CUSP134: Icarus’s Parachute Technics as a Primary Historical Agency *reductively encompassing: theological, cosmological, biological, psychological, etc. A few examples of the importance of technology…. Anthropological* Plato Augustine Rousseau Freud ~Darwin, ~most politicians Technological Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, et al. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time ~Discourse on “Posthumanism”

CUSP134: Icarus’s Parachute Plato’s Republic Imagining a Just Society -First, you have to think straight: get a theory of reality, inquire into Justice -Second, you have to order your society according to that straight thinking: forms > objects > images = thinkers > tradesman > artists -Third, you have to put the best thinkers in charge of governance and education: poets out, philosophers in

CUSP134: Icarus’s Parachute Plato’s Double Divided Line

CUSP134: Icarus’s Parachute Writing as Plato’s enabling technology Imagining a Just Society Plato was imagining a society in the abstract, thinking about human nature, concepts like justice and “the good”, and an ideal order of community Leading inquiry: What is Justice? How can we think it? Plato’s process: Justice, the senses, representation -Alphabet as technology gives Plato a key insight: A A A A A A A A A A A -Plato’s thinking DEPENDS on the technics of writing

CUSP134: Icarus’s Parachute Reconsidering Plato’s Double Divided Line The makers of technical objects (beds, swords, pots, houses) and of artworks (paintings, sculptures, literary works) create a material heritage which conditions, shapes and enables what is likely to be thought, done in everyday life, or created for use in social commerce.

CUSP134: Icarus’s Parachute Benedict Anderson & Printing Press Example: The Gutenberg Revolution (15 th C) -Political: Bible, access to sacred texts; Reformation -Time/Space: Newspapers, Novels – reading publics/national consciousness, calendrical time/progess -Relations: monk-quill/codex >> printmen-press: human-tool shifts toward operator-machine What provides these functions in your experience today?

CUSP134: Icarus’s Parachute Gutenberg Printing Press, Printmen

CUSP134: Icarus’s Parachute Bernard Stiegler, 1: Postindustrial New Conditions: 19thC, Industrial Revolution Human-Tech: "Today, machines are the tool bearers, and the human is no longer a technical individual; the human becomes either the machine's servant or its assembler: the human's relation to the technical object proves to have profoundly changed" (23) Knowledge-Tech: acceleration; time gap between science of phenomena and creation of tech: photography (102), telephone (56), radio (35), television (12), radar (14), uranium bomb (6), transistor (5)

CUSP134: Icarus’s Parachute Bernard Stiegler, 2: The Technical Milieu "One may conclude that the technical group then gains an advance with respect to the ethnic group to the extent that, as is the case today--with technical evolution accelerating and becoming too fast for the possibilities of appropriation by 'other systems'--one must wonder if we might not be in the presence of a separation and progressive opposition between, on the one hand, cultures, or an ensemble of interior milieus, and on the other hand technologies, which are no longer only a subgroup of the technical milieu but the external milieu become worldwide technology: the dilution of the interior milieu into the exterior milieu has become essentially technical, firstly as an environment totally mediated by telecommunications, by modes of transportation as well as by television and radio, computer networks, and so on, whereby distances and delays are annulled, but secondly as a system of planet-scale industrial production" (62)

CUSP134: Icarus’s Parachute Representations of Technology The Octopus, Frank Norris (1901) -Railroad & Farming Community -New economic interests, new forms of violence -the affect of disorientation/violence of technical novelty Body of Lies, Ridley Scott (2008) -conflict of Cultural and Technical Milieus -danger of politics grounded in technology [5:00, 39:20, 1:43]

CUSP134: Icarus’s Parachute Technology: Techne, Logos Greek Roots Technē – art or craft Logos – word, thought, ground of belief or action Alt. way of thinking about “Technology” Techno-logy as the “writing” of thought in craft; the concretization of belief, techniques, art into material objects