[D66] Anti-technology
R.O.
jugg at ziggo.nl
Wed Jul 29 14:52:29 CEST 2020
E.M. Cioran asks, "How can you help resenting the absurdity of time, its
march into the future, and all the nonsense about evolution and
progress? Why go forward, why live in time."" Walter Benjamin's plea for
shattering the reified continuity of history was somewhat simi-larly
based on his yearning for a wholeness or unity of experience. At some
point, the moment itself matters and does not rely on other moments "in
time."It was of course the clock that completed the
reification, by dissoci-ating time from human events and natural
processes. Time by now was fully exterior to life and
incarnated in the first fully mechanized device. In the 15th
century Giovanni Tortelli wrote that the clock "seems to be
alive, since it moves of its own accord." " Time had come to
measure its contents, no longer contents measuring time. We so
often say we "don't have time," but it is the basic reification,
time, that has us.
On 29-07-2020 14:49, R.O. wrote:
> 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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