Saturday, July 23, 2022

The Limit

The 'problem to be fixed' is the imperative that the cosmological machinery of Technic demands of its (re)producers.

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What is impossible to resolve in its totality, is considered in its parts as a cluster of individual possibilities of resolution. By selecting increasingly minute portions of the impossible, and by turning them into small possible victories, Technic denies its own limits while progressing indefinitely in its infinite chase after itself. In this perspective, we can also appreciate the role played by incremental innovations in all fields of contemporary activity, and the conspicuous absence of any authentic instance of groundbreaking innovation in recent decades.

A possibility is thus to be understood, not as a radical form of indeterminacy, but rather as a gap that exists only inasmuch as it is possible to fill it. A possibility is a ‘not-as-yet’ that, in Technic’s own conception of time, is always-already resolved, since its presence is exactly as ‘that which can be resolved’. The problem that can be fixed is always-already resolved exactly in its being resolvable, that is, in its being reducible to the productive discourse of seriality. On the contrary, what escapes entirely the discourse of productive On the contrary, what escapes entirely the discourse of productive resolution, that is, of ontological mutation and annihilation, is not even allowed a negative form of presence. Nothing is impossible, because the impossible, by claiming to be irreducible in its nature, also claims a nature of its own, that is, a nature which isn’t reducible to the linear seriality of Technic’s cosmogony - and to anything advancing such claims, no form of presence whatsoever is allowed.

The irreducible mystery of life, stubbornly escaping Technic’s capture, is converted into a theme park for Technic’s triumph. By resolving its resistance into a case of vulnerability - that is as endless possibility for resolution - life is turned into the stage for Technic’s denial of its own limits. Resolution by simulation indicates exactly this condition of ceaseless postponement of the end. This is what happens, for example, when we consider most contemporary discourses over health and illness, and particularly mental health and mental illness. That which most stubbornly resists the process of reduction-to-work operated by Technic, is turned into a medical problem, that is, into a problem that functions as a not-as-yet-accomplished possibility of resolution. From this angle, we can understand more generally the contemporary focus over illness, diseases, catastrophes, even pseudo-apocalypses (as in most contemporary cultural productions), as a further case of possibility. The crumbling support that life as vulnerability offers to Technic’s unfolding, and which would eventually lead to Technic’s own demise, is frozen in the very instant of its crumbling; it is never a resolved situation, or a complete defeat. The permanent state of crisis that characterizes most contemporary discourses in virtually every field, from politics to economics, from medicine to culture, embodies exactly this aspect. By maintaining its relationship with its own limit as a state of endless crisis, Technic is able to freeze it into a suspended condition. For example, the current epidemic of mental illness is not presented as a symptom of Technic’s own limit, as it encounters the resistance of life, but rather as a problem of life itself that Technic has to tackle and fix through socio-medical means. Like Saint Augustin denied the existence of evil, defining it instead as the contingent absence of good, so Technic denies the existence of anything that would authentically escape it, defining it instead as a possibility that hasn’t as yet been fulfilled. For example, life’s mortality is included within Technic’s cosmology as an as-yet- unreached (but by no means unreachable) state of immortality; medicine and medical technologies are working on it, and it is only a matter of time - or so the discourse goes - before we can achieve it. Of course, the notion of immortality as infinite presence is not in the slightest a discourse over life as such, but merely an application to life of the very temporal structure of Technic itself.
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Federico Campagna - Technic and Magic