[D66] Anti-technology

[R.O.]

But something that I think has very, very enormous implications has 
happened in the last 20 or 30 years, and I don't think it has yet got 
out very much. There has been a wholesale revision in scholarly ideas of 
what life outside of civilization really was. One of the basic 
ideological foundations for civilization, for religion, the state, 
police, armies, everything else, is that you've got a pretty 
bloodthirsty, awful, subhuman condition before civilization. It has to 
be tamed and tutored and so on. It's Hobbes. It's that famous idea that 
the pre-civilized life was nasty, brutish and short, and so to rescue or 
enable humanity away from fear and superstition, from this horrible 
condition into the light of civilization, you have to do that. You have 
to have what Freud called the "forcible renunciation of instinctual 
freedom." You just have to. That's the price.Anyway, that turns out to 
be completely wrong. Certainly, there are disagreements about some of 
the parts of the new paradigm, some of the details, and I think most of 
the literature doesn't draw out its radical implications. But since 
about the early '70s, we have a starkly different picture of what life 
was like in the two million or so years before civilization, a period 
that ended about 10,000 years ago, almost no time at all.Prehistory is 
now characterized more by intelligence, egalitarianism and sharing, 
leisure time, a great degree of sexual equality, robusticity and health, 
with no evidence at all of organized violence. I mean, that's just 
staggering. It's virtually a wholesale revision. We're stillliving, of 
course, with the cartoonish images, the caveman pulling the woman into 
the cave, Neanderthal meaning somebody who is a com-plete brute and 
subhuman, and so on. But the real picture has been wholly revised.

On 29-07-2020 15:09, R.O. wrote:
> Now the question is, why did they ever take up agriculture? Which is 
> really the question of why did they ever take up civilization? Why did 
> they ever start our division-of-labor-based technology? If we once had a 
> technology, if you want to call it that, based on pretty much zero 
> division of labor, for me that has pretty amazing implications and makes 
> me think that somehow it's possible to get back there in some way or 
> another. We might be able to reconnect to a higher condition, one that 
> sounds to me like a state of nearness to reality, of wholeness.I'm 
> getting pretty close to the end here. I want to mention Hei-degger. 
> Heidegger, of course, is thought of by many as one of the deepest or 
> most original thinkers of the century. He felt that technology is the 
> end of philosophy, and that's based on his view that as technology 
> encompasses more and more of society, everything becomes grist for it 
> and grist for production, even thinking. It loses its separateness, its 
> quality of being apart from that. His point is worth mentioning just in 
> passing.And now I get to one of my favorite topics, postmodernism, which 
> I think is exactly what Heidegger would have had in mind if he had stuck 
> around long enough to see it. I think that here we have a rather 
> complete abdication of reason with postmodernism in so many ways, and 
> it's so pervasive, and so many people don't seem to know what it is. 
> Though we are completely immersed in it, few even now seem to have a 
> grasp of it. Perhaps this, in its way, is similar to the other 
> banalities I referred to earlier. Namely, that which has overpowered 
> what is alien to it is simply accepted and rarely analyzed.So I started 
> having to do some homework, and I've done some writing on it since, and 
> one of the fundamental things—and sorry, for people who already know 
> this—comes from Lyotard in the '70s, in a book called The Postmodern 
> Condition. He held that postmodernism is fundamentally "antipathy to 
> meta-narratives,"meaning it's a refusal of totality, of the overview, of 
> the arrogant idea that we can have a grasp of the whole. It's based on 
> the idea that the totality is totalitarian. To try to think that you can 
> get some sense of the whole thing, that's no g o o d .   A n d   I   t h 
> i n k   a   l o t   o f   i t ,   b y   t h e   w a y ,   i s   a   r e 
> a c t i o n   a g a i n s t  Marxism, which held sway for so long in 
> France among the intelli-gentsia; I think there was an overreaction 
> because of that.So you have an anti-totality outlook and an 
> anti-coherence outlook, even, because that too is suspect and even 
> thought to be a nasty thing. After all, and here's the one thing in 
> which he probably concurred with Horkheimer and Adorno, what has 
> Enlightenment thinking brought us? What has modernist, overview, 
> totality-oriented thinking got us? Well, you know, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, 
> neutron bombs. You don't have to defend those things, though, to get a 
> sense that maybe postmodernism is throwing everything away and has no 
> defenses against, for one thing, an onrushing technology.
> 
> On 29-07-2020 14:55, R.O. wrote:
>> 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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