Alternative culture: traditions and innovations

This paper is concerned with the problem of alternative cultures - cultures that could substitutethe modernist cultural paradigm. The impulse towards the investigation of a new alternative model of cultural evolution is thenelucidated and criticized here. This new analysis brings one to conceive a plurality of possible cultural variants to the modernist model.The first part of the writing presents a series of criticism to the modernist culture. The second part illustrates and develops the alternativecultural models. Modernist cultures are criticized from many different perspectives or points of view. First, from the romantic orsocialist point of view, one could criticize the modernist culture because it is the expression of a mercantilist spirit. Indeed theopposition between romanticism or socialism and mercantilism is interpreted from the point of view of the alternative position in termsof a different opposition: the opposition between natural beings and artificial organizations. Here, one should pay attention to twopossible critical ideas: i) the fact that the technical way of being is seen as something universal; ii) the fact that the same field ofhumanitarian studies, as they are often conceived in many universities, exercises some sort of constraint on the common life of people.As for point i), the main focus of criticism denounces the too scientific orientation underlying the European culture. This means, forexample, that the bourgeois Enlightenment chose the wrong direction when it came to the problem of shaping the process of civilization- that is to say, it supported the wrong type of civilization (science and engineering are systems of knowledge that do not only constraintthe external life of human being, but also, and this is the crucial point, their inner life). The main theorists that defend the alternativeparadigm point out that Faust's principle of reality together with the main principles of rationality and science generate a repressivesociety. As for point ii) one should notice that the kind of knowledge developed by many universities during the Middle Ages,organized, and thus coerced, some sort of collective consciousness. The industrial technologies also pushed people away from their mostspontaneous nature, and from their way of living their corporality. A whole system of norms manipulated the most natural traitscharacterizing the members of the civil society. It is argued here that the program for an alternative culture needs to develop a whollynew cultural paradigm. Alternative forthcoming paradigms should be based on new metaphysical approaches, new world-views, newconceptions and schemes of representation of human beings and society. Perhaps with respect to the possibilities of developing analternative culture, one should see the importance of three main models: an ecological model, a romantic model, and a posttechnologicalmodel. A temporary conclusion reached in the paper is that an alternative paradigm to culture should have at its centre anunderstanding of engineering as a form of art; and an appreciation of information as something replacing the old industrialization andbook printing.

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