Rapt in technology

Abstract

Given the energy expended within dominant Cartesian epistemologies constructing and policing conceptual boundaries between the natural and the cultural - energies joined, paradoxically, to the pragmatic Baconian colonisation of nature - the terms environment and technology have come to share an interesting convergence. First, both have become amorphous and diffuse, referring to ubiquitous conditions in human experience. Langdon Winner's pronouncement in 1977 that technology "has come to mean everything and anything; it therefore threatens to mean nothing" is relevant still. It is increasingly true also of the functioning of the term environment, an observation that goes some way in explaining the centrifugal forces currently disintegrating and dispersing environmental discourses.