[D66] Anti-technology
R.O.
jugg at ziggo.nl
Wed Jul 29 14:55:38 CEST 2020
Bringing this condition of life into focus has proven elusive at best.
Levi-Strauss began his anthropological work with such a quest in mind:
"I had been looking for a society reduced to its simplest expression.
That of the Nambikwara was so truly simple that all I could find was
human beings."" In other words, he was really still looking for symbolic
culture, and seemed ill-equipped to ponder the meaning of its absence.
Herbert Marcuse wanted human history to conform to nature as a
subject-object harmony, but he knew that "history is the negation of
nature."21 The postmodern outlook positively celebrates the reifying
presence of history and culture by denying the possibility that a
pre-objectificational state ever existed. Having surrendered to
representation—and every other basic given of past, present, and future
barrenness—the postmodernists could scarcely be expected to explore the
genesis of reification.If not the original reification, language
is the most consequential, as cornerstone of representational
culture. Language is the reification of communication, a
paradigmatic move that establishes every other mental separation.
The philosopher W.V. Quine's variation on this is that
reification arrives with the pronoun.""In the beginning was the Word . .
. " the beginning of all this, which is killing us by limiting existence
to many things. Corollary of symbolization, reification is a sclerosis
that chokes off what is living, open, natural. In place of being stands
the symbol. If it is impossible for us to coincide with our being,
Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness, then the symbolic is the measure
of that non-coincidence. Reification seals the deal, and language is its
universal currency.
On 29-07-2020 14:52, R.O. wrote:
> 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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