-02: Philosophy.
What I compose here is entirely conjecture. It is the product of others’ ideas and systems of thought about the world and how they intermingle and come to converse with one another in my own mind.
Ferdinand de Saussure, in his Course in General Linguistics, asserts that for every word in language there is an equivalent object in nature which corresponds with the expression. The expression is called the signifier, and the object is the signified. The image of the expression, or the word, that embodies it, is referred to as the sign.
In the 1950s and 1960s, our perception of language’s direct correlation with corporeality begins to take a shift. The rise of deconstructionist thinking from the minds of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and others, challenged the idea of a fixed link between signifier and signified. We began to consider the possibility of meaning beyond God and the Author. Deconstruction opened up the possibility of the reader and the receiver interpreting the meaning.
In the decades following, critical theory and philosophy flourished in multiple directions - towards gender, economics, psychology, and politics to name a few. One of the more notable, and more to the purpose of my thinking, are the works and theories and Michel Foucault.
To summarize some of his notions, Foucault asserts that knowledge is generated by ourselves through observation of the world and the imposition of a viewpoint over others as well as on the external world. Knowledge, then, is not inherently “embedded” into the landscape. Technology, then, is a function of knowledge as power - either to improve or to diminish. Technology can be the kind of machine as we have come to understand it in the twenty-first century - trains, cars, smart phones, tablets, and computers. But technology and machines can also be ideological in nature, according to Foucault - his now-classic example is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison, which would instill paranoia into the prisoner-subjects o the extent where they fear authority enough to police themselves.
It stands to reason, then, that we are cyborgs philosophically-speaking. We have operating within ourselves technologies of knowledge and power, both by our own and by others design. Cyborgean philosophy and the image of the cyborg in general, seeks to observe the sum of all parts and not the machine disassembled. Deconstruction dismantled the literal connection of language with the world that is introduced in structuralist thinking’ other poststructuralist approaches to thinking - feminist, psychoanalyitic, and Marxist for example - examine these parts to the finest nuances. Cyborgean modes of thinking seeks to address the machine as the sum of all its parts, and how each part works both in concern and in dissonance with one another.
Ferdinand de Saussure, in his Course in General Linguistics, asserts that for every word in language there is an equivalent object in nature which corresponds with the expression. The expression is called the signifier, and the object is the signified. The image of the expression, or the word, that embodies it, is referred to as the sign.
In the 1950s and 1960s, our perception of language’s direct correlation with corporeality begins to take a shift. The rise of deconstructionist thinking from the minds of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and others, challenged the idea of a fixed link between signifier and signified. We began to consider the possibility of meaning beyond God and the Author. Deconstruction opened up the possibility of the reader and the receiver interpreting the meaning.
In the decades following, critical theory and philosophy flourished in multiple directions - towards gender, economics, psychology, and politics to name a few. One of the more notable, and more to the purpose of my thinking, are the works and theories and Michel Foucault.
To summarize some of his notions, Foucault asserts that knowledge is generated by ourselves through observation of the world and the imposition of a viewpoint over others as well as on the external world. Knowledge, then, is not inherently “embedded” into the landscape. Technology, then, is a function of knowledge as power - either to improve or to diminish. Technology can be the kind of machine as we have come to understand it in the twenty-first century - trains, cars, smart phones, tablets, and computers. But technology and machines can also be ideological in nature, according to Foucault - his now-classic example is Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison, which would instill paranoia into the prisoner-subjects o the extent where they fear authority enough to police themselves.
It stands to reason, then, that we are cyborgs philosophically-speaking. We have operating within ourselves technologies of knowledge and power, both by our own and by others design. Cyborgean philosophy and the image of the cyborg in general, seeks to observe the sum of all parts and not the machine disassembled. Deconstruction dismantled the literal connection of language with the world that is introduced in structuralist thinking’ other poststructuralist approaches to thinking - feminist, psychoanalyitic, and Marxist for example - examine these parts to the finest nuances. Cyborgean modes of thinking seeks to address the machine as the sum of all its parts, and how each part works both in concern and in dissonance with one another.
