OUT NOW ! Edmund Berger : Accelerazionismo Grunge (Traduzione di Ettore Lancellotti) - Rizosfera / collana The Strong of the Future (2016)

PER SCARICARE L'E.BOOK CLICCA QUI

E' uscito in una nuova veste grafica il saggio di Edmund Berger, Accelerazionismo grunge, per le edizioni Rizosfera (collana The Strong of the Future, SF 003.it).

Ecco l'incipit del saggio:

Michael Hardt : Sulla democrazia radicale di Deleuze (testo finale di «Deleuze, Un apprendistato in filosofia», Michael Hardt, Derive e Approdi, 2016)

Michael Hardt

Gilles deleuze, un apprendistato in filosofia

Derive e approdi, 2016

Si ringrazia l'editore per la concessione a pubblicare.

Qui trovate la scheda del libro @Derive+approdi

Molti autori americani hanno cercato di definire il problema delle conseguenze politiche del post-strutturalismo. Le loro ricerche hanno avuto esiti molto diversi, collocandosi all’interno di un ampio spettro politico. A dire il vero, non ci si dovrebbe aspettare di trovare una risposta chiara a un problema simile, che investe un ampio ambito teoretico. Ad esempio, negli ultimi centocinquant’anni, la filosofia di Hegel è stata il punto di partenza di una grande varietà di posizioni politiche, tanto reazionarie che progressiste, molte delle quali in aperto dissenso con la visione politica personale di Hegel. È ovvio che non è possibile ricavare la posizione politica, come se fosse una conseguenza necessaria di un corpus teoretico. Passando dalla teoria all’azione le vie perseguibili sono infatti molte. Per questo non serve a granché tentare una definizione anche generica della politica post-strutturalista o della politica della filosofia deleuziana. È più appropriato e produttivo chiederci: cosa può offrirci il pensiero di Deleuze? Cosa possiamo farci? Ovvero, quali sono gli strumenti utili che la sua filosofia ci mette a disposizione per perseguire i nostri progetti politici? È con questo spirito che ho cercato di portare alla luce alcuni degli strumenti forniti da Deleuze per la costituzione di una democrazia radicale. Le distinzioni che ho cercato di sottolineare contrappongono la molteplicità di organizzazione alla molteplicità di ordine, i concatenamenti della potenza (les agencements de la puissance) ai dispositivi del potere (les dispositifs du pouvoir). Ognuna di queste distinzioni dipende da un concetto di costituzione che rimane latente, ma che è fondamentale nel pensiero di Deleuze. Da questa prospettiva, può aiutarci a sviluppare una concezione dinamica della società democratica come aperta, orizzontale e collettiva.

Una visione della democrazia che per certi versi coincide con quella del liberalismo. Forse il principio più importante di una teoria liberale democratica è che i fini della società siano indeterminati, e quindi che il movimento della società sia aperto alla volontà dei membri che la costituiscono. La priorità del diritto sul bene è ribadita per garantire che il libero sviluppo della società non sia impedito o costretto da un telos determinato dall’esterno. Questo rifiuto politico della teleologia ci porta direttamente a un rifiuto filosofico dell’ontologia, perché l’ontologia stessa si presume porti con sé una determinazione trascendentale del bene. Allora, la deontologia sarà l’unica posizione filosofica in grado sostenere una società democratica aperta a una molteplicità di fini. I pensatori “liberal” che ragionano in questo modo hanno di fatto accettato troppo presto le affermazioni platoniche ed hegeliane sul nesso tra ontologia e teleologia sociale; sono ancora troppo legati alla logica delle contraddizioni, e quindi perdono importanti sfumature. In altre parole, a una visione ontologica all’origine una società chiusa e conservatrice, credono sia necessario opporre una teoria deontologica che consenta una società aperta e democratica. Ma non c’è bisogno di cadere nell’errore opposto, non c’è bisogno di rifiutare l’ontologia in quanto tale per affermare l’apertura dei fini nella società. La tradizione della metafisica occidentale non è un pezzo unico o un monoblocco, ma contiene al suo interno molte alternative radicali. (Il fatto che la tradizione appaia ad alcuni così scarsa di alternative è solo una prova della debolezza dell’indagine filosofica contemporanea). Quando Deleuze interroga Bergson, Nietzsche e Spinoza sta riaffermando e articolando una tradizione alternativa nella storia della metafisica occidentale, capace di presentare un’ontologia ma senza proporre alcuna carta teleologica, né alcuna determinazione dei fini. Ciò che Deleuze sviluppa coincide con la prospettiva “liberal” quando afferma l’indeterminatezza dei fini nella società democratica, che non per questo si configura come un rifiuto del discorso ontologico. L’essere di Deleuze è aperto all’intervento di creazioni politiche e cambiamenti sociali: questa apertura è proprio la “producibilità” dell’essere che ha ricavato dal pensiero scolastico. La potenza della società, per dirla in termini spinoziani, corrisponde alla sua potenza di essere affetta. La priorità del diritto o del bene non c’entra niente con la concezione di questa apertura. Ciò che è aperto, e ciò che connette ontologia e politica, è l’espressione della potenza: il libero conflitto e la libera composizione del campo delle forze sociali.

Questa organizzazione aperta della società deve essere distinta dalle strutture verticali dell’ordine. Per organizzazione qui non intendo un piano o un programma volto a ordinare le relazioni sociali, bensì un processo continuo di composizione e decomposizione attraverso gli incontri sociali su un campo di forze immanente. Lo skyline della società è perfettamente piatto, perfettamente orizzontale, nel senso che l’organizzazione sociale procede senza alcun disegno predeterminato, sulla base dell’interazione delle forze immanenti e può quindi, in linea di principio, essere ricondotta in qualsiasi momento al suo grado zero di uguaglianza, come schiacciata dall’instancabile pressione della forza di gravità. L’organizzazione porta con sé la potenza distruttiva del ritorno ai principi di Machiavelli. Il che non significa che non esistano le istituzioni (o altri esempi di verticalità), ma che esse ricevono una determinazione assolutamente immanente, e quindi rimangono sempre e completamente suscettibili di ristrutturazioni, riforme e distruzioni (nello spirito, ad esempio, della Comune, dove la rappresentanza era sempre soggetta a revoca immediata). I dispositivi, o dispiegamenti, strutturano l’ordine sociale dall’alto, da uno spazio di trascendenza esterna; gli agencements, assemblaggi o concatenamenti, costituiscono il meccanismo dell’organizzazione sociale dal basso, dal piano sociale immanente. L’orizzontalità della costituzione materiale della società si fonda sulla pratica come motore della creazione sociale. Una pratica politica di corpi sociali che libera le forze immanenti dalle strettoie di forme predeterminate per scoprire fini propri, inventare una propria costituzione. Ancora una volta, troviamo che la produttività dell’essere sociale corrisponde alla sua producibilità. La società orizzontale è il luogo aperto che favorisce la creazione pratica e la composizione, così come la distruzione e la decomposizione. Il modello di questa costituzione è l’assemblea generale, l’assoluta e uguale inclusione di tutto il piano immanente: la democrazia, come Spinoza insiste nel dire, è la forma assoluta di governo.

I processi di assemblaggio sociale, di costituzione sociale, sono indifferenti ai limiti posti dall’individualismo; o, più precisamente, i confini dei corpi sociali sono continuamente soggetti a cambiamento, così come la pratica dell’assemblaggio decompone certe relazioni e ne compone altre. Non c’è contraddizione, allora, tra individuale e collettivo: la costituzione della società si basa su una diversa assiologia. Il processo di concatenamento politico, la composizione di rapporti sociali gioiosi, si muove invece tra molteplicità e moltitudine. La pratica deleuziana dell’affermazione e della gioia, in altre parole, è diretta alla creazione di corpi sociali o piani di composizione sempre più potenti, che rimangono però aperti ad antagonismi interni, alle forze reali della distruzione e della decomposizione. L’assemblaggio politico è certamente un’arte, in quanto va continuamente rifatto, reinventato. La moltitudine è assemblata attraverso questa pratica come un corpo sociale definito da un insieme di comportamenti, bisogni e desideri comuni. È questa la prospettiva dalla quale Deleuze valorizza le forze vive della società che emergono dalle forze morte dell’ordine sociale, proprio come il lavoro vivo marxiano rifiuta di farsi succhiare il sangue dai vampiri del capitale che si alzano in volo. E questa qualità della vita è definita sia dalla potenza di agire che dalla potenza di essere affetti: un corpo sociale senza organi. La composizione o la costituzione della moltitudine non nega in ogni caso la molteplicità delle forze sociali, ma al contrario innalza la molteplicità ai più alti livelli di potenza.

È solo un accenno di politica democratica: restano da delineare i suoi meccanismi costitutivi con pratiche sociali concrete. Quello che Deleuze ci offre, in realtà, è un modo per orientarsi nella futura ricerca di forme concrete di architetture sociali. Sul piano politico, saranno la molteplicità delle pratiche sociali e dei desideri a dirci a quali condizioni composizioni o architetture sociali potranno realizzarsi. È questo il campo su cui il processo deve esplicarsi: l’assemblaggio avverrà a partire da corpi sociali con rapporti interni compatibili, con pratiche e desideri componibili. Nelle pratiche sociali esistenti, nelle espressioni affettive della cultura popolare, nelle reti di cooperazione lavorativa, dovremmo cercare di distinguere i meccanismi materiali di aggregazione sociale che possono costituire rapporti adeguati, affermativi e gioiosi: dunque concatenamenti potenti di soggettività. Completare il passaggio dalla molteplicità alla moltitudine resta per noi il compito fondamentale per una pratica politica democratica.

Hardt + Negri: Sul mediatizzato (estratto da Questo non è un Manifesto, Feltrinelli, Ottobre 2012)

Michael Hardt: Sleep no more - Michael Hardt on Jonathan Crary's 24/7 @ Artforum.com - September 2013

Michael Hardt: Sleep no more - 

Michael Hardt on Jonathan Crary's 24/7 @ Artforum.com - September 2013

JONATHAN CRARY’S dark, brilliant book 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep analyzes the nonstop demands of the contemporary global capitalist system and laments the damage we suffer from being caught up in the fascination and relentless rhythms of its technological production and consumption. This brief volume’s central claim is not that we are always awake—although Crary notes the growing prevalence of insomnia and use of neuropharmaceutical sleep suppressants and alertness aids—but rather that the division between wakefulness and sleep is being eroded, along with a series of other vital boundaries, such as those between day and night, public and private, activity and rest, work and leisure. Crary makes “24/7” a concise and powerful shorthand for this emerging social condition, which he characterizes as “a generalized inscription of human life into duration without breaks, defined by a principle of continuous functioning.” The constant availability of e-mail, online entertainment, and Internet shopping sites, the incessant call for attention from ubiquitous video screens, and myriad other potential occupations and distractions exert a persistent pull and eat away at the bases of noncapitalist life and rest. Sleep no more! Capital hath murdered sleep—or, perhaps better, sleep has been worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels.

Crary’s principal subject of investigation is the transformation of temporality that began with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and has vastly accelerated during the so-called Information Age. More specifically, he is concerned with how the coming sleeplessness will alter our sense and experience of time (and the distressing degree to which it already has). Reading this book, I was frequently reminded of historian E. P. Thompson’s analysis of industrial capital’s creation, in eighteenth-century England, of a new temporality defined by clocks, homogeneous temporal units, and universal synchrony. The older senses of time aligned with nature’s rhythms, such as the tides, or the duration of common tasks such as milking a cow, were gradually subordinated to workers’ experience of the precise measure of hours, minutes, and seconds—a machinic temporal sensibility. This new inner sense of time, which for Thompson is intimately tied to the creation of the working day and the strong demarcation between work time and nonwork time, spread from the factory over the course of decades and centuries to all other economic sectors and across society as a whole.

The temporal transformations of 24/7 capital, in Crary’s account, do not return us to precapitalist natural and task-based temporalities, nor do they destroy the uniform, homogeneous clock time that Thompson anatomized. In fact, Crary argues, modern machine time has perhaps only come to be fully realized and generalized in today’s nonstop rhythms. The crucial shift, for him, is instead defined by the ways in which contemporary media and other technologies have overcome those basic demarcations of the day that previously defined our experience and sense of time. Indeed, the blurring of the boundaries between work time and nonwork time is destroying the very notion of the working day and concomitantly altering our sense of time—a phenomenon felt more intensely in particular sectors of employment and regions of the world than in others. Some of the workers most affected have come to recognize that the ability to work online from any place at any time, which can at first appear a newfound freedom, ends up being a mechanism of temporal enslavement.

Crary focuses primarily, however, on more basic existential divisions than the working day. “24/7,” he writes, “steadily undermines distinctions between day and night, between light and dark, and between action and repose. It is a zone of insensibility, of amnesia, of what defeats the possibility of experience.” Instead of investing us with a new temporality, which progressively aligns all social activity and even our inner sense of time with the rhythms of the industrial machine, as Thompson conceived the changes in an earlier period, Crary theorizes 24/7 as a strategy of power that strips us of time, leaving us living in a kind of destitute nontime, “a disabled and derelict diachrony” that seems to preclude even the possibility of change.

Crary sees 24/7 as the fulfillment of a tendency inherent in capitalist modernity from the outset, and he articulates this point through a wonderful reading of British painter Joseph Wright’s landscapeArkwright’s Cotton Mills by Night, ca. 1782. He also demonstrates, however, that 24/7 is an unlivable condition (at least for humans), given that the time of reproduction, for physical and mental recuperation, is being reduced beyond sustainable levels. “Time for human rest and regeneration,” Crary writes, “is now simply too expensive to be structurally possible within contemporary capitalism.” This trend passes beyond the tipping point when expansion of the working day makes humans less, not more, productive, and it also threatens a more fundamental threshold: Beyond a minimum limit of reproduction time, capitalist production itself cannot be maintained—at least insofar as we assume it to be based on human productivity. Crary’s analysis thus identifies a contradiction by which capital’s fundamental tendency to erode the time of reproduction undermines its own sustainability. Some authors would develop this contradiction into a narrative about capital’s imminent or eventual collapse, but Crary instead leaves it as a background condition that adds to the gravity of our contemporary predicament. He is much more concerned with the demise of the human than with that of capital.

The driving force in Crary’s analysis is the increasing technological domination of our world, and he positions this polemic against “technophilic intellectuals and writers” who believe that new technologies will somehow necessarily or automatically bring justice and equality. In many respects, this is a familiar script about the dehumanizing effects of machines (no less familiar, of course, than the continual trumpeting of each new technology as the bearer of mankind’s salvation). Karl Marx, along with many nineteenth-century reformers, lamented that the lifelong vocation of the artisan was destroyed by the factory, wherein the worker, rather than employ his tools, himself became an instrument wielded by the industrial apparatus. Crary recognizes a similar inversion of subject and object in the contemporary developments of new media and digital technologies. “Everything once loosely considered to be ‘personal,’” he observes, “is now reconfigured so as to facilitate the fabricating of oneself into a jumble of identities that exist only as effects of temporary technological arrangements.” The increasing animation and vitality of the technological apparatuses in which we are enmeshed corresponds to a draining of subjective potential from our existence, leaving us degraded, reified beings.

One danger of such a lament is that it might lead to nostalgia. As the relentless rhythms of information technologies overtake our world, we can easily, understandably, find ourselves yearning for technologies and temporalities of the past. I remember fondly the experience of receiving a letter in the mail and taking the time to read and respond to it, for instance, and the sensations of the dark peacefulness of the night when all shops were closed and all machines turned off. Crary admirably casts aside all misty-eyed nostalgia for an idyllic past. As he sees it, we are all inside the 24/7 world, and there is no turning back. However, no sooner is the danger of succumbing to nostalgia warded off than arises another: that our lament of humanity’s degradation in the face of unremitting technological advancement leads merely to a profound pessimism according to which humanity is trapped in a closed technological dystopia with no way out.

Some critiques of technological innovation steer clear of the dual perils of nostalgia and hopelessness by recognizing that the new, in addition to intensifying the means of control and domination, also contains the seeds for previously unknown potentials for liberation. That is a core element of Marx’s own critique of capitalist technologies, for instance. Does 24/7 capitalism create its own gravediggers—that is, antagonistic subjects who arise “inside” and directly as a consequence of capital’s own development? Is there a way not only to sabotage, to jam the gears of, the nonstop machine but also to transform its tools into weapons for liberation? This is the path I would pursue to address our current predicament.

Crary’s primary mode of resistance does not draw from the arsenal created by the development of 24/7 capitalism but instead focuses on one irreducible human need that is intrinsically incompatible with capital’s regime: sleep. Indeed, some of the most beautiful passages in the book (weaving together insightful readings of Tarkovsky, Kafka, Chris Marker, and Philip K. Dick) are paeans to slumber. Sleep has long been a primary expression of the refusal of work, and its powers of resistance become even greater today, especially insofar as capitalist production and consumption rely increasingly on attention. Against the destructiveness of a global system that never sleeps, Crary writes, “sleep can stand for the durability of the social.” In the sleeping exodus from capitalist control, moreover, Crary senses the potential for community. In sleep we are vulnerable and rely on the care of others in a way that suggests to him the possibility of a form of being together: “In the depersonalization of slumber, the sleeper inhabits a world in common, a shared enactment of withdrawal from the calamitous nullity and waste of 24/7 praxis.” In the time of sleep, when we can dream a better future, Crary locates the potential to resist the pressures of contemporary capital and rescue our humanity from its destruction.

Michael Hardt, a professor in the program in literature at Duke University, is coauthor, with Antonio Negri, of Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), Commonwealth (2009), and Declaration (2012). Read more

Adrian Chan: The Net Effects of Affective Capitalism @ Gravity7.com

The Net Effects of Affective Capitalism

P2P Wiki entry on Affective Capitalism. 

This is a repost from my occasional blogging at the P2P Foundation, run by Michel Bauwens.

Michel has posted a fascinating addition to the Relational category and asked that I blog it. Called Affective Capitalism, it draws on authors Juan Martín Prada and Michael Hardt. I have to confess that I’m not familiar with Prada’s work, and have not yet read Hardt’s and Negri’s Multitude, though Empire was terrific.

If you subscribe to the version of economic and social history as told by the Left, our daily lives today have become rationalized, instrumentalized, and assimilated to economic purposes more now than ever before. But things are even more complicated in the view of these authors. By their account we are beyond any conventional late stage advanced capitalism. Affective capitalism, as it’s put here, has progressed even further: beyond extracting value from surplus value, to the extraction of value from our relationships, our leisure time, our desires and enjoyments. By their definition, in this phase of capitalism, economic organization “is essentially the production of sociability itself.”

Clearly though, capitalism is far beyond the industrial age, and I would argue, beyond the information age also. I’ve suggested elsewhere that we now live in an age of communication, and that one of the vectors behind the explosion of communication technologies is a centripetal force of decentralization. A proliferation of productive and consumptive relations expanding ever outward: into the home, into leisure, into daily practices that go go go, around the clock. “The individual serves and is served, in turn, by an economy based on desire, affectivity and pleasure.”

Capitalism is founded on growth and progress, and if it is not spreading horizontally across the world’s territories, it instead colonizes the “lifeworld” (the every day) along a line that descends like hook, line, and sinker. A line of economic logic that runs from the currents and trends that send waves across the surface, downward like a vertical, (data) mining the depths of our desires and interests. Even if you disagree that capitalism eats at the soul, you have to agree that it increasingly looks as if everything is for sale…

Indeed, a dark reading of the Long Tail (concept) might argue that all of the serendipitous dots connected by collaborative filtering engines reduce the rich spontaneity of friendships to relations based on a one-dimensional pivot around a simple data point: common interests shown by the consumption of alike objects. Renters of March of the Penguins and Winged Migration Unite!

This dark reading is possible even with the lights on. In fact it’s more enjoyable. In the words of Juan Martin Prada:

“economic power does not intend to continue to base all of its privileges on the exploitation of its subjects as a workforce but on the increasingly lucrative regulation of their ways of life, life dynamics and personal and affective interactions, emotions, consumer habits and satisfaction.”

This is the rub of affective capitalism. It describes a mode of regulation we could conceive of enjoying. Precisely because it targets enjoyment itself. So the inclusion of affective and emotional aspects of life and experience in economic production and consumption is a positive or negative development according to how you calibrate your philosophical and critical sensibilities. Negative, if you would like to reserve some of your heart and cranium for activities outside the economic sphere. Positive, if the Venn overlap of the public and private, productive and intimate, is as good as it feels. There is nothing essentially wrong with a capitalism whose growth and reach increases with every bigger and expanded catalog of new and enriched products. And surely an open-minded view of body modifications, gene therapies, and other life-preserving medical advances could befriend affective capitalist production, whether it seeks quantity or quality of life:

“affectivity is for once and for all liberated from its former, restrictive enclosure in the contexts of intimacy and the family and is gradually becoming the real object of production in new industries that are increasingly designed to produce new forms of life and subjectivity.” Juan Martin Prada

The evidence for affective capitalism is all around us. Entire industries now cater to entertainment of all kinds, from life-threatening location-based thrills to one-click phenomena like Amazon and Netflix. There’s tourism for the ecological, archaeological, religious, even medical tourism, and with trips to Gulags and Chernobyl now possible, the pathological? If the evidence simply showed that money can be made by pleasuring the senses this would be nothing new. But by “affective capitalism,” the authors mean more than the economics of enjoyment (and the enjoyment of economics). I think they also mean the mobilization of “human interests” (Habermas) but with affective attributes added to those of reason. An economy not just of reason and rational choice, but of pleasure and affect.

An economy of affect would have to generate affective flows just like any other. It would have to inspire the desires it can satisfy, and successfully market to markets it has presumably created. The argument gets interesting here, and here I depart from a strict reading of our affective capitalism entry. Backing up a few levels, what is an economy? Cultural anthropologists have described “archaic” economies as allotting deductions from a common stock (e.g. land) and apportioning amounts from shared flows (say, harvests). Pre-capitalist economies took from the land, or cultivated and farmed foodstuffs and livestock, using allotment and apportioning regimes to distribute shares to members (of a tribe). The act is deductive. It is a distributive act of dividing resources that belong to all into parts according to a social logic, with a view of sustaining not only a society but the relations among its members. Capitalist production, by contrast to the disjunctive economic logic of archaic societies, produces through conjunction, by a creative act of addition (see Deleuze’s Anti-Oedipus). Goods are created ex nihilo, not given by the gods or spirits (in gift economies the gods are placed in debt to tribes through offerings and sacrifices, those divine debts repaid in the form of bountiful harvests and other interventions). As consumers of a capitalist mode of production, we do not owe higher authorities anything but a tax (which is a debt, but a monetary one only). The conjunctive economy constantly adds. It adds through relations, connections, and links. But how? Communication.

What better to use for creating links and associations than communication (and related tools and technologies). Here’s Hardt on affective capitalism:

“Whereas in a first moment, in the computerization of industry for example, one might say that communicative action, human relations, and culture have been instrumentalized, reified, and “degraded” to the level of economic interactions, one should add quickly that through a reciprocal process, in this second moment, production has become communicative, affective, de-instrumentalized, and “elevated” to the level of human relations—but of course a level of human relations entirely dominated by and internal to capital.”

From the marketing might of mass media to social marketing phenomena like MySpace (miniMedia), messaging, imagery, and the sheer sex appeal of people, goods, and services move from mouth to mouth by face to face as well as mediated connections. Word of mouth marketing, then, is an example of affective capitalism, for it establishes demand on the evidence of shared interests and likes. We’re back to the long tail. Buzz marketing is marketing to affects, by means of communication tools.

Indeed, collaborative filtering is also a means of filtering collaboration. In particular, it suggests an AND between two products based on their likeness or similarity. Connections and relations spread out like a web among products, and with the dots connected (collaborative filtering), human relations emerge (filtered collaboration). Our relations become subordinate to economic relations because they have been produced by them. Is that not an example of “human relations entirely dominated by and internal to capital?” And are these relations not an example of filtered collaboration, for our communication is in the service of product promotion?

Coda
This being an economy of surplus and digital duplicates, not of scarcity, getting attention is the aim of affective marketing. But it works off a logical twist: that we like things that are alike. Surely we don’t like things (intrinic logic) because they are alike (extrinsic logic). We may like things that are alike, but not because they are alike. The long tail is an example of affective marketing in its early stages, because the similarities among products promoted together (linked) is only a stand-in for the real marketer’s grail: the connections between personal likes. For now, connections of likeness substitute for the connections between likes. The latter suggest themselves as a frontier of resistance to author Michael Hardt, who writes: “On the contrary, given the role of affective labor as one of the strongest links in the chain of capitalist post-modernization, its potential for subversion and autonomous constitution is all the greater.” Hardt seems to suggest that we thwart marketing surveys and throw a wrench into the machine, with the aim of refusing to allow capitalism its sought-after model of our desires and pleasures.

I wonder whether Foucault, were he alive today, might write a book on the database as a concrete design equally suited to surveillance and to marketing purposes. The concepts here are rich. Affective capitalism marks a historical moment in capitalism’s development. I’m with Hardt. But I’ve always thought that if there’s one thing we have going for us (humanity), it’s that capitalism can’t think. It can only observe. We have a lead on it, always.