/lit/ - Literature

>These questions open the second volume of this work. They will be pursued through an analysis of orthotheses particular to present analogical, numerical, and biological technologies (which are nothing other than mnenotechnologies "en-gramming" [engrammant] the already-there). The second volume will attempt to interpret the specificity of contemporary technics from this perspective, measuring up to the following question: to what extent can the who that we are today double up on its what?

>The irreducible relation of the who to the what is nothing but the expression of retentional finitude (that of its memory).Today memory is the object of an industrial exploitation that is also a war of speed: from the computer to program industries in general, via the cognitive sciences, the technics of virtual reality and telepresence together with the biotechnologies, from the media event to the event of technicized life, via the interactive event that makes up computer real time, new conditions of eventization have been put in place that characterize what we have called light-time. Light-time forms the age of the différance in real time, an exit from the deferred time specific to the history of being that seems to constitute a concealing of différance and a threat to all kinds of difference— which is why one can speak of the end of history or of a change of epoch. Today this light-time raises demands for exceptional measures: hence "the cultural exception." There is therefore a pressing need for a politics of memory. This politics would be nothing but a thinking of technics (of the unthought, of the immemorial) that would take into consideration the reflexivity informing every orthothetic form insofar as it does nothing but call for reflection on the originary de-fault of origin, however in- commensurable such a reflexivity is (since it is nonsubjective). Whence the excess of measure in this exceptional phrase inscribed on the wall of time: no future.

this brings us to the end of Technics and Time vol 1. pretty fucking fascinating book, imho. as i was saying earlier, 2 has a lot going on in terms of the industrialization of memory which really is fascinating (and this is, as indicated in the OP, 'Prosthetic Memories edition'). so i think i'll probably burn some more of the image space in this thread greentexting from that next, unless you guys have any objections. it's crucial Cosmotech, imho.

but aw yeah, we hacked our way through another book. feels good man. i don't know if i want to do all of T&T 2 but maybe just those parts that connect the relay from Epimetheus to our current section of the Wild Ride.

>>11794822
>I'd add that our beliefs about history and economic laws are patently incomplete or downright false because bad stuff keeps happening in those domains. Suggesting that we have little to no real control over the phenomena.

this is exactly what i think also. that is the exact vertigo that land and other acceleration-ish philosophers are describing. we *think* we have a lot more control than we actually do.

and a lot of this comes back to language, especially the phase of a post-linguistic turn we are now presently in. both deleuze and lacan (along with derrida, foucault, and others) are highly alert to the issue of language and *control* - see deleuze on order-words or lacan on virtually everything. language always has this recursive dimension, whether spoken or written. and yet, necessarily, we keep speaking to each other. we evolve societies of control, but what is it that actually drives them? land's contention is, ultimately, an economic process flirting with self-consciousness. this is a hyperbolic thesis, no doubt, and it's far from airtight. but one thing that doesn't seem to be in doubt, to my mind, and is indeed a very good thing to bear in mind, is that nobody is really in control for the time being.

peterson talks about this also, but his critique of neo-marxism is less interesting, imho, than what land is saying about postmodernity. he is basically contending that the more ironic we become, the more potentially automatic as well. baudrillard tested out all these waters first, in his own way, over a period of decades. land is less interested in cultural analysis than building a thesis about the analysis of these cultural productions as a total phenomenon, and comes up with his own unique answer: that we're building an AI that knows our desires better than we know ourselves. we call this thing capitalism, but its final horizon extends far beyond our own human desires, let alone our politics.

and it could well be the case that voluntarily surrendering that control is in fact a far better move than trying to double down on it, either by way of totalitarian politics or even the most ironic and hyper-refined deconstructive criticism possible. the time for that could very well be past, but we still go on acting as if we are in much more control of the situation than we actually are. we claim to hate capitalism but we show up every day for it. and there really may be no alternative.

anyways. you get the idea. the space that land occupies is an interesting and a liminal one. he's intimating things about the nature of an autocatalytic and autotelic process we are *today* calling capitalism because in some sense we are still indebted to the thinkers we have on these things. no doubt time will show that there is a lot more to this story than we presently realize, and we can't *force* it either. all we can do is kind of look at what's there and make the best guesses we can. but nobody really knows where things are going.