The question I would like to put forth to consider while reading the essay by Kroker and Weinstein, is can the notion of emergent being which transcends humanity be formulated simply as a messianic modernist humanist/religious belief of progress? and how Sri Aurobindo’s message contrasts with it, and also does the emergence of a “media-net” so described here by Kroker as collective transcendent (to humanity) consciousness have any implications when considering the superamental manifestation as set forth by Sri Aurobindo? Would such a supramental manifestation be:
A. The antithesis of said “media-net:
B. Or could “media-net” set the stage for the unfolding of unexpected consequences
which may help determine the course of future human evolution of the spiritual
kind?
remember the "Hour of God" will take place in
"the hour of the unexpected"
Teilhard de Chardin’s “noosphere” Marshall McLuhan’s “global village” The notion of an emergent form of being that comes out of the “human” and surpasses it. Samuel Alexander’s “deity” and all the other “gods” that humans are supposed to bring into being and which were in the minds of James, Bergson, Unamuno, and Whitehead. For the most part evolutionary and progressive. Also Hegalian. Just because the human will be decentered and surpassed by a new mode of being does nt mean that the human will be diminished. On the contrary it will come into its own as collaborator in something greater. Honored collaborator. James’s god was a friend and a partner who needed us. Whitehead’s god was fulfilled only in its consequent nature through our efforts.
McLuhan’s technological humanism stands at the end of this modernist discourse. All other emerginists were visionary anticipators with theological imaginations. In McLuhan the noosphere materializes as the media-net. The emergent is no longer to be striven for as something in the future, but a fact. McLuhan is the moment of positivistic emergentism. He is reporting the fact that there is a mode of being that has succeeded and now encompasses the human. But he is still a humanist . He is still a doctor. He needs to prescribe. For him, there is a common sense which might be trained to respond to the distortions created by technology and to restore its homeostasis through an indigent diet. The media might yet serve “man”.
Cross McLuhans’s nervous system outerized by the media with Nietzsche’s “last man” and you get crash theory. This is how it happens : Crash Theory is the post-humanist (not anti-humanist- what is there to be against if the “human” is dead and now a subject of endless resurrection efforts) continuation of emergentism. It follows McLuhan’s outerization thesis, and extends elaborates it by calling attention to how the media-net is constituted by technologies that were not in McLuhan’s ken. Crash theory, however, abandons the notion that media are “extensions of man”. Far from it . They are the humiliations of the flesh which remains an embarrassment after man dies.
The crash has happened . The emergence of the media-net is accompanied by the onset of the reclining life. Rather than McLuhan’s Hegalian vision of a common sense restored by and through the media, a media-net scans, sucks, and probes the body for more images and bytes to be archived, called up, recombined, run, and archived in cyclical processes leading nowhere: that is non-history.
History is irrelevancy because its subject “man” is no longer the protagonist of anything but cynical dramas on the media-net, and dead ideologies. There is no protagonist, but there is a mode of being emergent from flesh that displaces protagonists. Telematic being has no history because its only principle is the endless exchange of data, combined in every possible form. Any of the directions that it seems to take are determined by the vicissitudes of the reclining flesh, which provides it with a (rotting) biological infrastructure (a resource base and an incitement for resource organization)
Telematic being , indeed can no longer free itself from some form of the flesh anymore than the flesh can free itself from the mineral kingdom. Androids synthesized especially for the process of providing images (data) are registering them consciously (bringing them into appearance) are the ultimate answer to the media net’s requirement for a biological infrastructure. It hardly need be mentioned that these “androids” would not require any structural resemblance to the human body. As we are told ad nauseum by technotopians, silicon dryware will probably be far more effective in producing consciousness than the wetware thar Homo sapiens has become.
That is all in the “future” however. Right now the media-net would cease to be without activation through flesh.
The flesh has crashed and is in transition (virtualization) into the media-net to nowhere (cyber space) There might however, still be “histories” of the vicissitudes of the flesh in relation to the media net: history within an emergent historyless mode of being in which everything is contemporaneous and drawn from archives into recombinant narratives. This would be the history of heroic struggles whether micro resistances or global revolutions, of flesh against media-net: but would be chronicles of the abuse (value) of the flesh, reports on virtualization and the ways in which the flesh was react(ivat)ing to it.
The complications of the flesh and the media-net (telematic being) all the variations in the field between the complete replacement of the flesh by techno source receptors and retro fascist primitivism, are the subjects of these studies and probes. From the viewpoint of modern history the moment of recline is not a historical periodat all but the symptom of the emergence of telematic being as a distinctive and preemptive mode of being. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that there might still be “histories”
The flesh has crashed and is in recline. (Retro) Fascist spasms should be viewed as nothing but instances of rebellion within recline, even though it is, if Pierce is right in general, some probability coefficient attached to the possibility that the flesh will short-circuit its slow death with quick annihilation. Within the horizon of recline there are two possibilities – the literal abbatoir and the virtual abbatoir – Quick or slow death of the flesh.
In recline the flesh takes itself with terrible cynical seiousness. Histories of every possible group and individual are collected and archived. Measures are adopted to save the flesh of the virtual classes. The body therefore, becomes a subject of innumerable rights for the virtual classes. But all this is an obsession with that which has already been superseded and is present only as infrastructure and abuse value: the body is thoroughly cynical and exists to disguise the disappearance of the flesh. To recapitulate: some visionaries at the beginning of the twentieth century announced (prophesied) the emergence of a being out of man. McLuhan , the last prophet, declared the advent of the emergent. Crash Theory shows the consequences of the emergent.
In itself the media-net is universal . First it
does not distinguish among images by worth. It does not exclude. A gay in a
military uniform is as good as a straight. Both images can be uploaded from
bodies and downloaded into them. Second the media-net is omnipresent and
telematic. Upload a skinhead in
Telematic being circulates and mutates in a cycle in which bodies are uploaded into and downloaded from the media net, producing a dizzying succession of hybrid monsters.
The class struggles of the virtualization process occur within a horizon of recline. One great tendency of the formation of the virtual class comprised of directors and specialist with its internal tensions. The mission of the class is to deliver the flesh to virtuality, telematic being.