Response to the readings - Connected by Steven Shaviro

59 W 12th Street . November 14, 2007 . 10:23 pm .

"What separates a man from a wolf if it is not that a man wants to make a profit?"
Jane Bowl
(Connected, p. 214)

So I ended up being pleasantly surprised by the book Connected. I also enjoyed the order in which we read it - first middle, then start, then end... very hypertextual of us.

In this section Shaviro goes into great detail about extravagance. He argues that the principal forces behind capitalist agglomeration are waves of massive, uncontrolled spending, and the financial speculations (which he accurately refers to as manic) that also whirl around consumption. He makes very interesting points when comparing and contrasting evolutionary biology and free-market economies: their replication, expenditure, utility, equilibrium... and the idea for example that without scarcity there would be no competition and henceforth no efficiency.

(I can't help thinking about the fast approaching 2007 Black Friday. The sole idea of getting up and going to the mall at 4 am seems beyond berserk to me. In any case I applaud the creation of Cyber Monday.)

Something else that I found very interesting this time around was Shaviro's analysis of the science fiction novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Salt (love the title.) He mentions that the web is becoming a 'new topography upon the cosmos', a scenery which I for some reason envision as a very heterogeneous and jelly-like cloud, sparkling with flashes of data and information. It is yet uneven but pretends to wrap us all around with the same intensity one day. What an overwhelming system of universal equivalences this would be... similar again to Castells' network society... globalization feeding off local affirmations of identity and viceversa.

It seems like an ambitious and rather splashy objective to accustom oneself to such an infinite spectrum of realities, practices, fields, desires (Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Salt mentions 6200 different worlds.) We can traverse the network but do we have to become it as well? Have we really moved out of time and into space? Is art imitating nature or is nature imitating art?

Anyway... just some ideas.

T