Post 138.
I began reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, translated by Isabel Hapgood. It is eminently readable, which is good, because the book is long (at 1263 pages). I finished reading Dante’s Inferno, which was interesting, shorter, but had its own type of tedium. Inferno is less about the story and more a fictional philosophy. Back to Les Mis, which is interesting and philosophical. I am reading about the good bishop, who is so out of place in a harsh world, as a Christian must needs be.
The bishop is physically affected by the guillotine, walking with a condemned criminal to it and into that man’s hope of salvation. But he is physical impacted by the technology of the guillotine.
"The guillotine is the concretion of the law, it is called vindicate; it is not neutral, and it does not permit you to remain neutral. He who sees it shivers with the most mysterious of shivers. All social problems erect their interrogation point around this chopping knife. The scaffold is a vision. The scaffold is not a piece of carpentry; the scaffold is not a machine; the scaffold is not an inert bit of mechanism constructed of wood, iron, and cords." (p. 16)
I think that Deleuze or another postmodern philosopher already treated the guillotine more concretely and directly, but not as Catholicly as Hugo does in this artistic response. [I looked it up, it was Foucault, not Deleuze.] Some of this quotation—not all of it—can also apply to any technology we humans immerse ourselves with voluntarily, and not only the technologies aimed at swiftly ending our lives. The internet, social media, and artificial intelligence each are concretions of relationships among people, though not necessarily or explicitly “the law,” as the guillotine was. On the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence, human hopes, dreams, expectations, and desires coalesce and are elevated or exterminated at the whim of an apparently neutral tool. Nevertheless, these tools are, like the guillotine, not neutral, and do not permit one to be neutral when faced with them. They reduce experience to a complex and occult binary equation and define the terminus of possibility. These tools replace relations that entangle the actors who use their eyes, ears, nose, and skin, replacing human-to-human contact with mere interactions that are detached, separated, and isolated.
Like the scaffold, for today’s people, interactions with and through the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence do not seem machine-like to them. These tools are not lived as being inert mechanisms with material realities, including parts built and shipped around and trashing the globe, built with obsolescence in mind, run by server-farms polluting faraway rivers. The internet, social media, and artificial intelligence are, to so many normal people without the time to think deeply about them, their friends, relatives, and companions on their easily forgotten journey toward the grave. The scaffold and the everyday tech we surround ourselves with, then, have something in common—the end, also known as our eschatology. AI and the scaffold are both meant as relatively tranquil and pacifying modes of passing.
DS
See also:
Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy, Shevock 2017
Music Lessons for a Living Planet, Shevock & Bates, 2025
I began reading Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, translated by Isabel Hapgood. It is eminently readable, which is good, because the book is long (at 1263 pages). I finished reading Dante’s Inferno, which was interesting, shorter, but had its own type of tedium. Inferno is less about the story and more a fictional philosophy. Back to Les Mis, which is interesting and philosophical. I am reading about the good bishop, who is so out of place in a harsh world, as a Christian must needs be.
The bishop is physically affected by the guillotine, walking with a condemned criminal to it and into that man’s hope of salvation. But he is physical impacted by the technology of the guillotine.
"The guillotine is the concretion of the law, it is called vindicate; it is not neutral, and it does not permit you to remain neutral. He who sees it shivers with the most mysterious of shivers. All social problems erect their interrogation point around this chopping knife. The scaffold is a vision. The scaffold is not a piece of carpentry; the scaffold is not a machine; the scaffold is not an inert bit of mechanism constructed of wood, iron, and cords." (p. 16)
I think that Deleuze or another postmodern philosopher already treated the guillotine more concretely and directly, but not as Catholicly as Hugo does in this artistic response. [I looked it up, it was Foucault, not Deleuze.] Some of this quotation—not all of it—can also apply to any technology we humans immerse ourselves with voluntarily, and not only the technologies aimed at swiftly ending our lives. The internet, social media, and artificial intelligence each are concretions of relationships among people, though not necessarily or explicitly “the law,” as the guillotine was. On the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence, human hopes, dreams, expectations, and desires coalesce and are elevated or exterminated at the whim of an apparently neutral tool. Nevertheless, these tools are, like the guillotine, not neutral, and do not permit one to be neutral when faced with them. They reduce experience to a complex and occult binary equation and define the terminus of possibility. These tools replace relations that entangle the actors who use their eyes, ears, nose, and skin, replacing human-to-human contact with mere interactions that are detached, separated, and isolated.
Like the scaffold, for today’s people, interactions with and through the internet, social media, and artificial intelligence do not seem machine-like to them. These tools are not lived as being inert mechanisms with material realities, including parts built and shipped around and trashing the globe, built with obsolescence in mind, run by server-farms polluting faraway rivers. The internet, social media, and artificial intelligence are, to so many normal people without the time to think deeply about them, their friends, relatives, and companions on their easily forgotten journey toward the grave. The scaffold and the everyday tech we surround ourselves with, then, have something in common—the end, also known as our eschatology. AI and the scaffold are both meant as relatively tranquil and pacifying modes of passing.
DS
See also:
Eco-Literate Music Pedagogy, Shevock 2017
Music Lessons for a Living Planet, Shevock & Bates, 2025
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