The Brain at Work: Cognitive Labor and the Posthuman Brain in Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer

This essay examines cognitive labor and the posthuman brain in composer Alvin Lucier’s Music for Solo Performer (1965). Alongside a discussion of the historical relationships between cybernetics, posthumanism, and political economy, it contextualizes Lucier’s neurofeedback experiments in light of the expansion of the military-industrial complex and the large-scale labor transformations of late capitalism. Read as staging the performer’s “brain at work,” Music for Solo Performer appears here as a response to post-Fordist economic models that prioritize cognitive over manual forms of labor.