Sri Aurobindo anticipates both McLuhan and Teilhard

Re: The processed world of Marshall Mcluhan by Arthur Kroker by Rich on Thu 30 Nov 2006 07:20 PM PST Profile Permanent Link Deb, you put in a nutshell my concerns. First off, although yes I think McLuhan as well as Teilhard who provided McLuhan with much of his "catholic" inspiration about the coming “Pentecostal Condition” can be forgiven, if not for their Catholicism, which did provide an inadequate instrument for cultural penetration, for their naiveté in addressing issues of mass communication and futures of electronic technology. In fact if anything they were visionaries at the time of their voicings, for these technologies as we have today were hardly a gleam in the collective eye, and only a prophet could glimpse the faint glimmering of the cybernetic gods to come.

But, yes, certainly, their captivation with the implications of the Medium for creating a global village or meta-industrial cathedral, blinded them to the methodology that globalized virtual capitalism would employ for its effectuation, and the resultant socio-economic consequences of both information technology and Jihad. - Burneko paper on Teilhard really takes him to task for his christo-centrism not only for the post-colonial implications, but for privileging technology as a ratiocination of the (western) will, and as such for speaking - although certainly not with an ill will - for both the "global" imperialist and against the spontaneities of the Earth.

So in fact, Guy really exposes technology as a real problematique for Teilhard - But certainly now with 40 or 50 years of hind sight things look differently and a theorist today (e.g. Kroker) has tons more scholarship as well as experience to draw on in formulating his own Theory, be it of the Virtual Class, A Will to Technology, Streamed Capitalism, Hyper-Nietzsche, or Born Again Heidegger. That said Kroker riff here (ref: chapter 2 of his Born Again Ideology) is brilliantly illuminating in his deconstruction of the regime of technicity as wed to the Puritan ethic ,which drives Americans to do stupid things like invade helpless others.

But that said, although he touches on it from time to time, I am not sure if he really sheds that much light on the poesis of techne and/or how creative freedom might be won through technology in an age of Empire and Terror. or at the dawn of the god yet to come? In fact in some high highfalutin MI.T collection of scholarly articles on Cyberculture which were all well and good ,by the likes of NK.Hayles, Erik Davis, Donald Theall, Donna Harraway, Evelyn Fox Kellner, Darren Tofts, could only present one reconstructive vision and that guy could only reference Ken Wilber.- So although a deconstruction of the will to technology and primitive post-humanism is sorely needed so to is a “reconstructive” voice to poet our post-human destiny, and it is here I think that we can draw illumination from the vision of Sri Aurobindo.

• In fact, if Heidegger heralds the coming of the god as well as lamenting the lost of humanity in the technological apparatus, might not we consider the coming of the avatar and the creative use of technology as it relates to human unity and the practice of yoga?
• Might we not also think technology metaphysically? and in the light of Sri Aurobindo!
• Heidegger thought technology metaphysically? but Heidegger's vision was obscured by the man and his Times?
• So why not think technology metaphysically (e.g. in the light of SA) and then perhaps even go on beyond thinking about it, and perhaps even aspire to bring a force down to bear upon it?
• or if nothing else to locate a more suitable epistemology to penetrate the will empowering it, than that which can be known through academic jargon ?
• And might this not be done by considering those “inner technologies” which are deployed and developed through the practice of yoga and how they may transform the practice and use of external technology?

But above all since my interest in this matter peaked, I probably have consumed a hundred or more books and publications regarding the future of the human in light of the exponential progress of science and technologies, and although many consider the fate of the post-human to be extrinsic to the physical body, in other words will require the fashioning and uploading of the mind into a new technological body , there are almost no accounts on how the future of post-humanity may be an embodied one which involves a transformation of the cells through a transformation of consciousness? And certainly at least on the Academy there are no viable considerations of the future of the species which Sri Aurobindo heralds? -

Actually N.K. Hayles does cry out for an embodied vision of the Future, in her book How We Became Post-Human, but that was 1999, by 2006 in her book My Mother was a Computer she had declared that a purely embodied future was questionable, as the ubiquity of technology and its exponential increase will for at least for the foreseeable future suggest an increasing intermediation of experience, e.g. "Intermediation" between the "human and the natural world" But couldn’t consideration of Sri Aurobindo contribute to such debates also involving bio-technology? where questions hinge on what is natural and how far it is permissible to intervene in the modify the species, and although I at present subscribe to the Habermasian argument on genetic intervention.

Habermas is arguing precisely against the granting authority to any Social Agent, parent, government, scientist, to constrain what has here to now been everyone equal right, to genetically body forth an existence free from the stamp of another’s will, which risks the ideological motivation, in which the Social Agent exercise of control over the genetically altered being trumphs that beings Personal freedom to develop his/her own intelligence will as they see fit, RH recently brought to my attention the idea that he did not think the arguments against cloning on the grounds of natural right is a convincing one, especially in light of the Hindu doctrine of the immortality of the soul (mind) and instrumentality of nature (body).

So there are indeed many very important complex issues of the future that require illumination in this epoch where everywhere the local is imploding into the global, although the local is remaining tribal!. e.g. "the weird get weirder" My own feelings are that the future envisaged by Sri Aurobindo on humans evolution (and/or devolution) and globalization is not only welcomed into the wider culture, but is essential! ( In a certain way SA anticipates both McLuhan and Teilhard, but without the failure to detect the potential for catastrophic failure of the global project when driven by the Titan Economic Barbarism, of whom I reference so frequently from the Human Cycle) rc