QUESTION CLAIRE BILDERBACK

Katerina Kolozova describes techne as fulfilling the desire by humans to explain the nature of reality: “...techne exacts operations over and through the physical, not in order to ‘transcend it’ but rather to use it in ways that help weighed-down animals, including human animals, in the physical reality they inhibit”1. In other words, techne reflects the human desire to explain metaphysical phenomena (phenomena that exists beyond the physical world, such as where life comes from or why humans are good or evil). The tendency to explain this is rooted in anthropocentrism, an ancient, Western philosophical tradition that places humans at the center of the universe. This viewpoint is derived from the story of the creation of the universe in the book of Genesis in the Bible. Techne and anthropocentrism travel hand-in-hand, and techne is the physical manifestation of the aspirations of anthropocentrism. Techne facilitates humanistic intervention into metaphysical phenomena. Kolozova’s example of language as techne allows humans to understand questions like “where does human consciousness come from?” within the physical world. Techne creates something that is not metaphysical phenomena itself, but rather a human-imposed version of it.

A peculiar and contemporary example of the use of techne to fulfill a humanistic desire to be the center of the universe can be seen in Hollywood’s depiction of technology. Very often robots in film and television will be depicted as having a kind of pseudo-consciousness. This pseudo-consciousness will often create empathy or distaste for the robotic character, but they will always be at least an arm’s length away from being an actual human. Stories with these kinds of robots will often involve a creation story, whether that be the creation of the robot itself (such as Luke Skywalker’s building of C3P-O in Star Wars) or the creation of a new world (such as in Wall-E or Westworld, in which the robots create a new world for themselves).

The question is why do humans feel the need to attach the uniquely metaphysical and human experience of human consciousness to physical, non-human entities the way they do in film and television? The use of robots in this manner in film and television is clearly intentional, but it is rather peculiar that science-fiction tends to tackle human consciousness by omitting humans and metaphysics from the expression.

Endnotes

1 Katerina Kolozova. Capitalisms Holocaust of Animals: A Non-Marxist Critique of Capital, Philosophy and Patriarchy, (London, England: Bloomsbury Collections, 2021), 58.