too good to not post. From the site social ecologies.com

Creative Destruction: The Age of Metamorphosis

”Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

It’s not really reality that’s giving way in our age, but rather the symbolic worlds we built against the tide of change and becoming other; against metamorphosis and mutation. Children of the Sun that we are we’ve held too our age old illusions, shaped across millennia to protect us, seduce us, solace us; to keep us safe from the truth. We’ve built grand narratives, expressed fantastic stories, charted and mapped the unknown with countless microstudies, bled the universe of its intrinsic power, forced it into our cages, tamed it with our poetry, our sciences, our… philosophies. Now the universe is absorbing us in return, bringing us back into its fold, deconstructing our illusions step-by-step, returning us to the roots of our ignorance and stupidity.

The very technics and technologies that once gave us the illusion of command and control, that helped us master the elements, craft external systems to shape the natural world to our desires is now shaping us, molding us, modulating the intricate complexity of our brains and physical systems, reducing us to its abstract algorithms, its designs. The world is crumbling around us not because we did too little, but rather because we’ve done way too much; we’ve constructed the very technical systems of production that are now coming to fruition: a world of accelerating abstractions. No longer creative we are now created by the very systems we once saw as prosthetic apparatuses to help us uncover what our meagre senses could not: the Real. But now the reverse is true, our apparatuses are using us as prosthesis to give birth to something new, something else… something we’ve only imagined up to now in our cartoon scriptures: a world without us.

No we will not vanish, rather we will be absorbed into this new world, become invisible within its abstract processes, truant products of an elaborate technology; transformed, mutated, brought forth into a world shaped by that which we never had access: the impersonal power of creativity itself. For far too long we sought to shield ourselves from ourselves, from the truth of our own abstractions, our technologies, our technical being; now it is cannibalizing us from within, feeding on our fears, our hatreds, the remnant of our illusions; shaping us, splicing us, removing all those illusions of the human we built up to protect us from the impersonal core of our own inhuman being. The flood will not be held back now for the simple reason there is no external threat, only the libidinal ocean from within that is overwhelming us with the force of creativity: the force of destruction and metamorphosis, mutation and change; the intensity of accelerating immanence.

For too long we tried to calculate the probabilities, model the consequences of our actions; now we must conclude these, too, were illusions: art and technics are too enmeshed in our reasoning powers to evade this dark truth. The dragon of our cunning will not survive this transition, now comes a new intelligence; something unheard of from the beginning to now, only imagined. Now comes the end, which is also a new beginning; a transition, a gap between, a thrust across, a movement; just not for us as we are, but as we will be and must become, in becoming abstract intelligences.

We’ve known it for some time now, that reality was not solid, that things were not fixed, substantive. We’ve conceived the microworlds of physics to the nth degree, resolved the elements into synthetic diagrams, pondered the neuronal abyss, handled the darkest matter as it slid away, swerved just beyond our instruments. Now comes the truth of material change, of continuous metamorphosis, the dance of stars unbound to human reason and cunning. The solidity of the world has give way to immaterial and formless becoming other, of movement, of light and particles, of a void within a void. Our words will not hold it, our speech cannot say it. We are moving out into it, as it is moving into us, merging us with its force, its intelligence. What little remains of our metaphysics can no longer bridge the gap between the worlds of being and becoming. Being is giving way to event, acts… the change of one symbolic world for another. We exist in the bubble in-between, neither able to relinquish the old symbolic realms, nor able to speak the new.

Like children in a garden we’ve bitten off more than we can chew, exposed ourselves to the transparency of evil, of energy unbound. Our very need to be in control has imprisoned us within fabricated totalities, tyrannies of mind and affect. Stolen from us the truth of the abyss. Do not be bitter, young one, do not give way to anger and hate. Now comes the time of nakedness, the stripping away of layer upon layer of illusion, till that which you are becoming awakens. Do not try to forecast it, do not try to channel it, do not try to reduce it to the metaphysics of Being. It will only elude you.

Our myths presaged it, our sciences revealed it. Yet, up till now we could not bear it. Even now there is a great war afoot, a war between one world and another; one symbolic power rather than physical force. Yet, its effects are felt in the transitional space in-between. Like schizoanalytical agents of a nightmare we live out our lives believing we are victims of some paranoiac’s madness, some Manichaean zone of daemonic corruption, not realizing that neither our aggressive violence, our radical gestures of revolt or revolution; nor our reactionary derision and dreams to the One will suffice in this metamorphic age of transition. Notions of duality are lies we’ve told ourselves for far too long. Notions of Left or Right, of politics are beside the point; old school illusions that sought to economize the destructive power advancing on us out of the future.

Even now philosophers and scientists seem to meet in that sophistic territory of theory and fiction, crosswise mumbling across divided and divisive barriers, seeking to shake the linguistic dust of metaphysical rhetoric and define a new world, a new registry of intelligent thought and reason. No one is coming to save us, no one is capable of it even if they did come from elsewhere. No, we must do this ourselves, collectively and singularly. All we have is this general intelligence we externalized into the very fabric of things themselves, this machinic world of algorithmic abstraction that now bleeds our memories dry, that serves the systematic concourse of singularities. Now we must allow it to move, shape us toward what is coming, what we are becoming… to resist is futile, to fight is death, to exit is sheer oblivion. Accept the responsibility of your becoming other or find yourself dissolved in the annihilation of this symbolic world we’ve constructed against the future.

We think of the move from agriculture to industry as just walking down the street and getting new job. Started reading Fraser’s the Age of Aquiesence. It goes like this:

Excerpt

Globalized capitalist agriculture also wiped out or imperiled peasant proprietors and other small producers in Sicily and southern Italy and all across the Balkans, Germany, Austro-Hungary, Poland, and Scandinavia. As miraculous as the rapidity and scope of American industrialization (and as enmeshed in its triumph) was the overnight uprooting of millions of people from their ancestral villages and from traditional ways of life that could no longer be sustained. If local populations managed to hang on, they did so only by a process of social amputation, exporting their young (and not so young) men, and eventually whole kin networks, to work in the New World, there to remit back what they could to those left behind. A century before industrial ghost towns haunted the American Midwest, ghost villages made their spectral appearances across the underbelly of Europe.

Nearly seven million migrated to America from Europe between 1881 and 1894, increasing numbers of them from the continent’s rural hinterland. In 1907 five thousand immigrants arrived at Ellis Island each day. By 1910, immigrant working-class women from the old country constituted the core of the workforce in textiles and garment manufacturing, and in mechanical laundries and domestic service. Human chains of sojourning labor migrated back and forth across the Atlantic in rhythm with the business cycle, returning home when the economy went south. Once in the United States they joined their efforts with home-grown superannuated farmers along with native handicraftsmen displaced by the machine and the factory’s exquisitely refined division and specialization of labor. These legions of displaced immigrants became charter members of an American proletariat. By 1870 the foreign-born accounted for one-third of the industrial workforce; soon enough in some cities, like Chicago, they would constitute the majority.

Expatriated peasants were not the only river flowing into the sea of wage labor. Mass-production, factory-based, machine-driven industry grew robust at the expense of home-grown handicraft economies and the knowledge, skills, and traditions embedded in those ways of life. They weakened, were debased in a futile effort to compete with the factory, and then vanished. Craftsmen—woodworkers and printers, barrel makers and bakers, butchers and iron molders, tailors and shoemakers, glassblowers and brass workers, masons and smithies, weavers and bookbinders—were swept up into the process of industrial capital accumulation. Once they had been small-shop proprietors in their own right. Or, even after losing that independence, they had clustered together inside factory gates as groups of invaluable industrial craftsmen, enjoying a functional quasi-independence thanks to their secret knowledge, experience, and self-directed control of what went on in their specialized precincts; iron puddlers, rollers, boilers, and heaters, for example, for a time exercised decisive control over production in the iron and steel mills; skilled butchers did the same in the new meatpacking plants of Chicago.

Soon enough, however, these industrial artisans became “nothing more than parts of the machinery that they work.” Capital accumulated at the expense of their social existence; they took up new lives, became part of that larger waged labor force which modern capitalism produces and depends on—its chief commodity and natural resource. Indeed, the stupendous rate of mechanization in America was in part driven by the need to reduce the high costs associated with those forms of handicraft, skilled, and highly valued labor that for a while continued on into the factory age. They not only were expensive but, given their leverage over vital aspects of the manufacturing process, slowed the pace of production on the shop floor. New machines promised to wipe out those remnants that resisted. After a while the machines, aided by the efforts of determined managements, won.

Excerpt From: Fraser, Steve. “The Age of Acquiescence.” Little, Brown and Company, 2015-02-17. iBooks.