As a queer teacher and practitioner of nonviolence who thinks marriage is mostly an invitation to unhealthy co-dependence and a patriarchal vestige of human trafficking and who believes first of all that the derangements of desire are self-creative ends in themselves, even when they fail, I cannot help but re-iterate that I am far from enthused by the reduction of emancipatory queer politics to what amounts to celebration of and assimilation to the bourgeois project of endless shopping, patriotic murder to maintain attractive markets for endless shopping, and compulsory reprosexuality to provide the next generation of consumers and warriors for endless shopping (that is to say, gay politics as nothing but the struggle to legalize open military service, gay marriage, and gay parentage).
But I do recognize that legal legibility in these terms provides what for many really does seem to amount to the indispensable foundations for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, let alone for any more capacious understanding of queer political projects. And this recognition suggests to me that queer radicalism demands at once that the assimilated queer subject be provided for, the better to be rejected or elaborated otherwise.
In other words, my own queer repudiation of militarist masculinity is all the more forceful now for its welcome after the repeal of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" of my participation, which I now reject on my own terms rather than in a lame recognition of the fact that I am always-already rejected come what may. My queer repudiation of marriage as a delusive and possessive organization of meaningful loving affinity is likewise all the more forceful for its welcome after the legalization of Gay Marriage and even robust Domestic Partnership statutes of my participation. So, too, my queer repudiation of the reprosexual reduction of the contingent disruptive provocative problematizing promising experimental field of embodied and desiring practices of sex-gender is all the more forceful once adoption and same-sex parental rights and protections welcome my participation on those reductive terms.
Sex-Gender-Sexuality are languages we speak and which speak us no less. We are all of us prosaic legal subjects (or at any rate, we hope to be: to fail to manage to be prosaic is to risk being rendered illegal in our substance, informal, incomparably precarious), and we are also all of us, in certain blessed moments of serendipity and grace at least, incarnated poems.
To strive to be free is at once to strive to be legible, literal, but also to resist reduction to the literal, to desire to be figurative, to turn and in turn provoke the profound turn of desire and change in others.
The competent speaker of a language, mind you, not only knows how to make meaning in that language through the proper deployment of its literal vocabulary and following its grammatical rules correctly, but also grasps and knows how to make meaning by violating the rules of that language while still, somehow, speaking it, deranging its literal usages and taking up its fallacious forms turning then into forceful rather than simply incorrect or nonsensical figurative ones.
To be illegible is to risk violation and abjection, even if for some lucky people this illegibility has provoked creative expressivities and lifeways that are wonderful, heroic. But while it may be radical to demand an impossible heroism of all people and in all moments of life, that radicalism too easily amounts to little more than a declaration of indifference and hostility for one's peers in the world and the terms in which they actually live the meaningful substance of their lives, it is too easily an ungenerous, inhumane radicalism: What is radical and also liberal, generous, humane is to grasp the beauty, the creativity, the meaning in lives that are not heroic, or in those parts of our lives that are not heroic, as well as in those few who or moments which do differ heroically in ways that render more capacious the space in which the everyday lives free.
A queer politics reduced to bourgeois assimilation is a queer politics shorn of its promise and provocation, no doubt, but a queer politics that rejects the assimilationist project altogether in its bid for radicalism (a gesture to which I am all too prone myself) is, I fear, a queer politics too readily shorn of its promise as well: Availability to gay assimilation is necessary to those queers who would refuse to avail themselves of it in their work to be queer otherwise. What is wanted, I think, are queernesses that welcome being welcomed into the world on its terms, and then welcome that world to come well elsewhere.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Friday, February 18, 2011
Design of a Crime
Hal Foster's Design and Crime is so good, how I wish I had written it. In fact, I may have to re-write it and pretend that's not what I'm doing. Possibly, more than once.
Saturday, February 12, 2011
The Egyptian Revolution Is Not Miraculous:
Far From Leaderless, Spontaneous, Unplanned, Accidental, or Twitterific, Egypt Provides Resources of Hope for Activists Who Would Be As Resourceful As Egyptian Organizers Have Been
The Egyptian Revolution is not leaderless.
It is not spontaneous.
It did not arise like a spasm in unplanned sympathy with the uprising in Tunisia, or spurred by blind rage at the aged dictator Hosni Mubarak's declared hopes for the kingly succession of his son.
Although it is certainly true that thirty years of oppression have lead to a widespread discontent that proved an incubator for insurrectionary energy, such oppression could just as readily have provided the substance of deepening despair and further generations of oppression in the absence of an actually organized response.
And although it is true that cellphones and twitter feeds and facebook pages were key organizational tools for the Egyption Revolution, what matters is that organizers made use of organizational tools, not that these in particular were the tools they used (which is also true of the faxes, radio broadcasts, megaphones, wheatpaste posters, and pamphlets that were the definitive educational, agitational, and organizational tools of prior revolutionaries).
Cellphones, twitter, and facebook are not inherently or provocatively revolutionary artifacts. It is merely certain deployments of these tools that can be revolutionary. If anything, the default uses of these artifacts have been overwhelmingly reactionary so far, facilitating ubiquitous elite-incumbent surveillance, enabling the radical intensification of targeted corporate marketing harassment, evacuating public discourse of indispensable complexity, depth, deliberation, criticality in a mesmerizing froth of canned one-liners, promotional slogans, and interminable impressionistic, sensationalistic, superficial reportage.
Discussions of Egypt emphasizing social media in the United States may appear to foreground technical concerns about the ease of their use the scope of their reach, and their relative susceptibility or not to censorship, but the focus on such technicality functions in profoundly political ways.
Indeed, this techno-centrist discourse functions primarily to promote an anti-political technologically deterministic fantasy of spontaneism that -- taken together with endlessly repeated declarations about the leaderlessness of the movement and especially of the miraculousness of its nonviolence -- functions to distract countless millions of people from the lessons of the Revolution even while their eyes are fixed on the Revolution: Namely, that well-planned disciplined organized nonviolent resistance to the elite-incumbent authoritarian figures and structures that maintain the profoundly unjust unsustainable corporate-militarist neoliberal/neoconservative global order can indeed be as effective as ever.
It has been said over and over again that it is easier to imagine the end of the world in an environmental collapse or military catastrophe resulting from the greed and stupidity of the current capitalist order than it is to imagine the end of the current capitalist order itself. This is palpably ridiculous, especially when before our eyes we are greeted with literal evidence to the contrary.
I cannot recommend highly enough this informative short documentary from Al Jazeera about the leaders of the April 6th Youth Movement without which the Egyptian Revolution almost certainly would not have taken place or at any rate managed not to founder in the face of the brutal, all too typical and usually effective, counter-revolutionary violence of Mubarak's regime in the Revolution's early days.
The documentary speaks of the beginnings of the Revolution three years ago in the textile strike of April 6, 2008 from which the movement got its name, in the work of activist Ahmed Maher and Mohamed Adel. Another key figure in the April 6th Movement is, of course, Asmaa Mahfouz, whose work attracted the special attention of Democracy Now! and the New York Times. Coverage of Mahfouz's truly inspiring youtube videos regularly do not go on to point out her crucial connection with a profoundly well-trained well-disciplined well-organized nonviolent activist campaign years in the planning.
It is sometimes noted that the April 6th Movement took up iconography from the nonviolent Serbian Otpor Student Movement which successfully resisted Slobodan Milošević a decade ago (the extent of planning and organization -- with the conspicuous assistance of life-long activist and scholar of nonviolent social struggle Gene Sharp and his colleagues -- is likewise shunted to the side in too many popular accounts of Serbian resistance in my view, for familiar reasons). But it is important to grasp that the connection of the Egyptian April 6th Youth Movement and Serbian Otpor Student Movement was not a matter of superficial appreciation or just some cut-and-paste appropriation of Otpor's raised fist .gif by Egyptian students shopping for slick revolutionary graphics by way of google image search.
Ahmed Maher of April 6th consulted extensively with Serge Popovich of Otpor, and turned to the strategies of nonviolent struggle Popovich learned in turn from Gene Sharp (strategies many of which were gleaned by Sharp, who is sometimes wryly described as the "Machiavelli of Nonviolence," from his extensive research into the successes and failures of King, Gandhi, Thoreau and others). The leaders of the April 6th Movement are well versed in the techniques and, indispensably, the disciplines of a nonviolence well-attuned to the deceptive and distractive tactics of mass mediation and well-prepared for state violence and the difficulties of de-escalation in its face.
Also, young as they are, the leaders of the April 6th movement certainly seem to be very friendly and familiar with the tapestry of Egyptian experienced feminist and labor activists not to mention engaged artists and intellectuals both living quietly in Egypt and, often, less quietly, abroad.
Largely ignorant of far too much of this context myself, even as a highly interested and comparatively well-informed idiot American, I think too much of my own commentary on Egypt here and in the classroom these last couple of weeks has been shaped by my disdain for the ugly conflict-tourism and facile techno-utopianism of so much coverage here in the United States.
Nothing I am saying should be taken to imply that I regard the Egyptian revolution as accomplished rather than only just beginning, that I am blissed-out in celebration and insensible to the dangers ahead, not least because of the actions of my own country in my name. But People Power is real. Education, agitation, and organization is its substance. Egypt is providing still more evidence, in a world with a history brimming full of such evidence, of the real possibilities of nonviolent democratizing revolutionary struggles to defeat corporate-militarism before corporate-militarism destroys the world.
The Egyptian Revolution is not leaderless.
It is not spontaneous.
It did not arise like a spasm in unplanned sympathy with the uprising in Tunisia, or spurred by blind rage at the aged dictator Hosni Mubarak's declared hopes for the kingly succession of his son.
Although it is certainly true that thirty years of oppression have lead to a widespread discontent that proved an incubator for insurrectionary energy, such oppression could just as readily have provided the substance of deepening despair and further generations of oppression in the absence of an actually organized response.
And although it is true that cellphones and twitter feeds and facebook pages were key organizational tools for the Egyption Revolution, what matters is that organizers made use of organizational tools, not that these in particular were the tools they used (which is also true of the faxes, radio broadcasts, megaphones, wheatpaste posters, and pamphlets that were the definitive educational, agitational, and organizational tools of prior revolutionaries).
Cellphones, twitter, and facebook are not inherently or provocatively revolutionary artifacts. It is merely certain deployments of these tools that can be revolutionary. If anything, the default uses of these artifacts have been overwhelmingly reactionary so far, facilitating ubiquitous elite-incumbent surveillance, enabling the radical intensification of targeted corporate marketing harassment, evacuating public discourse of indispensable complexity, depth, deliberation, criticality in a mesmerizing froth of canned one-liners, promotional slogans, and interminable impressionistic, sensationalistic, superficial reportage.
Discussions of Egypt emphasizing social media in the United States may appear to foreground technical concerns about the ease of their use the scope of their reach, and their relative susceptibility or not to censorship, but the focus on such technicality functions in profoundly political ways.
Indeed, this techno-centrist discourse functions primarily to promote an anti-political technologically deterministic fantasy of spontaneism that -- taken together with endlessly repeated declarations about the leaderlessness of the movement and especially of the miraculousness of its nonviolence -- functions to distract countless millions of people from the lessons of the Revolution even while their eyes are fixed on the Revolution: Namely, that well-planned disciplined organized nonviolent resistance to the elite-incumbent authoritarian figures and structures that maintain the profoundly unjust unsustainable corporate-militarist neoliberal/neoconservative global order can indeed be as effective as ever.
It has been said over and over again that it is easier to imagine the end of the world in an environmental collapse or military catastrophe resulting from the greed and stupidity of the current capitalist order than it is to imagine the end of the current capitalist order itself. This is palpably ridiculous, especially when before our eyes we are greeted with literal evidence to the contrary.
I cannot recommend highly enough this informative short documentary from Al Jazeera about the leaders of the April 6th Youth Movement without which the Egyptian Revolution almost certainly would not have taken place or at any rate managed not to founder in the face of the brutal, all too typical and usually effective, counter-revolutionary violence of Mubarak's regime in the Revolution's early days.
The documentary speaks of the beginnings of the Revolution three years ago in the textile strike of April 6, 2008 from which the movement got its name, in the work of activist Ahmed Maher and Mohamed Adel. Another key figure in the April 6th Movement is, of course, Asmaa Mahfouz, whose work attracted the special attention of Democracy Now! and the New York Times. Coverage of Mahfouz's truly inspiring youtube videos regularly do not go on to point out her crucial connection with a profoundly well-trained well-disciplined well-organized nonviolent activist campaign years in the planning.
It is sometimes noted that the April 6th Movement took up iconography from the nonviolent Serbian Otpor Student Movement which successfully resisted Slobodan Milošević a decade ago (the extent of planning and organization -- with the conspicuous assistance of life-long activist and scholar of nonviolent social struggle Gene Sharp and his colleagues -- is likewise shunted to the side in too many popular accounts of Serbian resistance in my view, for familiar reasons). But it is important to grasp that the connection of the Egyptian April 6th Youth Movement and Serbian Otpor Student Movement was not a matter of superficial appreciation or just some cut-and-paste appropriation of Otpor's raised fist .gif by Egyptian students shopping for slick revolutionary graphics by way of google image search.
Ahmed Maher of April 6th consulted extensively with Serge Popovich of Otpor, and turned to the strategies of nonviolent struggle Popovich learned in turn from Gene Sharp (strategies many of which were gleaned by Sharp, who is sometimes wryly described as the "Machiavelli of Nonviolence," from his extensive research into the successes and failures of King, Gandhi, Thoreau and others). The leaders of the April 6th Movement are well versed in the techniques and, indispensably, the disciplines of a nonviolence well-attuned to the deceptive and distractive tactics of mass mediation and well-prepared for state violence and the difficulties of de-escalation in its face.
Also, young as they are, the leaders of the April 6th movement certainly seem to be very friendly and familiar with the tapestry of Egyptian experienced feminist and labor activists not to mention engaged artists and intellectuals both living quietly in Egypt and, often, less quietly, abroad.
Largely ignorant of far too much of this context myself, even as a highly interested and comparatively well-informed idiot American, I think too much of my own commentary on Egypt here and in the classroom these last couple of weeks has been shaped by my disdain for the ugly conflict-tourism and facile techno-utopianism of so much coverage here in the United States.
Nothing I am saying should be taken to imply that I regard the Egyptian revolution as accomplished rather than only just beginning, that I am blissed-out in celebration and insensible to the dangers ahead, not least because of the actions of my own country in my name. But People Power is real. Education, agitation, and organization is its substance. Egypt is providing still more evidence, in a world with a history brimming full of such evidence, of the real possibilities of nonviolent democratizing revolutionary struggles to defeat corporate-militarism before corporate-militarism destroys the world.
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
Hannah Arendt on Technology and Nature
I just posted this to the blog for students in my design as politics/design as anti-politics seminar at SFAI. It contains mostly material transcribed from Hannah Arendt, but I do interrupt the quoted passages with comments here and there. Most of these comments refer directly to topics that we have been discussing in the course itself, but since these topics are also regular themes addressed at Amor Mundi, and since I often emphasize my indebtedness to Arendt but rarely provide really sustained discussions of that indebtedness, I thought this stuff might be of more general interest.
This supplemental material from Arendt's The Human Condition provides a useful critical vocabulary for our discussion Thursday on cradle-to-cradle design and the whole so-called "natural capitalist" green(/greenwashing?) ethos, but also provides context for much of our discussion over the last two weeks, not to mention the themes with which the course as a whole will remain preoccupied all term. The first significant passage (and you'll have to forgive a few interruptions) is to be found on pp. 149-151 of the University of Chicago Press, second edition:
[In the case of t]he first instruments of nuclear technology, the various types of atom bombs, which, if released in sufficient and not even very great quantities, could destroy all organic life on earth... it would no longer be a question of unchaining and letting loose elementary natural processes, but of handling on the earth and in everyday life energies and forces such as occur only outside the earth, in the universe; this is already done, but only in the research laboratories of nuclear physicists. If present technology consists of channeling natural forces into the world of the human artifice, future technology may yet consist of channeling the universal forces of the cosmos around us into the nature of the earth. It remains to be seen whether these future technologies will transform the household of nature as we have known it since the beginning of our world to the same extent or even more than the present technology has changed the very worldliness of the human artifice.
-- let me interrupt the quote here, to introduce another, from the "Prologue" much earlier in the book, pp. 2-3, which provides figures and frames with which the prior paragraph will be resonating with the proper reader of the whole:
-- In addition to deepening our understanding of the Arendtian distinctions of earth and world and cosmos, this last point also draws on the distinction between the instrumental and the political we discussed in the opening lecture, and to which we will return again and again (especially in the form of the discussion of the emancipatory as the amplification of force or given capacities as against the emancipatory as an interminable ever re-opening social struggle). Returning now, to the later passage we were already reading --
The channeling of natural forces into the human world has shattered the very purposefulness of the world, the fact that objects are the ends for which tools and implements are designed. It is characteristic of all natural processes that they come into being without the help of man, and those things are natural which are not "made" but grow by themselves into whatever they become. (This is also the authentic meaning of our word "nature," whether we derive it from its latin root nasci, to be born, or trace it back to its Greek origin, physis, which comes from phyein, to grow out of, to appear by itself.) Unlike the products of human hands, which must be realized step by step and for which the fabrication process is entirely distinct from the existence of the fabricated thing itself, the natural thing's existence is not separate but is somehow identical with the process through which it comes into being: the seed contains and, in a certain sense, already is the tree, and the tree stops being if the process of growth through which it came into existence stops. If we see these processes against the background of human purposes, which have a willed beginning and a definite end, they assume the character of automatism. We call automatic all courses of movement which are self-moving and therefore outside the range of willful and purposive interference. In the mode of production ushered by automation, the distinction between operation and product, as well as the product's precedence over the operation (which is only the means to produce the end), no longer make sense and have become obsolete.
-- I ask you to pause again for a moment and let this passage sink in. I'm not going to interrupt it right now to interject another, still longer passage, but I want you to remember this section because I am going to leap forward in the text a bit later in a way that will press and elaborate these points enormously. Do notice though, by the way, that our discussion of the conceptual archive out of which our sense of "nature" arises is rehearsed concisely in the prior passage, and also how Arendt's formulation comports with our discussion last week of the likely flawed logic or at any rate confused figuration of so-called "biomimetic design," which, to be actually biomimetic -- that is to say, morphology evolved in the ongoing dynamisms of ecosystems -- seems to be structurally at odds with being legibly still a matter of willful design at all. Skipping a bit forward from where we were before but remaining on page 151, and forewarned that the specific topic of "the automatic" is one to which I will have still more to draw your attention later, let us continue on --
The discussion of the whole problem of technology, that is, of the transformation of life and world through the introduction of the machine, has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upon the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful. Their instrumentality is understood exclusively in this anthropocentric sense. But the instrumentality of tools and implements is much more closely related to the object it is designed to produce, and their sheer "human value" is restricted to the use the animal laborens makes of them. In other words, homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and implements in order to erect a world, not -- at least not primarily -- to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, to the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy the world and things.
-- That last point relies on highly idiosyncratic Arendtian terminology and mappings, especially the distinction of the animal laborens from the homo faber, and from the classical definition of man as at once the rational and political animal. You have to read an enormous amount of Arendt (not even reading the whole book The Human Condition is quite equal to the depth of the categories it itself introduces and deploys) to tap into the full richness of her vocabulary, but there is an extraordinary passage on pp. 236-237 that provides an unusually clear and concise survey of Arendt's account. This passage is also especially interesting given the aversion to (even the horror of) "the automatic" that is thematized in the passages you have already read. My last comment is that you should think about the distinction between exchange (as in Arendt's warnings above about the desire to exchange the earth for the world) and the notion of a redemption that saves and that provides the thread that connects all the crucially distinct but equally crucially indispensable facets of the human condition throughout the whole passage --
We have seen that the animal laborens could be redeemed from its predicament of imprisonment in the ever-recurring cycle of the life process, of being subject to the necessity of labor and consumption, only through the mobilization of another human capacity, the capacity for making, fabricating, and producing of homo faber, who as a toolmaker not only eases the pain and trouble of laboring but also erects a world of durability. The redemption of life, which is sustained by labor, is worldliness, which is sustained by fabrication. We saw furthermore that homo faber could be redeemed from his predicament of meaninglessness, the "devaluation of all values," and the impossibility of finding valid standards in a world determined by the category of means and ends, only through the interrelated faculties of action and speech, which produce meaningful stories as naturally as fabrication produces use objects. If it were not outside the scope of these considerations, one could add the predicament of thought to these instances; for thought, too, is unable to "think itself" out of predicaments which the very activity of thinking engenders. What in each of these instances saves man -- man qua animal laborens, qua homo faber, qua thinker -- is something altogether different; it comes from the outside -- not, to be sure, outside of man, but outside each of the respective activities. From the viewpoint of the animal laborens, it is like a miracle that it is also a being which knows of and inhabots a world; from the viewpoint of homo faber it is like a miracle, like the revelation of divinity, that meaning should have a place in that world.
The case of action and action's predicament is altogether different. Here, the remedy against the irreversibility and unpredictability of the process started by acting does not arise out of another and possibly higher faculty, but is one of the potentialities of action itself. The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility -- of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing -- is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. The two faculties belong together in so far as one of them, forgiving, serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose "sins" hang like Damocles' sword over every new generation; and the other, binding oneself through promises, serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between men.
Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell. Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocations -- a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel. Both faculties therefore, depend on plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound to a promise made only to himself; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one's self.
-- As I said, this is an incredibly rich passage, and only some of its riches directly connect with the concerns of our course (although we will return to some of what we put in the background for now when we shift our attention in a couple of weeks from "green" design for sustainability to "p2p" design for network participation). For those who do go on to explore Arendt's philosophy more deeply for its own sake, I will say that this passage remains a useful touchstone. What is sometimes described as a "turn" from Arendt's early to her late thinking, a shift from the radicality to the banality of evil under totalitarianism is clearly anticipated in this comparatively early passage. In "Thinking and Moral Considerations" Arendt will go on to say that under conditions of totalitarian tyranny thinking itself can take on the character of acting, extending to thinking-otherwise itself the sort of redemptive force she assigns to other facets of the human condition in respect to their limits -- usually figured as a horror of interminable automatism -- in their own terms, so that thought-as-action might rescue humanity from the madness and isolation of totalitarian anti-politics quite as much as political action more generally is said by Arendt to rescue thought isolated and enthralled by interminable free-associational rationalism.
This supplemental material from Arendt's The Human Condition provides a useful critical vocabulary for our discussion Thursday on cradle-to-cradle design and the whole so-called "natural capitalist" green(/greenwashing?) ethos, but also provides context for much of our discussion over the last two weeks, not to mention the themes with which the course as a whole will remain preoccupied all term. The first significant passage (and you'll have to forgive a few interruptions) is to be found on pp. 149-151 of the University of Chicago Press, second edition:
[In the case of t]he first instruments of nuclear technology, the various types of atom bombs, which, if released in sufficient and not even very great quantities, could destroy all organic life on earth... it would no longer be a question of unchaining and letting loose elementary natural processes, but of handling on the earth and in everyday life energies and forces such as occur only outside the earth, in the universe; this is already done, but only in the research laboratories of nuclear physicists. If present technology consists of channeling natural forces into the world of the human artifice, future technology may yet consist of channeling the universal forces of the cosmos around us into the nature of the earth. It remains to be seen whether these future technologies will transform the household of nature as we have known it since the beginning of our world to the same extent or even more than the present technology has changed the very worldliness of the human artifice.
-- let me interrupt the quote here, to introduce another, from the "Prologue" much earlier in the book, pp. 2-3, which provides figures and frames with which the prior paragraph will be resonating with the proper reader of the whole:
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition, and earthly nature, for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice. The human artifice of the world separates human existence from all mere animal environment, but life itself is outside the artificial world, and through life man remains related to all other living organisms. For some time now, a great many scientific efforts have been directed toward making life also "artificial," toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature. It is the same desire to escape the imprisonment of the earth [Arendt's discussion here is spurred by the launch of the first artificial satellite in 1957 and the curious but representative reactions it occasioned in the many who declared the event the "first step toward escape from men's imprisonment from the earth," pg. 1] that is manifest in the test tube... "to produce superior human beings" and... I suspect, also underlies the hope to extend man's life-span far beyond the hundred-year limit. The future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something made by himself. There is no reason to doubt our abilities to accomplish such an exchange, just as there is no reason to doubt our present ability to destroy all organic life on earth. The question is only whether we wish to use our new scientific and technical knowledge in this direction; it is a political question of the first order and therefore can hardly be left to the decision of professional scientists or professional politicians.
-- In addition to deepening our understanding of the Arendtian distinctions of earth and world and cosmos, this last point also draws on the distinction between the instrumental and the political we discussed in the opening lecture, and to which we will return again and again (especially in the form of the discussion of the emancipatory as the amplification of force or given capacities as against the emancipatory as an interminable ever re-opening social struggle). Returning now, to the later passage we were already reading --
The channeling of natural forces into the human world has shattered the very purposefulness of the world, the fact that objects are the ends for which tools and implements are designed. It is characteristic of all natural processes that they come into being without the help of man, and those things are natural which are not "made" but grow by themselves into whatever they become. (This is also the authentic meaning of our word "nature," whether we derive it from its latin root nasci, to be born, or trace it back to its Greek origin, physis, which comes from phyein, to grow out of, to appear by itself.) Unlike the products of human hands, which must be realized step by step and for which the fabrication process is entirely distinct from the existence of the fabricated thing itself, the natural thing's existence is not separate but is somehow identical with the process through which it comes into being: the seed contains and, in a certain sense, already is the tree, and the tree stops being if the process of growth through which it came into existence stops. If we see these processes against the background of human purposes, which have a willed beginning and a definite end, they assume the character of automatism. We call automatic all courses of movement which are self-moving and therefore outside the range of willful and purposive interference. In the mode of production ushered by automation, the distinction between operation and product, as well as the product's precedence over the operation (which is only the means to produce the end), no longer make sense and have become obsolete.
-- I ask you to pause again for a moment and let this passage sink in. I'm not going to interrupt it right now to interject another, still longer passage, but I want you to remember this section because I am going to leap forward in the text a bit later in a way that will press and elaborate these points enormously. Do notice though, by the way, that our discussion of the conceptual archive out of which our sense of "nature" arises is rehearsed concisely in the prior passage, and also how Arendt's formulation comports with our discussion last week of the likely flawed logic or at any rate confused figuration of so-called "biomimetic design," which, to be actually biomimetic -- that is to say, morphology evolved in the ongoing dynamisms of ecosystems -- seems to be structurally at odds with being legibly still a matter of willful design at all. Skipping a bit forward from where we were before but remaining on page 151, and forewarned that the specific topic of "the automatic" is one to which I will have still more to draw your attention later, let us continue on --
The discussion of the whole problem of technology, that is, of the transformation of life and world through the introduction of the machine, has been strangely led astray through an all-too-exclusive concentration upon the service or disservice the machines render to men. The assumption here is that every tool and implement is primarily designed to make human life easier and human labor less painful. Their instrumentality is understood exclusively in this anthropocentric sense. But the instrumentality of tools and implements is much more closely related to the object it is designed to produce, and their sheer "human value" is restricted to the use the animal laborens makes of them. In other words, homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and implements in order to erect a world, not -- at least not primarily -- to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, to the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy the world and things.
-- That last point relies on highly idiosyncratic Arendtian terminology and mappings, especially the distinction of the animal laborens from the homo faber, and from the classical definition of man as at once the rational and political animal. You have to read an enormous amount of Arendt (not even reading the whole book The Human Condition is quite equal to the depth of the categories it itself introduces and deploys) to tap into the full richness of her vocabulary, but there is an extraordinary passage on pp. 236-237 that provides an unusually clear and concise survey of Arendt's account. This passage is also especially interesting given the aversion to (even the horror of) "the automatic" that is thematized in the passages you have already read. My last comment is that you should think about the distinction between exchange (as in Arendt's warnings above about the desire to exchange the earth for the world) and the notion of a redemption that saves and that provides the thread that connects all the crucially distinct but equally crucially indispensable facets of the human condition throughout the whole passage --
We have seen that the animal laborens could be redeemed from its predicament of imprisonment in the ever-recurring cycle of the life process, of being subject to the necessity of labor and consumption, only through the mobilization of another human capacity, the capacity for making, fabricating, and producing of homo faber, who as a toolmaker not only eases the pain and trouble of laboring but also erects a world of durability. The redemption of life, which is sustained by labor, is worldliness, which is sustained by fabrication. We saw furthermore that homo faber could be redeemed from his predicament of meaninglessness, the "devaluation of all values," and the impossibility of finding valid standards in a world determined by the category of means and ends, only through the interrelated faculties of action and speech, which produce meaningful stories as naturally as fabrication produces use objects. If it were not outside the scope of these considerations, one could add the predicament of thought to these instances; for thought, too, is unable to "think itself" out of predicaments which the very activity of thinking engenders. What in each of these instances saves man -- man qua animal laborens, qua homo faber, qua thinker -- is something altogether different; it comes from the outside -- not, to be sure, outside of man, but outside each of the respective activities. From the viewpoint of the animal laborens, it is like a miracle that it is also a being which knows of and inhabots a world; from the viewpoint of homo faber it is like a miracle, like the revelation of divinity, that meaning should have a place in that world.
The case of action and action's predicament is altogether different. Here, the remedy against the irreversibility and unpredictability of the process started by acting does not arise out of another and possibly higher faculty, but is one of the potentialities of action itself. The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility -- of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing -- is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. The two faculties belong together in so far as one of them, forgiving, serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose "sins" hang like Damocles' sword over every new generation; and the other, binding oneself through promises, serves to set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by definition, islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability of any kind, would be possible in the relationships between men.
Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell. Without being bound to the fulfillment of promises, we would never be able to keep our identities; we would be condemned to wander helplessly and without direction in the darkness of each man's lonely heart, caught in its contradictions and equivocations -- a darkness which only the light shed over the public realm through the presence of others, who confirm the identity between the one who promises and the one who fulfills, can dispel. Both faculties therefore, depend on plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no one can forgive himself and no one can feel bound to a promise made only to himself; forgiving and promising enacted in solitude or isolation remain without reality and can signify no more than a role played before one's self.
-- As I said, this is an incredibly rich passage, and only some of its riches directly connect with the concerns of our course (although we will return to some of what we put in the background for now when we shift our attention in a couple of weeks from "green" design for sustainability to "p2p" design for network participation). For those who do go on to explore Arendt's philosophy more deeply for its own sake, I will say that this passage remains a useful touchstone. What is sometimes described as a "turn" from Arendt's early to her late thinking, a shift from the radicality to the banality of evil under totalitarianism is clearly anticipated in this comparatively early passage. In "Thinking and Moral Considerations" Arendt will go on to say that under conditions of totalitarian tyranny thinking itself can take on the character of acting, extending to thinking-otherwise itself the sort of redemptive force she assigns to other facets of the human condition in respect to their limits -- usually figured as a horror of interminable automatism -- in their own terms, so that thought-as-action might rescue humanity from the madness and isolation of totalitarian anti-politics quite as much as political action more generally is said by Arendt to rescue thought isolated and enthralled by interminable free-associational rationalism.
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