Technoculture and life technique

Abstract

The present article provides grounds for ethical singularity in a world of technological culture. Against a backdrop of crises in the foundations of our established order, particularly with regard to our faith in a certain approach to objectivity, our refusal to acknowledge the Nietzschean death-of-god, and our disregard for Schopenhauer's insight that the only resolution to our suffering is by way of a voluntary extinguishing of our very will-to-life, Wolfgang Schirmacher proposes a phenomenological approach to our epoch of artificial life – a time of biotechnological creation, technoculture and virtual worlds – where we carry the full responsibility that follows from having created our world. Avoiding the double pitfalls of euphoria and distrust in the face of technoculture Schirmacher suggests a set of life techniques that can work towards the kind of equality and fulfilment made possible by an anthropomorphic, rather than an anthropocentric, perception of the world. In the place of a technoculture given to domination, goal-orientation and prefabricated norms this article proposes five specific barriers to our “progress towards inhumanity”: an erasure of the self; refuse or trash art; indirectness (such as in mediated histories); silence and chaos; and a rereading of Heidegger's Fourfold (Geviert). It is in such a crux that Homo generator – the one who stands as originary to an entire life-world of technoculture – can begin a militant releasement of justice where we bear full responsibility and yet hold no privilege.