ABSTRACT
Although the last several chapters have engaged a variety of ways in which the social and political impact of contemporary technologies and new communication media have intersected questions of ethics, in this chapter I turn to what we might call the question of ethics “itself”: the degree to which contemporary technics might force us to rethink the very concept of ethics, whether we take it to be the critical consideration of “right” and “wrong” behavior or as the more general mapping of the nature of relationships between individuals within a community. In the following I argue for the need for such a rethinking by interweaving two narratives: one that traces the emergence of Western ethics in Greek antiquity as indexed against the techne and media of that time and its continued legacy in the present, and one that trace the recent “turn to ethics” in contemporary political theory and its relation to the dominant media and technologies of today. These two threads will crisscross at a variety of points, but perhaps most importantly around the ways that technicity has relentlessly, if often implicitly, shaped our understanding of the “mortal” world of the material present,
and the “immortal” realm of the ethical imagination and our ability to imagine the ideal society, and thus our understanding of both the present as well as our hopes for the future.
