Where is the personal in the network? How can you ground a social movement when abiotic assemblages ( which dont sleep, drink, or eat) are given the same ontological status as those than can. I sense a new, more advanced form of Cartesianism, driven by the fragmented, shallow and narrow focus of Pentagon/Silicon Valley. This is hardly an emancipatory scheme. I have heard this liberation by robotics story since I was a child, along with the Easter Bunny and other tall tales. I can use a hammer, I am not a hammer. I use models, I am not a model. I use a smart phone but my phone is not smart, I am. The phone that is smart is a metaphor that has been made up to sell a machine to a human buyer. It is fine to get mad at your car for not starting as long as you know you using your imagination to create a human-machine relationship that is one sided. I hope you know which side you are on. If we are unclear about who is the agent we can create unprecedented havoc but what ethical response does an Uber vehicle have when it kills a pedestrian? Or when a Boeing jet crashes because the manufacture intends to withhold software to create a more lucrative second tier product? Are those who make the profits after the crash, just more post-human than those who died in the crash? Did the jet that crashed have a right to life, too? It is too easy to parody acceleration as a kind of Star Trek show trial on robotics produced by hyper-fragmented adolescent minds.
I have yet to get through Brassier, as I find that those who get intoxicated by Sellars are in a state of premature cognitive commitment. This is what Gebser would call a deficient Mental structure. It Is is a gross form of reductive materialism that doesn’t attract me, as I have been tortured by these men in the white lab coat with their superior Scientific Image, since I was very young… I read about the Scientific Image back in the 60s when I was a lad and rejected it. I was gay youth and science was not my friend! Others might identify with a Scientific image, but I am not an image. I am not a story that someone else created in their own image. I am the real thing. And there is is more going on in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of by those who worship only what they have cognitive access to. We have ( luckily) cognitive access to very little. As Martha Graham, the great choreographer, scolded one of her dancers," You have never taken an honest step in your life!" I find that a very provocative idea. And what would an honest step feel like? This is something that only a human with feet that touch the ground could figure out. And creating a movement that liberates will require in my humble sense of things, many feet on the ground.
Having said that I am open to take Brassier with a grain of salt and welcome new voices into the mix. He may be better than this but I am not a materialist or a nihilist. I have lived with those who are. I do find much of the New Materialism interesting, though I am not able to find any patterns that really connect in that frame of reference. No one, not even the materialists, know what matter is, so why claim so adamantly that someday we will all be that way? I tend to identify as concrete Utopian and that gets me out of bed in the morning. So I admit my bias and confess my attraction to the Romantic and the Dionysian, though I do have an Apollonian streak in my desire structure. I am curious and find some of this thinking still caught up the undertow of the Post-modern? I listened to a lot of drunk frat boys who quoted Derrida and Delueze back in the 80’s before it became the norm . I, perhaps, have yet to recover from that long hangover! I think that is all very necessary, but not sufficient. I have had to pay way too much attention to identity politics because my group was under attack. I learned to work with a group and the inside and outside were always ambiguous. I have an ongoing need to create strategies that triangulate from the ever shifting margins. This is a Queer kind of logic of becoming. And like the US military, we can capture the high ground, stay connected, and keep moving. Those meta-level capacities, that we are trying to activate, are what will make the interior worlds of future people who will be way beyond us, actual. Or so I imagine.
Hi there, I’ve read the thread again and found that I need to improve my English pronounciation, since it caused some mistakes in the transcript (Doug, was that you? Thanks!) that are better to be corrected. I’ve done this here in bold:
10:55 -
- enframement as basic condition of human (Heidegger); our subjectivities are not free of being influenced by technology.
- tech./VR
- Gebser (1948) + Heidegger and Tech. (1946) —> different experiences = different theories (because of the time of their socialization/enculturation: *1889 vs. *1905)
- Davor - there is nothing that is outside of the environment; the contects of the mind are to some degree coming from the outside and consciousness/subjective self cannot be separated from technology.
- SF/dreamers and futures - can extrapolate futures, but still attached to the culture of their time
- no pure thinking mind outside of enframement
21:15 *link to Gebser + previous comments - different types of mind;
- Observing what cognitive structures are/were behind the use of technology (from archaelogical perspective) . . . Gradual and accumulative (cumulative, cumulation) . . . Enframement (though Heidegger states started before the universe) started with humans (for our purposes or with the concept of purpose) . . .we (as humans) have been actively anticipating the future . . . Imagination always there, but differs from the different structures of mind
- Guttman Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guttman_scale (used for comparing development/complexity of cultures, i.e. cultures have: writing? check! math? check! bookprint? no! etc…)
- 1-page Intro: https://books.google.de/books?id=Ei4eCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA163&lpg=PA163&dq=guttman+scale+carneiro&source=bl&ots=p24g3Alhx7&sig=ACfU3U3m0w5xpiUDO8JKJDmnftwuEdjDyw&hl=de&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj_tL7X3snhAhUD6KQKHdKFDXMQ6AEwBnoECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q=guttman%20scale%20carneiro&f=false
- shift in (I meant to say: origin of) operational chains (the human web) starts 3 million y ago. . . . Through media, start to form bigger connections . . .can see distinct stages developing over time (qualitive stages and breaks) . . . When shift in operational chains, when they are deepening= new temporality, new cognitive structure, new metaphysics, new economy, . . . Both shift in depth of thinking and in new operational chains
- VR as realization of the enframement is a limiting statement. (all your realizations belong to us!) . . .Heidegger may say it is the opposite of enframement, takes us away from it. There is more potential in VR than what has yet been explored . . .only a projection of Western realities up to now
"So people are not just people, and the media don’t connect just people, but ‘humans-in-assemblages’.
That sentence was actually Davor’s, but I did agree as I was thinking of “assemblage” as reminder of the fact that “people” are not autonomous tabulae rasae, but always ‘wake up’ so to speak in the middle of an on-going story. Just last night I was reading Matthias Jung’s essay (Chapter 4 of The Axial Age and its Consequences) and I like the way he stressed that we are “embodied” symbol users no matter how we use them. I still gladly cling to the notion that there is something irreducible about whatever-it-is we are - hence my observations a few posts up about ‘virtual’ cultures. Answers would still have to be found for the following excellent questions:
As Davor says, there is no pure thinking mind outside of enframement. I imagine that cuts both ways - there is no enframement without bearers of a cognitive “system” that perceive and maintain it.
A quick apology for my rudimentary note taking skills. . .I have good intentions when listening and transcribing! Thank you for the clarifications Davor and Johnny, but I imagine some of the notes stem from my selective listening.
Let’s just say, I’m feeling very disenchanted by materialism at the moment. Im particularly turned off by the cult of Sellars, who had some good ideas, but a lot of his philosophy seems unfinished and people take it with this absolutism like he is the end all be all and the myth of the given wasn’t an idea already placed by human congnition. “What is an idea if it doesn’t give you something?” It would be very easy to ride this materialist wave, but the assemblage still interests me. A lot of these people (it seems like) are just post-Deleuzians who were disenchanted with the Deleuze/art school silliness and needed a new hill to die upon. This is why I think, what you guys and Davor are all discussing is very important stuff 
That’s very funny, Barrett. I appreciate your sarcasm. There is a lot of pomp and circumstance around Sellars. that has spawned some post-metaphysical claims that have gone, as you might expect, nowhere. I think he has been thoroughly debunked, decades ago, and why this " myth of the given," became such a rallying cry is a mystery to me. I do admit, Sellars had the virtue of clarity, but he has left a lot off the table, to arrive at that. Perhaps, there is a a need from his new disciples, to wrap up in a security blanket and only invite guests to the party who use the same secret code? If we want to go past the New Age kitsch and the Post-Metaphysical backlash, we will have to put back on the table what the Materialists take off the table, in the name of their myth crushing catechism. I have seen some really smart people use fixed questions, answers, to shut down paradoxical situations. Luckily, I believe a healthy skepticism with an openness to the para-normal and the Queer, would be a sign that the Cartesian gaps between matter and mind, inner and outer, interior and exterior, are bridgeable. We can distribute potentials in many different kinds of ways, and this is when consciousness and imagination meet, art and religion and science become good playmates. Hence, the call that many of us have heard, to re-organize ourselves, as we make use of these new kinds of public spaces, for shaping performance based initiatives. The human potential movement, as Jeff Kripal suggests, is not a human achievement movement. We are not there yet collectively but there are many persons who are feeling something different is happening in between hybrid states, trances, yoga, tai chi, lucid dreams, OBEs, art, dance and music, births and deaths, booms and busts, that can’t be reduced to molecules and algorithms. There is something much weirder going on that is not captured by the acceleration spin-meisters. We are far more wierd than the post-metaphysical crowd will allow. And a new metaphysics will be shaped by new and more coherent " we" spaces.
“It is too easy to parody acceleration as a kind of Star Trek show trial on robotics produced by hyper-fragmented adolescent minds.”
Have you read this fabulous woman’s fabulous book: A Sideways Look at Time by Jay Griffiths
which Gary Syner calls “an exercise in Dharma, Poetry, and Philosophy”. ? I would add that it probes deeply into the para-technological “values” of modern Western culture and connects them, both to each other, and to a species of fascism operating on all levels, not simply the overtly political.
" Fast Knowledge --technologically based—assume that nothing much useful was known before the Enlightenment, and that no indigenous ‘science’ is worthy of the name…Slow Knowledge is shared and multi=disciplinary, unowned,…shaped (by( a specific cultural context, to a particular ecological locale."
“Every year the world burns as much fossil fuel (to create food for machines) as the earth produced in almost a million years” !!!
(The) metaphorical car is being driven by a seventeeyear old boy, hooked on speed, seeing the world’ resources as something to use up before anyone else gets to them…meanwhile, (techno-acceleration) is writing an all-too-real history of extinction for animals, birds
and fish."
What is lost, cannot be seen. And Neruda wrote, “The weeping cannot be seen…”
Here is a quote I found on twitter pertaining to the Notre Dame burning. I found this very thoughtful re: the importance of the liturgy, awakening the outside.
I am surprised how upset I was to see fire consuming a Symbol of Sanctuary. This is really sad. I visited the Cathedral years ago. One of the great novels! I love Quasimodo. He is very dear to my adolescent heart.
That is deep! Thanks for sharing.
I was first tempted to replace the word “capital” specifically with “developmentalism” (neologism for the madness of thinking that the finite can be infinitely expanded and exploited). Capital does serve a kind of liberating economic function as currency did (in the ways Davor points out in the theory). Cultural time tends to have its way with initially liberating ideas of course, but that is more a reflection on us (in particular the ubiquitous greed of the ‘well placed’) than our ideas.
Then it dawned on me that what is described is nothing less than the clash between the efficient and deficient modes (in Gebserian terms) of any cultural approach. Tradition is important and progress is important. But when these are conceived as necessarily mutually exclusive… you get the effect of rowing a boat with one oar. Efficiency is a life-affirming balance; deficiency is a self-induced coma of anxiety over a false sense of control.
…Don’t mind me. When 800 years of history burns for any reason I feel it… 
A very good metaphor…rowing with one oar…which is sort of like shooting yourself in the foot and trying to run a relay race! Yes, we are ruining our own chances for functioning at a meta-level, which is where we can stop playing out the binding patterns of our cultural shadows. We are frequently drawn to the shadows because we have lost something in the dark, it is invisible to us, we vaguely recall where we lost it and we are not functioning at all well without it. It seems art, music and syncronistic events help us remember. Art wakes us from Newton’s sleep. I hesitate to call the new structure Quantum but there is a serious scholar of international politics , ( a non-physicist), who has put a foot in both worlds and is coming up with something weird. It a new world order ( which is conservative) but with a twist ( like in a Klein bottle). He claims we are moving out of a classical world view, which dominates our current foreign policies and economic theory, and are starting to re-think matter. We may be walking wave functions. Strange? Absurd? Alternate ways of knowing are happening every day.
