Читать книгу The Radical Singularity. Essay on Singular Phenomena онлайн

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For the epistemic order of the Enlightenment, history (like physics) developed according to a fixed, immanent, irreversible and universal law; the straight line of Progress was the sense of the betterment of humanity. For the metastatic disorder of Postmodernity, the sense of historical continuity is totally pulverised by the annihilation of the idea of progress (which has further freed itself from its original meaning to become an indefinite and indifferent outgrowth). There is no longer historical unity nor the unifying power of Reason; that leading thread that Kant spoke of has been broken; that intention that Nature had hidden in the human being (and in history) to be discovered and practiced has vanished.«For example, the idea of progress has disappeared, yet progress continues» Baudrillard tells us. Progress continues, but in the politically correct version of it, what we call progressivism. The fossil clone of progress made us believe that radically liberated things work better, but it resulted in a society that lost criteria for having lost critics (which is the first sign of the annihilation of Modernity). This society, due to its lack of references, was condemned to an unbearable dualism: Zen but positivist, tribal but cyborg, vegan but tech, sexually liberal but dogmatic, revisionist but sceptical. Who would say that progress would become a type of involution or, worse still, a paralysis (of history and ultimately of thought).