The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism: Heidegger, Marx, Nietzsche

by Arthur Kroker, Marilouise Kroker (Editor)

In The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism , Arthur Kroker explores the future of the 21st century in the language of technological destiny. Presenting Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche as prophets of technological nihilism, Kroker argues that every aspect of contemporary culture, society, and politics is coded by the dynamic unfolding of the 'will to technology.' Moving between cultural history, our digital present, and the biotic future, Kroker theorizes on the relationship between human bodies and posthuman technology, and more specifically, wonders if the body of work offered by thinkers like Heidegger, Marx, and Nietzsche is a part of our past or a harbinger of our technological future. Heidegger, Marx, and Nietzsche intensify our understanding of the contemporary cultural climate. Heidegger's vision posits an increasingly technical society before which we have become 'objectless objects'– driftworks in a 'culture of boredom.' In Marx, the disciplining of capital itself by the will to technology is a code of globalization, first announced as streamed capitalism. Nietzsche mediates between them, envisioning in the gathering shadows of technological society the emergent signs of a culture of nihilism. Like Marx, he insists on thinking of the question of technology in terms of its material signs. In The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism , Kroker consistently enacts an invigorating and innovative vision, bringing together critical theory, art, and politics to reveal the philosophic apparatus of technoculture.

Genres: Philosophy, Sociology

240 pages, Hardcover

First published March 6, 2003

Reviews

[Leonard Houx · Rating 1 out of 5]

This may be the worst book I've ever read. This book is not just philosophically mediocre, it is deeply, deeply embarrassing. Embarrassing like catching your overweight dad secretly practicing to dance like Michael Jackson. If anyone actually read the drafts of this book, they must have either a) assumed no one would read it or b) wanted for the author to suffer cruel humiliation.

[zeosauce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nietzsche, Marx, and Heidegger—although unlikely as a political or aesthetic combination—are critically appreciated in The Will to Technology as three cultural “trauma theorists” in advance of the 21st Century. Arthur Kroker’s book is a transdisciplinary meditation on the genetic, biological, and emerging technologies, with human flesh “disappearing into” technological-being as the Ariadne’s thread winding through and connecting their life’s work. In addition to interpreting each author through other writings by the same author, this exegesis reads Heidegger, Nietzsche and Marx through and alongside writings of all three authors, together, as stand-ins and interpreters of each other, and as “perspectival simulacra” (78) of one another. Kroker repeatedly makes use of a “recombinant” DNA metaphor from the life sciences. In the context of critical digital studies this refers to more than a postmodern pastiche effect. It also refers to the “cutting and splicing” [1] of the material and analog surplus as they disappear and reassemble in virtual and digital forms. The author’s cutting and splicing of the trauma theorists is a recombinant-style reading too, which makes this book a rich and uniquely chimerical consideration of the question of technology.

Review of this book published in The Agonist Journal on my blog here:

http://utopiaorbust.wordpress.com/201...