Javier Murcia Zomeño

(May 26, 2019)

Time is the emergence of difference, full equality is therefore the absence of time. Without difference of place (geometry) or qualitative difference, time does not exist. Neither in a logical sense nor for our perception.

But the simple difference is not enough to make temporality “emerge”, another element is needed: proportionality. And this arises from a simple intuition, which thus becomes an essential mode of knowledge. Simple intuition freed from culturalized resources of all kinds allows us to access essential phenomena in the grasp of our reality.

But the intuition of proportionality is prior to any formed knowledge.

For example, when listening to a musical melody, we have the full perception of proportionality. Not only in the orderly and “at time” succession of each note, but also in its harmony (proportion in the vibrations of the air, that is, the musical tones).

This intuitively grasped order is not due, and this is my hypothesis, to the fact that we have in our perceptive capacities something like an internal metronome, nor a perfect ruler to measure proportions. But it is because the “proportion itself”, non-existent a priori, creates reality itself, giving it entity and making it emerge.

The experience of the musical melody itself is the experience of time itself, the enjoyment we experience with it is the enjoyment of “feeling” time as it passes, having the experience of temporality is what gives us aesthetic enjoyment. Being aware of one’s own time: that would be the pleasure of music.

Because otherwise we would have to follow a “culturized” path to explain why we instantly “understand” that some sounds are in order according to an exact temporal succession, and that also the sounds in the air vibrate in concrete and exact proportions: the harmonies.

All of this would have to be “analyzed” by the brain instantly and we are, at last, transferring the analogy of a calculator to our consciousness, as if the calculator had existed first and then consciousness. As if we were essentially a complicated computer.

Does the appearance of proportionality give intelligibility to the real? Intensity? What I am trying to say is that the experience of proportionality is prior to and independent of its own verification, and in the case of time we have access to its experience through it, then ¿to the experience of space do we have access through geometric proportionality?

We have developed geometry or built calculating machines to carry out what consciousness “intuits” in reality from the beginning. Machines have to act on matter just like our body, but they imitate “intuitions” (I call them that for lack of a better name), which self-consciousness possesses.

If the simple auditory succession of a rhythm makes time “emerge” for us, what other successions or forms will open up other dimensions of reality for us?

In short, what I am saying, for example, is that before geometry itself, space did not exist. But at the same time, consciousness did not need it to perceive, for example, a harmonious physical form or equality in its proportions.

As in a visual hallucination, reality shows us its infinite variety of proportions, lights, colors and shapes in an endless dance. The ear can also be given those auditory sensations of infinite proportionality through a construction of experimental, electronic and to a certain extent harmonic music.

Both experiences reveal to us the conformation of reality through its infinite proportionality.

With touch, with the fingers, we can also perceive proportionality and succession, touching an ordered row of things with our eyes closed, in order, we can have that same perception of proportion and also succession , without having to use sight or hearing. Have access to crystallization of difference and proportionality, that is, time.

Although the knowability of the real seems to go hand in hand with a certain possibility of the vision, in a certain way the infinite is not known because it cannot be “seen”, “encompassed” in our knowledge as “vision”.

The knowable is the graspable, what makes us trust in our capacities for knowledge is the idea that we can always “reduce” the totality of being in such a way that we make it “graspable” for our understanding, even for our sight.

(May 14, 2019)

If there are already material and technical means to appease human need, why has it not been done? Does the appeasement of human needs depend exclusively on technical capacity? Can we really affirm that an increase in technological development necessarily implies a greater liberation of humanity?

Nowadays, perception seems to be directed, rather, to the opposite pole. The more technological the relationships, the greater the poverty; The more technology exists, the greater the exclusion produced.

Does humanity need more technology? Is technology still involved in a liberating dialectic? o Have we entered a process of inflation where more is less for the well-being of human beings?

For all this, I can’t help but wonder: Have technical development and the improvement of existence stopped going hand in hand? What is the relationship between increasing technology and the increasing impoverishment of populations?
At what exact point did this change of direction occur? The steam engine enslaved factory workers like never before and developed a historical process to subvert its alienating and exploitative use. The very concept of exploitation emerges from this process.

The movement that followed attempted, hypostatizing the technology itself, to reap its fruits and benefits for the populations as a whole. That is to say, he assumed that the technological development of productive processes generated a first moment of exploitation and then the possibility of subverting it and twisting the technology for use for the common good.

Probably the dialectic was not exclusively in technological development.

Without a doubt, the triad of rationality, technology and capital accumulation continues to be of great relevance; but such concepts have not been hierarchized in a consistent way until now.

Technology would thus seem to be an “instrumental” extension of the will to privatize and exclude.

The relationships between the economy itself, capitalist accumulation, and technological development do not follow clear lines. Each discovery or technical development is not followed by a clear use, application and economic deployment. And on the contrary, simple economic needs do not end up, even if they try hard, to limit the field and direction of technology.

It is a relationship of greater depth, which invokes past modes of operation: technological possibilities are kidnapped, privatized and put at the service of modes of absorption of capital, knowledge and life itself. Or, alternatively, they could operate toward novel modes of development that were open, non-alienable, and harmonious with life.

Technology continues to be tied in its emergence, development and purpose to deep historical milestones such as possession, property, self-referentiality and the paranoid delusions of States.

The result is a growth in technology that turns against the populations themselves, as weapons technology or as devices that displace human capabilities, at the service of an ever-increasing, more restrictive, violent accumulation that escapes the control of communities.

It is argued that technology is, let’s say, “neutral” and that it is its use that certifies its morality. Is technology just used in a bad way? Or is the growing situation of expulsion of the majority from welfare intrinsic to its use and growth?

Demonstrating this would require demonstrating how the dialectic of technology itself goes hand in hand with that of its private possession, and that its absolute expansion would be the dream of any totalitarian power. We would then be faced with a technology whose essence is the domination of nature and capabilities, an essentially violent technology.

Currently generated technology increases domain capabilities and does not mitigate human needs.

We could also ask ourselves if technology makes life easier or simply modifies it by imposing new ways of ordering it. By creating mediations with reality and defining it itself, technology imposes its own ontology.
The ability to manage information with greater power and speed further facilitates capitalist accumulation. And from improved information processing modes such as Artificial Intelligence we can only expect, from the start, an economic cumulative use and increasing manipulation.

Imagining the conditions of a technology that is not privatized and not entangled in the growing tangle of power is a necessary and urgent task. The more technology makes up our reality, the more alienation we feel towards it, as we move towards a plan in which we have not participated at all.