Ethico Aesthetics 1

Juliet Araujo
803.2 Final Exam
Dr. G. Smith
05/01/15

A): Pick one or two texts from each of the four seminar sections and show how they deal with or reflect modern technology. You might think about how these texts approach the two sides of technology as manifest (technology per se) and latent (essence of technology). (See Freud on the interpretation of dreams in the White Book.)
B) And secondly, taking into account all or whichever you like of the seminar readings and our discussions over the course of the semester (video-conferences, study-group work, Saturday Morning Chats w/ Jason, one on one phone w/ Sylvere & me), make a case for art and the artist-philosopher as a means toward an ethico-aesthetics—toward, that is, a "coming community" of your own making.

Modern Technology and the Shaping of Consciousness

For Heidegger "essence" is simply what something is– the "origin" or source (143). In "The Question Concerning Technology" he interrogates the source of the ambiguity in this notion of whatness. Thus, Heidegger calls for thinking both the manifest (technology per se) and latent content (in the essence of technology) of modern technology in his confrontation of its "supreme danger" (Krell 309). By exposing the latent content, its source in the Gestell (enframing) of its essence, which is always already questioning its whatness as both a thing and its origin. As with the work of art –as well as with being itself, technology, is therefore not merely a thing in itself per se, but also a thing as it appears in its essence– Gestell or enframing in which the unconcealment of truth always already revealing itself to the freedom of thinking.
Accordingly, the challenging of the ambiguity of modern technology that seduces human will towards a quest for objective and quantifiable mastery is viewed as a "menace" (Krell 309) to the destiny of human free will. As a "defiant challenging of beings that aims at total and exclusive mastery" (309), this view of modern technology is grounded in the Heddeggerian notion of thinking as a living thing. Thus, free will as a human resource posits a risk to the whatness of modern technology. Yet, through its own mobilization in 'Gestell,' the task of thinking in the time we experience it can be thought of as a mobilizing force, a resource, which Heidegger refers to as a "standing reserve" (309). As such, its call for thinking potentiates its power to displace the open engagement of the human body and mind in its own connection to the spirit of free will. In its opportunity for the exercise of free will, modern technology serves to mobilize the action of thinking toward the challenging of its hold on the "technological will to power" (309). Thus, thinking in the gaps between art and science, which has long since contributed to the polemic split between poiēsis and practice calls for a gathering of the forces en masse armed by human thinking as a coming community which serves to bring an ethico aesthetics into its own becoming as crystallized through the works of artist/philosophers.
Taken as a Freudian "nucleus of crystallization" (21), the essence of technology attracts technology per se to itself and thus, effects its distribution and performance through its affective responses. In the hands of the artist/philosophers, this "great surging forth of the masses thereby reaches a point of crystallization" (Jünger 128), whereby the essence of technology can be revealed as specific form of disciplined bondage through the palpable violence of its hold on thinking. Technology per se, like the will of war that it explicates and potentiates (Jünger TM 123) uses its scientific genius as devices to keep its essence stable and its essence fluid. As an act of transference from the actual to the virtual, Heidegger's 'standing reserve' flows into the gaps between the manifest and the latent content of modern technology. Accordingly, its symbiotic manifestation is exemplified in the use of modern technology as a device in thinking conflict through the casualties of war. Virilio calls to Kipling statement: "Truth is the first casualty of war" (VM 66), to reiterate the violent propensity of our draw to the elusive essence of technology as the truth of progress. Through its dangerous latent content, the regressive enframing destiny of technology per se, embodies the unique character of a "great catastrophe" (Jünger 123). Yet, Jünger writes: there are two sides to every event of "cosmic significance" (Jünger 123). Hence, the essence of technology is both an existential and a social force always already poised for its own total mobilization despite its symbiotic attachment to its physical instrumentality "hidden behind the concept of 'progress'– an ambiguous concept glittering in many colors" (Jünger 123).
Thus, the genius effects embedded in its affective unmaking of free will is indeed a menace to thinking. As such, through the seductive draw of its latent content, whose genius, according to Jünger is "penetrated by the spirit of progress" (123), the hold that the essence of technology has on our thinking, by default involves teaching and learning. Thus, this is an idea whose powerful influence is evidenced in the prolific address by thinkers such as Smith, Jünger, Sloterdijk, Virilio and Lotringer to name a few. By always already forming the question concerning itself, the essence of technology keeps one step ahead of the ontological self while simultaneously calling forth or challenging technology from the realm of memory (Heidegger 309). Arendt, Fanon, Foucault, Baudrillard and Agamben assert the possibilities of its less visible effective inclinations– whereby Jünger's nostalgic dream of an "era of the well aimed shot is already behind us" (128).
For Nietzsche there are two kinds of memory, one that is actively unleashed and one that permits forgetting (35). As such, it is in its recollective capacity that thinks back, in which the genius of memory asserts its propensity to move toward something always already thought (Heidegger 376) that concerns technology. Such mobilization of thought in memory can enslave human free will in its potential as an abusive addictive derailment of thinking. Therefore, the will's memory is answerable only to the forgetfulness that settles in and calls human will toward peace beginning in the present moment and leaps toward its own future (Nietzsche 36). It is in Nietzsche's notion of forgetfulness that "the active ability to suppress the Freudian thoughts of the unconscious or "dream thoughts," is objectified in technology per se. The risk of the unconcealment of its latent content is hidden beneath the illusion of desire manifested in the sheen of slick devices, which serve as substances for potential abuse to the challenging of thinking. Therefore, technology per se such, like the memory in which it is embedded acts to seduce free will with the false hope of insatiable desire in the form of spiritual ingestion (Nietzsche 35). Furthermore, as the pursuit of inexorable logic that seeks to quantify sensations, perceptions and impressions continues to set itself upon nature while simultaneously promising the freedom it holds captive. Thus, this whatness essential to the essence of technology, which, according to Smith "requires a new kind of subjectivity" (par 3).

Arendt, Fanon, Foucault, Baudrillard and Agamben assert the possibilities of its less visible effective inclinations– whereby Jünger's nostalgic dream of an "era of the well aimed shot is already behind us" (128). Additionally, in "Digitizing the Humanities," Armand Marie Leroi asserts: "Scientists know that impressions lie; that they truly tell us what we want to hear, not what is" (par. 5). Yet, this leaves us with the conundrum of Virilio statement that "The philosophical questions of plausibility and implausibility override those concerning the true and the false" in our shift from the actual thing to its image. The leap from technology per se to the essence of technology requires the movement from space to time, "to the more relative actual – virtual" (70). As such, the question concerning technology and its relationship to its propensity to alienation and violence is a progressive negation of freedom that continues to threaten the shape human consciousness today.
Technology per se is alienated from its source/essence by its call to the method or process of effacing nature as a manifest destiny– or it's disruption of spirit or will (Heidegger 300). With Freud however, dream thought (represented here as technology per se), is modified through the process of symbolic representation and "exercises a determining influence upon the form taken by the content" (21). Does technology per se reveal a form of regressive thought that hides its essence in the illusion of the desperation for a quick fix? As Jünger states: "The suspicion of its source is of much greater significance" (123). Despite his aristocratic investment in monarchy, when Jünger exposes the obvious mask of reason as a perfect place to hide (124), he unwittingly stands at the threshold before the door of possibility which leads us to the aesthetic space of Agamben's "Coming Community." As such, as Heidegger states: "We never come to thoughts. They come to us" (365).
In a climate where the pain of alienation reveals itself as Gestell, the capacity to call for thinking "how the world is becoming more shallow and superficial" (Jünger OP 45) we are still in a position for the esoteric teaching of pain (45). Along with Nietzsche's "spiritual ingestion" (35), the mingling of differences can provide for Jünger's "testing ground of reality"(45) even without his consent. As such, the intellectual revolution that serves as a legitimizing force to protect the hegemony of a single truth in any given society (TM 72), can also serve to mobilize aesthetic resistance to the sedimentation and stagnation of thought. Thus the state of exception is one of ambiguity where change marks its territory as a new kind of freedom (Jünger OP 44).
Regarding the Heideggarian crisis of being in its manifestation in his call for thinking technology, the condition of denial in human thought and behavior is set upon us as a comfort in exchange for the action of free will (Smith par. 1). This idea speaks both to Jünger's prioritization of pain and Nietzsche's argument that we "simply live through experience" (35). Enframing exponentially allows human thought to decrease its distance through the speed of technology per se, which in turn reduces the distance to nothing. When we lose the experience of distance as a result of its saturation, in other words, as Virilio claims: "power will be invested in acceleration itself" (PW 59). As such, this will take a leap in our thinking, "to a place where everything is different" (Heidegger 377). While, Arendt reminds us that the human mind is unwilling to face realities and therefore negates its own frame of reference (37). Is this the Nietzschean "forgetting" that allows for: "A little piece, a little tabula rasa of consciousness to make room for something new?" (35).
Is the addict simply "the person in whom this apparatus of suppression is damaged"? (35). While Smith's notion of our holding fast to our habitual "global addiction" as manifested in Heideggerian, the latent content of modern technology, speaks to the habit of profound human disconnection that robs us of our sanity. Can this madness as such also viewed as a breakthrough? As Deleuze and Guattari state: "Madness need not be all; breakdown…afterall they remind us "Our sanity is not 'true'" (131). "Unfortunately" as Arendt writes, "it seems to be much easier to condition human behavior and to make people conduct themselves in the most unexpected and outrageous manner, than it is to persuade anyone to learn from experience" (Arendt 37). Yet, such madness involves thinking as learning to learn the ethical implications of modern technology, which heeds the call for both production and reduction of its own automation.
Holding fast to legitimized notions of morality, leaves us with "the mere habit of holding fast to something" (45). To recognize our own powerlessness over the essence of technology may be be our "last remnant of strength" (Arendt 45) in its support of an inside outside dichotomy and allows us to remove the "I" from Daesin. As Smith sees it, this is a vision, " a far off possibility, namely a new kind of subjectivity– in relation to itself, to the world" (1). The essence of technology appears as a challenge to our denial in its disappearance into the fabric of our world– to our economic, intellectual and social growth its ties to philosophical ethics challenge us forth because ethics is always already present in human behavior.
As we have seen in this essay, many thinkers take this challenge to the extreme. As Heidegger reminds us there is danger is in the latency of the thinking our relationship to power and knowledge itself and in our subsequent denial of such. For example, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault deconstructs the modern penal system but he also accounts for the ethics surrounding the genealogy of the modern soul. He concludes that rational disciplinary processes have morphed the soul through the apparatuses of technology per se whose affect allows us to critique who we have become in our alienation from aspects of our society that call for thinking and questioning the spiritual affect of disciplinary practices that have caused both the body and mind (167). Discipline and Punish outlines the structure of the creditor debtor relationship that Maurizio Lazzarato employs to ground his theory of exploitation and domination, which he closely links to the wider society.
For Lazzarato, 'Credit' is the final judge. Accordingly, as we are all 'Debtors' in one way or another, we stand guilty as charged and are punished or disciplined as such. As a Foucaultian punishment of the mind, the debtor creditor relation also stands as an example of the Freudian dream thought analogy stated above. In our neoliberal economy, this relationship concerns technology as its enframing "immediately acts on the global level, affecting entire populations, calling for and contributing to the ethical construction of the indebted man" (Lazzarato 89). Therefore, ones assumption of "responsibility for the constraints of power" (Foucault 202) is required. As with modern technology, Lazzarato leaves us with the question of whether all obligation is moral and as such, bound to a spiritual debt that can no longer be redeemed (77)? Yet, in questioning such norms, it can be seen why in his critique of Foucault, Baudrillard's interest lies in "the mysterious point where he stops and finds nothing more to say" (FF74). It is in these gaps that the artist/philosopher is poised for action.
Therefore, the artist/philosopher is bringing forth thinking as a way of revealing technology in the acts of both aletheia and techne which is the origin of the work of art. As Fanon states: " Everyone of my acts commits me as a man" (69). With this in mind, Smith asks: "Can an aesthetics of the future, 'an art of critique,' set us free?" (par. 2). Fanon continues: "Every action is an answer or a question: both perhaps" (70); the manifestation of such action has been built into the latent content of this essay which is synthesized in the notion of freedom in the spirit of the artist/philosopher. The artist/philosopher is simply that which is of spirit; the lovable "intelligence of the intelligibility" (Agamben 2); a refutation of the exclusivity of the "logic" of authoritative domination; and an aesthetic resistor par excellence. She is not the seeker of a powerful knowledge as truth, but the manifestation of the lover of the action inherent to the latent content of thinking.
For Agamben, this notion is embodied in the "whatever singularity" an idea taken from Deleuze and Guatarri's thinking on that which cannot be reduced to a quantifiable term (1). As with the artist/philosopher, who matters because she is, who escapes self-division from both within and without, 'whatever singularity' is not a form of normalized or universal humanity. As such, the artist/philosopher exceeds subjectivation and unified human essence and always already precedes being. Accordingly this discourse implies an ethics aligned with Heidegger's notion of the 'letting be' of Dasein. As such, Agamben's radical thought casts a unique shadow on Heidegger's question concerning technology.
Accordingly, Agamben states: "The life that begins on earth after the last day is simply life" (6.7). By stripping man to his most stripped down form, the danger inherent to modern technology acts as a catastrophic spiritual salvation, which serves as a transition to the potentiation of moments of possibility. Thus, the artist/philosopher lives in a state of limbo, in the gaps between art and science. In her "spiritual ingestion" (Nietzsche 35), she "persist[s] without [Jünger's} pain in divine abandon" (4). That is to say, she has "always already forgotten God" (5) and in the ethos of care shares "the benefit of active forgetfulness" (Nietzsche 35).
As 'coming beings' artist/philosophers are joy incarnate dwelling in possibilities par non. Therefore we stand beyond judgment because we are our own salvation. Free from the sovereignty of Lazzarato's debtor/creditor relation as for us there is no debt to pay, only great significance, intention and worth to be as such. In our be-(ing) coming, the way of coming communities of artist philosophers is to face the intelligence of ambiguity from the lens of that which is latent in belonging itself; that which is neither universal nor individual. "The lover wants to be loved with all its predicates" (2). As "loveable," that which is contingent to artist/philosophers reveals ever – present potentialities, yet as Heidegger states: "The way is long" (377).
Moreover, the way need not be an all or nothing phenomenon. In our coming communities, as artists/philosophers we engage in aesthetic resistance as we act to recompose our subjectivities and social relations through the art of critique. Thus, we work toward an ethico aesthetics, which "addresses itself to thought" (Heidegger 381) to catch the draft of its dialogic potential and to exceed some of the intertextualizabilities set forth in our attempts at: "What Call for Thinking." Finally, after clarifying the ambiguity of Heidegger's: "Question Concerning Technology," the Coming Community is inescapable. As artist/philosophers in our "perfect purity" as teachers, we must let learning of modern technology learn (Heidegger 380). As such, we both command and shelter the art is critique by responding with thinking through our relatedness. Everything we do answers to whatever addresses us as essential" (379) as we choose freely to engage in be – coming in language manifested in latent content of speaking the unnameable truth of "belonging itself" (Agamben 75.5) is revealed in "being as such" that the "whateverness" of everything and everyone matters at all cost (1). For it is not we who play with technology per se, it is the essence of technology that plays with us, plays with our thinking and enjoys letting our thoughts lose sight of the natural joy of free thought in the face of our own forgetfulness (Agamben 5.6). While we all remain "especially pronounced to succumb to the danger of commonness" (Heidegger 388), this protective sheltering of artists/philosophers is no mistake because "we are the stakes" (389). Our best hope of getting to the essence of any telling in asking lies in letting our thinking think towards an ethico aesthetics. To accomplish this task we must hold ourselves accountable to being a loveable spirit of possibility in our modeling of belonging in a future that lives in the present as a coming community of our own making.

[* worked with: Wilson, Tonilee, Paige, Jason]


Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Print.
Arendt, Hannah. Responsibility and Judgment. Ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken, 2003. Print.
Baudrillard, Jean. Forget Foucault. Cambridge: Semiotext(e)/The MIT Press, [1977] 2007. Print.
Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus, Penguin Classics, [1972] 2009. Print.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove press, 1952/2008. Print.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish, Vintage, [1975] 1977. Print.
Heidegger, Martin. "The Question Concerning Technology," in Basic Writings. Ed., David Farrell Krell. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
--- "What Calls for Thinking." in Basic Writings.
--- "The Origin of the Work of Art." in Basic Writings.
Junger, Ernst. On Pain, New York, Telos, [1934] 2008, 96 pages
--- "Total Mobilization," in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, Boston, Mass., MIT Press, 1992. Print.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of Indebted Man, Semiotext(e)/The MIT Press 2012. Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Trans. Carol Diethe. Ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson On the Genealogy of Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Print.
Smith, George. "The Art of Critique in the Age of Addiction." In The Art of Critique, Ed., Stephen Knudsen. Forthcoming, Chicago UP. (PDF).
Sloterdijk, Peter. Terror from the Air, LA, Semiotext(e)/The MIT Press, 2009. Print.
Virilio, Paul, and Sylvère Lotringer. Pure War. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008. Print.
Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine, Bloomington, Ind., Indiana University Press, 1994. Print.