INTRODUCTION
The forms of consciousness that relate to contemporary manifestations of capitalism have taken
on a triumphal, insistent air. These forms of consciousness promise that heaven on earth is within
our grasp, history has ended, what happened in the past no longer matters; democratic,
corporate capitalism has resolved earthy concerns; technology allows the shedding of the
limitations of physical existence and one is in the age of the last man in whom one could merge
biology and machines into futuristic life forms. Utopian notions of individual and societal
perfectibility abound, everything, even DNA, could be reified and turned via the marketplace into
things that one could manipulate to enrich existence.