Re: [-empyre-] what is to be done?

[Brian Holmes <brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr>]

odyens@alcor.concordia.ca wrote:
 What is to be done with a process that helped create our
> perception of the metaphysical, but whose operations, whose forms and 
> sometimes even content are now within the control of machines? When most of 
> what art produces today ignores humanity’s need for the transcendent, when 
> what most of what art produces today responds to machine’s perceptions of the 
> world?

This is a great text, with interesting references and a clear relation 
to present reality. But I think the onus is on you to give some initial 
ideas of what is to be done. There is, effectively, nothing in the 
Western philosophical tradition that will help respond.

I am currently reading a philosopher from that retrograde country, 
France, one who writes in the minor imperial language most of them still 
use over there, his name is Bernard Stiegler. He thinks that the entire 
European production of technological writing machines in the enlarged 
sense - the kind of machines with which we cultivate ourselves, along 
the lines sketched out by Foucault in his text "writing of the self" - 
should be reoriented so as to basically save the inhabitants of Europe 
and perhaps elsewhere from a threatening reduction of human singularity, 
and with it, of any possible ethics. He thinks that capitalism, in the 
advanced economies, is now primarily cultural, focused around the 
different devices whereby memory and creativity of all kinds is 
exteriorized into objects and traces. He thinks such machines are 
essential, a basic part of the human experience in time, but that care 
needs to be taken with their production, so that persons can go on 
becoming individuals ("individuating") in a relation of creative tension 
with societies which are also constantly individuating. If this care for 
the social and psychic self cannot be translated into a change in the 
kinds of machines which are produced, he believes that a generalized 
disenchantment with democracy will grow more widespread, leading to a 
collapse of desire into gregarious, instinctual outbursts of destructive 
violence. His latest book, Reenchanter le monde: La valeur esprit contre 
le populisme industriel, begins precisely with a chapter entitled "What 
is to be done?" However, if I have understood the post you sent, this 
whole approach and anything like it is already obsolete. So I am quite 
curious what you think is to be done.

all the best, Brian Holmes