of alien socio-bio-technical noise parliaments. Underground experimentalists like MycoLyco express a noöpunk archetype; even the cringey commercialization of MidiSprout is a part of the family.
On the more representational end stand the prolix confrontations of the modernists as they attempted to explode the ego into its diverse inputs and memberships: Finnegan’s Wake, Beckett’s The Unnamable, Woolf’s The Waves, the cybernetic stream of conscious of John Clare’s letters and journal entries. But “Literature” is a humanist’s game; when it comes to the weirdness and anarchic cognition-apophenia needed for noöpunk, genre fiction will always do it better: Algernon Blackwood, Lovecraft of course, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, Jeff VanderMeer, Laird Barron. Thomas Pynchon’s talking dogs, his adenoid.
Remedios Varo may be the beginning of a noöpunk visual grammar: carnivalesque, inhuman folklore, filled with odd interspecies systems, fantastic portraits of cognitive mésalliance. Paul Klee and Austin Osman Spare lived in worlds that were suspiciously tenanted, as did Takashi Murakami, if in a more ecstatic register. Basquiat tried to crack the code on social cognitive assemblages in order to transcend them; Hannah Weiner played with collective enunciation as a prosthetic to temper her schizophrenia. Cinema, too, is a great carnival of speculative cognitive configuration: anything by Terry Gilliam; Charlie Kaufmann and Spike Jonez. Upstream Color is absolute canon. Annihilation. Tarkovsky, Cronenberg. Andrea Arnold’s Cow.
For as long as I’ve been around, Solarpunk and Lunarpunk have been operative design aesthetics in web3 and dWeb, north stars responsible for catalyzing considerable gains for infrastructure for a new civilization. From a cultural atmosphere, they discovered a blend of technological optimism and defense that broke from the corporate narratives and pointed to new lands. It’s in this same spirit that I present noöpunk - a design horizon where biosemiotics, cognitive ecology and diverse intelligence fuse with the data sovereignty and permissionless (read: ontologically agnostic) p2p coordination enabled by dWeb, and the value pluralism and emergent economic coherences allowed by cryptoeconomics.
The latter is especially high stakes. Many of us participate in worlds of many minds: we direct empathic labor and imagination at forests, rivers, the animals in our lives, the friendships and atmospheres, the collective psyches and material flowstates that make life worth living. Yet our core social infrastructures systematically subjugate them, even enact violence on them, in the interests of a mystified and unreal naked human subject supposed to persist without relations. Our technological imaginaries are captured by a chauvinism of the human mind, missions to mars and apocalyptic visions of AI as a superhuman clone, birthed ex nihilo with no regard for the complex parliament of things that will constitute it. Noöpunk vibes dominate the underground, but they have no hold on the mass consequentialism of industry and mainstream politics, because they have been exiled by the main channels of social reproduction.
If this is so, it is because the economy is, after all, our primary shared epistemological substrate: our primary way of interpreting what has agency, what is intelligent, what is grievable, what is real. And our economy depends on privation, the generative contradictions of a quantified private individual who cannot be private, a process of intersubjective social production that must be captured by individuals. The tension and grieving of this awful, empirically absurd monolith after all produces more demand. Those that seek to fully consequentialize the inhuman and upgrade our collective umwelt to the cognitive ecology that science has unveiled for us must do so in economic space.
Nonhuman minds will continue to be marginalized until they can participate, stake their claim in the social fabric, escalate to the status of quantitative mattering. And yet, this mass of minds is fundamentally unaccountable: no ledger could totalize its nested and multiscale multiplicity; no objective index could recognize the speculative cognitive phenomena whose very existence may be contingent upon recognition. The noöpunk monies of the earth-with-many-minds must be intersubjective and contextual, creative accounts of value in a field that both allows for and plausibly merges those accounts.
Distributed ledgers will provide the infrastructure for this exploratory multiplicity, but the apps need to be built. They will be speculative, aesthetically charged; they will be science fiction realized, metaphysical discourse operationalized to results beyond all expectation; they will be harrowing acts of empathic technology, calm technology, optimistic and heterogenous accounts of right relations. A noöpunk revolution that realizes money as a democratic social technology at the same time as it embeds it in the panoply: no more cognitive privation, your surroundings suspiciously tenanted, and a new economy that runs off of the abundance, rather than the scarcity, of mind.
As sure as history only encloses in order later to produce greater openings, the noöpunk economic revolution is a technological and empirical inevitability. The possibility space beckons, and the tools are available. However, the question remains, how to cross the umwelt gap between us and the many minds, dispel ourselves of representational or rights based models of nonhuman agency that depend on centralized bodies, and give diverse intelligences means of direct participation in an economy that is semantically inclusive and multiple enough to engage them. Personally, I think this would require, on the one hand, a mass, decentralized experiment in biodata intermediation (along with other sensor technologies adequate to sociotechnical or collective minds) to the end of establishing direct feeds of intent or desire, and on the other, intent centric interfaces to radically diverse token economies that might contain those obscure intents. [5]
But this is a question with many answers. The face of noöpunk should be an open ended, decentralized, pluralistic, community-level empiricism, backyard gardens rigged up with Raspberry Pi’s and and homebrew biosensors, open source LLMs parsing cybernetic loops for a voice from the underground, ready to be made real.
Notes
[1] My equation of cognitive capacity with “mind” here follows the biologist Michael Levin’s use, defended in his “Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere” framework.
[2] “When I began, I was thinking in terms of the naturally situated cognition of individuals. It was only after I completed my first study period at sea that I realized the importance of the fact that cognition was socially distributed.” Hutchins in Cognition in the Wild (1995).
[3] More speculatively: Does that sensemaking process bleed out of evolutionary fitness into excessive or “junk” deployments, writing Othello and Bitches’ Brew and Pulp Fiction, unspooling vermiculate patterns in biological forms, contemplating other wilder forms that “we do not know”? As I canoe down the Willamette and behold the facade of Forest Park, I have to ask, regarding the great expressive facade - what are the trees thinking?
[4] The position is explained well in Weinbaum and Veitas’ Open-Ended Intelligence paper: “Actual sense-making is a continuous process of integration and disintegration of discrete individuals taking place in a network of agents and their interactions. In the context of cognition, sense-making is synonymous with individuation. It is important to note that in our general approach to cognition there is no a priori subject who ‘makes sense’. Both subjects and objects, agents and their environments co-emerge in the course of sense-making.”
[5] I’ve been quietly developing and circulating research for my Signal Ecologies project along these lines; it will likely be the topic of my next piece.
Not only was this written extremely well, but also the fact that it integrated aesthetics and wasn’t just theory was both impressive and fascinating + I love to see other Deleuzians on Substack.