Conference organized within the project D PLATFORM – Cultural instrument and interdisciplinary portal dedicated to the Danube area, CODE: PN-II-RU-TE-2014-4-2601
Bucharest, 7 December 2016, 10:30 – 15:35
Room 6 – Constantin Noica, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest
In an age marked by functionality and anthropocentrism, an analysis of the impact of technology on nature, and of the possibilities of repositioning the human within the broader perimeter of the living, proves useful. This renegotiation entails a complex process with multiple facets. If the industrial revolution brings, together with the celebration of technology and the machine, an increasingly significant tendency to dominate the natural, to reduce it to the status of a mere infinitely exploitable resource, as a positioning of the individual against nature, the post-industrial period will entail, along with a shift of focus from the machine-matrix pair towards abstract and dematerialized information, a counter-offensive of nature that swallows abandoned factories and industrial sites that have fallen out of use.
All of this must be read through the filter of the post-human as the new condition that closes the series of post- prefixes opened by post-modernity and continued by: post-colonialism, post-industrialism, post-communism, post-feminism, etc. Whether it refers to the pragmatic discourse of robotics and biogenetics, to the critical discourse that downgrades the humanities and questions the status and value of theory itself, or to the reconsideration of the concept of the human beyond the realm of gender and species, the post-human raises fundamental questions. Among them: the way in which contemporary science and technological developments facilitate the dissolution of the nature-culture duality, of the opposition between what is given and what is constructed. Debated as well is the replacement of the modernist, anthropocentric position with one of equidistance, of equal valuation of the animal or plant kingdom.
We propose to investigate the relationship between these theoretical constructs, in their dynamics before and after the anti- and post- determinations, observing the manner in which these new theoretical positions will mark both the socio-political and the artistic spectrum.
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