----- Original Message ----- From: "Ted Winslow" <egwinslow at rogers.com>
What if, as Marx assumes, capitalism is inconsistent with the full development of rational self-consciousness. Employing more modern language, what if there is a significant irreducible aspect of psychopathology in the mentality dominant in it.
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Doesn't this presuppose that we know rational self-consciousness is? Is arationality or irrationality in social life eliminable and how could we know and wouldn't that be a prediction either way the answer was arrived at?
This is not inconsistent with the achievement of a great deal of insight into the nature of reality. Newtonian physics, for instance, was obviously powerfully insightful though it came from a deeply disturbed mind. Newton suffered a paranoid psychotic breakdown in 1693. (Keynes, with the express purpose of calling in question the view of Newton and hence of Newtonian physics as the embodiment of "reason," emphasizes this aspect in his biographical essay. Collected Writings, vol. X, pp. 363-74)
============== Well that's what happens when one reads too many alchemy texts, stays terrified of women, poetry and music and has Locke as ones physician......
If this is so there will be important aspects of modern science and technology that reflect not rationality but psychopathology. Even those features of work that embody science and technology will then not be wholly determined by unalterable features of nature itself but by the particular psychologically constrained ways of thinking about nature and technology characteristic of capitalism.
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Given that it's possible to slow and even stop the speed of light, nature seems to be a lot more malleable - in principle - than we thought we could imagine. And, if Richard Gott is right, it's only a matter of time before anyone who wants to can build different space-time systems in their basements.
If labour process engineering, for instance, is done by minds driven in important ways by irrational defences against persecutory anxiety the resulting technology will embody an irrationally based need to sadistically and obsessively dominate others, to treat them with contempt ("idiot proofing"), and to "fragment" both the production process as a whole and the individual jobs it involves. Taylorism illustrates this. The lack of individual autonomy and the "specialization and division" characteristic of work would then be to some extent expressions of the psychopathology.
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So what would a paranoid-proof technological system look like? Who/what is an idiot?
Among other things this would make the technology inefficient in comparison with what would be developed by minds free from these limitations.
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What would be the meaning of efficiency if we had a different culture of property and contract? If we designed all our technological devices-appliances-systems up to the limits of the 2nd law of thermodynamics would that solve the problems of human suffering via domination etc.?
In particular, a properly designed technology would attempt to facilitate the development and full use of the capacities of the producers - not merely to make the labour process more efficient but also to make it "worthy of [the producers'] human nature."
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Who gets to determine the meaning of proper?
It would also have eliminated those aspects of its view of those capacities that reflect irrational paranoia and contemptuousness. A labour process that developed and made use of these capacities would then, in combination with other social arrangements having the same effect, also set free a great deal of creativity and intelligence that is now stifled by the alienated character of modern work, creativity and intelligence that would find one of its outlets in improving the science and technology embodied in the process.
Ted
============== So, if everyone was a scientist in some minor way [Marx, De Solla Price, Perelman], we'd no longer be paranoid or manifest various other forms of 'fear of the other'?
Respecting epistemic incompleteness in a Godelian world[s],
Ian