Абсурд и вокруг: сборник статей

But the deeper sense of total absurdity does not arise from a specific clash we can analyse. It is more than this. It is free-floating, all-engulfing sense of disharmony, a non-intelligible problem of something out of its place, indeed it is a feeling that human existence itself seems to be «out of place». When we ask for the ultimate meaning of the accidental universe, the only answer is — silence. We cannot imagine what modification would create fundamental harmony. This absurdity is not the intellectual perception of clash or disharmony but the existential collapse of our whole sense of order. Seen from within the absurd, nothing has a proper place.

One of the 20th century's most popular non-realistic genre is absurd. The root «absurd» connotes something that does not follow the roots of logic. Existence is fragmented, pointless. There is no truth, so the search for truth is abandoned in Absurdist works. Language is reduced to a bantering game where words obfuscate rather elucidate the truth. Action moves outside of the realm of causality to chaos. Absurdists minimize the sense of place. Characters are forced to move in an incomprehensible, void-like realm. Danish philosopher Srnren Kierkegaard was the first to use the term «absurd» in its modern context. His application of the term related it to what he considered the incomprehensibility and unjustifiably of Christianity. Existentialist philosophers such as the Frenchman, Jean-Paul Sartre and the German, Martin Heidegger propagated the use of the terms in their work. In the philosophical world of the novel, Albert Camus employed absurdism to portray the difference between man's intent and the resultant chaos he encounters.

In modern civilization man is posited as the subject of knowledge in science and technology, animating the utopian projects of industrial civilization, and culminating in great urban conglomerates, as in the sealed universe of commodities which constitutes the omnipresent mall. Technique, defined as the ensemble of means, is the driving force of social development, more important than the ends it is supposed to serve. Unfortunately, technique became an end in itself and the society is organized around it. Of course, we are all aware that we need certain changes to subdue technique, but I think it is too late now to change the course of technique. However, technique is frequently pictured as the only hope for a better future and the only means of making the world more humane. And that is the sort of statement that French philosopher Jacques Ellul calls the technological bluff. Technology is a discourse on techniques: therefore, the bluff lies not in the failure of techniques as such but in presenting them in a falsely optimistic light. The author formulated in 1954 two laws of technical progress: first, it is irreversible: second, it advances by a geometric progression. Thus, a computer revolution changes nothing in the nature of technical progress, although products are new. This progress is hampered not by internal mechanisms, but by the maladaptation of the social body to it, since society is rooted in the past and constantly refers to it. On the other hand, technique is future- oriented and discards as valueless everything that cannot be incorporated into the web of techniques.

The extraordinary influence of technology on the world has always been a paradox to me. That scientific and technocrats minds could produce unparalleled effects on the course of human activities during the last fifty years, still seems absurd to most people today. Technical progress gives rise to a new aristocracy, technocrats, who combine authority with competence. Their knowledge is indispensable for the proper functioning of the society.

However, if they talk about democracy, ecology, culture, etc., they are «touchingly simplistic and annoyingly ignorant». For instance, when stating that everyone will have access to data banks, only other technicians are meant, not poor farmers or the young unemployed. Technocrats are also the main source of the technological bluff, since when picturing tomorrow's society they often disregard such problems as pollution, growth of armaments, or stagnation of some countries, especially those from the Third World. In their eyes, to halt building nuclear power stations is the same as returning to the caves. Technical progress is good by its very nature and thinking otherwise is a mark of obscurantism.