Ganna be Heidegger for Halloween

What can be scarier than convoluted philosophy?

Geeze, this blog’s collected more cyberdust than Napster. I confess I’ve been neglectful to the blog, but not to the course kit. I have to admit I was ‘losing faith’ in this class before I got into the course kit readings. And though I’m a bit of an anti-essentialist (who isn’t no a days?), I find the philosophy of Agamben and Heidegger’s nonetheless intriguing.

There are a few things that turned me on and off in Heidegger’s essay. One aspect I find troubling (as I bantered on about in class) is the logocentricism that is of principle support to his argument. As if returning to the etymology of words validated them as “more true”, rather than understand words as a constructed social concept. The pedestal treatment of the Classical Greeks as the ‘ideal’ society that coexisted with nature also raised one eyebrow for me. It sounds similar to More’s “Utopia”, an imaginary world used as a rhetorical tool to contrast the crumby reality of European culture.

Yet weather Hiedegger’s description of the classical Greek world is true or not is of no importance. Just like More's use of “Utopia”, Hiedegger uses ancient Greece as a literary tool to convey his argument. And I admit, it is really good use of rhetoric. Yet what strikes me is Heidegger’s grammatical structuring of “questioning concerning technology” in the first paragraph of his essay. Heidegger encourages a step back and “prepare a free relationship to it [technology]”, which will thus lead to a greater understanding of it. Thus, by positioning himself outside the culture he critiques, allows him to peel away the skin to get to the pithy seed, or the essence of technology: “the relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology” (63). Almost through an anthropological viewpoint, perched like a raven on a telephone wire, Heidegger’s concern around the question becomes “what is technology?” This “outsider” curiosity reminds me of a documentary where a white guy from England traveled to China seeking an answer to the question “what is Buddhism?” Weaved within the rituals and routines of everyday life, Buddhism and Chinese culture are inseparable and is understood rather, as a way of life. Likewise, technology is inseparable with western culture, and can not be understood as consisting of an ‘essence’ separate from cutlure.

Moreover, the trouble with the grammer of the question lies in the verb “is”. In the sentence “what is technology”, the verb presupposes a tangible concept or a concrete ‘thing’ that ‘is’ technology. The question of what “is” frames technology within an essentialist box; a perspective that I’m simply not interested in. As a participant within the technocratic culture, I’m interested in investigating the cultural process that are undergoing as a result of technology, and the sub sequential affects and effects that occur.

Yet, I appreciate Heidegger’s returning to art and poetry as the ‘redemptive’ qualities of our culture. Digital technology has become a leading medium in the production of art, and I am fascinated by this marriage of art and technology. Still an embryonic medium, I’m not intrigued by the ‘newness’ of a techno-aesthetic, but rather the creation of new myths for a relatively new culture.