Alexander > Recent Status Updates

Sometimes I allow myself to think: "gee, I've read a fair bit now haven't I?". Then I read an author like Hirschman, who apparently can cite just about every American and European political-economic treatise from Hamilton to Machiavelli, Montesquieu to Adam Smith and apparently no, I have not read a fair bit now.

So I'm on the appendices and at this point, Anderson is just showing off. Having covered, in meticulous detail, every part of Europe (including both Russia and the Ottoman Empire), here, just for comparisons' sake, he spends about another 150 pages or so also going through Japan, the Caliphates, and China. Just for comparisons' sake.

Between this and Passages, I kinda feel like Neo in the Matrix when they plugged him in and he wakes up going 'I know Kung fu'. Except here it's... 'I know European history'. Well, like, up to the early modern period anyway.

You remember how in class, sometimes you just wanted to ask the professor to put aside academic detachment and ask them what they *really* thought about such and such an author or authors? This is that.

One day, there will be a history of capitalism written like this: as a complex, sprawling mode of production, a charting of its internal transformations, resistances, and conflicts across tiers, time, and territory. It will not only have a start date, meticulously tracked, but so too, an end date. It will one among many of old, a specimen under historical scalpel, vivisected from end to end. A book of tears and hope.

When I read Ellen Wood's Origin of Capitalism earlier in the year, I'd figured it'd more or less had said pretty much all that needed to be said. Everything else would be filigree. I was wrong. While Wood does an incredible job at pinpointing the specificity of capitalism, A&N chart it's pre-history outside of Europe, and in fact explode the closed coherence of 'Europe' as an entity to begin with. Awesome.

This is a pretty bonkers book in terms of both ambition and imagination. It's basic programme: what if the realization of Hegel's Absolute were nothing other than the effort to construct and refine an Artifical General Intelligence (AGI)? An AGI, no less, for whom humans - us - are to serve as an extrapolable (and interim!) model? And then to claim this as the fulfilment of the project of freedom? Nuts. I love it.

Becoming-slog of Alexander

Total slog.

Lévi-Strauss x Deleuze