Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science and Communication
(home address) Via Scopoli, 6 27100 Pavia
Tel: +39 0332 218901 / +393493664054
Fax: +39 0332 218909
E-mail: paolo.bellini@uninsubria.it

General: Political Philosophy, Theories of symbol and Studies about collective imaginary.

At Present:
Technology and politics in the collective imaginary of 20th and 21thcentury.

This project originates from a previous study on the subject of Symbolism in post-modern collective imaginary, concerning technology and political power. In particular the results showed that symbolical perception of technology and politics is not an eliminable fact within man’s life and the development of society, especially in the contemporary era of globalisation. Political and technological power are perceived by man as an important mean of knowledge of reality, by experiencing the possibilities to build a new and better word at the imaginary level. Nevertheless sometimes imagery and rationality appear like opposite poles, it is possible a construction of a dynamic balance that can compose the opposites, through a new model of collective perception in relation to technological and political values.

The collective imaginary is the privileged horizon to understand this phenomenon that reverberates its effects on the whole society, which is in fact composed by a plurality of individuals joined by the same imaginary. For instance, when the mass media (but also every individual) talk about democracy or about clonation, they do not use only political and scientific language, but also an imaginary vocabulary plenty of symbols that characterize the values and the meaning of the analysed arguments.

The aim of this research project is to focus on the role and the function of symbolical language and on the rhetoric of the imaginary in the contemporary technological era. The analysis of symbol’s significance aims to emphasize its importance to mass communication and politics. In particular, the research will point out the communicational strategies and values employed by means of communication in relation to political and philosophical aspects on technological progress.

This research does not adopt the sociological methodology, but it intends to accept a philosophical one that analyses the post-modern mythological construction of politics, technology and of their connections. On this matter the fundamental idea and the project’s development is based on the assumption that the contemporary era can be understood (on regard of politics and technology) by the analysis of techgnostic concept. The techgnostic vision consists of a synthesis of ancient mystical and metaphysical point of view (gnosticism) with the worldview springing from information and communication technology.

This specific ideas’ movement produces new and interesting mythologies that influence the whole society and in particular social and political values. In the ancient Gnostic mythology the matter and the empirical world is conceived like an error, that proceeds from the spiritual substance and represents a fall with respect to the metaphysical infinity of the One-God and the perfection of his spiritual Pleroma (formed by archangelical forces). Coherently with this viewpoint the empirical world is considered by gnostics as an horrible prison where the Man is called to remedy at the original sin (creation of matter and empirical world), through the discovery of the light that pulses inside of him. In the techgnostic vision the spiritual substance of Pleroma is replaced by the performative model of technology and natural sciences, with their worldview and values.

Along with the technological expansion of the information Age, the 20th century has also seen an expansion in the techniques of mass communication and of acquisition of political consensus, so, at the beginning of 21th century, the collective imaginary and the social perception of technology are influenced by techgnosticism. This phenomenon reverberates its consequences in social and political dominion. This research project intends therefore to compare the techgnostic vision with the political western system and his dynamics of legitimation and acquisition of consensus. In fact, every western system presents itself under the generic definition of liberal democracy, but this concept runs the risk to be more formal than substantial and it is not moreover in a position to decode the reality of power and of authority in the contemporary world.

The post-modern society shows that political power and technological performance converge in an indissoluble unity, this phenomenon is totally new in the history of the world, just as it is unique the pervasiveness of technology in every existence’s level (spiritual, imaginative and empirical). In this case it is possible for political contemporary system to talk about biopower (Cf. M. Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, Pantheon, N.Y., 1977 and Power vol III in The essential works of Foucault, The New Press, N.Y., 2000). This concept means that the convergence of politics and technology produces a new kind of political power. In different way in comparison with the past age before modernity, the political power is now the power to produce and to reproduce life, by control on technology, assuming that life is not a simple empirical fact, but also an imaginative and spiritual way to give significance to the reality.

The understanding of these new complex relations and their role in the history of the western culture, where this phenomenon appears in its hardest way and in its former meaning, needs an examination of the imaginative facts and of their creative depth in which every new value and social significance is generated. In fact the collective imaginary is the most suitable research’s object to define, in a synthetic vision, political, communicational and technological mythologies that perform the existence of million people in the world. Studying the rhetoric of symbols and their rules of scheme, it also allows us to determine the trend of the western culture and its political values. This can supply the strategies of intervention, to improve the relation between people and power in every context where the acquisition of consensus is determinant for the result of any performance in the social field.