The Avatars of Knowledge: Mediatization
The Avatars of Knowledge: Mediatization
The relation of human beings with reality and the issue of knowledge is based on two realms of the lived culture: the realm of experimented significances and the one of mediated ones. The first promotes a subjective reality, that organizes and confirms our self-consciousness, our direct contact with the elements of reality, determining a correspondence in substance between the knower and the object to be known. In the mediated knowledge, our interaction with the objective reality is achieved by translation of mediated significances into experienced significances; in other words, the mediated significances replace our relation with reality, they assume for themselves the necessity of direct contact, apparently simplifying and at the same time expanding the process of knowing.
Despite philosophical divergences within the classical knowledge, the generally shared feeling was that reality is identifiable, and hope was also nurtured that one day it would be possible to hold it down in a definition. Mediated knowledge bestows on us a realization that things do not exist in themselves or by virtue of their belonging to any superior reality, and neither by their intrinsic values; they exist only to that extent in which they are part of the process of communication. Through their mediated significances, reality is produced and reproduced, frontiers lose their fixity, they interfere and infuse with each other. The objects of reality and their defining concepts become elastic and multiply ad infinitum, producing the same number of composition patterns, as the number of existing techniques.
Keywords: knowledge, reality, tehnicization, representation, translation, relation, sign, event, facticity, referent, system, simulacre, mediation, individuality, communication.
