https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=CcsU7WMfr3o
So hello everybody, I would like to introduce you to Christian Roy. Christian is an independent scholar. He has written a book on traditional festivals, which you can probably see just behind us here. He is on the International Jacques Ellul Society Board. So he’s an expert on Jacques Ellul. He’s also an expert on Technicity, the media. And he also happens to be a member of my parish and a friend of mine. And so we’ve been talking for a while about symbolism. He also has a very deep interest in orthodoxy and symbolism and how all of this comes together. And so we’re going to have a discussion which is going to center around Technicity, the author Jacques Ellul, who he’s an expert on. But it’ll probably spill over into all kinds of interesting things. And so I’m really looking forward to talking with him. This is Jonathan Pageot. Welcome to the Symbolic World. So Christian, maybe you can tell us a little bit more about yourself and maybe a little bit about… You were just at a conference just now in Toronto. Maybe you can tell us a bit about that. Yes, it was the… The 28th Annual Conference of the Media Ecology Association. It was in Toronto, which happens to be one of the seats of, in a sense, of reflection on media as an issue, in a sense philosophically, but also practically. There’s such a thing as the Toronto School of Communication, including some of the other schools in the world. There’s such a thing as the Toronto School of Communication, including such luminaries as Marshall McLuhan and Notri Pryde, a great biblical scholar. Even Glenn Gould, the pianist, had some interesting thought and practice around the uses of media. The list could go on. But one can point out here that for many of these people, I want to take also the religious with Father Walter J. Ahm, who worked on the contrast between oral and written alphabetic cultures. Many of these cultures, many of these thinkers have in common that they have a very deep personal faith that informs all their thinking. And it’s certainly no coincidence because being rooted in tradition is possibly the best vantage point to have enough distance from our modern environment, which most of us take for granted, to see what’s actually happening, to see the patterns from a certain distance. And by, for instance, historicizing it or being rooted in a natural religious practice when you enter into an experiential world that is not the same as the modernity around you. And of course, I have the mental patterns to just to have imbibed intellectually this whole tradition to have categories to point out these differences with the current times and the evolutions that happened over time, the transformations. Well, one of the interesting ways of characterizing this media ecological approach, as it’s been termed, is that in it, media are not seen as means of transportation of data, but of transformation of human beings, of ways of being. Because they all involve certain different foci of attention with different senses, different relations to time and space that are entailed, all refashioned by different, by new ways of communication. In communication is not a neutral conveyance of one bit of data from point A to point B. Everything is in the way of the common way of being and of moving between these two artificially separated points. It’s it’s it means being in media res in the like in the Latin expression, being in the middle of things to understand that that gap, which isn’t a gap. That’s what the life actually is. And I think I think that it’s so important to talk about this now because I would say that for several general for several decades, we were presented media as almost a transparent. Yeah, we were people were trying to convince us that media was transparent. It was only this means of of transparent communication. But now as political discourse starts to fragment, as conflicts start to arise in society, worse, we’re noticing more and more to what extent selection, even just the selection of information that that attention is being pointed to is already such a frame that to imagine. If we imagine that even the actual structures of media themselves, their matter of distribution, the way they frame space or their spray, the frame, so already all of this tension. Yes, the way that they frame attention ends up manipulate not necessarily manipulating, but participating in the way that information is received. And because of the breakdown, we see it more and more because because we can see our enemy do it. Yeah, we we know we don’t see that we probably do it, too. But we can see our enemy do it because we have that that distance from from what’s going on. And we have actually because we we frame our discourse and communication the same way. We have much more in common with the with the with our current so-called adversary or enemy that we did with the people we claim say to return to, you know, that we’re part of the same world. And that’s what’s important to understand, because that’s the constant trap. And of course, there’s been plenty of of of movements that have been critical of modernity. OK, OK, we’ll just mobilize against that. See, but but counterrevolution assumes revolution and takes the same forms. Yes, it’s all based on project mobilization. So you end up and you may invoke some values from the past. But in practice, that you’re actually a modern movement and one probably even more efficient as a modern movement because you have the reassuring references to the past. Some of the fascist groups did try to to, let’s say, use some traditional ideas or some imagery, traditional imagery. But it was only a way to give a fuel to their to their modern project. Yeah, or they might not. Well, we can’t even give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they were even sincere about that. But they were fooled by by by by think, OK, we just have to take sides firmly against that and mobilize our energies against. But mobilization is already modernity. And the more you’re fully mobilized, the more modern you are. Yeah, yeah. So maybe let’s let’s go with the loop because I Jacky Lule is a thinker that I do not know much about. But many people who watch my videos, many people who I’m in contact with, they keep telling me that I need to spend some time with the Lule and to understand him a little more. And so I knew that I had my expert here with me. And so this is my chance as well to discover a little bit about him. Maybe you can tell us a bit about his own because he was converted to Christianity and then his own intellectual progress, you could say. What are the things that were important to him? Well, I’m tempted to to to to to approach this as a historian in terms of events. What is the Lule known for? Well, it’s for he came he burst onto the scene, a treat international scene and and the English speaking scene in particular in 1964 with a translation of his already 10 year old book on technique, as he called it, because it was translated as the technological society. So he came to global awareness in 1964. But that was just 35 years after he had been sort of involved in that scene. But there’s just some there’s, I think, significant anecdotes about how that came about because it’s Aldous Huxley who came across the original French edition from 1954. And he was so impressed by this description of technique as it was. And he thought, well, that this that’s matches what I with what I described in Brave New World. And it’s important to bring this out at this moment where we’re being refashioned by technology and always so he convinced by different channels, the publisher not to publish this translation. It had quite an impact on 60s cultures. And but the irony is that actually when Aldous Huxley’s book came out in 1930, Brave New World came out in the same year in French translation. It was picked up by Elul and his friend Bernard Charbonneau actually, who we said, well, wait a minute, that’s that’s that confirms what I’ve been taking on my own. So there was an influence of Huxley on on Elul and then Elul came back to Huxley. They were taking the point is they were taking the same way. But they hadn’t. It took them 30 or 30 more years to become aware. But it was only one way because Huxley couldn’t have suspected that. Someone was thinking it’s almost kids were thinking the same way in France, southwestern France and Bordeaux in 1930. And they had already devised a kind of critical and even revolutionary approach to counter these phenomena, which they saw in their daily life. And when I say they, it has to be said that it was this this this friend that came to know a couple of years before called Bernard Charbonneau, who he acknowledged that he wouldn’t have, you know, have said anything original in this in the in the in terms of social ideas without meeting him. It would just have been. You have to understand that Jacques Elul had a kind of twin conversion around 1930. Wanted well, he had a conversion experience to Christianity, which he understood in terms of Kierkegaard and Karl Barthes on the one hand. And on the other hand, because his father was ruined by the economic crisis, he had a kind of conversion to Karl Marx. So Karl Marx and Karl Barthes both form two forms of dialectic. So is every terms very much of dialectics of usually exclusive opposites. So that’s what his framework at the time that he came across Bernard Charbonneau sort of took the place in his social thinking of Karl Marx. But he remained a Marx expert all his life. But basically would have been some sort of Christian Marxist if he hadn’t come across this almost a class clown at the school they were going to. And so one day came over to Jacques Elul who was kind of a kind of a nerd, really a bookish kind of guy and invited him to to to to a camping exhibition outside and then in the countryside. And then they had these unending discussions. And Jacques Elul was sort of overwhelmed by Charbonneau’s sort of effortless grasp of culture. But most importantly, his way of seeing the patterns in a embodied daily life. And he had already come to certain realizations about about the nature of technological modern society that few people would would come around to. You know, Heidegger and Frankfurt School were still some few years off. But on his own, just there’s two experiences that are foundational for this Charbonneau’s intuition of technique. It’s one that realizing that the Bordeaux streets in which he had grown up from almost overnight, the cats and the children had disappeared. They were replaced by cars. Overnight, the city had turned from a human environment to a network of pathways for the circulation of these mechanical motorized engines. And that was true of the whole of society. But no one talked about it. And it was a time of the Great Wars. And of course, it was also a motorized war. But he understood also because he was too young to go to war, but he saw his big brother come back and being kind of shell-shocked and incapable of talking about his experience. And what struck him is the way a society can be mobilized in the people’s minds, as well as all the resources of the territory it controls. See, there’s something similar and comparable about the impact of something like the car and modern war as a demonstration of what industrial society really is. The mobilization of everything in human reality as resource to be concentrated by the means to deploy the apparatus for whatever end. The end doesn’t matter. The point is the mobilization in itself. And he understood that the things like World Wars or totalitarianism, they were just out of the ordinary expressions of something that is just the fabric of daily life as it mutates. He called this the great molting of mankind. Once a man has triumphed over nature, it’s no longer something that pressures him so much. But for that, a man had to rely on total social organization. So now he has to defend. Man has to defend against society as his new environment, his second nature. So he understood that the struggle, both personal freedom and nature are in peril, my brother’s society, for the same reasons. And therefore they are a common cause. I’ve shown that he was the inventor of political ecology in France and possibly worldwide in the 1930s. He put things in something that started in America or Germany in the 1960s. But the movement that he started locally, we tell you, can be seen clearly as a kind of ecological revolutionary movement. Conceived that, not in terms of fighting this or that ideology, but the common structures of the modern world, the state, the media, propaganda, modes of transportation. And the two changes would affect how people eat, how they read their paper. So how do you see this is taking a little bit of attention? But it’s interesting to me because what seems to have happened now in the way that things have stepped themselves up is that the modern state and the modern media apparatus, all of this has now taken over the ecological discussion and is using it for its own means. It seems to be to be using it to also to, let’s say, to manipulate people into certain directions. It doesn’t seem to have anything revolutionary about it anymore. Well, exactly. And no one was better placed than Bernard Charbonneau to point this out in the first decade of the actually existing French ecological movement, which was sort of started seemingly after 1968. In 1980, he came out with a book which he called, well, The Green Light, The Self-Critique of the Ecological Movement, which I translated for Broomsbury last year. It’s the only Charbonneau book out there. So that has good introductions to his talk, not by me, but so if people want to know more about Charbonneau, that’s it. But he could, with this experience going back 50 years, he could see that the Green Movement had gotten mired in the quest for media attention. And for presence in the political system, which, of course, is paid by with media attention. So this critique of media is and as a kind of categorical imperative of our presence in this world is central to his critique of what the Green Movement had become. And now it was in turn, he calls it The Green Light because it’s 1970 was the decree as the year of the environment by the Council of Europe. So it’s OK. No one would touch this topic in Europe until then. But it was a red light. I knew it personally because you’ve written tons of books about it and no publisher would touch it. And all of a sudden, 1970, it comes from the Council of Europe. Everyone broaches these issues. The green washing pump started rolling because it started from bureaucratic centers. So it was it was already a kind of discourse that sort of papered over the same kind of society. And the people who were trying to challenge this kind of society, they sort of did by taking on the same means through which this society propagated itself. Well, they were sort of corrupted by it. So that’s why you have a kind of green version of the same kind of technological society. It’s interesting because what I’ve seen is because I look at my kids, you know, we do homeschool, but they use sometimes books from the school system and everything. And I can see that it seems to be it seems to be replacing a kind of the kind of guilt system that was in the Catholic Church in the 1950s and 60s where you had to really feel guilty about being alive, basically, you know, being a human, you was being a sinner. And you have to live in this guilt. And now we replace that kind of original sin guilt with this guilt of living in consumer culture where you have to consume and you have to buy things wrapped in plastic. You can’t avoid it. But then you have this guilt. You have to atone. You have to recycle them. All these gestures, these kind of social things you you have to do in order to atone for your your sins of just existing in the world. And you can see in the books like my son has a math book. And in his math book, all the problems are all if you cut so many trees in this area, you know, how long will it take for the trees if they grow in such years? How long will it take them to grow back? So it’s like all the mathematical problems have become ecological problems. And it really struck me because I heard that in Quebec in the in the 40s and 50s, the math problems were all Catholic. Calculating how many challenges are are used and everything. And so I thought, wow, it’s a great way to indoctrinate children is to how many Chinese you can convert Chinese kids. Can you convert? And so and so it seems like it has become this, you know, even though I can understand the need for for ecology, I find myself resisting not at the idea that we have to take care of the world around us. But I find myself resisting because I see it now as part of this apparatus, this kind of strange, techno powerful apparatus of control. Well, yeah. And one of the points that Chauvin made early on is that probably the the the the the need for ecological environmental measures would it would not come about as the effect of some grassroots environment activism by marginal groups. It’s when the real people who had managed the the the exploitation and ruin of the earth, when they couldn’t do that anymore, they would manage trying to rescue something of it. But it would be the same people, the same system. Right. But that even called it well, for him, it raised the specter of eco fascism because as it was one illustration of the way the chaos that is spread by by by this constant encroachment of organization needs to be managed by still more organization, which in turn generates more chaos. So so this the so this builds up the drive towards social totalization, which source is saw a danger of the industrial system reverting, well, reversing to to to kind of management of growth to a management of endless consumption, to a management of of of scarcity where everything would be precisely accounted for. But at the cost of personal freedom and the point when the big difference between him and, say, deep ecologists who want to make you guilty for being a human having where you grow the earth is that for him, even even the sense of nature, that this is something to be appreciated and preserved. This can only occur to a human. So so he was just as concerned and as for for the preservation of freedom as far as for nature, which was for him in practice indistinguishable for him. Freedom was a very physical thing. It was, you know, that in his childhood, he used to go to almost down the street and be in the forest. And we as years went by, the suburbs would eat up more and more. And and and nature as a complete experience was inaccessible. And you are in a complete, you know, box store or environment and you can’t get anywhere except by car. For him, that freedom and nature are none are one in that experience of the private that that that that the modern industrial society creates. It’s it’s it’s both concrete freedom as the ability to move around in a differentiated space in the elements of air and water and earth and also free of having to follow standard procedures for every day life. I mean, our our our so-called instruments and devices are not neutral, you know, for that, in order for them to work. Well, we have to to adjust our behavior to them. We have to speak their language or even when they pretend it pretends to imitate ours. But that is so that we can integrate more their way of thinking, of operating. See, we have to become interoperable with our machines, which have to become interoperable with each other. That’s one of the things that the elite is famous for underlining these different laws of technique as the search for the one best way in every possible procedure and area of life. And as a totalizing process, you can’t just have it in one area and leave the other areas inefficient because it just won’t work in order for something to work efficiently. It has to work efficiently with every everything else has to be connected by the same rules to everything. So if you introduce one improvement in one area, everything has to sort of fall in line with it. You have to. And of course, since the improvement continues, everything has to constantly adapt to these new changes and even more efficiently and quickly. See, so there’s ever ever increasing in conformity and standardization, even as the process that drives it is the quest for convenience, personal freedom of choice, whatever. And then it’s because of that, because that interdependence and because things end up speeding up by the fact that everything has to adapt to themselves and the efficiency has to grow in every aspect. Then we realized that we’ve become slaves to our that we that we’ve actually like you said that we were cyborgs already. Yeah. And we are completely dependent on on these machines. And if we didn’t see it, let’s say, or very few people saw it with the automobile. Although now we can see it from a certain distance, we can see exactly what you said that now the entire layout of society has been made for cars. We have we have planned our cities in terms of cars, but with the cell phone that has now I mean, I think almost everyone who has any form of self-consciousness is aware of that problem of the problem of how we end up living. We end up adapting our life to to that to this object. Well, our our life means which means concretely our our our sensorium or management and awareness of space and time. I mean, people that have been articles, you know, by people whose whose whose job it is or not just their job, but their pleasure in life was to read books and comment upon them. They have observed that their attention span has drastically diminished. They can’t they can’t read a couple of paragraphs without fidgeting to check the because they’ve been literally rewired. I mean, it’s our our our, you know, our synapses are sort of our neural networks are sort of they become restructured by the stimuli that we become used to and addicted to. Yeah. So we’ve already been changed. We are cyborgs. We don’t have to have them attached to our bodies. Yeah. Well, that may come in no way. Of course, the phones will soon be inside our skulls. But that won’t make that much of a difference because we already are inside them. Yeah. We wear them or they may be wearing us. Yeah, that’s very fascinating. And I think that maybe I would I’d like to hear you talk about something you mentioned just before you were kind of going through and you mentioned the the relationship between the system, the increasing of the system, let’s say, and the increasing of chaos at the same time. And then the reaction of the system to those to that to that process, let’s say that’s something that really interests me. I tend I as you know, you followed some of my videos, I tend to talk about how the modern world seems to actually be a rising of extreme system and extreme chaos at the same time. Exactly. That those two things are coming up together because one feeds the other. Exactly. That’s exactly what Shavanu was saying. You wrote a whole book on that. Yeah. So maybe tell us a little bit about how Shavanu how Shavanu frames that. It’s hard to resume the entire book in small bits. I know. I know. Where do you take it from? Because it’s also it’s at the level that we’re so embedded in that kind of reality that we don’t see it. So where can you sort of put it in this sense? Oh, yeah. So he would. Well, let’s assume somewhat pre-modern conditions, you know, there are local customs, regular ways of doing things over a certain area and you tend to vary from locality to locality, et cetera. So you introduce you bring it OK, we’ll bring in a road or we’ll electrify it. What happens? Well, pretty soon the whole activity, rather economic or social, can sucked up by interaction with this road or with the TV that just came in. Well, you know, millennia or hundreds of years of customs just disappear overnight with the appearance of a TV screen. You know, I remember my first experience of strolling through a French village deep in the in the Burgen countryside in 1980. I was struck walking at night that there would be no one out there and you would see these screens flicker in every every house. And probably that wouldn’t have been the experience 30 years before that all these people with who had these very particularized local experience, ways of spending time together, maybe around the fire after supper, et cetera. And all of a sudden, they had this one one common awareness coming through the TV screen, this one common folklore which which it overcame and erased generations and centuries of ways of interacting or making sense of the of the world. And that’s what would mean, for instance, well, you know, even the local languages, it’s well known that, well, France wasn’t a French speaking country until 120 years ago. Most people would speak their own language. Same thing in Italy. There’s only two things that made most Italians speak Italian. Well, I guess there was the forced sort of standardization policies of the fascist regime. But even that was a that even that was an outgrowth of the First World War, which, you know, took peasants from everywhere and just put them in a place to fight. But yeah, true. And they were treated and the Italians were the worst at treating their own their own their own soldiers. I mean, it would be a temptation to go over to the other side because it wouldn’t be as it’s no wonder that fascism came out of that. But that’s where they all that’s why everyone learned Italian and the front lines and the back lines and the back lines. And the same thing for every modern nation state, which means the the elimination of all these particular cultures everywhere. And that was one of the big issues that Chabonou had. I guess he had in mind some kind of an international, local, the kind of internationalization that was happening in Italy, which was very, very important to the Italian population. And that was a kind of local homesteads or local local areas because even some the nation state as a stage to a kind of global uniform consciousness because the nation states are not modern creations. And so the effects would be linguistic, but they’ve also yet you have to be able to have a kind of a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just a language that is not just school them of course yeah to take them out yeah there’s a famous book uh by historian Eugene Weber describing this process called from peasants to frenchmen so that’s about what the third republic did in the late 19th century by by by basically taking all these peasants out of the middle ages and and putting them in rows in in the secular schools of the republic and just standing their uniform consciousness and punishing them if they spoke their own language language like britain etc so uh in a sense globalization continues this process but then with softer means but more like true seduction yeah uh i guess tv had done that on the national scale before but there’s a kind of soft totalitarianism inherent just to the technical system uh that that probably works better when it’s in many ways when it’s not under a hard totalitarian political regime uh the the the way uh yes american pop culture is the kind of universal language of that and wherever there’s a there’s any kind of electric media well that does impose itself as the kind of universal norm you know and and but what’s interesting about the american pop culture is that uh especially the music was that it was positing itself as a reaction yeah yeah right it’s positing itself as a kind of rebellious uh declaration of uh of uh of uh individual of uh you know giving into your desires yeah not participating in the system but then it it just got sucked into to the same process right yeah it became like you said a kind of uniform uniform uniform language of rebellion uh that could be managed because we all knew what it was like you can recognize a punk from every country yeah because they all look the same yeah these all these uh alternative rebel cultures became just well well there was this term that arose you know in the early 80s when i grew up you know there were in record store there would be the rock bin and then the alternative bin but there were still records being marketed and made exactly the same way you just have the mainstream uh consumer niche and then you have the reverse alternative consumer niche but it’s they’re still consumer niches they all function they’re all the same so that that’s one of the ways in which the medium the format is much more important than the content uh uh you have different different uh contents of the same structure of individual mass consumption consumption with with uh which is not being very refined you know by by finding these ever finer niches of of aesthetic or ideological uh association which by being identified by the proper algorithms then you can tailor make things so that they will fit meet their expectations and therefore standardize them even more because they’re made to fit what they receive and they develop a taste for it and forget whatever can trouble this form of sensibility that becomes self-referential and fortified in its own assumptions and the more, ever more intolerant of anything that disturbs it in the same way. There’s less and less distance between desire and gratification or actually we expect being gratified actually. Gratification comes first and then this desire goes to meet it. Well yeah that’s intense but I’ve seen that myself in my own experience you know now putting out YouTube videos I start to perceive the algorithm and the content that I’m doing is strange it doesn’t you know because I’m talking about symbolism, religious symbolism but then also movies and everything and so I can see that the algorithm is struggling to to fit me to please place you yeah but then once in a while I make a video and I know when I’m making the video that I’m going right into the algorithm like I made a video to call Alex Jones, symbolism of conspiracy theory, symbolism of Alex Jones right and that I knew when I put that out that video and I put it I did another video called symbolism of propaganda yeah and and I knew when I put out the video that I was moving I was going right into kind of anti social justice whatever part of the algorithm and exactly what I expected happened you know within a few weeks I had 100,000 views and and but then I was like then that’s dangerous because it says okay well if I make more videos like that then I can keep the attention and so you have to whip yourself to to not just to not fall into not to be just not to be something that feeds the machine and I’ve seen YouTubers do exactly that where for a while I was interested in their content then all of a sudden they found this this wheel yeah they can feed and then they just put out all their content ends up being the same kind of stuff become formatted by the algorithm yeah and they don’t realize that you know because it’s it’s really like you get a pellet because you get views you get likes you get even money from yeah it’s very it’s very friendly but what do you think about because there seems to be right now on the internet there seems to be a war of of information you know you you have the big the big tech companies trying to censor you have alternative tech companies coming out and then not being you know like gab for example doesn’t even appear on google and is had was branded right away as an extreme right wing group but I mean it wasn’t more the people on gab weren’t more right wing than the people on twitter you know it was just a kind of like the the guy the one one of the one of the mass shooters recently I remember the articles that came out right away when they came out they said a gab user so and so when I then shot a school but that person was also on twitter and used twitter on gab equally yeah but then they said the gab user because gab was pariah in this kind of information control that seems to be going on we see and patreon we saw censorship we’re seeing it on youtube seeing demonetization and like little ways to to push the the attention of people in some directions seems to becoming more more transparent because also because of 2020 because the election is coming and you can see that they’re trying to direct the people’s information for for so but but what interesting is that you’re actually seeing the war because when television was there you didn’t see the war there was no war right there was three networks in the united states and there were and and canada with cdc and and there was that was it like that was they were feeding you with a spoon yeah this is reality just take it whereas now it feels like there’s a war for reality yeah uh you know which reality do you want and then then then you’ll get the whole world view that comes with it the whole package that take on reality which doesn’t need to to to to to to to fit anything out there particularly because it’s the whole well it’s the virtual reality experience of having this complete experiential world view that’s complete unto itself doesn’t matter if your guys in power or not it’s the same mental unit okay so this is what’s interesting in what you’re saying is that to a certain extent with you what you’re saying is that let’s say there’s several parties that are fighting this war information war that in a certain manner it does it doesn’t matter because the two sides have accepted the same reality yeah the same frame yeah and so because of that it does in a way doesn’t matter who wins because what matters is the medium itself or the manner in which information and technology it’s a power that that has which is the the most pernicious we could say yeah and the way whichever brand of reality you’re into well you’ll be you’ll be your brain will be sucked onto your screen or your your hand off device and and you won’t pay attention to your immediate surroundings you know and and that that’s that’s the upshot you you will be more and more a well a kind of organ of resource of that of that invisible wireless organism out there which is is now the real subject of i guess post-human history and you know it comes back to you know one of mcclewins famous aphorisms humans are just the sex organs of the machines they still need us you know to to as in a way kind of a kind of a third party to to to make a little detour through you know but but of course we’re promised a singularity where we will self-reproduce reproduce yeah they won’t need us anymore yeah and the singularity question is very interesting because what we’re seeing is this we can we can feel that we we’re slaves to this process because you have people warning you have all these people afraid of this this of the ai and what the ai will be and we have a whole mythological storytelling terminator of the matrix we have this whole mythological storytelling which is warning us of that problem but we know that it’s inevitable because there’s so much money and there’s so much power that that that the the fight is is going to happen well well well it’s already fine the fight the fight is just a one mode of entertainment within the same medium you know because whether you relish the prospect or dread it you’re still fascinated by it and you still pay bucks to see entertainment on that theme and it’s still going seeing these these dystopian movies doesn’t inspire people to to get off the grid no they want to see more of that of that genre see to feed their the the the the obsessions which are not different in kind from those are porn watchers you know which they probably are when they’re not watching that because also it’s the same logic getting kicks of of intensity you know having having i guess some of your some of your some of the the the levers of of of your psyche pulled in in in in efficient ways you know so it it it’s entertainment as whatever its content has the same underlying the same as the same logic or so we are we are hooked on the spectacle of our own demise you know it’s the most entertaining for way of approaching it that that is i mean it is fascinating because it we had a slew it’s a bit less now but we had a a whole slew of you know end of the world movies in the 2000s was non-stop every year there was two or three comets you know everything earthquakes doesn’t matter you know like and and we recently there was a whole slew of they remade the planet of the apes yeah in which the apes are the heroes yeah and the human beings are the the bad people the bad guys and so we are actually watching we are we’re watching our own demise you know we’re rooting for the other like we’re rooting for the enemy and this strange fascination with the with the demise of humanity also the constant suggestions you know that that machines might be well you know it it well germinator 2 was still optimistic if human if you machines can become more human maybe we can too and then you you have also these all these robots who strive to become human even because the humans like say let’s say alien force this this ruthless military that indulges in horrible experiments but if that represents humanity then the little the winona rider android who reads the the bible then has more humanity so we sort of do these these transfers we hope that there will be among whatever succeeds us whether it’s animal or machine there will be something that’s less uh mindlessly mechanical than we are yeah that’s really fascinating yeah definitely definitely so maybe we can we can kind of can finish off about talking a little bit more about one of the things that has been interesting to me has been discovering the notion of of technicity as a supplement something that i you know in terms of the garments of skin yeah and in terms of this idea of uh of adding layers to to to to something which is untouched or something which is pure it doesn’t really matter how you characterize it but this constant adding of layers and the the dual effect that it has uh on us and obviously we’re in an extreme version of this and it’s my understanding that that that group like illyar mcclellan they’ve also thought about that problem so so maybe we can talk about that a little bit and see see well uh yes because they’re just uh it struck me with your whole theory of garments of skin there’s something kind of like that in in elul i’m not sure that he focuses that much on on the garments of skin stage which someone at the media ecology uh conference rightly pointed out well that was the first technology yeah clothing right and and well mcclellan said houses are in this it’s also an extension of the skin yeah or so uh but uh elune in particular has has a biblical angle to this is there is is is of course he’s not just a sociologist there’s two two two um two streams to his thought and and they were sort of conceived and outlined together around the time of the of the war the sociological description of the way modern society is and then there’s the the theological assessment and sometimes on the same topic one kind of kind of non-judgmental relatively because he’s always kind of more realistic really and and then this the openly theological side and of course being the protestant that he is is a very very thorough biblical scholar so that he really uh analyzes the the the the the issues in terms of well the the first chapters of of of genesis and he wrote a whole book on called the the the meaning of the of the of the city as a critique of well uh these these extensions of of man that our city walls and and gathering together as a kind of uh he sees it purely in terms of of babel as a as a conscious objection of of god to be in the self-englobed human world uh to me that’s kind of kind of over the top i think you have more subtlety than that and then chalvano does too and he and he sort of there’s a subtle hint in the in the nature and christianity chapter of charles bonnard’s book the green light where he sort of there seems to be a subtle allusion to to well well uh sure we we have to to to to to find some some some shelter etc but well we were expelled in nature what do you expect you know yeah sure uh it’s like a little sort of uh uh he sees these protections that that that that man finds in his actual conditions as inherently a kind of disobedience to god and that’s that that that’s it and then at a later stage god and his mercy sort of integrates that after the fact in his plan of salvations for sort of for him for him the the city is just a kind of uh uh well okay man decided to live in city so i’ll make a heaven in jerusalem so because okay he’s used to i think there’s more i mean there’s more there’s there’s deeper symbolism i mean there’s more serious uh more deeper reasons for for for for that urban suburb symbolism of the lasting that eliot allows and i think it has to do also with the fact that he doesn’t have any notion of the icon for him just just the the idol right when you represent something visually that’s all there is you you put the screen between you and god and that’s it the idea of a mediation of a healthy mediation with with with yeltsin and even with god through uh concrete to to concrete objects is sort of anathema to his yes the kind of old calvinist reflex right so uh yeah but that’s interesting that he would see at least he would understand that you know he would have the wisdom to understand that the city is is that actually that he would understand that there’s a relationship between the problem of the image itself or the idol or any form of exterior manifestation and the city you know and and to see also the temple it’s i mean i don’t know if he probably wouldn’t go that far but to understand that the temple is also that you know that the temple is is isn’t is already a hint of how the city enclosure is transformed into into something else right for that for that to have that discussion seriously we need to to to read some of his writings on on this topic if we want to get into the theological aspects which are very much there always in the background in in as in mcclellan actually so so perhaps that could be a focus of some other discussion all right because yeah because right now i don’t think either of us is truly prepared to to get going that we should do a little bit more homework well i’ll leave you a chabonose book which is chapter on nature and christianity and then you get a really a grip of of of that what i call the bordo schools approach to these to these issues all right well thank you so much this has been a great discussion and i hope that we can go more into a little on this question particularly because it interests me very much later but then also talk about i think it would be interesting for people to talk a bit more about mcclellan as well because he was such i remember even when i studied in college and was studying in art and in the kind of post-modern world mcclellan was a staple where people would quote him and it’s only later that i discovered that he was a traditionalist catholic and then most of his analyses of what was happening was a critique and was it a celebration which most people took it as exactly yeah and so i think that that’s something that would be very interesting to to look into well also elu’s notion of symbolism because he has a very rigorous thinking about that around the different status of the word and the and the image well you can see how this relates to the the iconoclastic strand see the the the the is opposing a bit like the oral world of the experience of the word and the the visual experience of course of the image which the visual world being that of the the the what he calls the real as opposed to the oral world of the true real which comes from thing because in latin rest because you can focus on one thing at a time sort of pin it down and you see one aspect at the time which is non-contradictory as what what makes the oral experience of things in the world of course more symbolic is that it sort of implies that it’s never whatever you get is not the whole picture there’s different aspects that you could get in time and you and and and and you could you could theoretically circle it it’s not a visual thing like not like a like not like the bullet time of the matrix when you get it from all angles and add it up and you know that our oral experience is is fundamentally different from that there’s always seemingly contradictory aspect that coexist or even with what is given and is not given see there and that’s it becomes a revelation of something not given that that can come through an oral experience of the word or even of any perception because these it’s not it’s not the odds that so much an issue of using that organ as opposed to that but what is the ratio in the use of this organ which which which organ structures the whole economy of your senses you can you can you can hear things visually and you you you and you can see things orally see that’s that’s my clue in the territory of all right these kinds of things okay well i look very much forward to to going in that direction so guys thank you for your attention and if you’re interesting is interested kistan is part of the civilak world facebook group and he he he is known to get involved in discussions so uh so it might be a place where some of the discussion about this video we can have and see uh and see what kind of uh what kind of soil what can grow out of this soil so thanks again for your attention guys and i’ll see you soon if you enjoy the symbolic world content there’s a lot of things you can do to help us out if you’re not subscribed please do go ahead and share this to all your friends if you can get involved in the discussion we have a facebook group in which people can talk about these subjects i will put all those links in the description and also if you can please support us financially by going to my website www.thesymbolicworld.com support and i also have a patreon and a subscribe star so thanks again and i will see you soon