Techno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurism

Your Intelligence is Artificial

Consciousness never was natural. Foucault has parsed many of the technologies that made its Romantic avatar possible: the examination, the excercise, the enclosure, the timetable. [1]   Consciousness and Romanticism go together so well because both are university discourses, products of similar technologies. Both are figments of institutional architecture. The Internet only makes obvious what's been true all along. Consciousness is always already technologized. [2]   Artificial intelligence is a redundancy--in the best sense.

Notes

1. See Michel Foucault, "Docile Bodies," Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979): 135-69.

2. The lesson of William Gibson's earliest stories. See "Fragments of a Hologram Rose" Burning Chrome (New York: Ace, 1986): 36-42.

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