Tecgnose

Ainda não comentei muito sobre o Techgnosis porque tô saboreando ele lentamente. Acabei de encerrar o primeiro capítulo, em que o Davies traça uma linhagem de arquétipos que têm essa mistura de técnica e magia. Hermes Trismegisto, claro, e mais alguns. Agora tô no começo do segundo capítulo, e ele está mostrando que muitas das pessoas que descobriram a eletricidade também estavam envolvidas com estudos alquímicos, e tem aí, claramente, uma contaminação de imaginários. Vou seguir lendo. Pra quem quiser uns pedaços,  trechos do livro estão disponíveis no site:  Techgnosis.

Algumas passagens interessantes do primeiro capítulo:

Hermes the messenger helps us glimpse the powerful archetypal connections between magic, tricks, and technology. But the god does not bloom into a genuine Promethean technomage until he heads south, across the wine-dark sea, to Egypt. (p23)

… let it be said as frankly as possible: Writing is a machine.
(…) Thought writing has become the most commonplace of information technologies, it remains in many ways the most magical. Brought into focus by properly educated eyes, artificial glyphs scrawled onto the surface of objects leap unbidden into the mind, bringing with them sounds, meanings, and data. (p30)

… as the literary scholar David Porush points out, “Every time culture succeeds in revolutionizing its cybernetic technologies, in massively widening the bandwidth of its thought-tech, it invited the creation of new gods”. (p37)

The powerful aura that today’s advanced technologies cast does not derive solely from their novelty or their mystifying complexitty; it also derives from their literal realization of the virtual projects willed by the wizards and alchemists of an earlier age. Magic is technology’s unconscious. (p48)