From Heidegger to Pantechnical Anarchy

Abstract

Why after Heidegger (?)What does it mean to raise the question concerning technology after Heidegger? The average form of the answer could be summed up in one key point: today we must, literally following the way of Heidegger, entrust the question of technology to the matter of thought, by default sharing the belief that this question has no technical solution.Along the way, we must accept the reference point of Heidegger’s thinking, which is a variation of the ontological difference (being is essentially different from a being, from beings) and which is that “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological.”1 This reference point implies the rejection of the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology and is a condition for the release of thought into the open, where only one can get the growth of the saving power (whichwill also, probably, not be anything technical).In other words, to be ‘after Heidegger,’ on average, means to follow his way, moving along it further into the free openness of the ontological relationship (of thought) to technology.However, the extreme form of the answer, to which Heidegger himself pushes us, would suggest something different.He begins manuscripts of the 1940s dealing with modern technology by asking: “[w]hy should the non-intermittent statements of opinion about ‘technology’ be increased by one more?”2 This question marks the task of talking about technology in a way that no one has ever talked about before.It is obvious that today the drama of this question is complicated precisely by the situation that has developed ‘after Heidegger,’ that is, in the conditions when ‘the non-intermittent statements of opinion’ about technologyare produced exactly in the order of following Heidegger’s way.In order to dramatically repeat and put this ‘why,’ today it would be necessary to rather go against Heidegger and talk about technology in a way that no one else, including Heidegger himself, has ever said.So there are two forms of how to be ‘after Heidegger.’The average form: to be on the side of Heidegger, to speak with his voice, to be possessed by Heidegger3; and the extreme form: to be against Heidegger, to force him to speak with a voice other than his own, to make him possessed. The averaged form opens up a space of safety (there is nothing safer for ‘after Heidegger’ thinking than to rant about the dangers of technology). The extreme form opens up a space in which exactly what Heidegger warned about happened.We will take the way of extreme form.This does not mean that we will not listen to and hear what Heidegger says about technology, it means that we will take what he says to the extreme.Pushing to the extreme is possible in two ways: criticism and anomalous encounters.Critically, we will ask how far Heidegger goes in rejecting anthropologism and instrumentalism, in rejection, on the implementation of which the credibility of his main theses depends.If Heidegger does not bring it to the end, then as a result of a chain reaction, two of his key theses come into question: that the essence of technology is by no means anything technological, and that the question of technology is resolved by means of thought, not technically.Critical pushing to the extreme makes Heidegger flammable and explosive, open to encounters and abnormal rapprochements; criticism releases demonic Heidegger doubles who stand on the other side of the question of technology, putting it from the point of view of technics itself.As anomalous counterparts of Heidegger, we will have the pananarchistGordin Brothers, whose texts, if Heidegger had addressed them, would have forced him to feel them as embodiments of the demonry of technology (which Heidegger, as we know, refused to recognize4).They ask a question similar to Heidegger’s question, but arrive at diametrically opposite conclusions.