tradition et technology

Nationalism constructed on the pride of a country’s advancing technology is an interesting and strange sentiment to understand. As Subramaniam eexplores the revival of Vedic sciences, or rather more appropriate, the hybridity of an archaic modernity, the dangers of establishing ‘hinduness’ in India as the dominate cultural ideology, which attempts to embraces development via technology, negates social tensions of caste, gender, and race symptomatic of dominant discourses.

Yet, this rhetoric of nationalism is a familiar argument for progress and development, often a competitive response to the rest of the post industrial world, at the cost of human rights. Such is a utopian sentiment of blinding optimism disinterested in the apparent contradictions and inconsistencies it presents. A visual illustration of such “nationalist spirit” is typified as the formal motif in socialist realist art. Below is a Chinese propaganda poster promoting communist prospects of scientific advancement with a caption reading: ‘Science can be dangerous and difficult; bitter struggles can set new standards”.


(1979)

Below is an earlier image poster distributed during the “Great leap Forward” campaign. The sails bear the slogan, “Better, Faster, Cheaper”, while Europeans and Americans welter in the waves on the right.



Juxtaposed to one another, the nationalism these posters present reflects the authority of tradition and the enthusiasm of the new, similar to what Subramaniam portrays in her portrait of an archaic modern India. That is, both attempt to modernize with a façade of “culture and tradition”. That science in India is “distinctively Hindu”, or communism to Moa is “clearly Chinese”, such blatant ethnic characterizing blurs the lines of national and cultural identities. Thus, the irony of a janus-faced nationalism of nostalgia and progress is that modernization is legitimized by the authority of tradition, that celebrates a future liberation via technology, without dismissing ostracizing via tradition. Thus oppositions are met by a combined rhetoric of science and tradition

My attitude towards the assigned readings for this class fluctuate on grid lines of cheer or chore. As my blog entries will show, I have a tendency to focus nominal on the articles discussing related topics, or talk only about the article. This week, I thoroughly enjoyed the reading, so this entry will be of the latter- though more boring than the former.

Of particular interest is Eueben’s discussions of spirituality and technology in the context of Islam, and the binary of post-enlightenment western rationality, and Islamic modernity she presents. However, Euben’s paradigm shift is not solely based on juxtapositions, rather she problematizes the incongruent ‘essentialism’ within both streams of western and Islamic rational thought, and reads them as critical ambiguities. She thus call for an approach that returns to the morals and values that religion provides, with the aid of scientific processes, rather than the hindrances of it.

Throughout her essay, the tone of contest against western reductionalism sounds like a call to pack our bags up and go. However, rather than abandoning one side of the binary for the other, she proposes a hybrid of “horizons”, and a shared “expressed ambiguity” that does not dismiss religiosity (rather than secular spirituality) or science, that can utilize rationalism as points of merger rather than failure.

Interestingly, like many other theorist we have read, Eugen leaves us with the challenge of finding “the middle way”, but provides us no map or compass for our travels. Yet, this investment of hybridity in her article, a pithy conclusion of two pages or so, does illustrate nicely the complexities and tensions such a hybridity entails, yet the necessity of it.

A problem then, as explored by many of the theorist we’ve read in class, is how to re-orient our binaristic mode of thinking, when according to Derrida, our systems of meaning function on a mode of difference and deference of binaries. How can we stand in the in-between of knowing, and not knowing- or rather, how can we deal with the inherent attitudes of violence, apathy, and frustration in these spaces of knowing-and-not-knowing? How do we find this fulcrum of accepted ambivalence, and the courage to act with certainty? And, perhaps most important to me, how do we experience this ambivalence, and what can we learn from it? To Kant, experiencing the limitation in both faculties of reason and imagination is a moment of the sublime.

In a history textbook some years ahead, I won’t be surprised if the chapter “The twentieth Century” is subsequent to a subtilted “The Silicon Age”. But as history is to textbox; time is to literature.

Sci-Fi literature, as Hayes describes in her reading of Egan’s trilogy, a genre of future dystopian or utopian worlds, can only arise from a post enlighten, industrialization, mechanization era. That is, the view of a hyper-siliconized world in literature is derived from a reflection of our own familiar techno-saturated landscape.

The Posthuman as Hayes describes, under the rule of The Computation Regime, points to the proximity of Egan’s sci-fi plot lines, and our contemporary world. Thus, Egan’s literature is more than allegory; it’s metaphoric intent severs the ties between the reader and his or her culture, to scrutinized the obscurity, yet familarity of a posthuman protagonist. Through these echoes does the suspension of one’s disbelief become less and less suspended, while the plot becomes more and more believable.