Kindle Notes & Highlights
The line makes topics, maps them into the topographic, then folds the topographic into a digital topology.
In the 1950s Heidegger’s exploration of what he called “originary technicity” arose in the context of a coming of age of “modernism” in the arts.
It is well recognised that from the very first use of gesture, its development into language and early writing systems, that the technological thrust was associated with the arts as well as the various crafts of making and constructing.
The Wake is a work that involves a “designed” language, which Joyce declares is not English, because as his text points out, “in the Nichtian glossery which purveys aprioric roots for aposteriorious tongues this is nat language at any sinse of the world” (83.12).[375] The uniqueness of Joyce’s last two productions—Ulysses and the Wake—is their utilisation of the eighteenth century vision of Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova, by embracing aspects of: the history of the most ancient times; the history of the liberal arts and drama from Greece to Augustan England; and those of the recent history
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arithmetic which constructed the pyramids and their connection with art as technē and hence also ancient technology: “the hieroglyphs of engined egypsians.”
With the process of composition taking seventeen years, beginning in 1922, the Wake was finally completed in 1939 just at the dawn of the digital age.
Wake tells us, is a universe where “flash becomes word and silents selfloud” (267.16-17)—a “languo of flows” (621.22) producing a merging of a pre-Mosaic and a post-telegraphic (Morse code) mode of communication: “language this allsfare for the love of Marses which is ambiviolent about it” (518.2-3).
technicity—the co-presence of the expressive and the poetic with the technological in the act of creation.
Valéry had argued that the role of the contemporary poet or artist was to be: “a cool scientist, almost an algebrist, in the service of a subtle dreamer.”
for the very beginnings of the arts in rituals in the ancient caves and in drama in the classical world exhibited most of the generally accepted characteristics of intermedia: integration (or convergence of the arts), interactivity (audience participation in the ritualistic character), immersion (of presence or illusion; an impression of being-there; the equivalent of hypermedia in any given period), and narrativity.
The Wake concludes with a vision of: “The untireties of livesliving being the one substrance of a streamsbecoming. Totalled in toldteld and teldtold in tittle-tell tattle”
Joyce shared an avant-garde vision of convergence or multimedia as expressed by Moholy-Nagy (1924): “The Theatre of Totality with its multifarious complexities of light, space, plane, form, motion, sound, man—and with all the possibilities for varying and combining these elements—must be an ORGANISM.”[380]
Shakespeare’s The Tempest clearly reveal the Renaissance sense of the arts—the technē producing a “virtual” world which reflects the everyday world:
We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
In the conclusion of the Wake (the “Coming Forth by Dawn”), in terms that echo Valéry’s remarks, Joyce describes his book as an electromagentic machine, “a wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer” in which: “It will remember itself from everysides, with all gestures in each our word” (614.20-1).
“The Dynamo and the Virgin”
As Adams saw it, the energy produced by faith in the Virgin was being transmuted into a new faith in the electric generator, the dynamo.
Nevertheless, they may disagree on whether the posthuman will be an embodied person or an assemblage of abstract information that might be stored in a computer.
might better be denominated as “parahuman,”
we can agree with Heidegger (at least with the Heidegger of the middle years) that knowledge today is defined on the model of the physical sciences. As Derrida might put it, this relegates “aesthetic” knowledge to the function of a supplement that is often seen as dangerous.
The epoch of technicity threatens to turn human beings into standing-reserve (Bestand) or raw material, in the interests of productivity. “Everywhere,” Heidegger writes, “everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.”
Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it therefore orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way.
Today, then, an all but all-pervasive will to coherence, which defines the logic and the epoch of technicity, dominates our understanding of knowledge.
For Heidegger, of course, technicity is not a problem in itself. The problem lies in technicity’s occlusion of other ways of knowing or revealing. The problem isn’t related to anything that might be seen as essential to technicity, but rather with a dominating will to order the world and make it cogent.
it typifies the conventional journalistic—and technological—disclosure of the world as always already coherent and calculable.
conventional journalism abstracts a certain set of limited features from the total mass (or mess) of potential features that make up the world—and constitutes the world in the image of that abstraction.
What will become of this when we … indeed have to remove the concept of virtuality from the couple that opposes it to actuality, to effectivity, or to reality?
“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”
He is referring here partly to the very obvious threats of massive destruction posed by quasi-autonomous weapon systems, media-savvy terrorism and the ecological degradation that flows from industrial capitalism, and also to the possibility that developments in genetic manipulation and nanotechnologies may lead humanity at some point in the near future simply to upgrade itself out of existence. But there is an important philosophical sense in which it seems quite redundant to deliver humankind a collective memento mori of this kind, since according to Stiegler’s logic our pure or originary
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Like Simondon, Stiegler points out that although “human nature” likes to think of itself as something pre- or non-technological, the very possibilities of self-reflection, self-expression and self-consciousness are dependent on technologies of inscription; without this technology there can be no continuity of self-awareness across time, no means of commemorating the past or anticipating the future, and no means of transmitting such knowledge from one generation to the next. In a powerful extension of a Derridean “logic of the supplement” into our anthropological pre-history, Stiegler thus
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a scheme of things where being is definitively “being-outside-oneself.”
“The only initial difference between man and animals,” says Stiegler, “is that man is inclined to mimic them all.”
If technology is the human operation of technical systems, Stiegler argues, then one of its futures is “the disappearance (or the replacement) of the operator.”[523]
In this regard The Matrix and its sequels invite comparison with Heidegger’s famous arguments, in “The Question Concerning Technology,” about the extent to which humanity itself is challenged, ordered or exploited by the forces of technology that “enframe” the natural world in terms of its exploitability as a “standing reserve” of resources.
Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,
John Isidore discourses briefly on what he calls “Kipple,” which is his nickname for junk and clutter of any description. According to Isidore it is in the nature of Kipple—all the used and useless objects that constantly accumulate around us and that seem to proliferate when we are not around—to drive out “non-Kipple.”
technics is the unthinkable condition of thought.
