The Question Concerning Heidegger

TOPIA 16 143 REVIEW Andrew Wernick The Question Concerning Heidegger A Review of Kroker, Arthur. 2004. The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Nietzsche, Heideger and Marx. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Feenberg, Andrew. 2005. Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Arthur Kroker’s The Will to Technology and The Culture of Nihilism, and Andrew Feenberg’s Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History are important books which in strikingly different ways aim to advance our thinking in that resurgent problem-area one could call culture and technology. In tone and register the books are worlds apart. Where Feenberg’s is primarily a work of commentary, Kroker, after building a position from modified elements of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Marx (and other more recent thinkers), moves to a direct reflection on contemporary culture with its “will to technology” and all-seeing “dig- ital eye” (Kroker 2004: 169). Kroker probes, poeticizes and inveighs. He throws the excrement of digitalia (data trash, data dirt…) back into its face like some electric-age hipster, but with an eye and an ear for the miraculous it might reveal. Indeed, his is a deliberate counter-strategy of aestheticizing theory. Feenberg, straighter on the sur- face, but perhaps as radical underneath, sticks to texts and ideas. His main concern is to elucidate Marcuse’s later work in the light of his complex relation with Heidegger and, through this, to foreground the “aesthetic dimension” (Marcuse 1966: 172) in which for Marcuse (and himself ), technology—such as it has developed under conditions of advanced capitalism—might be redemptively transformed. Where Kroker and Feenberg converge is not just in their shared focus on the cultural problematics of technology. With Innis, McLuhan and Grant over one’s shoulder, this is itself of course, a distinctly Canadian preoccupation which brings with it a  democratized attunement to the Anglo-German culture-and-civilization problematic that stresses both the empire/power element and the shaping capacity of technology, especially media, vis-á-vis the senses and sensibility. These themes are present in both books, though more explicitly in Kroker’s, whose work as a whole stands in a con- scious line of succession to the Canadian tradition. More particularly, though, both approach the question of technology through a criti- cal but sympathetic engagement with Heidegger. Technology is not to be understood, then, merely as tools or equipment, or expertise. It is to be understood in proximity to the Greek techne, meaning indistinguishably art and skill, as a form of making (poiesis) which, as in Aristotle’s example of the silver chalice, reveals the nature of Being in the mode of a bringing forth that harmonizes matter, function and form. In this regard, what, for Heidegger, distinguished moderne technische, as epitomized in the replacement of windmills by the hydro dam on the Rhine, is a diremption that splits art from production, poeisis from physis, and sets the world over and against the self-asserting modern ego as an object to be mastered and used. At the limit, not only external nature but our own being-in-the-world comes to be disastrously shaped by technicity as a paradigm that subsumes human activity along with everything else as a “standing reserve” of energy and material (Heidegger 1977: 297). For Feenberg, it is only through recovering Heidegger’s re-reading of the Greeks, and the uses Marcuse made of this through the corrective prism of the young Marx, that we can appreciate, and rescue from charges of mystical romanticism, the TOPIA 16 | ground breaking analysis and critique advanced in Eros and Civilization and beyond. Kroker’s enagement is still more direct. He reads Heidegger as continuing Nietzsche’s 144 existential (and Hellenistic) protest against modernity from within, but free from the latter’s tortured embrace of modernity’s nihilist moment, and so more able to discern its egoic/technological roots. For him, therefore, Heidegger is the philosopher of technology par excellence. Not that either author follows Heidegger all the way. How could they? Even if we charitably pass over Heidegger’s politics, or try to place them outside the perim- eter of his thought, we are still left with a crypto-theology, allied with a radically conservative anti-modernism. History, moreover, is considered only from the angle of the metaphysics held to ground each (Greek, Christian, modern) age, while the mediations of the market disappear in the vagueness of the “everydayness” in which Heidegger’s apperception of the social seems stuck. Thus the question of capitalism is never engaged, while technology itself, deprived of socio-economic substance, floats in an unexamined productivism to become, despite Heidegger’s intent, a kind of evil demiurge, driven by a self-benighted and empty will. Heidegger’s “question concern- ing technology” has therefore to be rethought. Feenberg’s Marcuse shows one way this might be done, highlighting Lukacs as an intermediary, and the bridge that can be built between enframing, alienation and the reification that, Lukacs argued, inhered in the quantitativenes of economic exchange and in the reduction of work to abstract labour. For Kroker, on the other hand, Heidegger’s “modern technology” has to be essentially reconceived so as to take into account its inextricableness with capital, whence also (following Marx’s later view of capital as the systemic autono- mizing of dead labour), the vampiric qualities that are embedded in what presents, and fetishizes itself as, a purely technicist imperative. At the same time, Kroker wants to rethink Heidegger’s essay with respect to its now historically surpassed idea of the modern. The world of industrial power machines has morphed via biotech and digitality into a world of both speed and the post- human. Thus technology/capital has entered decisively into a new configuration, requiring a new critical paradigm for its comprehension. The suggestion that theory must catch up with this speed—and, indeed, with this posthumanity, that it must learn from the most advanced insights and provocations of digital age art and that (we have McLuhan and Baudrillard in the wings here) we must leave the slow cook- ing of linearity behind—will not persuade everyone. But it does make for a bravura performance that engages with the grain of the ontic in a way that traditional critical theory—even gone lyrical, with Adorno—can hardly emulate. I can do neither book justice in a brief review. The Will to Technology, a brilliantly rich and far-ranging theorization of contemporary tehnoculture, is in my view Kroker’s best book. Feenberg’s fine-grained and masterly intellectual historiography will be indispensable in further discussion of Marcuse. A reservation I am left with, how- ever, is that even with a strongly Marxist, or Freudo-Marxist correction, a critical meditation on culture and technology that passes through Heidegger will find it hard not to undertheorize that side of modern nihilism which is not attributable to, or graspable in terms of, technology, the rising up of the ego into the place of the subject and the aporias of modern or postmodern poiesis. The techno-poietic side of our practico-inert is not the whole, nor the whole of modern nihilism. What also, and independently, needs to be pondered more than it has, I believe, is the nihilating TOPIA 16 | implications of (hyper)commodification as a culture-shaping force in itself. The need for such reflection is no less pressing—and perhaps more so—if, as contemporary critical theory of all stripes seems to soberly assume, capitalism and its categories 145 have become (once more, but perhaps interminably) an uncomfortable terminus rather than (also) a transitional zone on the way to something better. References Heidegger, Martin. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology. In Basic Writings, edited and introduced by D. Krell, 296-301. New York: Harper. Marcuse, Herbert. 1966. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. Boston: Beacon Press.