Narcissus | Extension Technology

Philosophy as a technology

Technology can be the knowledge of techniques, processes, and the like, or it can be embedded in machines, computers, devices, and factories, which can be operated by individuals without detailed knowledge of the workings of such things. If wisdom is to be applied, it has to be a technology based on ecology. I will borrow a term from psychology, a human science that studies the mind and will often utilise concepts from philosophy in order to develop theories of how the human mind works. Ecological validity looks at methods, materials and settings of any study to see how much they approximate the real world that is being examined. Therefore, if wisdom is to be achieved and applied, then the way in which language is studied to change and influence human actions, perceptions, thoughts, ideas etc, must reveal a technology that can function in an ecological setting.

Philosophy is often regarded as something that people with too much time on their hands talk about, it’s just stuff that exists in your head that has no real world value. Ethics is perhaps the only branch of philosophy that people generally take seriously, as that directly informs the laws of a society. This technology can be operated by anyone who has no nuanced understanding of it, so in that sense, philosophy is a technology that has ecological validity.

For example, we might have a metaphysical foundation of a God that knows all and at some point he set the law in stone and said ‘thou shalt not kill’. Whether or not a person has ever read the literature of the Bible, or contemplated the a priori assumptions, they will be able to use this technology in the real world – don’t kill, it’s bad, harmful to others.

So philosophy can be self-informed in a way that we understand the inner workings of a process, or it can be provided in a way that makes the knowledge of it unnecessary in order to achieve it’s ends – what is most important is that it has a real world application.

Symbols fulfill desire

We have to use language in order to satisfy our desires. We use language to warn people of danger, to manage an economy, to fulfill our need for commune with other people. Therefore a world without language would be one of suffering beyond comprehension, an inexpressible agony of loneliness and impotence. The technology of language is a technology of the self, which is inherently narcissistic.

Narcissism as a technology

The Narcissus myth is often misinterpreted as Narcissus ‘falling in love with his own reflection’, this is not technically valid. If he had known it was just a repitition of himself, he would have had a different reaction. The Greek word narcosis, or numbness better encapsulates what the Narcissus myth has to tell us about a fundamental fact of human nature. The youth mistook the reflection for someone else, another person. The reflection was an extension of himself and we continually extend ourselves and we become fascinated by these extensions. The nymph Echo tried to win his affection by relaying fragments of his own speech, but in vain, he was numb. He was enclosed and alienated by his own extension, unable to communicate with the ‘other’ and so plunged into the depths of his own self as a closed system.

Autoamputation and enclosure

We ‘amputate’ ourselves in order to relieve ourselves of pain, to acheive a state of equilibrium. Autoamputative power or strategy is resorted to by the body when the perceptual power cannot locate or avoid the cause of irritation. We have many expressions that describe autoamputation, they are similar in many ways to what I talked about in a previous thread on abjection. ‘I want to jump out of my skin!’, ‘I am going out of my mind’, ‘I am flipping my lid!’ – we can then percieve language as an autoamputation technology that serves the ecological interactions for pain relief first and foremost, but eventually these extensions enclose us and we become numb as the technology (language) begins to obscure the real ontological foundations (ready-to-hand) and the signs override sensations.

The wheel is the foot in rotation for example. This is a technology that replaced the overloaded and limited human capacity for the transportation of goods. The loads were too big and the strain was impossible to endure, so the system developed a technology that isolates the offending area and then ‘amputates’ it to increase the load and relieve pain. This new intensity of action by it’s amplification of a seperate or isolated function, such amplification is bearable by the nervous system only through numbness and blocking of perception.

The image of Narcissus produced a generalised numbness or shock that declines recognition. Self amputation forbids self recognition.

The central nervous system must protect it’s function and the threat is contained, localised, cut-off, even to the total removal of the offending organ in order to find equilibrium, which currently has variations in the physical and social environment.

Battle shock created by violent noise has been adapted by dentists – an audiac device – which amplifies a noise in headphones worn by the patient to the point where they feel no pain from drilling.

Extending bodies

A body can be thought of not soley as a human body, but of a social body. Multiple bodies forming a social body that has these same technologies.

With the arrival of electrical technologies, man set outside himself and extended his own central nervous system. We are now super-stimulated in order to try to rebalance the variations of the demands of our society to the point where we can barely extend ourselves further and so the Earth is a closed system, we are enclosed.

We can think of the word ‘idol’ as similar to the Narcissus myth. An idol that is beheld by men is made by man and will in turn ‘make man like him’. Man is perpetually modified by his extended body and in turn finds many ways of modifying it as well.

The walled city during a time of war is an extension of the skin, the accumulation of group pressures and irritatons that prompt invention and innovation as counter-irritants in the social sense of body technology by extension. War and fear of war are the main incentives. The after math of invasion is a rich technological period; because the subject culture has to adjust all its sense ratios to accomodate the impact of the invading culture.

Ecology of technology

We have already covered how we shape our tools and our tools shape us in return. It is through encounters that multiple contingencies occur and cultures re-shape, transform, reject and recall simultaneously. Hybrid technologies take place, what we could call an assemblage, or relations of exteriority. Philosophy sooner or later has to become an ecology – the study of interactions and encounters between bodies, how their territories are formed and how they involve, exclude and transcend themselves. Philosophy starts with a philological horizon of sounds being transmitted in order to relieve pain through amplification. Signs then transform as we need them to change and a feedback occurs.

Lamarckism dynamics in language-trait evolution

Lamarckian evolution can be applied to language evolution and how they in turn affect our desires, or networks of drives in the micro and macro levels of our presence. While Lamarckian evolution was overtaken by Neo-Darwinism in the theory of evolution in biology, it does have value in a social sense. The field of epigenetics describes an ecology where traits are inherited and passed on during a life time due to shocks from the enviornment, expanding the definition of a unit of natural selection. By starting with philology to reveal a phylogenic trait process, we can impose Lamarckian theory in this ecology.

We can see this evolving process technology as a family tree of traits and transitions over periods of time. If we are able to spot these patterns of what will be extended in time, what changes it will develop, what it will leave behind through exclusion and what it will recall, we then have the basis for an ecology that may not have predictive certainity by looking at necessities, but will be better adapted at dealing with contingency. Maybe a reduction of load would be better in our modern society, as opposed to an increase that requires another extension?

We can see a history contained in each body with it’s own inherent process of Narcissus technology. A study of language is not found only in the signs and their meaning, but behind them from their original sources of which the processes are still there moving through time responding to shocks through amputation that leads to a two-way transformation system.