Sublime

Fourth, this artificially expanded opportunity will favor general bigness and concentration in finance itself.

The revolutions in biotech and infotech will give us control of the world inside us and will enable us to engineer and manufacture life.

This should give us pause. History, which for a time seemed to be running from west to east, now seems to be moving from east to west. Everything that happens here seems to happen there first.

However, the conceptualization and larger implications of foregrounding circulatory histories over linear and bounded national or civilizational histories are yet to be elaborated, and my early chapters represent a preliminary effort in this direction.

An environmentalist such as Vandana Shiva directs her critique and ire less at national governments than at the idea of the global itself.

There is a pervasive illusion that, as more of the earth’s biosphere is annihilated or irreparably damaged, human beings can magically disassociate themselves from it and transfer their interdependencies to the mecanosphere of global capitalism.

Complexity theory and ‘big history’, particularly notions of pulsating global networks of exchange, allow us to grasp changes through three logics: of capital, of political systems, and of culture, by which I refer to the formation of subjectivity and social actions.

Global Greenspeak has become a signifier that hides the predatory interests of particular multinational corporations who plan the “final colonization of life itself” by seeking to patent plant genes and germ plasms.74