Fascism is a technologically equipped primitivism

Although fascism rallies to the defense of the main icons of a bourgeois ideology that has become conservative (family, private property, moral order, patriotism), while mobilizing the petty bourgeoisie and the unemployed workers who are panic-stricken by economic crisis or disillusioned by the socialist movement's failure to bring about a revolution, it is not itself fundamentally ideological. It presents itself as what it is – a violent resurrection of myth calling for participation in a community defined by archaic pseudovalues: race, blood, leader. Fascism is a technologically equipped primitivism. Its factitious mythological rehashes are presented in the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion. it is thus a significant factor in the formation of the modern spectacle, and its role in the destruction of the old working-class movement also makes it one of the founding forces of present-day society. But since it is also the most costly method of preserving the capitalist order, it has generally ended up being replaced by the major capitalist states, which represent stronger and more rational forms of that order.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Soul Bay Press, 2012) p. 88

A machine is merely a supplementary limb

Man, he said, was a machinate mammal. The lower animals keep all their limbs at home in their own bodies, but many of man's are loose, and lie about detached, now here and now there, in various parts of the world – some being kept always handy for contingent use, and others being occasionally hundreds of miles away. A machine is merely a supplementary limb; this is the be all and end all of machinery. We do not use our own limbs other than as machines; and a leg is only a much better wooden leg than any one can manufacture.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 223

Man's soul is a machine-made thing

Man's very soul is due to the machines; it is a machine-made thing: he thinks as he thinks, and feels as he feels, through the work that machines have wrought upon him, and their existence is quite as much as sine quâ non for his, as his for theirs. This fact precludes us from proposing the complete annihilation of machinery, but surely it indicates that we should destroy as many of them as we can possibly dispense with, lest they should tyrannise over us even more completely.

Samuel Butler, Erewhon (Penguin Books, 1970) p. 207

The megalopolis of the excluded

In fact, after the pluralist era of sustainable staying-put in the different neighbourhoods of registered urban land – a form of stationary settlement that once in antiquity, introduced the notion of 'citizenship', as deriving from political localization, and with it, ultimately, of the 'legally constituted state' of nations – the era of habitable circulation is now dawning with the transpolitical delocalization that is now overturning the geopolitics of settlement in the age of globalization. And this is happening at the precise moment that the teletechnologies of information are ensuring that sedentary man is at home everywhere, and the nomad nowhere, beyond the provisional accommodation offered by a now pointless transhumance. That transhumance is now taking place, not only from one country to another. Now people are displaced within their very homeland from their heartland to some vague territory where refugee camps have not only taken over from the shanty towns of days gone by, but from the towns. The megalopolis of the excluded of all stripes, pouring in from all sides, has now come to rival the all-too-real megalopolis of the included, the ultracity.

Paul Virilio, The Futurism of the Instant (Polity Press, 2010) pp. 2-3

The city as such is disappearing

Growing familiarity with the world-city and the city-world can lead to a feeling [...] that the city as such is disappearing. Of course, urbanization continues on all sides, but changes to the organization of labour, insecurity – that dark downside of mobility – and the technologies imposing on each individual, via television and the Internet, creating a sense of a geared-down, omnipresent centre, make contrasts between town and country or urban and non-urban increasingly meaningless.

Marc Augé, Non-Places (Verso, 2008) p. xv

Those who deny all other things the ability to learn lose the ability to learn from their own mistakes

The delusion of control—the conviction, apparently immune to correction by mere facts, that the world is a machine incapable of doing anything but the things we want it to do—pervades contemporary life in the world’s industrial societies. People in those societies spend so much more time dealing with machines than they do interacting with other people and other living things without a machine interface getting in the way, that it’s no wonder that this delusion is so widespread. As long as it retains its grip, though, we can expect the industrial world, and especially its privileged classes, to stumble onward from one preventable disaster to another. That’s the inner secret of the delusion of control, after all: those who insist on seeing the world in mechanical terms end up behaving mechanically themselves. Those who deny all other things the ability to learn lose the ability to learn from their own mistakes, and lurch robotically onward along a trajectory that leads straight to the scrapheap of the future.

John Michael Greer, 'The Delusion of Control' on The Archdruid Report (URL: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.se/2015/06/the-delusion-of-control.html, 24/06/2015)

Poetry is language's excess

In order to accelerate the circulation of value, meaning is reduced to information, and techno-linguistic devices act as the communicative matrix. The matrix takes the place of the mother in the process of generating language.

But language and information do not overlap, and language cannot be resolved in exchangeability. In Ferdinand de Saussure's parlance, we may say that the infinity of the parole exceeds the recombinant logic of the langue, such that language can escape the matrix and reinvent a social sphere of singular vibrations intermingling and projecting a new space for sharing, producing, and living.

Poetry opens the doors of perception to singularity.

Poetry is language's excess: poetry is what in language cannot be reduced to information, and is not exchangeable, but gives way to a new common ground of understanding, of shared meaning: the creation of a new world.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi, The Uprising (semiotext(e), 2012) p. 147

No more illusions about technology

No more illusions about technology. We do not control what we produce. Knowing how to do it doesn't mean we know what we are doing. Let's try to be a little more modest, and let's try to understand the riddle of what we produce. Inventions, the creations of scientists are riddles which expand the field of the unknown, so to speak. And there we have an inversion. This inversion is not pessimistic per se, it's an inversion of principle. We no longer start from a positivistic or negativistic idea, we start from a relativistic idea. The problem is the following: technology is a riddle, so let's work on the riddle and stop working only on technology.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) pp. 76-77

The invention of the boat was the invention of shipwrecks

In classic Aristotelian philosophy, substance is necessary and the accident is relative and contingent. At the moment, there's an inversion: the accident is becoming necessary and substance relative and contingent. Every technology produces, provokes, programs a specific accident. For example: when they invented the railroad, what did they invent? An object that allowed you to go fast, which allowed you to progress – a vision à la Jules Verne, positivism, evolutionism. But at the same time they invented the railway catastrophe. The invention of the boat was the invention of shipwrecks. The invention of the steam engine and the locomotive was the invention of derailments. The invention of the highway was the invention of three hundred cars colliding in five minutes. The invention of the airplane was the invention of the plane crash. I believe that from now on, if we wish to continue with technology (and I don't think there will be a neolithic regression), we must think about both the substance and the accident – substance being both the object and its accident.

Paul Virilio, Pure War (Semiotext(e), 2008) p. 46

A Luddism of the human machinery

There is a whole Luddism to be invented, a Luddism of
the human machinery
that feeds Capital.

Tiqqun, 'How To?' on http://www.tiqqun.info/ (15/03/15)

The more informed man is the more the desert expands

Man, fascinated with himself, constructs his double, his intelligent specter, and entrusts the keeping of his knowledge to a reflection. We're still here in the domain of cinematic illusion, of the mirage of information precipitated on the computer screen – what is given is exactly the information but not the sensation; it is apatheia, this scientific impassibility which makes it so that the more informed man is the more the desert of the world expands around him, the more the repetition of information (already known) upsets the stimuli of observation, overtaking them automatically, not only in memory (interior light) but first of all in the look, to the point that from now on it's the speed of light itself which limits the reading of information and the important thing in electronic-information is no longer the storage but the display.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 46

A society of laborers without labor

Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical development had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.
However, this is so only in appearance. The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society. the fulfilment of the wish, therefor, like the fulfilment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating. It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. Within this society, which is egalitarian because this is labor's way of making men live together, there is no class left, no aristocracy of either a political or spiritual nature from which a restoration of the other capacities of man could start anew. Even presidents, kings, and prime ministers think of their offices in terms of a job necessary for the life of society, and among the intellectuals, only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living. What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them. Surely, nothing could be worse.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998) pp. 4-5

Knowledge and thought have parted company for good

But it could be that we, who are earth-bound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do. In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1998) p. 3

The crisis of homogeneous space

The crisis of dimension thus appears as the crisis of the whole or, in other words, as the crisis of the substantial, homogeneous space, inherited from archaic Greek geometry, to the benefit of an accidental, heterogeneous space where parts and fractions become essential once again. Urban topology has, however, paid the prize for this atomization and disintegration of figures, of visible points of reference which promote transmigrations and transfigurations, much in the same way as landscapes suffered in the face of agricultural mechanization. The sudden breaking up of whole forms and the destruction of the entity caused by industrialization is, however, less perceptible within the space of the city – despite the destructuring of suburbia – than it is in time, in the sequential perception of urban appearances. In fact, for a long time now transparency has replaced appearances. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the depth of field of classical perspective has been renewed by the depth of time of advanced technology.

Paul Virilio, 'The Overexposed City' in Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Columbia Books of Architecture, 1998) p. 549

The technique of construction and the construction of technique

Along with the technique of construction, there is, one must not forget, the construction of technique, the ensemble of spatial and temporal mutations which continually reorganize on an everyday basis the aesthetic representations of contemporary territory. Constructed spaces is thus not simply the result of the concrete and material effect of its structures, its permanence and its architectonic or urbanistic references, but also the result of a sudden proliferation, an incessant multiplying of special effects, which, with consciousness of time and distance, affects perception of the environment.

Paul Virilio, 'The Overexposed City' in Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Columbia Books of Architecture, 1998) p. 547

Arrival supplants departure

With the advent of instantaneous communications (satellite, TV, fiber optics, telematics) arrival supplants departure: everything arrives without necessarily having to depart.

Paul Virilio, 'The Overexposed City' in Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Columbia Books of Architecture, 1998) p. 544

A time that instantaneously exposes itself

Only a short time ago, the opening of the city's gates was determined by the alternating of day and night. Today, however, since we not only open the shutters but also the television, daylight itself has been changed. A false electronic day, whose only calendar is based on "commutations" of information bearing no relationship whatsoever to real time, is now added to the solar day of astronomy, electric light and the dubious "daylight" of candles. Chronological and historical time, which passes, is this succeeded by a time that instantaneously exposes itself. On the terminal's screen, a span of time becomes both the surface and the support of inscription: time literally or, rather, cinematically surfaces.

Paul Virilio, 'The Overexposed City' in Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Columbia Books of Architecture, 1998) p. 544

Civilisation's stoves

At length he replied that when all was said and done, the stove flames of world civilisation were probably the very flames which fed the heart's inextinguishable distress, and it is also an open question, old woman, whether the body itself is not better off in an environment colder than that engendered by the flickering flames of civilisation's stoves. True, the world has great superficial beauty when it is at its best, in the murmuring groves of California, for instance, or in the sungilded palm-avenues of the Mediterranean, but the heart's inner glow grows so much the more ashen, the more brilliantly the diamonds of creation shine upon it. But for all that, old woman, I have always loved creation, and always tried to squeeze out of it al that I possibly could.

Halldór Laxness, Independent People (Harvill Press, 2001) p. 353

It is a desire to stand in the ritual unfolding of the world that inspires me to build, rather than only wander and see, for to build is to participate more fully in the great cycles of natural change. In building, I do not propose a return to nature, much less a return to primitivism, but an alignment of modern technology, including that of architecture, with cycles of change and the great powers both active and latent in the world.

Lebbeus Woods, Origins (Architectural Association, 1985) p. 42

Tekniken som räddare av liv, och räddare från liv. Mer än något annat är tekniken ett medel för att undkomma den direkta livserfarenheten, att skyla nakenheten som det medför att vara hud mot hud med tillvaron.
Genom teknologin skapas en värld dränerad på mänsklighet, och genom teknologin erbjuds vi en tillflyktsort från detta effektivitetens inferno. Framsteget biter sig självt i svansen: det konstruerar omtänksamma robotar för att fylla frånvaron av den omtänksamma människa som är upptagen i robotkonstruktion.

Helena Granström, Alltings Mått (Ruin, 2008) pp. 116-117