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authorSilvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>2018-02-23 09:38:41 -0300
committerSilvio Rhatto <rhatto@riseup.net>2018-02-23 09:38:41 -0300
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Books: One-dimensional man: chapter nine
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greater productivity without destruction. In other words, the higher historical
truth would pertain to the system which offers the greater chance of
pacification.
+
+### Negative Thinking
+
+ To the degree to which the established society is irrational, the analysis in
+ terms of historical rationality introduces into the concept the negative
+ element—critique, contradiction, and transcendence.
+
+ This element cannot be assimilated with the positive. It changes the concept in
+ its entirety, in its intent and validity. Thus, in the analysis of an economy,
+ capitalist or not, which operates as an “independent” power over and above the
+ individuals, the negative features (overproduction, unemployment, insecurity,
+ waste, repression) are not comprehended as long as they appear merely as more
+ or less inevitable by-products, as “the other side” of the story of growth and
+ progress.
+
+ True, a totalitarian administration may promote the efficient exploitation of
+ resources; the nuclear-military establishment may provide millions of jobs
+ through enormous purchasing power; toil and ulcers may be the by-product of the
+ acquisition of wealth and responsibility; deadly blunders and crimes on the
+ part of the leaders may be merely the way of life. One is willing to admit
+ economic and political madness—and one buys it. But this sort of knowledge of
+ “the other side” is part and parcel of the solidification of the state of
+ affairs, of the grand unification of opposites which counteracts qualitative
+ change, because it pertains to a thoroughly hopeless or thoroughly
+ preconditioned existence that has made its home in a world where even the
+ irrational is Reason.
+
+ The tolerance of positive thinking is enforced tolerance—enforced not by any
+ terroristic agency but by the overwhelming, anonymous power and efficiency of
+ the technological society. As such it permeates the general consciousness—and
+ the consciousness of the critic. The absorption of the negative by the positive
+ is validated in the daily experience, which obfuscates the distinction between
+ rational appearance and irrational reality.
+
+ [examples follow]
+
+ These examples may illustrate the happy marriage of the positive and the
+ negative—the objective ambiguity which adheres to the data of experience. It is
+ objective ambiguity because the shift in my sensations and reflections responds
+ to the manner in which the experienced facts are actually interrelated. But
+ this interrelation, if comprehended, shatters the harmonizing consciousness and
+ its false realism. Critical thought strives to define the irrational character
+ of the established rationality (which becomes increasingly obvious) and to
+ define the tendencies which cause this rationality to generate its own
+ transformation. “Its own” because, as historical totality, it has developed
+ forces and capabilities which themselves become projects beyond the established
+ totality. They are possibilities of the advancing technological rationality
+ and, as such, they involve the whole of society. The technological
+ transformation is at the same time political transformation, but the political
+ change would turn into qualitative social change only to the degree to which it
+ would alter the direction of technical progress—that is, develop a new
+ technology. For the established technology has become an instrument of
+ destructive politics.
+
+ Such qualitative change would be transition to a higher stage of civilization
+ if technics were designed and utilized for the pacification of the struggle for
+ existence. In order to indicate the disturbing implications of this statement,
+ I submit that such a new direction of technical progress would be the
+ catastrophe of the established direction, not merely the quantitative evolution
+ of the prevailing (scientific and technological) rationality but rather its
+ catastrophic transformation, the emergence of a new idea of Reason, theoretical
+ and practical.
+
+ The new idea of Reason is expressed in Whitehead’s proposition: “The function
+ of Reason is to promote the art of life.”1 In view of this end, Reason is the
+ “direction of the attack on the environment” which derives from the “threefold
+ urge: (1) to live, (2) to live well, (3) to live better.”2
+
+Then read the rest of the whole chapter 9. It's interesting enough that deserves
+to be quoted on its entirety. It talks about the completion of the
+Technological Project. Like this:
+
+ Civilization produces the means for freeing Nature from its own brutality, its
+ own insufficiency, its own blindness, by virtue of the cognitive and
+ transforming power of Reason. And Reason can fulfill this function only as
+ post-technological rationality, in which technics is itself the instrumentality
+ of pacification, organon of the “art of life.” The function of Reason then
+ converges with the function of Art.
+
+ The Greek notion of the affinity between art and technics may serve as a
+ preliminary illustration. The artist possesses the ideas which, as final
+ causes, guide the construction of certain things—just as the engineer possesses
+ the ideas which guide, as final causes, the construction of a machine. For
+ example, the idea of an abode for human beings determines the architect’s
+ construction of a house; the idea of wholesale nuclear explosion determines the
+ construction of the apparatus which is to serve this purpose. Emphasis on the
+ essential relation between art and technics points up the specific rationality
+ of art.
+
+ [...]
+
+ In the contemporary era, the conquest of scarcity is still confined to small
+ areas of advanced industrial society. Their prosperity covers up the Inferno
+ inside and outside their borders; it also spreads a repressive productivity and
+ “false needs.” It is repressive precisely to the degree to which it promotes
+ the satisfaction of needs which require continuing the rat race of catching up
+ with one’s peers and with planned obsolescence, enjoying freedom from using the
+ brain, working with and for the means of destruction. The obvious comforts
+ generated by this sort of productivity, and even more, the support which it
+ gives to a system of profitable domination, facilitate its importation in less
+ advanced areas of the world where the introduction of such a system still means
+ tremendous progress in technical and human terms.
+
+ However, the close interrelation between technical and political-manipulative
+ know-how, between profitable productivity and domination, lends to the conquest
+ of scarcity the weapons for containing liberation. To a great extent, it is the
+ sheer quantity of goods, services, work, and recreation in the overdeveloped
+ countries which effectuates this containment. Consequently, qualitative change
+ seems to presuppose a quantitative change in the advanced standard of living,
+ namely, reduction of overdevelopment.
+
+ The standard of living attained in the most advanced industrial areas is not a
+ suitable model of development if the aim is pacification. In view of what this
+ standard has made of Man and Nature, the question must again be asked whether
+ it is worth the sacrifices and the victims made in its defense. The question
+ has ceased to be irresponsible since the “affluent society” has become a
+ society of permanent mobilization against the risk of annihilation, and since
+ the sale of its goods has been accompanied by moronization, the perpetuation of
+ toil, and the promotion of frustration.
+
+ Under these circumstances, liberation from the affluent society does not mean
+ return to healthy and robust poverty, moral cleanliness, and simplicity. On the
+ contrary, the elimination of profitable waste would increase the social wealth
+ available for distribution, and the end of permanent mobilization would reduce
+ the social need for the denial of satisfactions that are the individual’s
+ own—denials which now find their compensation in the cult of fitness, strength,
+ and regularity.
+
+ [...]
+
+ The crime is that of a society in which the growing population aggravates the
+ struggle for existence in the face of its possible alleviation. The drive for
+ more “living space” operates not only in international aggressiveness but also
+ within the nation. Here, expansion has, in all forms of teamwork, community
+ life, and fun, invaded the inner space of privacy and practically eliminated
+ the possibility of that isolation in which the individual, thrown back on
+ himself alone, can think and question and find. This sort of privacy—the sole
+ condition that, on the basis of satisfied vital needs, can give meaning to
+ freedom and independence of thought—has long since become the most expensive
+ commodity, available only to the very rich (who don’t use it). In this respect,
+ too, “culture” reveals its feudal origins and limitations. It can become
+ democratic only through the abolition of mass democracy, i.e., if society has
+ succeeded in restoring the prerogatives of privacy by granting them to all and
+ protecting them for each.
+
+ [...]
+
+ To take an (unfortunately fantastic) example: the mere absence of all
+ advertising and of all indoctrinating media of information and entertainment
+ would plunge the individual into a traumatic void where he would have the
+ chance to wonder and to think, to know himself (or rather the negative of
+ himself) and his society. Deprived of his false fathers, leaders, friends, and
+ representatives, he would have to learn his ABC’s again. But the words and
+ sentences which he would form might come out very differently, and so might his
+ aspirations and fears.
+
+ To be sure, such a situation would be an unbearable nightmare. While the people
+ can support the continuous creation of nuclear weapons, radioactive fallout,
+ and questionable foodstuffs, they cannot (for this very reason!) tolerate being
+ deprived of the entertainment and education which make them capable of
+ reproducing the arrangements for their defense and/or destruction. The
+ non-functioning of television and the allied media might thus begin to achieve
+ what the inherent contradictions of capitalism did not achieve—the
+ disintegration of the system. The creation of repressive needs has long since
+ become part of socially necessary labor—necessary in the sense that without it,
+ the established mode of production could not be sustained. Neither problems of
+ psychology nor of aesthetics are at stake, but the material base of domination.