/lit/ - Literature

>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 orders 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. Freud, in turn, developed a theory of the unconscious and of repression in order to retrieve that which is deeply hidden and long since forgotten and repressed by the superego. The tasks of Freud and Heidegger, although they belong to two very different theories and disciplines, characterised two major discourses on modernity in the twentieth century, and two attempts to quit this modernity. 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.

>>11816342
>My position is that the stubborn vindication of Kantianism as the horizon of modern intelligence is the dominant phenomenon. I see blockchain as being Kantian. There’s obviously some kind of updating that happens through the process of technical implementation, but there’s nothing like the kind of overcoming that is seen in the history of German idealism leading into Marxism. I just don’t see that kind of thing at all. I think that you’ve got a much more stubborn isomorphism between the actual mechanism of critique and the process of the blockchain.

>Who knows what’s down the road. But it certainly seems to me that it’s an intensive transition in the autonomy of capital, which I think can be translated into the robustness of these route-around processes. So, while there is a deep leftist objection to the blockchain, which seems to be very rational and coherent and on point, there’s the fact that it obviously is an escape route for capital, and that it makes a whole series of social projects based upon the domestication of capital become increasingly implausible.

this is what i take from this, and without diving into things like the byzantine generals' problem and so on that i have no idea about. land believes you can not only make synthetic time, it’s in a sense superior to actual historical time as we have previously understood it, and this is the current prize being offered by capital itself - a prize it produces and simultaneously is. it’s artificial kantian time. it might be revolutionary time, so long as you put the time of the revolutionary on the line of technological immanence - which is, again, and reduced to a single word, acceleration. teleoplexy is this notion of a speed of autopoetic tech-development becoming sentient, or at least testing the limits of what we mean by sentience. it’s an ontology of virtual lightning bolts. and where they are going, nobody knows.

and this is where the comparisons between land and hegel don't quite seem so crazy. it is not so hard to believe that the result of globalization and the consumer society is to set up a relationship where technology just begins to have a conversation with itself that we initiate and progressively cede more and more control to. of course there are ways all of these things can be altered or subverted - political events, climate change, engineering limitations and so on. but i don't think land is sitting around anxiously hoping some Miracle Device is discovered that proves his thesis. this is his thesis, or thesis-in-progress, in a way. i just hope that the blockchain book doesn't become Old Nick's version of The Winds of Winter, a thing he hints and teases at forever but doesn't attack in full. but even if he doesn't, this question of a return to Kant or Kantian virtual-synthetic time or whatever is enough to chew on. tech setting its own pace. whether this is the intelligence explosion or prolegomena to it, we'll see.