The Spatialization of the World. Technology, Modernity, and the Effacement of the Human

Abstract

The idea of progress, commitment to which has been a defining feature of modernity, has almost always been associated with a belief in the progressive possibilities inherent in technology. The improvement of the world—even the achievement of some sort of utopia—has thus been seen as tied to the increasing technological mastery of the world. Yet, there are good reasons to suppose that the optimistic progressivism associated with technological modernism is misplaced, and that regardless of the various instantiations of modernity, with which technology is associated, and regardless, too, of the many benefits of particular technological advances and devices, the essential structure of technology conceals a danger within it. The key claim in this argument is that technological modernity is intimately connected with a certain mode of spatialization, and through this, to a blindness to, or even a refusal of, the necessary limits within which even technology itself comes to be. As a result, there is an essential contradiction within technological modernity that threatens the very possibility of a genuinely human—or ethical—form of life.

Keywords

• ethics
• human being
• limit
• number
• place
• space