Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Mechanics of the Deconcealing Machine


Thinking today of Heidegge(a)r's passage, "What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer: everything...The possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in revealing. Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing."

What do we see when we see the machine?
The machine as component of machine, as symptom that deconceals, as a coggy synecdoche of a larger machine or machines, machines within machines.

The machine produces and the machine points. The machine takes in force, motion, dynamism or has these put into it, circulates them, and releases them.

The machine of belief...
From Section IV of Blaise Pascal's Pensees:

247. Order.--A letter of exhortation to a friend to induce him to seek. And he will reply, "But what is the use of seeking? Nothing is seen." Then to reply to him, "Do not despair." And he will answer that he would be glad to find some light, but that, according to this very religion, if he believed in it, it will be of no use to him, and that therefore he prefers not to seek. And to answer to that: The machine.

From Lacan's Seminar II:

"The machine is the structure detached from the activity of the subject. The symbolic world is the world of the machine."

"Between Hegel and Freud, there's the advent of the world of the machine."

"There are no examples of energy calculations in the use of slaves. There is not the hint of an equation as to their output. Cato never did it. It took machines for us to realise they had to be fed...And later on, it dawned on people, something which was never thought f before, that living things look after themselves all on their own, in other words, they represent homeostats."

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