[D66] Anti-technology

[R.O.]

Thanks for coming. I'll be your Luddite this afternoon.

On 29-07-2020 15:14, R.O. wrote:
> 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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