#post-history

[agonisms]

Currently, programmatic thought imposes itself everywhere. Both natural as well as cultural sciences tend to show that every finalistic and causal “explanation” is condemned to failure. Finalistic explanations have failed because they explain the present according to the future, that is, the concrete according to the abstraction “not yet.” And causal explanations have failed because they explain the present according to the past, that is, the concrete according to the abstraction “no longer.” It is possible to observe the same imposition of programmatic thought within the arts. Every current tendency demonstrates that reality is progressively experienced as an absurd game of chance, as a “happening.” But it is above all in the field of politics that the imposition of programmatic thought reveals its essence. If society’s behavior is progressively experienced and interpreted as absurdly programmed by programs without aim or purpose, the problem of freedom, which is the problem of politics, becomes inconceivable. From a programmatic perspective, politics, and therefore history, comes to an end.

Vilém Flusser- Post-History

[wedesireabridge]

[1748497274738pm]

“A 24/7 environment has the semblance of a social world, but it is actually a non-social model of machinic performance and a suspension of living that does not disclose the human cost required to sustain its effectiveness. It must be distinguished from what Lukács and others in the early twentieth century identified as the empty, homogenous time of modernity, the metric or calendar time of nations, of finance or industry, from which individual hopes of projects were excluded. What is new is the sweeping abandonment of the pretense that time is coupled to any long-term undertakings, even to fantasies of “progress” or development. An illuminated 24/7 world without shadows is the final capitalist mirage of post-history, of an exorcism of the otherness that is the motor of historical change.”

— Jonathan Crary, 24/7

[agonisms]

This programmatic ontology leads to the invention of computers and intelligent instruments, and to the transformation of society into a cybernetic system composed of functionaries and apparatus. For programmers, man is a functionary to be programmed to live in a symbolic context. Man is a being that is to be symbolized, for example, enumerated. Men are cyphers to be inserted into several formal games, for example statistics or perforated cards. Although the post-industrial society has not yet been effectively realized, we can observe everywhere how it is emerging. And we already have its models: Eichmann as model functionary, Kissinger as model programmer, and Auschwitz as post-industrial society. However, the programmers, these “new men,” have not yet become fully conscious of the ontology that sustains them. If we observe how they program, we will observe that they are not always aware that they are themselves programmed to program. The ontology that is dominating society functions, at the moment, only at the level of experience and has not yet been formalized. What is still missing for us is the equivalent of an Aristotle of the agrarian society and a Kant of the industrial society. What is urgent is to rethink the meaning of the term theory in this new context.

Vilém Flusser- Post-History

[wagner-univocal]

Post-History by Vilém Flusser “We must neither anthropomorphize nor objectify apparatus. We must grasp them in their cretinous concreteness, in their programmed and absurd functionality, in order to be able to comprehend them and thus insert them into meta-programs. The paradox is that such meta-programs are equally absurd games. In sum: what we must learn is to accept the absurd, if we wish to emancipate ourselves from functionalism. Freedom is conceivable only as an absurd game with apparatus, as a game with programs. It is conceivable only after we have accepted politics and human existence in general to be an absurd game. Whether we continue to be “men” or become robots depends on how fast we learn to play: we can become players of the game or pieces in it.”