The Silence of Technology

abstract:This essay meditates on the entanglement of history and memory with forgetfulness, with silencing, with what is before or outside speech. Recalling along the way a few of the manifold varieties of the unthinkable made manifest in recent events, it notes the same mute iteration that led Freud to the death drive, only to be troubled once again by the very same repetitions enfolded in the diagnosis of cultural malaise Freud built upon his insight. Turning to Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money for an alternative, non-psychoanalytic account of unconscious purpose as a trans-individual, cultural phenomenon, it arrives once again at the hypertrophic life-technologies of the modern—and at Simmel's account of money as the ultimate being without qualities, "the most extreme … configuration of Geist" itself, which so thoroughly underpins ways of living that, obscuring dimensions of value that cannot be quantified, silently hum on in the face of catastrophe.