Twilight Of The Machines - Part 5
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Part 5

jO Betty J. Meggers, Amazonia: Man and Culture in Counterfeit Paradise (Chicago: Aldine Atherton, 1971), PP. 108,158.

" Pierre Lemmonier, "Pigs as Ordinary Wealth," in Pierre Lemonnier, ed., Technological Choices: Transformation in Material Cultures since the Neolithic (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 132.

" Knauft, op.cit., p. 50. Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 39.

33 Maurice Bloch, Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 88.

34 The "rank-and-file" of organized labor is another product of these originals.

31 Robert L. Carneiro, "War and Peace," in S.P. Reyna and R.E. Downs, eds., Studying War: Anthropological Perspectives (Langhorn, PA: Gordon and Breach, 1994), p. 12.

36 Cited and discussed in Marshall Sahlins, StoneAge Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 19720, PP.174,182.

4: THE IRON GRIP OF CIVILIZATION: THE AXIAL AGE.

'Jacques Cauvin, The Birth of the G.o.ds and the Origins of Agriculture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p.z.

Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), especially the first 25 pages.

3 Christianity and Islam may be properly considered later spin-offs of this Axial period, their own natures already established some centuries earlier.

4 Andrew Bosworth, "World Cities and World Economic Cycles," in Civilizations and World Systems, ed. Stephan K. Sanderson (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1995), P. 214.

5 Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003 [1951]), pp 9899.

'Henry Bamford Parkes, G.o.ds and Men: The Origins of Western Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1965), p. 77.

7 John Plott, Global History of Philosophy, vol. I (Delhi: Motilal Manarsida.s.s, 1963), p. 8.

8 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. II (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), p. 309 9 Mircea Eliade, "Structures and Changes in the History of Religions," in City Invincible, eds. Carl H. Kraeling and Robert M. Adams (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 365.

" Ibid., pp 365-366. Karl Barth's leap into the upper story of faith" has a similar sense; quoted in Seyyed Hossein Nasr,Knowledge and the Sacred (Albany: State University of NewYork, 1989), p. 48.

" Scott Atran, In G.o.ds We Trust: the Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 57.

" S.N. Eisenstadt, The Axial Age Breakthroughs," Daedalus 104 (1975), p. 13. "May the G.o.ds destroy that man who first discovered hours and who first set up a sundial here." Plautus, 3rd century B.C. Eisenstadt's is the best essay on the overall topic that I have found.

"The fate of domestic hand-loom weavers almost three millennia later comes to mind; the independent weaver household was overwhelmed by the factory system of the Industrial Revolution.

"It is a striking irony that Nietzsche named his archetypal "beyond good and evil" figure Zarathustra.

"Vilho Harle, Ideas of Social Order in the Ancient World (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), p. 18.

6 Spengler, op. cit., pp i68, 205.

"V. Nikiprowetzky, "Ethical Monotheism," Daedalus 104 (1975), pp 8o-8i.

'e Jacob Neusner, The Social Studies of Judaism: Essays and Reflections, vol. i (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), p. 71.

" 9 Paolo Sacchi, The History of the Second Temple Period (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press Ltd., 2000), p. 87.

"Ibid., pp 99-loo.

" Frederick Klemm, A History of Western Technology (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1959),p.28.

" Charles Singer, E.J. Holmyard and A.R. Hall, eds.,A History of Technology, vol. I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 408.

13 C. Osborne Ward, The Ancient Lowly, vol. I (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1888), Chapter V.

" Ludwig Edelstein, The Idea of Progress in Cla.s.sical Antiquity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), pp 15-16.

A id., p. 3.

z6 Romila Thapar, "Ethics, Religion, and Social Protest in India," Daedalus (104),1975, p. 122. See also pp 118-121.

1' For example, Vibha Tripathi, ed.,Archaeometallurgy in India (Delhi: Sharada Publishing House, 1998), especially Vijay k.u.mar, "Social Implications of Technology."

ze See Greg Bailey and Ian Mabbet, The Sociology of Early Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp 18-21. Bailey and Mabbet, it should be said, see more of the picture than just this aspect.

" Thapar, op. Cit., p. 125.

jO Bailey and Mabbet, op. Cit., p. 3.

" Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), pp 99-100, 119.

" Spengler, op. Cit., p.356.

5: ALONE TOGETHER: THE CITY AND ITS INMATES.

'Joseph Grange, The City: An Urban Cosmology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), p. xv.

Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion Ltd., 1976), p. 6.

3 Meanwhile, phenomena such as "Old Town" areas and historical districts distract from tedium and standardization, but also underline these defining urban characteristics. The patented superficiality of postmodern architecture underlines it as well.

' Max Weber, The City, translated by Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1958), p. 11.

5 ibid., p. 21 G Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), p. 6. For all of the valid historical content, Mumford can also lapse into absurdity, e.g. the city should be an organ of love...:. in The City in History (New York, Harcourt, Brace, 1961), p. 575.

Michel de Certeau, The Certeau Reader, edited by Graham Ward (London: Blackwell Publishers, z 000), p. 103.

8 Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1974), p. 7.

9 ibid., p. i.

" Andrew Sherratt, Economy and Society in Prehistoric Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 362.

"Arnold Toynbee, Cities on theMove (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 173.

" Nicolas Chamfort, quoted in James A. Clapp, The City, A Dictionary of Quotable Thought on Cities and Urban Life (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1984), p. 51.

" Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, translated by Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), P. 355.

" 4 Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: the Body and the City in Western Civilization (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994), p. 23.

" Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Cla.s.s in England (St. Albans: Panther Press, 1969), p. 75.

"Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America v. z (New York, Vintage, 1963), p.141.

" Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, translated by Harry Zahn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 174.

"Kurt H. Wolff, The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: The Free Press, 1950), p. 413.

'9 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York, Vintage, 1973), p.479.

" A typical and apposite work is Richard Harris, Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban, 1900-1960 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

"Very pertinent is Michael Bull, Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management ofEverydayLife (NewYork, Oxford University Press, 2000).

" This is not only true in the West. In Arabic civilization, for example, madaniyya, or civilization, comes from madine, which means city.

13 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 192.

'4 Toynbee, op.cit., p. 196 5 Jacques Ellul, The Political Illusion (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 43.

6 James Baldwin, n.o.body Knows My Name (New York, The Dial Press, 1961), p.65.

1' Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen, editors, Of States and Cities: the Partioning of Urban s.p.a.ce (NewYork, Oxford University Press, 2002), P. Vii.

ze John Habberton, Our Country's Future (Philadelphia: International Publishing Company, 1889), cited in Clapp, op.cit., p. 1o5.

" Kai N. Lee, "Urban Sustainability and the Limits of Cla.s.sical Environmentalism," in Environment and Urbanization i8:i (April 2oo6), p. 9.

8: TWILIGHT OF THE MACHINES.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY.

W.H. Auden, The DoubleMan, Random House, 1941.

Seyla Benhabib, "Feminism and the Question of Postmodernism," The New Social Theory Reader, ed. Steven Seidman and Jeffrey C. Alexander, Routledge, 2001 Marshall Berman, The Twilight ofAmerican Culture, W.W. Norton, 2000 Joseph Califano, "Group Calls Underage Drinking an Epidemic," New York Times, February 27, 2002 Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, Vintage Books, 1964 Barbara Epstein, 'Anarchism and the Anti-Globalization Movement," Monthly Review, September 2001 Dario Fo, "Italy, Mussolini's Ghost in these Times,"A-Infos web site, March 3, 2002 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion, Hogarth Press, 1953 Ch.e.l.lis Glendinning, My Name is Ch.e.l.lis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization, Shambala Publications, 1994 David Graeber, The New Anarchists," New Left Review, January-February 2002 Donna Haraway, How Like a Leaf Interview with T.N. Goodeve, Routledge, zooo; Modest Witness @a SecondMillennium, Routledge, 1997; Simians, Cyborgs and Women, Routledge,1991 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology," Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, Harper & Row, 1977 Esther Kaplan, "Keepers of the Flame," Village Voice, February 5, 2002 Henry Kissinger, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, Simon & Schuster, 2001 Richard B. Lee, Politics and History in Band Societies, Cambridge University Press, 1982 Karl Marx, The Grundrisse, ed. David McLellan, Harper & Row, 1970 National Intelligence Council, Global Trends 2015, Langley, VA, 2000 Fredy Perlman, Against His-story, Against Leviathan, Black & Red, 1983 Marshall Sahlins, StoneAge Economics, Aldine, 1972 Scheffer, Carpenter, Foley, Folke, and Walker, "Catastrophic Shifts in Ecosystems," Nature, October 11, 2001 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, Knopf, 1932 Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press, 1988 Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, Verso, 2000 Daniel R. White, Postmodern Ecology, State University of New York Press, 1998 John Zerzan, Future Primitive, Autonomedia and C.A.L. Press, 1994; Running On Emptiness, Feral House, 2002 Adrienne Zihlman, "Women as Shapers of the Human Adaptation," Woman the Gatherer, ed. F. Dahlberg, Yale University Press, 1981 9: EXILED FROM PRESENCE.

'Alan Lightman, Reunion (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002).

'Stephen AErickson, "Absence, Presence and Philosophy," in Phenomenology and Beyond: the Self and its Language, eds. Harold A. Durfee and David F.T. Rodier (Dordrecht: Kluver Academic Publishers, 1989), p. 71.

3 For example, Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Emerging Risks in the 21st Century (Paris: OECD, 2003), P. 3: "Large-scale disasters of the past few years-such as the terrorist attack of September ii, 2001, the appearance of previously unknown infectious diseases, unusually extensive flooding in large parts of Europe, devastating bushfires in Australia and violent ice storms in Canada-have brought home to OECD governments the realization that something new is happening.... Preparing to deal effectively with the hugely complex threats of the 21st century is a major challenge for decision makers in government and the private sector alike, and one that needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency." Even the ruling elites begin to see the magnitude of the crisis.

4 Paul Shepard,Man in the Landscape (New York: Knopf, 1967), p. xxviii.

5 Manuel de Landa, "Virtual Environments and the Emergence of Synthetic Reason," in Flame Wars: the Discourse of Cyberculture, ed. Mark Dery (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994, p. 2 84.

It is certainly arguable that phenomenology as a method failed to "return to things themselves."

Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 104.

s Jacques Derrida, "Sending: On Representation," Social Research 49:2 (Summer, 1982), p.326.

9 Quoted by Mikhail Harbameier, "Inventions of Writing," in State and Society, eds. John Glenhill, Barbara Bender and Mogens Trolle La.r.s.en (London: Unwin Human, 1988), p. 265.

"Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (NewYork: Routledge, 1994).

" Paul Piccone, "Introduction," TELOS 124 (Summer 2002), p. 3.

U Gregory Ullmer, Applied Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), PP 4,5,7, 10.

13 George Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

14 Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," Basic Writings (San Fran- ciso: Harper, 1992), p.33.

" Ellen Mortensen, Teaching Thought: Ontology and s.e.xual Difference (Boulder: Lexington Books, 2002), p. 117 '6 Timothy Lenoir, "The Virtual Surgeon: Operating on the Data in an Age of Medializa- tion," in Semiotic Flesh, ed. Phillip Thurtle and Robert Mitch.e.l.l (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), p. 45. A similar grotesquerie, among many, is Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

" Kathleen Woodward, "Distributed Systems: Of Cognition, Of the Emotions," in Semiotic Flesh, op.cit., p. 71.

8 Jacquere Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mecahnical Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 183.

'9 Maggie Mort, Carl R. May, Tracy Williams, "Remote Doctors and Absent Patients: Acting at a Distance in Telemedicine?", Science, Technology, &Human Values 28:2 (Spring 2003), pp 274-295.

" Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (New York: Continuum, 1997), p.19.

" Claude Merleau-Ponty, quoted by Leonard Lawlor, "Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: La Differance," in Ecart and Differance: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on Seeing and Writing (Atlantic Highland, N. J.: Humanities Press, 1997), p. io6 II: GLOBALIZATION AND ITS APOLOGISTS: AN ABOLITIONIST PERSPECTIVE.

'Anthony King, "Baudrillard's Nihilism and the End of Theory," TELOS 112 (Summer 1998).

Patrick Brantlinger, "Apocalypse 2001; or, What Happens after Posthistory?" Cultural Critique 39 (Spring 1998).

'To speak in terms of a supposedly "unfinished project" of idealized modernity is bizarrely out of touch with reality.

4 The globalization of the dominant culture is revealed in The Culture of Globalization" by Klaus Muller (Museum News, May-June 2003). Eighteen of the world's leading museums, including the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Hermitage, announced in December 2002 that artifacts of various cultures must be available to an international public, and therefore would not be returned, even if they had been seized during colonial rule.

5 Christine McMurran and Roy Smith, Diseases of Globalization (Earthscan Publications Ltd.: London, 2001) discusses deteriorating conditions.

G See Joost Van Loon, Risk and Technological Culture: Towards a Sociology of Virulence (Routledge: London, 2002).

Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy (Oxford University Press: New York, 2002), P. 276.

8 Rob Shields, The Virtual (Routledge: London, 2003), p. 212.

9 Lee Silver proposes an extropian and horrific solution: the bionic transfer of the sense organs of bats, dogs, spiders, etc. in Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform theAmerican Family (Avon Books: New York, 1997). For his part, Gregory Stock sees no likely opposition to such grotesqueries. "To 'protect' ourselves from the future reworking of our biology would require a research blockade of molecular genetics or even a general rollback of technology."-from Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future (Houghton Mifflin: New York, zooz), p. 6.