ABSTRACT
The first of the above quotations gives an excellent summary of the significance of Martin Heidegger’s work for digital matters. Whilst Ellul identified the Industrial Revolution as a tipping-point in the qualitative transformation of technology into an autonomous force, Heidegger makes a much earlier historical distinction between craft and later forms of production. The way in which he explores technology’s ability to cancel an object’s intrinsic potentialities provides the basis for Part II’s emphasis upon the replacement of traditional life worlds with the anonymous flows of technology that accompany the rise of the city as a large-scale prototype for the digital m/Matrix. Of particular relevance to Part II’s treatment of popular representations of the Matrix is the above notion that the essence of physical objects (and by extension reality) is handed over to alien ends: a major theme of the Matrix trilogies of both William Gibson and the Wachowski brothers. In the previous chapter we quoted Feenberg criticizing essentialism’s failure to fully recognize the experience of technology as it is lived. Here, Feenberg’s charge is that Heidegger’s work is marked by an ‘idiosyncratic esotericism’. We would argue that this is an inevitable consequence of avoiding the pitfall of constructivism we also quoted from Feenberg, where he claimed that it tended to disaggregate the question of technology too much. In other words, it would seem that essentialists, in Feenberg’s eyes, are rather caught
between a rock and hard place. They need to pay more attention to technology as it is lived, but when they attempt to do full justice to its aggregate qualities they are vulnerable to the charge of esotericism. Despite Feenberg’s misgivings, in this chapter we present Heidegger as a crucial theorist for the theme of digital matters and their im/materiality quality because of the way his analysis does attempt the difficult combination of close attention to both the material qualities of things and the abstract qualities of more general technological processes. Even Feenberg has observed that ‘Heidegger is no doubt the most influential philosopher of technology in this century’, noting:
it is the very authority of Heidegger’s answer to ‘the Question’ that has blocked new developments . . . If we want to acknowledge the possibility of alternative modernities, we will have to break with Heidegger.
