[D66] Anti-technology

Wed Jul 29 15:21:11 CEST 2020

And I also wonder, in passing, about Apple computers. Why would they use 
an apple? It's kind of a mystery to me. [laughter]

On 29-07-2020 15:19, R.O. wrote:
> 
> 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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