Let me talk to you about my companions in this book. Yes, they those I wrote against so often -- the people. My contemporaries, big and small, smart and stupid, man and women -- we all move like a stream of history, billions of us, changing ourselves and the universe.
We are the cosmic force, we are determend to be the universal power, not the gravity or other laws of nature. We will work with you, Mother-Nature, to make you work for us!
That's we need so many.
You thought I was speaking figuratevly about Resurrection?
Wrong. I stated the facts.
Do I need to introduce Marcuse? I already spent enough time on Marxism. Let Marcuse speak for himself.
Fighting them, the workers. In USSR and now here, in PostAmeriKa. Because they are working on erradicating death, pain, gender...
Questions
Notes
"Пока не будет внехрамовой литургии, внехрамовой Пасхи, т. е. всесуточного и всегодового дела (метеорического, теллурического), до тех пор и воскрешение останется только обрядом, и не будет согласия между храмовым и внехрамовым делом".<<54>>
"No need to destroy anything. All you need is to destroy the idea of God in people." Dostoevsky
"To impose Reason upon an entire society is a paradoxical and scandalous idea." (Marcuse) [1]
And we do it, we impose and we destroy. But there is not only the consistance in our destruction of the idea of God and imposing the Reason upon everybody, but some logic. We have to destroy the Idea of God, because we need God not as idea, but the reality. Not an abstruct and construct, but as functional entity. Not the God of the elements, but OUR God -- evolving with us. What is so unreasonal in our desire to control the nature? Isn't that what God was always expecting from a Man -- to rule? Our sin was in our weakness, when we fail this partnership with God.
God is a creator and a worker and asks from the Man to behave in image and likeness. The technology revolution we live through is the combination of both -- creativity and the work. Unlike our experience of the past, when the knowledge lived independently from the collective experience of the human race, today our dicovery and inventions are practical. The Creator hadn't have an idea of man, but CREATED Adam. The Greeks had "ideas" about the atomic structure of the matter two thousand years before the first nuclear reactor. We want discovery and invention to be one process. We need the ideas that work!
Do I miss the revelations that are ahead of its time? Yes. But this is limitations of my mind and my problems. Our problems are the unsolved problems. We are arrogant no less than the Creator Himself, we like the challenge of the creation of the world. We set our own deadlines for something that was unthinkable before. Look at the medical tasks we putting on the table! We are about to fix what the Maker Himself crewed up! And what is this pagan idea of respect for the nature? Did you hear that your should worship not the sun, but the creator of the sun?
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1. Technology and I
It has to be a double negation. In the past my relations with nature were through software of humanism. Technology, the second world, took place of the first nature. The apparatus is a negation of the world. In order to turn on the light we had to alienate the energy from its natural source. The bulb is a transformed reality. Our environmental concerns are based on this principle conflict between technology and nature. Technology is a mixture of life and mind, which use both as materials.
Nature, scientifically comprehended and mastered, reappears in the technical apparatus of production and destruction which sustains and improves the life of the individuals while subordinating them to the masters of the apparatus.[2] (Marcuse)
Since I am positioned in the middle, I am a master and a servant of the both. (And in the most extreme conditions; God and Nothing). In addition to Marcuse's thesis that nature is processed in technology, I have to remember that the humanity (history) is in the same position. Humanized or socialized nature (technology) could be seen as a materialized intellect. My present comfort and safety are paid with a greater submission to both -- nature and society. This greater un-freedom wouldn't bother me, if not for the further limitations of mind. That's my problem and challenge. The inner presence of technology is my subject.
I wish that postmodern mentality could tech us that the old sense of history is not for us; we still think that politics rule history. We do not understand the PC revolution has the real impact on our future. We debate the social issues that will be gone tomorrow, because they are already "history"! Who doesn't understand that education is the answer to our social status tomorrow? But the technological advances that are taking place, while we talking about the reforms of American schools, make the subject of reforms irrelavent. Not the refoms, but the revolution is going on, people!
Do you watch your news, my fellow Americans? Do you see it? What do you see?
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2. THE POLITICS OF A MACHINE
... Read the PostAmeriKa first, my fiends....
First, it always total, universal, constant no less than laws of the nature, which are incorporated in technology.
Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truely totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe.[3]
When and how does it become "political"? Technology is always "we" -- "I" am just a user. Is my separation from the techno-world even greater than from the nature?...
Domination is transfigured into administration. The capitalist bosses and owners are losing their identity as responsible agents; they are assuming the function of bureaucrats in a corporate machine.[4]
There's one small step from the social to the political and you do not have to make it, it will be done for you. Global economy is beyond the state of imperialism, it's a system with "capitalist" mechanics within. Communism negates capitalism in marxist terms by including it (remember Hegel). They, the bosses are the best workers and the servants of the system. The humanity is ready to be run like a corporation.
.... The physics have this notion of a "critical mass" -- when at some point the quantative elements become qualitive. The atomic bomb is an example. How come we didn't notice that we ourselves reached this level of the critical mass? How come that we do not see that the size and intensity of the human kind is different? We are just different, we are COMPLETELY different. Our history is different from the previous one no less that we are different from animals.
"Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves."[5] Adorno is right. No matter how we redistribute the power, we always to have those two positions -- master and slave. Technology teaches that the power "travels" transforming me from one position to its opposite. I drive. I elect (voluntary and free) this action. Sometimes my wife drives the car. We don't like to see our democracy in such a light of "negative dialectics."
.... Oh please! Stop it! Our slaves live like kings. The technological advances will provide them tomorrow with the new unthinkable today luxuries. The elections and democracy are over-rated; the Internet makes democracy mandutory, the cosumers elect the next leaders....
Technology is a perfected nature. My new living environment frees me from the domination of the nature through the submission to the Reality Two. "Technology serves to institute new, more effective, and more pleasant forms of social control and social cohesion."[6] I live within the machine as a part of it; the control is total. My control of a car is nothing more than a pleasure of not losing myself to it. The pleasure of driving is supported by the social (culture) reinforcement. I have to feel about driving; after all I have to perform this useful (necessary) action every day.
Yes, the pleasures, please.
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3. Commodification of Body Parts
After-Thoughts on SELF and POV.
.... "Литургия должна обнять всю жизнь, не духовную только и внутреннюю, но и внешнюю, мирскую, светскую, превращая ее в дело воскрешения".<<55>> Федоров не хочет рая, созданного не самими людьми и потустороннего. Он "требует рая, Царства Божия, не потустороннего, а посюстороннего, требует преображения, распространяющегося на все небесные миры... Рай и Царство Божие не внутри лишь нас, не мысленное только, не духовное лишь, но и видимое, осязаемое".<<56>> Внехрамовое дело - не чудесное, оно исходит от человека, а не от Бога.
"Sex is integrated into work and public relations and is thus made more susceptible to (controlled) satisfaction." (Marcuse)[7]
Communism is looking for total integration of everything, the Bolsheviks called it "nationalization of property" -- I am talking about my body. There are several way to enter the last bastion of private property, the body. Make it pleasant.
(Cybergs -- mechanical organisms or organic machines? Me in front of a computer. Or is it a computer in front of me? Us!)
Film -- an illusion of personal (outside of the written)...
Propositions assume the form of suggestive commands - they are evocative rather than demonstrative. Predication becomes prescription; the whole communication has a hypnotic character. At the same time it is tinged with a false familiarity - the result
of constant repetition, and of the skillfully managed popular directness of the communication. This relates itself to the recipient immediately - without distance of status, education, and office - and hits him or her in the informal atmosphere of the living room, kitchen, and bedroom.
The same familiarity is established through personalized language, which plays a considerable role in advanced communication.[8]
The new environment is very talkative. Of course, it repeats
the same thing over and over (machine).
If mass communications blend together harmoniously, and often unnoticeably, art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator - the commodity form. The music of the soul is also the music of salesmanship. Exchange value, not truth value counts.[9]
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4. REAL PLEASURE
...."В правиле "следуй природе" - заключается требование подчинения разумного существа слепой силе. Следовать природе - значит участвовать в борьбе половой, естественной, т. е. бороться за самок и вести борьбу за существование, и признать все последствия такой борьбы, т. е. старость и смерть; это значит поклоняться и служить слепой силе. Старость же есть падение, и старость христианства наступит, если проповедь евангелия не приведет человечество к объединению в общем деле".<<58>>
The Pleasure Principle absorbs the Reality Principle
(Marcuse) and becomes a criteria of Reality and the Real.
Non-pleasant must be excluded from the Real. Unpleasant must stay
only as a possibility. The fear of losing the Pleasure is one the
fundamentals of the culture of paradise.
In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist in indifference.[10]
Popular culture is a technology based super-discipline, the most powerful, the one we do not notice...
.... The working. Everything is working. A tree, gravity, sun. I am glad. If something isn't working, we are in trouble.
The ironic position in using the Frankfurt School thinkers (Adorno, Marcuse) to talk about the communist essence of pomo capitalism, understandable -- their were the critics, not apologists of democracy. I find little intellectual help in analysis of my conditions among the defenders of democracy. I don't believe that one has to be a critic in order to be analytical.
