Education correctly realized can enhance life, create jobs and make people happy. Good education combines technology, cognitive science, human need and knowledge together with information to produce minds that the world would enjoy their ecological products. According to Pink’s diagram, starting with farmers in the 18th century’s Agricultural Age we pass to the 19th century’s Industrial Age with factory workers; then to the Information Age in the 20th century with knowledge workers¸lastly comes the Conceptual Age of the 21st century with creators and emphatizers. That is to say: “We have moved from an economy built on people’s backs to an economy built on people’s left brains to what is emerging today: an economy and society built more and more on people’s right brains.” (Pink 2005:50)
Because right does not exist without left and left without right, we will all survive through not in contrasting pairs but right and left’s interactive concert in every field we can think of. We name the orchestra Right and Left if you like. So what if the rationalist philosophers turned a cold eye on the workings of the body? Our brains played the God in creating computers designed after our own image. What we hope for science is not to overmaster the scientist, so that our hubris not be rewarded with death as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein(1817) who killed its creator.
To think positively, we can be the masters of technology if we can go on staying human at all costs. That means we are the builders of Ages and the protagonists of Human Age despite all automatization of our own creation. Quoting from the Infoculture:
“The cyborg, like automaton, the science-fiction robot, and the intelligent computer allow us all to project ourselves beyond the possibilities of the world of nature. In doing so, we might reimagine ourselves, free from the bounds of established definitions of humanity and human activities. The computer, born of war and bureaucracy, is against all odds, a most malleable machine, a machine that we can shape as we please. Writers of science fiction and of feminist criticism have shown us how we might shape it, in our imagination. The task before us is to shape the future of computers to our needs and wants, in the real world.” (1993:397)
Unfortunately or not, a gap between the real and the virtual worlds seem inescapable. If we sympathize with Baudrillard’s ‘empty simulation’ we are trying to “relocate the zone of reference, the earlier scene, the Euclidean space of history, in order to separate the human from the inhuman, we are trying to escape ‘the state of empty simulation’”, but in vain. The more we seek to rediscover the real and the referential, the more we sink into simulation...at any event, hopeless simulation. The previous states never disappear, in that ‘hysteresis’ of everything, like nails and hair grow after death, explains us Baudrillard with all his gloom. “However, these earlier forms never resurface as they were; they never escape the destiny of extreme modernity. Their resurrection is itself hyper-real. The resuscitated values are themselves fluid, unstable, subject to the same fluctuations as fashions or stock exchange capital. The rehabilitation of the old frontiers, the old structures, the old elites will therefore never have the same meaning. If one day, the aristocracy or royalty recover their old position, they will nonetheless be postmodern. None of the ‘retro’ scenarios that are being got up has any historical significance: they are occurring wholly on the surface of our age, as though all images were being superimposed one upon another, but with no change to the actual course of the film.” (Baudrillard:1994)
Having Baudrillard’s somehow pessimistic views before us, and Derrida’s argument that goes as ‘what is always deferred, never realized’, we can dare say that the image of symbiosis between knowledge and information and between creativity and innovation, superimposing one upon another, whirl around our heads while we watch the ongoing film they draw for us. Knowledge’s supposed fullness built on a void of information, the goal of an education founded on creativity and innovation are endlessly deferred and never realized. But in the postmodern there is an endless consumation and our lifestyles never know any completeness, we can stand that Derridean deferrence in education as well. Derrida deconstructs education in Rousseau’s Emile; somebody else deconstructs and reconstructs Derrida’s deconstruction. It is an unending process since competence itself is an endless process.What we care is that this process take place not in too monological, too exclusive, too universalistic education.
The picture of our ‘symbiotic student’ does not look like The Man Without Qualities of Robert Musil. Ulrich who seeks neither peace nor enlightenment, finds himself in the midst of an existential crisis. He is in search for truth through love and the natural world first, later he goes on his inquiries through mathematics, only to lose interest after a short while. The unqualified Ulrich is always right but hardly ever productive. He never finds happiness even in love and he is , except momentarily, never engaged. Our symbiotic student might be the heir of modern writer Musil’s sense of humor while commenting on ‘intuition’, postmodernity’s favorite feeling:
“...this non-plussed feeling refers to something that many people nowadays call intuition, whereas formerly it used to be called inspiration, and they think that they must see something suprapersonal, namely the affinity and kinship of the things themselves that meet inside one’s head.” (Musil:129)
Neither Dorian Gray’s portrait matches our student’s. Oscar Wilde’s elite killer Dorian murders his own image out of hubris. May be because he finds ugly meanings in beautiful things and he is corrupt without being charming, as Wilde points out.
“This is fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.”writes Oscar Wilde in his selected quotations in (Wordsworth editions:1997) Beauty is in the eye of knowledge and information beholder. Those up-to-date zones formed by words are crucial for the qualified, creative and innovative student who may be a fictional hero with all the past narratives within. As Hasan Ali Toptaş imagines in Pleasure With Thousands Of Sorrows (Bin Hüzünlü Haz): “Everything comes from words. I felt myself like a long sentence full of commas and thousands of auxiliary sentences carrying different thrillers within.”(88)
With the thrill of a relationship caused by the mutual needs, knowledge may flow towards information; knowledge adjacent to information; knowledge in front of information; knowledge at the end of information; knowledge following information; knowledge within information, all said by the inspiration of Toptaş’s postmodern novel: “Time flew under time. Time adjacent to time. Time in front of time. Time at the end of time. Time following time. Time within time.” (72)
By a potential symbiosis, knowledge and information are allowed to oppose and struggle with each other but always leaving the door open for a coexistence in the sense of a dynamic pluralism. If the signifier which transmits meaning is information, knowledge is the signified-the content of meaning. For Lacan it was not the content that was important but the symbolic expression of content, its linkings as an event. The unconscious call from the signifier is what made the language function and in that dimension the human being is created as Lacan argues. In our case signifier being information, we are created by it, at least in postmodern conditions. Information stimulates and enlivens knowledge. Our creative and innovative future student will hopefully be recreated by the both, knowledge and information.
Ayten Suvak
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