exercises for a summer day

 

EXERCISES FOR A SUMMER DAY

It is normal to analyze and explain biocultural dynamics of human life; when the analysis is properly connected with the contexts of time or duration, the explanation may be impressive; when theory and theorizing are the motivating drivers, analysis and explanation become the object of doubt.  One instance is the desperation of Svetlana Radtchenko-Drailland's  essay" The Fates of the Human Factor in Science and Contemporary Society at the Era of Digitization."  The premise demands pause:

 

"The emergence of the discourse of science, the industrial economic  revolutions and then the taylorization have led to the systematic search for human efficiency on the merits of profitability. They allowed from digitized and serialized data to calculate trends and statistically exploit the digitized data of the results of human efficiency and of this cognitive performance."

 

The sentences communicate Germanic style better than the origins of an idea in French thought. The idiom is jarring to an American English ear. For certain academics who chant in temples of richly attired confusions, the idea and the idiom might be harmonious.  For critics who stand their ground against the awkward excesses of language and theorizing, the premise is obtuse.

 

It is surprising that Radtchenko-Drailland reaches a lucid conclusion.

 

"The questioning of the perspectives directed at technical innovations shows that the issue of social meaning of technological objects remains fundamental to rational understanding of the uses of digitization in contemporary societies."

 

The lucid conclusion exposes the argument as a torturing screed, as a snarky attempt to enslave human thought.  Perhaps what was intended all along was a tacit salute to Julia Kristeva's opinion "that, through its universality, the symbolic common denominator is necessarily echoed in the corresponding symbolic denominator of another sociocultural ensemble" ("Women's Time," 1979).

 

The essay illuminates how the abuse of the sign signifies on the impotence of the symbol.  A reproductive pejorative makes human suffering in 2021 more enormous than it ought to be.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            June 14, 2021

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