Date: Sat, 1 Apr 1995 11:37:47 -0500
From: Brad4d6-AT-aol.com
Subject: Re: A quiver of insults


I am here responding to the Fri 31 Mar 1995 21:17 EDT posting by (may I make
an assumption?) my kindred soul (at least we've been lumped together by
another respondent) Alan Sondheim.

>>Technology seems very involved with response.

This is a very important point.  Everything we do is a testing and probing
into <the thing-in-itself>, about which we learn, not "directly", but by
<its> *response* to our inquiry.  I open my eyes and see the same alarm clock
as was there beside my bed when I went to sleep last night (<--That
hypothesis, embedded in perception, is my probe into <what is>).  BANG!
 Oops! (presuming I'm still around to have an opinion...) Looks like the
True-Path loonies from Japan or the Jihad-ers or somebody replaced it with
something which *looked* like my alarm clock but was really a bomb....

But to be more "serious": Every time a carpenter aims his hammer at a nail,
he's testing out the hammer-nature of the "hammer", the nail-nature of the
"nail", etc.  It's a kind of quasi-conversation, in which the nail *responds*
to the hammering, etc.  This sends me off on the tangent of arguing, contra
Heidegger, that modern man's "technological" way of being in the world is not
really intrinsic to living with advanced technology  One *can* adopt an *open
to otherness* approach to technological activity (albeit capitalism does not
in the least facilitate this!!!!!): For instance, a person approaching a
computer program can (1) interrogate it as to its place in shaping persons'
form of life (Mcluhan's notion that the message of any medium is the changes
it induces in the pace, pattern and scale of human affairs ("Understanding
Media", p. 24)), and/or (2) let the program suggest tests which might be
undertaken to explore its behavior, not from the standpoint of propping up
business plans in which it may happen to be enmeshed, but from the standpoint
of disinterested understanding (Heidegger's "letting be"?).

I read the word "insult", and I am motivated to jump up from my chair and
consult my dictionary.  An insult, etymologically, is a *jumping in*.  At the
time I initially *jumped into* this mailing list, there had been *zero*
activity on it for several weeks.  My insalt(sic) was aimed at producing a
response.  It did indeed.  As far as insUlts in the more commonplace usage
are concerned, however, I believe persons should approach each other in
respect, especially, that those in power should approach the power-less with
respect, e.g., a professor approaching a student (and this is not just a
Levinas-ean bit of idealism, for, without the student, the professor would
have to do something else and likely less genteel to earn a living -- so it's
very important that students do not become aware of their power of the purse
over the institutions of higher (or at least inquisitorial) learning to which
they pay their good money to be intimidated by.

Speaking of insults, it does not seem that the person who "knocked" Ellul a
week or so ago (and proposed Deleuze to be much more important) ever
responded to my response to him/her -- or did I miss that posting?

Brad McCormick    


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