Radical Citizenship in the Republic of Technology: A Sketch

Abstract

Near the end of his famous essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, Martin Heidegger (1977, p. 32) concludes that the only way to recover agency with respect to the enframing essence of modern technology and its associated modes of being — modes of being characterized by calculation, instrumental reason, rootlessness and the will to master human and non-human nature — is to manage somehow to ‘catch sight of what comes to presence in technology, instead of merely gaping at the technological’. Of the several possible meanings of this phrase, one seems the clearest: he meant that instead of marveling or fretting over the possibilities of particular instruments, we should approach them as instances in which the truth about what it means to live in technological society is presenced or revealed. This was the so-called saving power that Heidegger thought technology harbored within itself. Every technological instrument or system unconceals the very essence of technology itself and, if we can catch sight of that, it becomes possible to establish a relationship with technology in which we do not cede to it the ground of independent moral and political judgment upon which stands human agency and citizenship. If, however, we approach discrete technologies simply as instruments, either to be used or even to be mastered, we give ourselves over to the enframing essence of technology, to being enframed as technological beings. And we forego the opportunity that technologies — especially new technologies — provide for a radical engagement with how we actually live in technological society, and the possibilities of living differently.