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
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