the world according to inter-individual (reproducible and communicable) formats. In order for the cosmic, social and molecular universe to be filtered through individual perception, the individual mind activates filters or models of semiotization, and these filters I call refrains. The perception of time by a society, a culture or a person is also the model of a truly temporal refrain, that is, of particular rhythmic modulations that act as ways for accessing cosmic temporal becoming and tuning in it. “From this perspective, universal time appears to be no more than a hypothetical projection, a time of generalized equivalence, a flattened capitalistic time: what is important are these partial modules of temporalization, operating in diverse domains (biological, ethological, socio-cultural, machinic, cosmic…) and out of which complex refrains constitute highly relative existential synchronies.” (Guattari 1995, 16) The stuff that composes a refrain is essentially rhythm. Singular refrains can create a common space of resonance, and the new form emerges as a new rhythm, and the new rhythm makes possible to see a new landscape.
Art sensibility and neuroplasticity The process of transformation, that in the modern age was the object of political imagination, is shifting to the conceptual and practical sphere of neuroplasticity. The mutation of the mind is underway: it is the consequence of a spasmodic attempt of individual minds to cope with the chaotic global Infosphere and to reframe the relation between the Psychosphere and the Infosphere, cognition and stress, brain and chaos. Traumatic phenomena of adaptation are traversing the space of the social brain. Not only the psycho dimension of the Unconscious is disturbed, but the fabric of the neural system itself is subjected to trauma, overload, disconnection. The adaptation of the brain to the new environmental conditions is involving enormous suffering, a tempest of violence and of madness. A wide range of contemporary pathologies are escaping the psychoanalytical framework, and are questioning cerebrality rather than sexuality—as Catherine Malabou puts it in The New Wounded. From Neurosis to Brain Damage.
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