Poetry and technology: an essay on the contemporary man

Abstract

To demonstrate that the coexistence of poetry and technology can be a key point to understand contemporary men, an approximation of three authors is made in this study. Octavio Paz made two contributions to that: i. poetry is a time-space of contradiction between men and the world and ii. signs around us need to be to evidenced in order for men to keep creating images for the lived and to-be-lived time. From Merleau-Ponty's perspective, we are interested in the notion of time as an array of senses, where the lived and to-be-lived are re-signified in every new phenomenon. From Giorgio Agamben's perspective, we assume the notion of contemporary being; for the Italian philosopher, the contemporary being is revealed in the perception and destabilization of the limits of time device through dialectic distancing. The American professor and philosopher Don Ihde is the scholar who allows us to articulate this approximation. Reader of Merleau-Ponty, Ihde has elaborated a phenomenology of technology. In this essay, we intend to place poetry in the center of such phenomenology, which tries to understand some issues in the behavior of contemporary men.