The destruction of imagination and the permanence of utopia: Development, Technology and Culture in Roland Corbisier

Abstract

We will discuss in this paper some of the reflections developed by Roland Corbisier about techniques in their relationship with societies. With emphasis on his writings from the period of the military dictatorship, we will attempt to demonstrate that Corbisier sought to problematize issues involving the relationship between technology, culture and development, technique and colonialism, technique and politics, technology and imagination, technique and violence, among others. We observed the transit of Corbisier from a perception markedly instrumentalist and deterministic of technology to an approximation of the theses of the critical theory about technology. This path was trodden by the philosopher through creative and contradictory syntheses which involved his many political and formative roots; his cultural and conservative modernism of a catholic-integralist kind; his cultural theory inspired by existential phenomenology and by culturalism, the growing influence of the theory of praxis in his thinking and his continued development of a theory of national development throughout the period. This is an original thought which we believe contributes to the development of a critical theory of the relationship between technology, culture and development in Latin America.