Incomprehensible Technologisms

‘We are no longer in an age when the amateurish citizen, knowing a little ordinary seamanship can adjust the rigging, read the sextant and compass and take over the helm. Instead the quarter deck begins to look like the cockpit of a spaceship, what do all these dials and gauges mean? what untutored, passenger can make sense of the strange charts, computer printouts and implements that fill the navigators cabin? Who can understand the working of the mysterious engines down below? It is precisely to deal with this esoteric apparatus that we have experts onboard, hired to serve by the government, the corporation, the party. They understand the mechanisms of the ship, and we do not. If we ask for explanations they answer us in incomprehensible technologisms. Even when we talk social policy with them, they speak of impenetrable procedures, methodologies and statistical factors, when people arguing politics used to talk of Justice, Freedom and Moral Rights and Wrongs, the new expertise talks of ‘parameters’ ‘tradeoffs’ ’interfaces’ ’inputs’ ‘optimisations’ ‘cross benefits’ and ‘cross matrix impact analysis’ Nothing is anymore simply and straightforwardly accessible to the layman. Everything – economics, foreign policy, war and peace, city planning, education, environmental design, business administration, human psychology – now requires the benefits of professional training to be comprehensible, or so the technocrats insist ; and often enough – given our condition of life – they are right.’

p.50  Where the Wasteland Ends – Politics and Transcendence in Post Industrial Society (1989)

Thedore Roszak

Celestial Arts. Berkeley, California.

Art as Performing the Self

The more man objectifies himself in his work, the more reality takes on the appearance of illusion. As the workings of the modern economy and the modern social order become increasingly inaccessible to everyday intelligence, art and philosophy abdicate the task of explaining them to the allegedly objective sciences of society, which themselves have retreated from the effort to master reality into the classification of trivia. Reality thus presents itself, to the layman and ’scientists’ alike, as an impenetrable network of social relations – as ‘role playing’, the ’presentation of self in everyday life’. To the performing self, the only reality is the identity he can construct out of materials furnished by advertising and mass culture, themes of popular film and fiction, and fragments torn from a vast range of cultural traditions, all of them equally contemporaneous to the contemporary mind. In order to polish and perfect the part he has devised for himself, the new Narcissus gases at his own reflection not so much in admiration as in unremitting search of flaws, signs of fatigue, decay. Life becomes a work of art, while ‘the first art work in an artist’ in Norman Mailers pronouncement, ’is the shaping of his own personality.’ The second of these principles has now been adopted not only by those who write ‘advertisements for myself ’ for publication but by the everyday artist in the street.

Pg 91,92,93
The Culture of Narcissism
Christopher Lasch

W W Norton & Co Ltd; New edition edition (15 Jan 1979)

Indifference to the past

‘our culture’s indifference to the past – which easily shades over into active hostility and rejection – furnishes the most telling proof of that culture’s bankruptcy. The prevailing attitude, so cheerful and forward looking on the surface, derives from a narcissistic impoverishment of the psyche and also from an inability to ground our needs in the experience of satisfaction and contentment. Instead of drawing on our own experience we allow experts to define our needs for us and then wonder why those needs never seem to be satisfied. ‘as people become apt in learning how to need’

Preface xviii
The Culture of Narcissism
Christopher Lasch

W W Norton & Co Ltd; New edition edition (15 Jan 1979)

William Blake Ancient of days

This is an image of Urizen who is the embodiment of conventional reason in the Mythology of William Blake,  and is used to convey an example of technocratic repression,  and is an important character in Blake’s opposition to a politic of empiricism and industrial power.

Will write more about William Blake later as am studying his work and considering his political ideology which existed in opposition to figures such as Lock and Newton .