/lit/ - Literature

>>21934613
He's right.
>But every time these forces attempt to assert themselves, they are flung against a ring of iron with which technique surrounds and localizes them. Moreover, technique attacks man, impairs the sources of his vitality, and takes away his mystery. We have seen that one of the objectives of certain human techniques is to rob him of this mystery. And men must and do react instinctively and spiritually to the aggression of technique. When Henry Miller utters his anguished wail against the modem world, he is appealing through his fundamental eroticism to man’s most primitive instincts. When the American Negro was still a slave, jazz meant release from despair and chains. But it is questionable that eroticism and jazz really represent a purposive reaction to technical aggression. We cannot settle these problems by appealing to a purely verbal idealism. Jazz is one of today’s most authentically human protests. Let us trace it back to its origin. The Negroes were hopelessly enslaved. The story of their toil, punishments, hate, and crushed rebellions has been often told. The terrible black emperor of Santo Domingo was now no more than a dream. In their extremity the Negroes discovered song, which likewise answered the needs of faith. Music expressed for them at once the despair of the present and the hope for salvation in Christ. Its culmination in delirium brought deliverance, but only as opium and alcohol did for others. Marx’s celebrated remark that nineteenth-century religion was the opiate of the European masses is equally applicable to the jazz of the Negro slaves. In jazz they created a true art form. But with it they also shut every door to freedom. Jazz imprisoned the Negroes more and more in their slavery; from then on, they drew a morose relish from it. It is highly significant that this slave music has become the music of the modem world.

>>21749795
>Given this ethos, utopia is built on a fanatical trust in schooling and pedagogy. A society completely schooled, in which everything is learned collectively, even how to make love: Does this not remind us of what our own society is becoming? Let us not forget that the most advanced movement always represents the cutting edge of the process of social integration. I am thinking here of the movement of universal sexualization, of collective sexual education, of sexuality in the schools, and so on. How can we fail to see that this whole thing is an effort to eliminate the mysterious, adventurous, uncertain, mythical element in sex and to reduce sex either to cold knowledge or to a practice that is collectivized and therefore technicized? When the question of sexual education in the schools or of sexology comes up, just listen to the incense-bearers talk of the sexual freedom we are thereby gaining. Listen to them say, as though they had won a great victory: "Now at last we can talk without shame or fear of what people did not dare whisper twenty years ago. See how far we have come! We have got rid of a frightful complex, and have become bold and intelligent. An absurd moral code used to have us tied hand and foot, but now we have destroyed it. We're done with all the complexes and all the false shame. Our dear little children must learn to practice sex right out in the open, just as they openly suck at their mother's breast." You wicked fools, you cretins who promote sexology and sex education and universal sexualization, have you still not understood what they did to Racine by mumbling about sex to him in school? You have still not understood that school and what they call education for life make the child utterly and forever disgusted with what they do in it, and that the infantile scientistic rationalism that holds sway in the schools will never be improved by introducing experimental sex into the program. If that is done, the only result will be that sex will be trivialized, collectivized, made ridiculous and deadly boring, and stripped of its mystery and drama and passion. "But that is just what we want: a sexuality that is stripped of its mystery and drama! Why should the human being wax enthusiastic just because he or she has organs for serving others?" But do you not realize that man needs mystery and passion? That if the white Mass is put into French and turned into a rationalized social affair, he will invent black Masses for himself?

>>21641849
You read all those people and not Ellul (who refutes Marcuse)
>I will not refer here to Marcuse's theory of one-dimensional man, for it is not new, many others before him have said exactly the same thing (the first, perhaps, being Arnaud Dandieu in 1929). Marcuse merely adds a bogus Marxism/Freudianism, which only complicates matters uselessly without contributing anything. He seduces readers with his philosophical parlance which makes him sound deep, whereas he is really intellectually confused-and by a verbal extremism which makes readers believe in his revolutionary commitment. Luckily, the illusions about him are starting to dissipate.

>>20963834
>Likewise, Mumford demonstrates at length that the sole conceivable and real finality of "technics'' is the augmentation of power. There is absolutely no other possibility. This brings us back to the problem of the means. Technology is the most powerful means and the greatest ensemble of means. And hence, the only problem of technology is that of the indefinite growth of means, corresponding to man's spirit of power. Nietzsche, exalting this will to power, limited himself to preparing the man predisposed to the technological universe! A tragic contradiction.