[D66] Anti-technology

[R.O.]

  How is it that, as William Desmond put it, "the intimacy of being is 
dissolved in the modern antithesis of subject and object?"

On 29-07-2020 14:47, R.O. wrote:
> "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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