TECHNO-UTOPIAS AND TECHNO-PHOBIAS – THE MYTH-MAKING OF THE TECHNOCRATIC IDEAL IN MODERN SOCIO-POLITICAL THOUGHT

Starting from the beginning of XVI century, political utopias managed to structure models of escape/redesign of social arrangements by proposing a new interweaving of freedom of knowledge and scientific implementation of power in which the technocratic element was declined in contradictory ways, sometimes as emancipation from particularisms, sometimes as a censurable stigma of control. The result is an imaginal production that will develop, over the last four centuries – through both a literary and visual narratives – into a worthexploring, intertwined nature-technology relationship, running along a dual and fascinating line, in limine between perfection and dystopia, hope and catastrophe, praxis and ideology.