Imagine what Simondon is writing against. Le Corbusier and the space race, they come to mind–and also the sleek lines of homeware modernist design. Or, let’s imagine the modernist in any other form. “Culture has become,” quoting the Rienaart’s entry, “a system of defense designed to safeguard man from technics”.
The one liner is complete. We need not read on. From a certain view, the next five decades of political-philosophy have already been summarised.
Instead, here is a short list of what other people thought culture had become.
Hegel: Christ becoming anti-Christ becoming anti-anti-Christ infinitude.
Castoriadis: a wee window on the Chaos which he calls man.
Derrida: nothing existing outside the text. And, his apostles decided it was everything but the text.
Kant: the Institution of Reason.
In “A thousand and one night” culture forestalls death when Scheherazade tell stories night after night.
“When I hear guns,” Joseph Goebbels’ famous dictum goes, the German film maker and top aid in the Third Reich, “I reach for my culture. When I hear culture I reach for my guns.”
Foucault might think culture was the privileged class. But, little was he to know that most of the ‘peoples’ revolutions in this lifetime would be lead by an educated elite.
A favourite twist of mine, Marx thought that thought arises from being across two cultures.
And, returning to Simondon, Castoriadis is a perfect foil when he strip culture: anything that is simple not functional. It makes me think of Ray and Charles Eames.
As an epilogue, culture was, for Heideggar, the world.
Does this spur anyone to add other versions?
