Re: [-empyre-] Re: Ontological equality

["sdv@krokodile.co.uk" <sdv@krokodile.co.uk>]

I agree enough, though it's been very interesting.

This difference around the 'we' thing does interest me. I was trying to 
refer to those who exist in the core of capital in the middle to upper 
levels of the class system.

Perhaps a personal example might help, in the early summer I went to the 
ICA to see Hardt and Critchley discuss and market their latest books, 
(The Critchley text being about politics and ethics). At the beginning 
of which they made a passing comment about their guilt for the 
unnecessary transatlantic flight they had taken and the unaddressed 
guilt they felt having taken their flight to London. The 'we' is 
intended to address the choice they made to consume the planet in their 
personal interests.  In our mass consumptive society there are many such 
choices, and it's an evasion of responsibility to believe that we can 
simply blame capital for constructing these desires.  On cynical days I 
rather imagine that Hardt and Critchley are hoping that scientists and 
engineers will remove the responsibility from them, the insistence on 
the  'we'  is because this is not an acceptable response. So yes – it's 
not unreasonable to assume that there are today approx 1 billion people 
who have some investment in 'the benefits of domination' including every 
person who EVER reads this note. So then what's not to understand about 
this "How do we control our  domination of the planet, how do we master 
our own mastery ?"

The other aspect of the 'we' is then precisely, political engagement

And the goal is not the same as eugenics, which is ideologically 
distinct and primarily existed in an earlier social and economic cycle – 
the main difference being that the ideologies that formed eugenics are 
pre-spectacle, pre-mass-consumption.

steve