Latour on the Anthropocene and the Heavy-Weight, as it were, of the Human, All too Human

http://www.academia.edu/4443176/O_Superman_or_Being_Towards_Transhumanism_Martin_Heidegger_Gunther_Anders_and_Media_Aesthetics

O Superman

Post by Martin E. Rosenberg.

WHO IS 269 ?

“269” is a calf who was born into an Israeli dairy farm. 

His life will be cut off not long after it started. By branding his number on our bodies, we show our solidarity with the victims of the animal holocaust all around the world, remembering to never forget.

On October 2nd of 2012, 'World Farm Animals day', at Rabin Square in central Tel-Aviv, animal rights activists performed an act of solidarity and empathy towards abused animals exploited by the human race.

The display's aim is to call for empathy towards the most oppressed sector of our society and call into question the deep disconnect we as a society, have towards sanctioned animal cruelty.

The activists got branded with a hot steel brand, in the same way farm animals are branded in farms all over the world. The number 269, which was burned on their skin,
was the designated number of a calf they have encountered in one of Israel's dairy farms.

"This anonymous male calf will be forever immortalized on our bodies, and hopefully this message of solidarity will somehow bring a new way of looking at non-human animals.

No animal should be exploited to satisfy the selfish needs and whimsical desires of humans, and that is why we chose to use the industry's own method of objectifying living beings as this symbolic means to convey our idea".

Annually, more than 150 billion animals are murdered worldwide due to people's selfishness, ignorance and greed.

This madness must stop and will stop the day humankind finally wakes up and understands that even the nameless feel pain and desire freedom no less than us humans.

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
(Frederick Douglass, slavery abolitionist, 1818-1895)  

• "
• "

• 
  

"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
(Frederick Douglass, slavery abolitionist, 1818-1895)      

Link to video lecture.

"I had bought two male chimps from a primate colony in Holland. They lived next to each other in separate cages for several months before I used one as a [heart] donor.
 
When we put him to sleep in his cage in preparation for the operation, he chattered and cried incessantly.
 
We attached no significance to this, but it must have made a great impression on his companion, for when we removed the body to the operating room, the other chimp wept bitterly and was inconsolable for days.
 
The incident made a deep impression on me.

I vowed never again to experiment with such sensitive creatures."

          ---  Dr. Christian Barnard, Surgeon

MIDWAY : trailer : a film by Chris Jordan

Dumbing-Down: György Markus on Psychotechnology

György Markus, in his 2006 Thesis Eleven essay:  Adorno and Mass Culture: Autonomous Art Against the Culture Industry (Sage link here) writes about mass culture

 

 Quoting this ‘system of response mechanisms’ from Theodor Adorno’s study On Popular Music (full text here), which he wrote in 1941 in collaboration with his translator, George Simpson (who was and this is not at all an incidental detail, a colleague of the archaeologically and number-attuned musicologist, Ernest McClain) and published in the journal, Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Markus argues that the implications of this study of popular programming and public opinion, and by no means incidentally during preparations leading for war -- the self-same preparations that led to Adorno’s invitation to America in the first place -- entailed that any review of the so-called culture industry, perhaps especially including social studies of popular music, also must include some attention to what Adorno and Simpson describe as a planned (in the terminology of the day) ‘socio-psychological function,’ or what Markus describes as ‘psychotechnology.’ 

For Adorno and Simpson,

The autonomy of music is replaced by a mere socio-psychological function

 As Markus explains this function:

the culture industry as psychotechnology has more far-reaching effects than the mere perpetuation of its own existence. It imposes upon individuals simplified and homogenized patterns of reality-perception, not so much through the thinly disguised ideological messages usually transmitted by it, but through its destructive impact: the systematic atrophy of the capacity of spontaneous imagination and reflection, for the development and exercise of which art had regularly provided the exempted terrain under conditions of civilization.

On Ivan Illich

See a recent commentary on Ivan Illich and his ongoing relevance, Chase Madar's article: "The People’s Priest" published in The American Conservative.

Ivan Illich on Water and the History of the Senses - 1984