Flight as the animated image: Whitehead, Latour and aviation

Philosophy

Abstract

The article represents an attempt to describe the event of flight from the standpoint of such ontological conceptions as Philosophy of Process, Actor-Network Theory, Deleuze’s Philosophy of the Event. Ancient dream of flying awakes and achieves rise in functioning of modern civil aviation. This sphere of production becomes so interesting for philosophy of technology because it represents work of the great number of actors (machinery, human beings and such unexpected things as volcanoes, viruses and magnetic fields) in one event. But the progress of technology is connected with the number of potential risks. And the first of them is abasement of human’s role in technological management, that produces the fear of technology. Work-net of modern technologies, as many philosophers claim,inhibits every manifestation of human’s free will and transforms autonomous human into the slave of technology. Philosophy can not save us from this fear, but it helps us to understand mechanics of functioning productive machinery and, may be, to discover the gap of freedom in a dense network of technology.