nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

activities? Are the quests of a shaman and a scientist so different? Questionslike these arise whenever the term technoshamanism is called upon. Afterall, why use this name? Why turn to shamanism to produce immersive experiences?What is the sense of invoking magic, witchcraft, shamanism inschizoanalytic practices using electronic equipment?Some consider the term shamanism a fruit of a deep exoticism, others criticizethe term accusing it of misappropriation of traditional cultures. Somequestion the lack of “spiritual power” of such procedures, but others, thosethat concern us, see the connection between the two forms of knowledge asevidence of a new ethics, an ecological ethics, or even as an ethics that transforms,that conceives technology not as a project of development, but as a livingorganism, interdependent with its environment, and just like planet Earthitself, capable of self-regulation. 3 Technoshamanism is an attempt to combinetwo forms of knowledge that are constantly separated. The witch and the scientist.The healer and the doctor. The sorcerer and the robot. The convergencebetween technique and shamanism is an investment to repair past mistakesof misallocation of knowledge and deterministic hasty judgements about itsforms. Technoshamanism appeals to animism, the religion of nature, to moretraditional or even ancestral worldviews, to draw out their synchronicities,make them interpenetrate each other. On the other hand it invests in a morebalanced future where the project to overdevelop machines does not end upcreating an irreparable rift between humans and machines, manufacturing enslavedrobots, hacked of all expression, desubjectivated. The use of the termcan be seen as an activism of matter, an investment in the subjectivity of matter,the crossing of different natures communicatingwith each other, taking the focusoff the boundaries between organicand inorganic. It can also bethought of as a humorousway of dealing withimminent disaster, oreven as a contemporaryutopia. In anycase, the idea of ​fusingthis knowledgecomes from the desireto strengthen itsstrongest attributes:the shaman’s technicalperformance and