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.
Customer Reviews
The Will to Politics and the Culture of Ethics…:
When I first came across this outstanding book, I was a little confused as to how Nietzsche and Marx could be read as critics of the technological Enframing, as well as how Heidegger could be read as *politically* radical in any meaningful sense. However, after looking through the various sections dealing with these questions I can see much more clearly now that he is not simply deploying these thinkers in their original bodies, as I was originally thinking, but is instead hybridizing the most critical elements of each of them into a new kind of patchwork, thus allowing each to become much more radical than they would have been prior to this process. Clearly this can be an interesting and productive approach to doing critical theory after the ‘death of the author’ - there really is no good reason we cannot have for instance, an anarchist Marx, a Marxist Heidegger, or even say, a Nietzschean Virilio (despite his likely protestations). I especially like the way Kroker has been recently emphasizing the importance of bringing back the ‘public intellectual’, a desire reflected not only in his lecture series and texts accesible for free online, but also in the sympathetic discussion of the antiglobalization movement of the ‘digital proletarians’ and its unhappy ‘double-movement’ relationship of resistance to the ‘virtual class’ - in my mind it is absolutely crucial in our time to tie critical theory to actually existing political struggles and this book does that quite well - well worth the read!
