Richard Carlson is starting an interesting series of inquiries, with great promise in terms of understanding peer to peer subjectivities.

(as explained yesterday, the SCIY site is where original thought is really happening!)

Here’s how it starts:

“Bernard Stiegler whose works are also explored on this blogzine, who develops his concepts of relational technologies (R technologies), from Foucault’s inner technologies states “such a meta-struggle is relational, consisting of “R technologies that can focus and expand the mind or operate as what Foucault calls “control technologies” within – to use a phrase both Stiegler and Deleuze borrow from William Burroughs – “societies of control,” which work diligently to prevent such (“mental”) instruments from having any other result than mind-control”.

The contrast between inner technologies as methods to impose control or facilitate freedom has some rough correspondences with how we have here previously theorized and contrasted the disappearance of the human into technology with the disappearance of technology into the human. The difference being one between subjugation and freedom.

In Stiegler’s perspective the issue is one of either the gathering or dispersion of attention visa vie our ubiquitous technological environments that is central to the concerns that confront humanity today. The dispersion of attention through the baiting of ten thousand streaming things and images broadcast by the desiring machine of hyper-capitalism threatens our free agency in the world. The loss of attention and integral being constrains our operations in the world solely in terms of our surplus value for the digital commodity object or as standing reserve for the technological apparatus of neoliberal global markets. While in contrast the appeal to inner technologies that concentrate attention and sublimate desire, that we here have translated into the Sanskrit word tapas, coupled with the mindful use of relational technologies might facilitate new evolutionary forms of human freedom.”