The Technological Visions of the Human, Nordic Summer University, July 2020
27 July 2020 (Monday) 10:45-11:35 am
Nordic Summer University, Summer Session 2020.
Study Circle5 & Study Circle 8 Jasna Koteska,
Nordic Summer University, Summer Session 2020.
Study Circle5 & Study Circle 8 Jasna Koteska,
Tracing the Spirit, link to the abstract
The Technological Visions of the Human (From the Perspective of the Futures of Education)
Jasna Koteska, Skopje
“Of all the prostheses that mark the history of the body, the double is doubtless the oldest.”
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
The question of the “extended” human has been raised already in the beginning of the last century. The early anticipations of the forthcoming world in the 21 century concentrated on how the technological means might become the only condition for enduring the intensified ecological problems and ideological sadism in the world. The grandiosity of the human will be achieved by bringing the organic closer to the prosthetic. Some of many prognoses were that the environmental and societal degradation will become so impossible, so uncomfortable, that humans could bear to stand them only with technological means. And while the idea of the symbiosis of the human and the technology dates back to Aristotle’s concept of Automaton, the reality is that the mechanical culture of the 20 century that marked the beginnings of the New Deal capitalism, communism, and fascism, has been organized with the help of the prosthesis of aggression: machines, camps, industrialization… At the same time, curiously enough, the prognosis was that the same aggression could only be tolerated if the technological extensions, prosthetic additions, and implants of various kinds could be implemented. (Note for e.g. the famous quote from the Civilization and Its Discontents: “Human has, as it were, to become a kind of prosthetic God. Only when s/he puts on all his/her auxiliary organs, s/he is truly magnificent”.) The prosthetic additions were seen as a way in which humans ease aggression they themselves produced in nature and in culture, and vice versa are therefore subjected to it, and how could they bear the ecological, social, and political fate less painfully?
The paper will explore how to conceptualize the Technological vision of human at the present time? What it means for the current time of the ongoing pandemic, and the ecological, social, and economic crisis? Furthermore, what form/s will that Technological vision of Human achieve in the present times of uniformity, homogeneity, social media, advertising, consumerism, the instant publicity, the transformation of the public into a “monstrous nonentity”, of endless chattering, and most importantly, in the time of the current pandemic? Also, how to understand the possible merger/s between human and the technological other? And most importantly what implications it has and will have for the futures of education? How to conceptualize the technological vision of humans from the perspective of the education of the futures?
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