Titanism

"The zero of nature would be the zero of a technology that had reached both its apotheosis and its death. Conversely, technical thinking, as an act of the mind of man, is qualitative and living – but life is foreign to the essence of technology. Hence the full reduction of man to a set of measurable quantities would be the end of all technics."

"The process of continuous neutralization of various domains of cultural life has reached its end because technology is at hand. Technology is no longer neutral ground in the sense of the process of neutralization; every strong politics will make use of it. For this reason, the present century can only be understood provisionally as the century of technology. How ultimately it should be understood will be revealed only when it is known which type of politics is strong enough to master the new technology and which type of genuine friend-enemy groupings can develop on this new ground."

There is no life in it. It is the unturnable.

The technical form of the modern era only realises itself in deep mourning, after darkness and night—an aesthetic we all recognise, even as it escapes us. "And grudgingly you went with fetters on your feet."

Only the Russians and Germans were able to capture the waning moon of modern capacities, what some had called being—and they destroyed one another. The twentieth century was just as much a century of mourning as it was a finality of the technical era. Cathedrals reveal their form in war.

It is in this sense that the weakness of politics appears as a necessity of the transitional phase. The political formation must be equal to the character of man, the lines of territory he carves out as a definitive state of being. There is always form, no matter the subterfuge which acts against it, and there is always sense even where there is no meaning. Technology leverages the end of morality for something deeper.

Peace is the absolute dominion of the world, even in war. The justice of the Wild Hunt. Bourgeois order wields technology only upon the surface, the frictionless substance dividing man from the earth. "Drowning his anguish in wine." The struggle against death defeats the technician and the worker. The ashen mud of the Somme remains as an image of materialism's self-defeat. Man drowning within the earth of Poseidon as his horses take flight from him; only they live on within the cosmic event of war, the deluge of time after the Battle of Anghiari.

If the technicians have lost and humanity has survived its destruction then some other element must be at work. One cannot take here the simple route of economic determinism either, for the bourgeois position is the continuation of law from a weakened monarchism. What dominates is the relation of being with nature through the fulcrum of technology—it simply takes on a mystical, even irrational appearance. The surrealists live in The Garden of Earthly Delights, where technology and humans have disappeared from all vision. To hold dominion over the substratum man must elevate himself to the position of gods, or at least be capable of imagining their perspective. Airplanes are one means of diverting the instincts into artificial optics beyond the world, and within this realm all intellectual thought follows the scarred lines of aerial photography.

The inability to distinguish between technology, being, and thought is itself a product of rationalist thought. What is strange is that this blindness deepens the form. Where technique is no longer divisible from technology a catastrophe in the mind has occurred—this follows the collapse of distinction in rationalism and empiricism, and later romanticism and technicalism. The lever is applied to the state of nature, then its licensing agents and the normative order, but this loss of distinction must not be confused with the form in itself. The paradox is that our technological order is precisely nontechnical, it never establishes perfection or completion, hence the impossible distinction between the form and its type. In transition from Aphrodite to Fate the mechanical forces its perfection, freed of machines.

Dominion is never a question for us, we weave through the substratum. Or as Junger suggests, the form of technology is an upside-down pyramid. One may liken this to a pencil or knife, the material behind the edge worn away in order to maintain sharpness and structure. Otherwise, the vast machinery required for strip-mining, each an immense mobilisation used to tear away and into the complete wealth of the minor stratum of the earth. All that remains is a form of life, a means of transition. After Goethe the skeleton steps out from the Gorgoneion, a dance no longer necessary.

This revealing of force behind technology explains the relation to Titanic figures, although the Giants are more appropriate if we are to understand our own era. The Titans as overstretchers, in the myths their dominion is that of guardians of earth, upholders of law at the edges of the cosmos. As bridge figures they are able to span between worlds, and at the same time sink into the earth as an abutment without causing undue stress. It is in this sense that they relate to the ancient order of technology, a peace within chaotic strength, a pathless road to the ineffable. The heroic can only be seen from within their shadow. One identifies with the Eagle in our era.

The Giants are, even from the other side of the earth, able to form cracks within the abutment. This is the power of the hammer strike, causing fissures which strengthen within glowing heat. Otherwise, countless heads and arms overwhelm even force and power. They are the form of Chaos against the earth, the brutal devastation of the infinite underworld. The modern form of technology harnesses this force, just as Hephaestus brought the Cyclopes into his forge. There are really only two movements within the technological framework: the forcing together of crystalline structures and the splitting of the elemental fragments. Perfection would necessitate their non-movement, forming as one. The knife outmodes the fasces in its wearing away.

"And like Athena Ergane, Hephaistos is the patron of the fine arts, which are not under the guidance of the Muses, because they are inseparably connected with craftsmanship." The infinite may only be seen from within the most finite allotments of time—the human conquers death and fate through the clock, imagining all of the weapons and defenses of the gods at his fingertips. Modern man is against Prometheus, and all of the gods, even insight and the forging fire itself. The brutality of industrialism only appeared for a short moment, a minor aspect of the myths, and it is this that horrifies us: that we were incapable of harnessing technology, the wearing away of our being as a crystalline structure. We brought forth our own great disappointment, an act of injustice against our own formative law. The revolt against technology seeks to reestablish it. The heavens are ossified through rationalism. We are cursed to weaving and so may only see Athena as a gutted statue

Technology is a nomos only to the extent that it can be wielded. Our armor and weapons forged in sacrifice to Typhon failed us, and now there is only the scattered desperation of survival. The economic forum plays this role, fills this void as best it can. However, there can never be a monument to the gigantic or the monstrous, Talos forms from within our very being.

These are the forces which exist beyond the substratum: the chaotic, primordial, titanic, gigantic, monstrous, elemental, telluric, and catastrophic. Technology and nature their duality; Man their appearance and non-being.