/lit/ - Literature

>With this new sensibility, human beings become more aware of what is in their hands, of the technical means they have developed and of the fact that their own will and existence have become dependent upon these apparatuses which they believed to be their own creations— and indeed that the human itself is in the process of being ‘rewritten’ by the new ‘immaterial’ languages of machines. It is in this way that Lyotard raised the question of anamnesis in relation to technology: he saw very clearly that the exploitation of memory by industry would be amplified with the development of telecommunications technologies. He therefore sought to overcome the industrial hegemony of memory by pushing the question to a new height (and setting it on a new plane), albeit one that remains very speculative and hence almost opaque. The process that is understood as the end of modernity, in my own conceptualisation, centres on the hypothesis that modernity is subtended by a technological unconsciousness, and that its end is indicated by a becoming conscious, a realisation that Dasein is a technical being who may invent technics, but is also conditioned by them.

>Heidegger’s Being and Time, especially his critique of Cartesian ontology; and in his later works the effort to reconstruct the history of Being— a task which can be understood as that of terminating modernity by posing a new question, a recommencement— arises from an awareness of the forgetting of Being. The ontological difference is an opening, since it reformulates the question of Being according to two different of magnitude, one concerning beings (Seiendes), the other Being (Sein). The forgotten question of Being functions as the unconscious of the ontic inquiry into beings constituted by the history of science and technology.

>As we shall see, in confronting the question concerning technology in China, Freud’s conception of the unconscious, repression, and working-through will be crucial. Indeed, Heidegger hinted at a kind of repression inherent in the antagonistic relation between technology and the question of Being: for him, technology, the completion of Western metaphysics, occluded the original question of Being.

>The forgetting of Being, in effect, is the question concerning technology. In order to understand technology, and what is at stake in it for non-European cultures, then, we must go by way of Heidegger and the concept of technology as the completion of metaphysics, but without equating Eastern and Western philosophical systems and thereby attributing a universal origin of technics to Prometheus. We must rather seize the possibility of appropriating it, deferring it as an end, and, in this deferring, re-appropriate the Gestell— that is, modern technology.

technics, Spirit and Being...in some order.