Representation, information, technology: the Enlightenment project revisited
Titel:
Representation, information, technology: the Enlightenment project revisited
Auteur:
de Beer, Fanie
Verschenen in:
Communicatio
Paginering:
Jaargang 22 (1996) nr. 1 pagina's 2-8
Jaar:
1996
Inhoud:
The Enlightenment project represents form, light, orderliness, and predictability. The key notion is representation. Representation presupposes a specific conception of reality. It is an operation that reduces the multiplicity of reality to rational sequences and controllable consequences, to laws and regularities, to a specific kind of logic. Through simplification, counting, calculation and brutal manipulation, the intractably complex, the disparate and the heterogeneous and the original richness of the real are severely reduced and eventually suppressed. Its most important current manifestation is information and the most reinforcing principle is technology. This bringing of form, light, and order is a distortion of reality rather than a sense-giving endeavour. We must try to assail this distortion and the problems it poses by redesigning our thinking, away from the representational thinking of the Enlightenment tradition to the differential thinking of the heterological tradition. This tradition focuses on the complex and the heterogeneous, on the non-dialectical interplay of the representational and the non-representational. The knowledge of differential thinking expands and extends to the entire body; it is an appeal for the rediscovery of knowledge as eros. It severely questions 'the epistemology of light' and promotes the thinking of complexity, or multiple thinking. To achieve the redesign of thinking a different educational dispensation is called for.
Tijdschrift beschrijving