Thursday, December 1, 2011

"Originary Technicity"

I am wondering about the limits of a thinking that makes a kind of automatism fundamental to thought (and presumably everything else). This sort of claim seems to undermine the truth-normative grounds for accepting it. Having just read Originary Technicity by Arthur Bradley (an excellent book), my suspicion is that this kind of discourse--one that sees "technology" (with or without scare quotes) at the heart of the human-- leads into a circle that cannot be escaped by radicalizing the insight, but that there is a fundamental impasse here. Bradley sees the impasse, but I think he wants to radicalize the discourse of technicity, although he gives no indication how this might work.

I should say that I do find these sorts of claims very convincing, particularly those of Derrida and Stiegler (but Deleuze has his own bag which I am not really up to commenting on). But they seem to lead to an inescapable aporia. They probably lead back to Heidegger (of course one could substitute any number of other thinkers who take the conditions of truth seriously as more than an effect of 'differance,' but Heidegger for me). The strength of this sort of thinking is that it critiques the residual anthropocentrism in Heidegger from a perspective that is not merely axiological, but has some argumentative traction. Yet it seems like it tends to collapse back into Heidegger, and I'm not entirely satisfied with that.

Sorry if this is too terse, it's hard to find time for this sort of thing. Please comment if you have something to ask or add.

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