Inevitably, science and technology between them domesticate entities that formerly had free range, living outside human supervision and control, and this is as true of rare atmospheric gases or sub-atomic particles as it is of the floral essences of the ancient perfumer’s art or the exotic fauna of the Renaissance collector. Consequently, we have reason to doubt that technology implies experiential opacity; it may rather extend the realm of what we perceive and come to know intimately. Accordingly criticisms of modernity that are based on the equation immediacy = presence = human value are likely to fall by the wayside.
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Rejecting the old tendency of philosophy to talk about invisible states of affairs and abstract entities, phenomenologists, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Martin Heidegger, began in a surprising move to describe in lengthy detail human experience with everyday objects such as jugs, inkwells, telephones, keyholes, letters, cafe tables, and so on.
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Renaissance inventors who brought forth new experiences with “machines” or who were able to perform action at a distance were suspected of being in league with the devil and assisted by demons, for it was generally agreed that such achievements surpassed the ordinary powers of nature. The “Faustian bargain” was an exchange of the human soul for power over nature, and, wherever they perceived it to be happening, it was symbolically resisted by philosophers. Walter Benjamin argued that mass destruction was the only human activity that could take full advantage of technology, and the French sociologist Jacques Ellul made the point that the achievement of absolute precision finds its natural expression in organized warfare.
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Benjamin, who deplored the degradation he believed followed from the availability of the multiple copies of artworks available in an age of mechanical reproduction, argued as well that real objects are surrounded by an “aura” of uniqueness and permanence… My central claim in this section is that the human ability to distinguish simulacra from real things and simulations from real events, has been made to carry too much psychological weight… The real world and fictional worlds are not emotionally, psychologically, or morally insulated from each other… it did not occur to Heidegger does not mention that the world of the peasant is not characterized simply by her relations with her bed, her stove, her hoe, etc. She is a human being and that is to say that she lives at the same time among images and simulacra. The real peasant has her images of the Holy Mother of God, her songs and stories, her longings for a world beyond the one she knows.




