The logic of the imperial frontiers was all based on establishing a communications advantage over its opponents. Little by little the frontiers became a dense network of bases—some very small—signal stations, barriers, control points, and, most important of all, roads
stress this
being together
How does the idea of "being together" show up elsewhere in Haraway's work?
f we recognized that we obtained satisfac-tion from the failure to obtain the perfect commodity rather than from a wholly successful purchase, we would be freed from the psychic appeal of capitalism
This is an interesting (and to me) original position. I find the idea that my most compulsive destructive behaviors (say boozing) have not been so compelling because they satisfied my desires, but because they failed to, and thus kept me suspended as an ideal capitalist subject.
ut the secret of capitalism’s integration of critique lies not in the process of commodifi cation, no matter how self-evident it appears. Th e secret is in the promise. If one invests oneself in the promise of the future, through this gesture one accepts the basic rules of the capitalist game.
You lost me.
one takes a cruise
qv. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
Power produces desire rather than just restricting it.
I don't know, but it doesn't sound like the earlier theorists were denying it; repression seems to me to be precisely the simultaneous production and restriction of desire
Desire directed toward com-modities is inherently repressed desire
In AA parlance, this would be filling your God-shaped hole with booze, drugs, sex, gambling, codependent relationships, etc.
Repression, according to the Frankfurt School, is the forgetting of what fails to fi t within the capitalist system, and the critical task becomes one of drawing attention to this repressed mate-rial.
Holy shit that's awesome. You could also say that's also one of the tasks of meditation practice.
intractable emptiness
this is a nice phrase
we will never be able to overcome repression and realize our desires
I didn't know this about Freud, and without knowing more, it's hard to comment on this. I will say though that it raises some potentially interesting parallels with Buddhist philosophy, namely the inevitability of suffering/craving per the 1st & 2nd noble truths. And my understanding here is qualified by a sort of AA-inflection, which is the dilemma that you cannot realize your desires, even/especially a desire for spiritual growth, because that desire is always framed by the pre-enlightened/"small"/active addict self. Hence the need for the intervention of something bigger than oneself (HP in AA, something like the 3 refuges in Buddhism, or perhaps Buddha-nature).
To grant freedom to Spartacus would amount to an admission of equality that would have undermined the entire Roman world
Romans freed slaves all the time. Freed slaves became citizens. Citizens were also notionally equal before the law.
Th e fact that everything can be made equal reveals that everything isn’t, and this makes possible the critical response.
This is an interesting position, but it feels more clever than correct.
To psychoanalyze a system is inherently to criticize it
Is to psychoanalyze a person inherently to criticize them?
But much more than other socioeconomic systems, capitalism necessarily relies on its incompleteness and on its opening to the outside in order to function
I don't see how this advances beyond the claims of the putative capitalism apologist; the apologist could argue that this is further evidence of the overlaps between capitalism & human nature, since human nature is also incomplete and needs something outside to function. More to the point/in other words, the author presents this as a bug in capitalism, but the apologist could argue that incompleteness (and criticism) is a feature of capitalism.
Introduction
Look at me, I'm a fancypants introduction