IVIV (12): 195-197

[David Morris]

Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:
> alice wellintown asks:
>
>> How can any reader of V. and GR and M&D and AtD say that P's texts do not ascribe agency to technology?...
>
>from GR 521 a very explicit pointer to THEY -- the actual (and always human) agents of the world.
> (BTW, did you notice that paragraph begins  "Yes but Technology only responds [...] 'All very well to talk about...' "
>
>
And Alice earlier wrote:
>>
>>To suffer the constant anxiety that mysterious powers may be manipulating human life is to be de facto, haunted by demiurgic phantasms, and thus to suffer the oppression that characterizes cabalistic gnosticism, even while the question of its basis in reality remains open.

And I think Alice's quote here (it IS a quote, right?  Not Alice's
words) fits perfectly w/ Monte's point:  Ascribed agency of technology
is (most likely) the product of **internal** anxiety, a projection of
a system (life) onto an inanimate thing, a fetishization.

And Alice later wrote:
"According to P-texts  there is a drive within us to establish systems
at the expense of differentiation. He has
it, and we have it, and They have it."
[...]
"According to the P-texts, the drive to establish systems at the
expense of the other(s) or differentiation, on the social level, and
we can say, on the aesthetic level, leads to repressive technocratic
society and an art that is only one tool of the repressive system."

Right.  So you agree.  The projections of systems of imagined life
(agency) onto technology is a perversity, a falsehood, and is to be
fought, avoided.

David Morris