Lerninhalte |
We live in a world that is highly saturated with technology: technical objects have pervaded our everyday life to such an extent that many or even most of our activities cannot be imagined or performed without technical support. Technology is omnipresent in our environment, and is typically taken for granted unreflectively. Insofar as technical objects are ready-to-hand and function smoothly, we tend not to think too much about them; they become part of our extended sensory-motor body schema and cognitive apparatus. They can also become objects of fetishism (we only need to think of the ways in which we are enamored with cars, laptops, cellular phones, etc.), yet they tend to remain 'black boxes,' since we are mostly ignorant of their internal workings. When technology breaks down or produces negative effects (on the environment, workplace, health, etc.), this is usually the time when the question of technology rises to acute awareness, instigates public debate, and reveals diverging attitudes: while some experience a feeling of threat and imagine catastrophic scenarios (destruction of modes of existence, massive job loss, psychosocial regression to stupidity and ignorance, new kinds of alienation, exploitation and surveillance, etc.), others believe in the possibility of human control of technology, its efficiency and utility for further productivity gain, and the availability of technological solutions to problems we encounter. Amid this mixture of forgetfulness of the technological condition and techno-fetishism, technophobia and technocracy, the question of technology needs to be addressed anew, critically and constructively. Through the engagement with major texts in the Continental tradition (Heidegger, Canguilhem, Simondon, Foucault, Deleuze, Stiegler, among others), this seminar attempts to incite critical reflection on the nature of technology and its evolution, the relations between humans, technics and the world, as well as the wider social, political, and ethical implications.
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