Barry Taylor and Josef Gustafsson speak on the nature of technology and about human interaction with it - how we create technology and how technology creates us. As Marshall McLuhan writes: “We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” But the episode opens with an intro in which Josef explicate some further thoughts about the opening statement (episode 1) articulated at the European Radical Theology Network gathering in Utrecht, emphasizing the importance of becoming worthy of the event. Music by Teologen
Being open to what is novel speaks of a willingness of becoming worthy of the event, which requires us to affirm both the becoming of being and the being of becoming, which is paramount since it makes organization and stability possible, while maintaining the plasticity of the structures we depend on. The reactive mind fails to perform this double affirmation since it perceives antagonisms and separation as fundamental to difference, which in effect leaves it blind in the face of novelty. Whatever is novel, singular and rare is nailed to a tree in series of deathly repetitions, because its strangeness challenges the established order. This is the nature of scapegoating, and the most common mode of articulation in political discourses.
Julia Kristeva writes: ”Strangely, the foreigner lives within us: he is the hidden face within our identity, the space that wrecks our abode… by recognizing him within ourselves, we are spared detesting him in himself.”
Affirming our difference, the becoming of our being, our strangeness within, opens up fields of virtuality - unseen possibilities - and it liberates our minds to conceive a reality beyond the contours of what is. It puts us in motion, in process, and it allows for an apocalypticism that neither succumb to defeatism, nor totalitarianism, but one that is becoming worthy of events that holds within themselves the power to crack the stale surface of the strata and qualitatively transform the world as we know it.