Technoid Realism - drawing against nature?

Abstract

Technical drawing is coextensive with the global propagation of capitalism, both historically and in its global reach. It is the imaginary subtext of the industrial revolution and must be seen as the dominant aesthetic of the world‘s productive forces. Hardly anything exists today that has not passed through the stage of being drawn in the format of the technical drawing. Considering the ideological underpinnings of these productive forces towards nature, either through what Marx called the „metabolic rift“ in the sense of an alienation from nature, or simply in the face of capitalism‘s death drive towards endless profit and the resulting ecologically catastrophic futures, it seems necessary to ask: can there be another drawing? Should it replace the technical drawing? Can we overcome it? Would another drawing have to enter the contested arena of truth and effect? Or would it refrain from doing so? Is drawing, as opposed to its „technical“ doppelganger, an appropriate lever to challenge the hegemonic ideological configuration that produces our alienation from nature?

Technoid Realism is a conceptual framework for analysing and framing technical drawing beyond the feigned ignorance inscribed in the ideological landscape of capitalism. Can this framework help to define a different kind of drawing? If so, it must certainly reconceptualise its relationship to nature and our embeddedness in it, as well as its concept of technology as a mediating force.