[D66] Anti-technology

[R.O.]

I  think  what  explains  the  change  in  perception  about  computers 
is the  deformation  caused  by  the  massive  amount  of  alienation 
that  has happened  in  the  past  50  years  or  so.  That's  why 
some,  and  I  hope  not many, hold to this point about computers 
living.In terms of what they are capable of, it seems to me, when you 
have the distance narrowing between humans and machines in the sense 
that if we are becoming more machine-like, it's easier to see the 
machine as more human-like. I don't want to be overly dramatic about it, 
but I think people more and more wonder, is this living or are we just 
going through the motions? W hat's happening? Is everything being 
leached out of life? Is the whole texture and values and every-thing 
kind of draining away? Well, that would take many other lec-tures, but 
it's not so much the actual advance of the technology. If machines can 
be human, humans can be machines. The truly scary point is the narrowing 
of the distance between the two.Another quotation to similarly mark this 
descent, if you will, is a short one from a computer communications 
expert, J.C.R. Licklider. In 1968 he said, "In the future, we'll be able 
to communicate more effectively through a machine than face-to-face." If 
that isn't estrange-ment, I don't know what is. At the same time, one 
striking aspect in terms of cultural development is that the concept of 
alienation is dis-appearing, has almost disappeared. If you look at the 
indices of books in the last, say, 20 years, it isn't there any more. It 
has become so banal, I guess, what's the point of talking about it?

On 29-07-2020 15:21, R.O. wrote:
> 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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