Avery Alexander Rijos
Stories (1/0)
Technology and Post-Humanism
The 20th century caused classical liberal ideals to be seen as, in many ways, the chimera. The structuralist movement of the mid to late 20th century had found itself in quite the quandary. As Foucauldian and Derridean schemas systematically attacked our fundamental tautological assumptions, the question that remained was this: what is, exactly, the locus of power described? In “The History of Sexuality”, Foucault proposed in the late 1976 that we as developed societies are under a “Victorian” regime of truth: a dominant, repressive, and coercively cosignatory process. Today, a similar regime dominates us today, and the ways in which we are dominated by discourse is more apparent now than ever before. The Foucauldian project, regardless of the historicity and the norms propounded within the domain of public discourse, seeks to intellectually liberate in the negative, or categorizing by “absence” rather than the “presence” of distinguishing features. This negative interpretation of power relations is a powerful methodology to systematically analyze institutions, social structures, and even scientific disciplines. In The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Foucault proposes a particular idea called the episteme. This concept most specifically is that of how ordering and taxonomy create influential power structures. Foucault writes: “Creating the fundamental codes of a culture— those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of practices.” In other words, the structures that organize and classify knowledge are limited by our own conceptual and intellectual purview. How do you think we ensure in the future that our representations of knowledge are as true to reality as possible? How may we best direct our collective energy and labor as a society in order to fundamentally transform society in radical ways? How can we best move scientific progress forward if we do not question our fundamental assumptions?
By Avery Alexander Rijos4 years ago in Futurism