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<TITLE>Re: [iDC] Class and the Internet, New Capitalism, and (True New) Socialism for the 21st Century</TITLE>
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Slowly mulling the class-consciousness thing, and also reminded otherwise of Roy Ascott’s facsination with consciousness in another sense, I began to wonder whether there is mileage in the rather passé but still geologically presumed heideggerian thesis of the standing –reserve (no, I’m not a heideggerian, on the contrary – but the idea has constantly to be struggled with in history of media/technology)<BR>
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Today the standing-reserve is not just the unconscious material world. It includes the human – as population, as biomass, as mechanism of aggregate consumption. The question about conscdiousness is whether (to use another heiddegger word) ‘thinking’ is already party to this conversion of humanity into standing-reserve, either when, as in de Landa’s case, we popularise the idea of humanity as biomass etc; or when by refusing to self-publish the self-censor the virtuality (capacity to create the new) of new thinking? Ie, again, damned if we do and damned if we don’t<BR>
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If we understand the standing-reserve as biopolitical and commodifying, we can add some terms: it concerns averages, and it concerns whole-number enumeration. It thus misses both the specificity and the ‘starting’ micro-conditions and so opens itself up to cascading chaotic and emergent structures in spite of itself. This is one way of thinking the schiz as a political consciousness which is nonetheless neither unified nor pleasant to experience. The periodic return to order from such chaotic episodes (as I think happened in the disciplining and monetarisation of the pre-dot-bomb web) may then be predictable but nonetheless not without influence (see also post-countercultural hip capitalism)<BR>
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Sorry to blip in and out of existence like this: I appear to be powered by an improbability drive<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT></FONT><FONT FACE="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>Prof Sean Cubitt<BR>
<a href="scubitt@unimelb.edu.au">scubitt@unimelb.edu.au</a><BR>
Director<BR>
Media and Communications Program<BR>
Faculty of Arts<BR>
Room 127 John Medley East<BR>
The University of Melbourne<BR>
Parkville VIC 3010<BR>
Australia<BR>
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Tel: + 61 3 8344 3667<BR>
Fax:+ 61 3 8344 5494<BR>
M: 0448 304 004<BR>
Skype: seancubitt<BR>
<a href="http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/media-communications/">http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/media-communications/</a><BR>
<a href="http://www.digital-light.net.au/">http://www.digital-light.net.au/</a><BR>
<a href="http://homepage.mac.com/waikatoscreen/">http://homepage.mac.com/waikatoscreen/</a><BR>
<a href="http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/">http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/</a><BR>
<a href="http://del.icio.us/seancubitt">http://del.icio.us/seancubitt</a><BR>
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Editor-in-Chief Leonardo Book Series<BR>
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