1.4.9 Conceptual Foundations for Humanities and Social Studies of Humans and Technology
Sergei Sokolovskiy
Project Leader
Project period
2020-2021
Context of Research Project within a Subject of Human Capital
Studying the human mind’s, body’s and affective life’s integration forms with the environment, both artificial (technological environment, artifacts, infrastructure) and natural, is based on the latest approaches in cognitive neuroscience, human ecology, media anthropology, philosophy of consciousness, digital anthropology and anthropology of action. The scientific project Conceptual Foundations for Humanities and Social Studies of Humans and Technology is focused on non-reductionist (holistic) ideas about humans and the world, the human organism and its environment, human beings and technology, which involves rethinking the category of the human potential on the basis of cutting-edge and breakthrough scholarly and philosophical concepts that emphasize the closest integrative links between the human body and its environment, mind or cognitive ecological niches, affective atmospheres and technology-mediated human action. In this regard, rethinking the category of the human potential will mean not only analyzing and describing various forms of techno-somatic integration, but also the disclosure of non-anthropocentric prospects for realizing the potential of hybrid integrity in which a person turns out to be only one of its components. Such a rethinking, dictated by the progress of the human sciences, has important consequences for any approach aimed at the development of the human potential, since it considers the criticism of previous approaches to such a development
Project Aim
Researching and describing the main mechanisms, types and forms of techno-somatic assemblages that unite the human body with its techno-environment into (semi-)autonomous ensembles and hybrid units
Project Objectives:
- Developing a typology of human corporeal integration forms with the technological environment
- Developing the concept of techno-morphs and techno-morphisms as local forms of adaptation to specific elements of a local techno-environment
- Analyzing the hybrid techno-somatic assemblages in human body research on the materials from current media studies and digital anthropology
- Considering forms of various aspects of human body’s integration (of physical, social and lived, or phenomenological body) with tools and complex technical appliences – apparatuses, mechanisms and automata in various types of environments in the "real-virtual" continuum
Key Findings
2020
New theoretical results have been obtained in the field of research on the interaction of the human body and technology, allowing to reinterpret the diversity of human cultures as techno-cultures, in particular – basing on the analysis of the research results in this field throughout the world, and taking into account the concepts of such researchers as Jakob Johann von Uexküll (founder of biosemiotics), Ernst Christian Kapp (founder of the philosophy of technology and the concept of organ projection), Marcel Mauss (author of the concept of body techniques), Gregory Bateson (author of the cybernetic concept, called "ecology of mind" and the first ideas on distributed mind), Andy Clark (specialist in the field of neuroscience, author of the concept of distributed cognitive functions), Hermann Schmitz (specialist in the phenomenology of lived body), Edward Hall (founder of proxemics), André Leroi-Gourhan (follower of M. Moss and author of the original typology of technologies), Herbert Marshall McLuhan (founder of media theory and one of the pioneers in the development of the concept of technical devices and systems as extensions of body organs) the author has developed and published a new typology of integration forms of human body and its techno-environment
2021
Various forms and types of integration of the human body and (techno-)environment have been considered, the typology of such forms has been proposed. Various types of this integration have been presented and analyzed: extensions, incorporations, somatic techniques (including skills and habits), which allowed us to describe the specifics of the use of cyborgian bodies. To describe the specifics of combining heterogeneous elements of this type of materiality, the concept of "partial connections", proposed by Donna Haraway and developed by Marilyn Strathern, has been used. Some ethical issues arising in connection with the increasing process of cyborgization of human body and multiple attempts at improvement of human abilities have been considered.
The re-conceptualization of the relationship between human being and its technological environment allowed us to obtain new results on the problem of body boundaries for the case of so–called cybernetic organisms - humans and animals combined with technical devices of varying degrees of complexity, or of those who bear traces of the influence of such devices
Publications
Sokolovskiy S. Man and Technologies: Assembly Models (RU) // Man. 2021. Vol. 32, No. 6, pp. 102-117
Conferences
XIV Congress of Russian Anthropologists (RU) (Tomsk, Russia 6-9 July 2021), namely:
- Section Section Digital Anthropology and Socio-cultural Challenges of the Digital Age (RU) (25 reports; moderated by S. Sokolovsky)
Sokolovsky S. Modes of Technosomatic Assemblages and Society 5.0 / Symposium Social and Humanitarian Dimension of Human Potential (RU)