Redeeming the Emancipatory Potential of Novelty Caught in Cunning Complexifications

Abstract

Competence in knowing and being is about making sense of change, of novelty’s place in the social, its functionality as well as one’s relation to it. The challenge is in acquiring, implementing, and resourcing methods of selecting and connecting things fit for the human condition of today. The main source of development has always been the urge to seek new forms of natural and spiritual order, and creative recasting of the inherited order into a new one. Until recently, such deeds were believed to be acts of Divine revelation. Advances of modernity turned the human action space into contingent networks of man-made quasi-objects grounded in disparate systems of thought and measurement that pattern the social. What will legitimate capacity for recognition and directional taxonomy of innovations? How will the resulting norms affect narratability of life? It is an outstanding intellectual and leadership challenge to develop practices leading to directional thought and fostering an elbow room for playful initiatives. Recent initiatives designed to bring knowing and being up to the demands of the digital age show that no amount of top down instruction, good will or revolutionary fervour, are a substitute for bottom up acquisition and ownership of knowledge and work in which the ultimate measure of value is the degree of personal independence and social emancipation. With it comes competent citizenship and social responsibility any socio-economic system with democratic ambitions cannot do without.