Re: <nettime> Political-Economy and Desire

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

Mark, this one is truly fascinating. Send updates as you go.

What you say about desire largely holds, I don't disagree. But over
that three hundred years since Adam Smith, a major corrective to
the moral theory of desire, which is visible already in Marx and
explicit in Nietzsche, is that the real aim of accumulation is not
acquisition or satisfaction of any kind, but power over other people.
For a contemporary view of that, check out Bichler & Nitzan, Capital
as Power: Order and Creorder.

Maybe the cybernetics guys, with their interest in rationality, were
also interested in power over entire populations: predictive power,
the power to control.

best, BH




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