Vértigos de la opacidad

Tiempos y experiencia en el régimen tecnológico

Abstract

Technology emerges in Modernity signalled out by this fundamental ambivalence: simultaneously an instrument and a sphere of objects, knowledge, disciplines and forms that transfigure the sense of the modern rationality; such an ambivalence project its own tension into the forms of life, and into each and every dimension of social life: public, private, and even intimacy. Technological knowledge and its objects inform and engender by themselves, dense universes of presences. They saturate everyday life, experience, sensations, the gaze. This density, this power to impregnate each facet of life renders these objects imperceptible: they become at the same time intimate and boundless, strange and irreplaceable. Heterogeneous knowledge and disciplines are supported by tacit and even secret dialogues, which breed mythic narrations, fantasies, utopian horizons, threats. The technological order reveals, by means of its own meaning, a regime that is that of the promise, the menace, the redemption. In becoming autonomous, the technological sphere and its history, its different spheres of knowledge engender its own opacity, while exhibiting the chief role of the symbolic social domain, displayed as patterns of visibility that turned social processes into a sheer spectacle. In Modernity, technology defines the rationality of control and visibility of the contemporary identities. Its own physiognomy reveals, recreates and preserves the logic of social segmentation, exclusion and power that derive from the deep metamorphosis of the sense of time and space in contemporary social processes.