Re: [-empyre-] Re: TechnoPanic

[Sean Cubitt <sean.cubitt@unimelb.edu.au>]

Simon Taylor wrote>>
Might it not be
that metaphysics with its analogical form, of aesthetics, authorised by
Kant, wears the same state-endorsed aspect of panic as the proprietary
version introduced at the birthplace in the www. matrix?<<

Yep - that's the danger. Or very nearly. But we need to clarify a few
things. There are very few Kantians around - Lyotard was probably the
last. Bt as Basil Bunting said of the Cantos: "There are the Alps. Ypu
will have to go a long way round if you want to avoid them". Deleuze did -
and it was (and remains) a very long detour. heading into the mountains
can give you altitude sickness, which is more or less what happened with
much of 20th C philosophy/theory. Or if it doesn't kill you, as the saying
goes, it makes you stonger. Tjis is often the worse option: look at
Nietzsche, or Heidgeer: the one the pipulariser of aristocratic disdain
for ordinary people, the other a thorough going nazi.

Which is where we hook up with the State. The state isn't the evil - not
unless you live in a totalitarian state.  Let's leave the question of what
kind of state the USA is aside for the moment. I nsmall countries, the
state is th=e last bastion against globalisation. In Aotearoa New Zealand,
only the state stops us vanishing beneath free trade agreements which are
anything but.

The state isn't the villain -- necessarily.

There are two moments in kant where he stuffs up. One is the
transcendental aesthetic, where he enforces the sepearation of space from
time which would become the basis for the second: the sublime.

The sublime is the final triumph of the eternal present - the status quo's
basis in totalitarianism. On it all sorts of mad figures have been bult
from Nietzsche's panic about democracy to Heidegger's panic about the loss
of "roots" (which here in Oz has a rather specific meaning)

metaphysics is a deadly toy: it is at root the separation of mind from
body. In this sense you could argue the internet is the worst of all
metaphysical inventions -- it invents an information economy which by
exclusion of the body, and of all materiality, reduces sub-sharan africa,
central asia, the carribbean etc to the status of supernumerar=ies to the
global information economy -- a brutal proof that the Real still exists,
but you wouldn't want to go there

(I'm of the opinion that strugglimng even for this daft piece of turf is
worth the candle, just as we fight for educatuon, even tho we know the
education system is stuffed)

have to go -

s