[D66] Anti-technology

[R.O.]

"Emotional desolation is seen as almost entirely a matter of 
freely-occurring "natural" brain or chemical abnormalities, having 
nothing to do with the destructive context the individual is generally 
left to blindly endure in a drugged condition."

"Husserl and others figured symbolic representation as originally 
designed to be only a temporary supplement to authentic expression.That 
Reification enters the picture in a somewhat parallel fashion, as 
repre-sentation passes from the status of a noun used for specific 
purposes to that of an object. Whether or not these descriptive theses 
are adequate, it seems at least evident that an ineluctable gap exists 
between the concept's abstraction and the richness of the web or 
phenomena. To the point here is Heidegger's conclusion that authentic 
thinking is non-conceptual," a kind of "reverential listening."'Always 
of the utmost relevance is the violence that a steadily encroaching 
technological ethos perpetrates against lived experience. Gilbert 
Germain has understood how the ethos forcefully promotes a"forgetfulness 
of the linkage between reflective thought and the direct perceptual 
experience of the world from which it arises and to which it ought to 
return." 10 Engels noted in passing that "human reason has developed in 
accordance with man's alteration of nature,"" a mild way of referring to 
the close connection between objectifying, instrumen-talizing reason and 
progressive reification.In any case, the thought of civilization has 
worked to reduce the abundance that yet manages to surround us. Culture 
is a screen through which our perceptions, ideas, and feelings are 
filtered and domesticated. According to Jean-Luc Nancy, the main thing 
representational thought represents is its limit.12 Heidegger and 
Wittgenstein, possibly the most original of 20th century thinkers, ended 
up disclaiming philosophy along these lines.The reified life-world 
progressively removes what questions it. The literature on society 
raises ever fewer basic questions about society, and the suffering of 
the individual is now rarely related to even this unquestioned society. 
Emotional desolation is seen as almost entirely a matter of 
freely-occurring "natural" brain or chemical abnormalities, having 
nothing to do with the destructive context the individual is generally 
left to blindly endure in a drugged condition."


On 29-07-2020 14:44, R.O. wrote:
> "we resign ourselves to conception only for want of perception."
> 
> We are captives of so much that is not only instrumental, fodder for the 
> functioning of other manipulable things, but also ever more
> simulated.  We  are  exiles  from  immediacy,  in  a  fading  and 
> flattening landscape where thought struggles to unlearn its alienated 
> condition-ing.  Merleau-Ponty  failed  in  his  quest,  but  at  least 
> aimed  at  finding  a primordial  ontology  of  vision  prior  to  the 
> split  between  subject  and object. It is division of labor and the 
> resulting conceptual forms of thought that   go   unchallenged, 
> delaying   discovery   of   reification   and   reified thought.I t   i 
> s ,   a f t e r   a l l ,   o u r   w h o l e   w a y   o f   k n o w i 
> n g   t h a t   h a s   b e e n   s o  deformed and diminished, and that 
> must be understood as such. "Intelligence" is now an externality to be 
> measured, equated to profi-ciency in manipulating symbols. Philosophy 
> has become the highly elaborate rationalization of reifications. And 
> even more generally, being itself is constituted as experience and 
> representation, as subject and object. These outcomes must be criticized 
> as fundamentally as possible.The active, living element in cognition 
> must be uncovered, beneath the reifications that mask it. Cognition, 
> despite contemporary ortho-doxy, is not computation. The philosopher 
> Ryle glimpsed that a form of knowledge that does not rely on symbolic 
> representation might be the basic one.' Our notions of reality are the 
> products of an artificially constructed symbol system, whose components 
> have hardened into reifications or objectifications over time, as 
> division of labor coalesced into domination of nature and domestication 
> of the individual.Thought capable of producing culture and civilization 
> is distanc-ing, non-sensuous. It abstracts from the subject and becomes 
> an inde-pendent object. It's telling that sensations are much more 
> resistant to reification than are mental images. Platonic discourse is a 
> prime example of thinking that proceeds at the expense of the senses, in 
> its radical split between perceptions and conceptions. Adorno draws 
> attention to the healthier variant by his observation that in Walter 
> Benjamin's writings "thought presses close to the object, as if through 
> touching, smelling, tasting, it wanted to transform itself."' And Le Roy 
> is probably very close to the mark with "we resign ourselves to 
> conception only for want of perception."' Historically determined in the 
> deepest sense, the reification aspect of thought is a further cognitive 
> "fall from grace"
> 
> 
> On 29-07-2020 14:40, R.O. wrote:
>>
>> "Technology is "the knack of so arranging the world that we need not 
>> experience it."' We are expected to deny what is living and natural 
>> within us in order to acquiesce in the domination of non-human nature. 
>> Technology has unmistakably become the great vehicle of reification. 
>> Not forgetting that it is embedded in and embodies an ever-expanding, 
>> global field of capital, reification subordinates us to our own 
>> objectified creations. ("Things are in the saddle and ride mankind," 
>> observed Emerson in the mid-19th century.) Nor is this a recent turn 
>> of events; rather, it reflects the master code of culture, ab origino. 
>> The separation from nature, and its ensuing pacification and 
>> manipulation, make one ask, is the individual vanishing? Has culture 
>> itself set this in motion? How has it come to pass that a formulation 
>> as reified as "children are our most precious resource" does not seem 
>> repugnant to everyone?"
>>
>> --Zerzan, Running on emptiness, The pathology of civilisation
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