Tech's Booty Call

When does technology stop being technology? Why, through an aesthetic procedure of course! Art!

When you get burnt by the sun coming out of the cave you've been in for your whole life and enjoy the burning sensation you are thoroughly Modern. Modern art hurts. It hurts like nothing else. It hurts like pleasure in pain. It hurts way out, beyond the pleasure principle.

But what of those periods when art doesn't hurt? When technology is understood as technical it is because it does something external to the activity of the human subject. It retains something of itself. But when we recognise technology within the field of human activities a misrecognition occurs. Objects independent of our intentions are misidentified as consitutents of human activities. To draw a particularly quotidian example, a telephone becomes a conversation.

And what then of all the discarded objects? The technology that loses its use-value withdraws from view. It doesn't call. It fails to notice you, and you ignore it. But all the while there is a certain unease about the whole situation. Like something that has been discarded gave something to human activity which we have forgotten.