Abstract
Technology extends human perception and it intervenes in relations to the environment. Life in cities is particularly affected by newest technological developments, and city dwellers are most shielded and disconnected from the natural world by these very same technologies. The term technology stems from the Greek techne, and it refers to an instrumental relation to the world—a manipulation and adaptation of the environment to human needs. However, by intervening in everyday life and modifying relations to the environment, technology also produces new forms of life and is therefore also poetic in the sense of poiesis. It is clearly distinguished from literary works because it opens worlds of possibilities that are not fictional. This makes a reflection on its poeticity all the more urgent, because the large-scale advent of new technologies such as the industrialization or the digitization radically changes the modes of perception and relations to urban environments. Art works like literature absorb and articulate these changes and are therefore useful “strange tools” for putting on display the changing modes of experiencing cities. For instance, industrialization, explosive urban growth and the rapid modernization of cities overwhelmed the senses. In its very form and rhythm, modernist literature performs the fragmented and brisk-paced experience of modernity. The digital age ostensibly promises intelligibility and order, for digital technologies can survey and manage vast amounts of information. Smart cities are designed for this purpose and for offering tailored solutions to the inhabitants’ individual needs. However, data analytics cannot capture the phenomenological quality of lived experience. Art works can, and contemporary literary works put on display urban life-forms characterized by disembodiment and by exhaustive information on any subject that on its own does not translate into any sense of meaning or belonging.
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Notes
- 1.
Art works arguably even shape these changes in the consciousness to some extent. For instance the sense of modernity being exciting and joyous has been shaped by Virginia Woolf’s literary works, whereas its tragic side by T. S. Eliot.
- 2.
Gregory Shaya defines the flâneur as follows: “He was a common figure of the nineteenth century, essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. The flaneur was the man of leisure who went into the street in search of some satisfaction of his overdeveloped sensibilities. He was, by various accounts, a gastronome, a connoisseur, an idler, an artist [...]” (2004, p. 47).
- 3.
To be sure, Smith does criticize the standardisation of experience due to Facebook in her essay “Generation Why?”, and the replacement of experience by representation due to digital technologies in “The Tattered Ruins of a Map: On Sarah Sze’s Centrifuge” (Smith 2018). in her
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The motif of the city as a locus of representation and dream-like effects also comes up in the second story in Dasgupta’s novel/story anthology “The Memory Editor“, set in London. The characters “drove down from Islington in the car, crossing over Blackfriars Bridge from where the floodlights on St. Paul’s Cathedral made it look like a magnificent dead effigy of itself. The restaurant was a floating cocoon of leather and stainless steel with lighting like caresses, and their table looked down over the row of corporate places that lined the other side of the Thames”. (2005, p. 29).
- 5.
At the end of the tale, another Klaus doppelgänger named Kurt appears. This suggests that Klaus, Karl and Kurt are unlikely to be triplets, but are themselves the result of the bizarre genetic experiments done at the hotel. This recalls Walter Benjamin’s text The Artwork in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, in which he theorizes that the technological reproducibility of art (as in photography and video) has contributed to the loss of “aura“, the veneer of irreplaceability of the original (2008, p. 23). Only, in Dasgupta’s tale the technological possibility of reproducing i.e. cloning people via genetic engineering has eclipsed the aura of irreplaceability of individual people. This is evident in the blasé way foreign maids’ bodies are disposed of (2005, p. 122 and p. 128). Since Dasgupta’s tale takes place in Frankfurt, and Benjamin was associated with the Frankfurt School of cultural critique, it is likely that this is a reference to Benjamin’s famous essay.
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Lobo, T. (2021). The Techne and Poiesis of Urban Life-Forms. In: Nagenborg, M., Stone, T., González Woge, M., Vermaas, P.E. (eds) Technology and the City. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 36. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52313-8_3
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