/lit/ - Literature

>>11206718
yes. this exactly. all of this begins, fundamentally, with liberalism: the individual anterior to society. your freedom - freedom to be happy, freedom of mind, *whatever* - is the force that will drive technological innovation. but we evolve control societies as we produce ever more free beings in this way.

go back to that genius quote based anon posted earlier:
>The true genius of cyberpunk is to cash-out the utterly alien into commercially-driven bionics (without in any way domesticating it).

the utterly alien is what has the truly emancipatory freedom that is the basic question of political philosophy. nothing is more free, in a sense, than capital, but capital and you are wedded together in this way. historically arrighi made this very important point about the long waltz between market expansion and landed territorial/sovereign power. today we grant that - traditionalist aesthetics aside - universal planetary *mobility* is a thing like no other. the universal cosmopolitan is the ideal, even if that individual truly has no walled or bordered cosmopolis in which to love.

capital is in a way the capture and control mechanism for your imagination, but your imagination is also realized in this process. it's very much like what zizek says about ideology: they're basically unavoidable. even the later pages of fanged noumena hint perhaps at what absolutely liberated machinic desire would look like: frankly, it's not even that interesting.

the question for politics becomes, what can actually provide the fantasies offered by - and *to* - capital in this way? it's possible that microstates work better than macrostates for this (and we will probably find out w/r/t US-China relations in the next century).

>and it make sense: first these faculties must be externalized before they are assimilated again.

the other thing is that i can never really understand why deleuze (and land?) dislike hegel so much. maybe it's just me, and i pretty much like everybody i read (which is probably dumb). but anyways, this is kind of the weird place we are in w/r/t all this stuff: feedback and response.

and, as i said in another thread, i have issues with the matrix-as-prophecy. neo and smith should have been allies. GITS was way, *way* more interesting like that. as in: what happens when people realize what they really want is to be different people? it was a thing baudrillard kind of anticipated in System of Objects - hey look, i have a mod kitchen, ergo, i am now a Mod Person - and so on. capitalism enables all kinds of transformations for the subject to experiment with. it's *theory of mind* and what 21C capital can show us that will be Interesting As Fuck. and who knows? it may even get us, finally, out of the long shadow of the 20C and all of the retarded political interventionism we did in order to keep people believing they were the centre of the universe and that the sun revolved around the earth.