/lit/ - Literature

>>14104948
Leroi-Gourhan is cool

>In the astral age, this world is now common to all humanity, it is "accomplished," culminated in its movement of planetary extension, insofar as this movement would have characterized it—"culminated" also means finished, terminated, disappeared or disappearing ("change of epoch"). The radical transformations effected by contemporary technics come to pass in this culmination. This world whose bearings are now planetary is that of Western science and technics in a new configuration that, traversing the virginity of the American continent, has become the world of technoscience.

>In this global Western culmination—which has allowed for the total mobilization of all geological and geographical as well as historico-spiritual energies, and soon will allow for the literal mobilization of stellar energies themselves, resulting in an unheard-of, incalculable, unpredictable increase in the power of technics in the immediate future, that is, in the first place, in the power of humanity—a strange problem is posed: the greater humanity's power, the more "dehumanized" the world becomes.

>The "change of epoch" consists in this imminence. It is from within this imminence alone that today it may still be asked, What is the human?, and asked again, What is the human world insofar as worldness is also always already technicity, technical power, activity," and perhaps it will finally be asked, for once, What is technology, qua the power of the human, that is to say, the human empowered?

>[A] certain understanding of technics dominates all the fields of discourse (philosophical, anthropological, scientific, technocratic, mediatory-political, artistic) that are articulated by categories—ends and means, subjects and objects, nature and culture—which only function and make sense in these oppositional pairs.

>The anthropology of Leroi-Gourhan, insofar as it cannot be constituted otherwise than as a technology, radically undermines these categorial oppositions and perhaps makes them obsolete. Such an obsolescence of the categories through which historical reason has apprehended technical reality is perhaps indissociable from the becoming astral of man {qua the question of intervention—and if the first volume of Gesture and Speech is mainly devoted to the technological origin of humanity, the second ends with an equally technological anticipation of humanity's end).

please note: Cosmotech does not support the technological extermination of humanity.