Skinner's Room

Sunday, 6 September 2015

technical mentality

http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia07/parrhesia07_simondon2.pdf

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But it is in the technical objects suited for the road network that the resistance opposed to the development of the technical mentality is the clearest: obsolescence hits the passenger car much faster than the utility vehicle or the agricultural tractor, which nevertheless are its close cousins—the car ages faster than the plane, whereas the plane has technically gone through more important transformations than the car. This is because the plane is made for the runway and for the air. It is necessarily a network reality before being a separate object.

The car is not only conceived as a network reality—like trucks—but as a social object, an item of clothing in which the user presents himself. It thus receives characteristics like the ones one used to wear on clothes and that overburdened them with lace and embroideries... these scurf-like ornaments of psychosocial life—here, they become paint, chrome, antennae. The social importance can also express itself through mass, volume, and the size of the vehicle.

Time travel

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n17/fredric-jameson/in-hyperspace

But where did the genre come from? My own hypothesis is a very general one: namely, that the late 19th-century invention of SF correlates to Walter Scott’s invention of the modern historical novel in Waverley (1814), marking the emergence of a second – industrial – stage of historical consciousness after that first dawning sense of the historicity of society so rudely awakened by the French Revolution. David Wittenberg does much better than this, but his remarkable hypothesis is only one of the conceptual breakthroughs in this stimulating contribution to literary theory. I will dwell mainly on the three that interest me the most: the relationship of SF to modernism in the arts; the historical periodisation of the genre; and the dramatic challenge to narratology as a field, with implications for the theory of ideology as well as for the analysis of narrative structure itself (of which the time-travel story, with all its ineradicable paradoxes, suddenly becomes the fundamental paradigm). Nor is philosophy itself untouched by the fallout from these dramatic revisions: after all, the phenomenological ego is a temporal matter, and time itself one of its fundamental paradoxes, which neither Husserl nor Heidegger ever laid to rest.

blue pacific horror

babadook / cups of choice / wedgwood blue pacific

rock in its own image

Kropotkin, like Marx, thinks that capitalism would be succeeded by a transitional period—certainly, without a State—in which the implantation of a decommodified economy guided by the needs of people through free confederation, would assure a “good life” to everyone and would develop even more productivity, to the point of reaching abundance, that stage where humans would dedicate themselves fundamentally to “the high pleasures of wisdom and of artistic creation”:

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/a-history-of-abundance/2015/09/05