Foreword: The Mutual Benefits of Cybersemiotics and the Field of Technology-Based Arts

摘要

The current institutional situation in Western academia, according to Terry Eagleton, is that the arts (hereunder the humanities) are in danger of disappearing in the near future, and that universities to an increasing degree are sub-servant to the global market economy, whose paradigms have taken over even the former, more liberal, institutions of knowledge generation: the universities (Eagleton, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2015). If Eagleton is right in his assumptions, their function of forming a space for critical approaches to society and forming open experiments that can enhance the evolutionary process of human knowing outside of short-sighted instrumental goals is under attack. This seems to be the situation, broadly today, even if there would of course be internal differences between Western countries. The function of academia to place itself as something other than existing social systems, as Luhmann put it as a social system in itself subscribing to first and foremost finding truth as opposed to primarily operating on behalf of the code of money or power (Brier, 2005), is thus, according to Terry Eagleton, no longer gaining nourishment at a broad societal level. Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons (2001) claim that market rationality is the deepest and most dominant rationality in our time. Yet, at the same time, much points towards the fact that the dominance of market rationality and neo-liberal economics seems to be a mechanisms that also steer us towards serious global crisis. With global crisis that has no obvious easy solutions, comes the need to redefine what a human being is, what relations between human beings are, and how, as human beings, we can live in accordance with the ecological barriers of nature. This demands new narratives and types of insights that we cannot gain by taking a point of departure in present rationalities that are at subtle levels dominated by global market economy, and current financial and political paradigms (neo-liberalism). It takes a space of exploration and re-definition that is, to some extent, free of such politically oriented imperatives.