One of the reoccurring concepts in Cheah's book is "techne." While we did not read the chapter on Kant and his definition of techne (mechanical), we do get a sense of what it is when he discusses it in juxtaposition with physis (natural) in his section on Aristotle and Descartes. What I got from that discussion is that the organicist nation (Fichte) or state (Hegel) is necessary undercut by a mechanist techne ridden contamination that takes the form of the state (Fichte) or civil society (Hegel). The techne, as best as I understand it, is this recourse to the technological, the automaton, the mechanistic consumption of industrial capital--the recourse to some outside creator that sets up causal mechanisms to animate existence that ultimately produce alienation in the subject.
However, I'm not sure that I understand the exact reason why the organicist nation or state must necessarily be read through techne. To the best of my understanding, the fatal moment where the organicist concept that promotes freedom for the citizen is contimated by the techne is linked to the inability to distinguish between physis and techne. That is to say, between the natural world as created by an outside technical force, i.e., God, and the fact that art (or society if we take that as a product of human technical skill) is an imitation of this same technical expertise. Since the natural world/human beings are "mechanical" in that they were created from some divine blueprint, so are also the objects (either artistic or societal) that we as humans create using tools--a kind of imitation of the first instance of divine "techne." This nullifies the auto-causality, or the spontaneous self perpetuating organicism because then it is reliant upon some outside design and is thus no longer free.
Why is this contamination? Does the existence of a God necessarily imply that we no longer have an autonomous will? Is this the contamination of the techne? That we should fall into some sort of indoctrinal mode of thinking shoved down our throats by the mechanical God/state/civil society? Is this just a manifesto for critical thinking, instead of indoctrination? And ultimately a critical thinking that leaves us with anarchism as the only viable political option?
I know I'm taking this to an extreme...and I'm sure that Cheah is not prescribing anarchism--he is, rather, prescribing a method of survival in this system (since you can't in reality actualize the idea of freedom due to the contamination by the techne)...the process will always be haunted by the spector of the techne so long as the objective is individual freedom within the collectivity--he calls this an aporetic freedom I think...
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