Pieter Lemmens

This article focuses on the power of technological mediation from the point of view of autonomist Marxism. The first part of the article discusses the theories developed on technological mediation in postphenomenology and critical theory of technology with regard to their respective power perspectives and ways of coping with relations of power embedded in technical artifacts and systems. Rather than focusing on the clashes between the hermeneutic postphenomenological approach and the dialectics of critical theory, it is argued that in both the category of resistance amidst power-relations is at least similar in one regard: resistance to the power of technology is conceptualized as a reactive force. The second part of the article reads technological mediation through the lens of the antagonistic power-perspective on class struggle developed in autonomist Marxism. The outline of a provisional autonomist philosophy of technology is developed using Foucauldian dispositifs of biopower in contrast to the hermeneutic and dialectical approach. It is thus argued that resistance should here be understood in terms of practice that subverts the technically mediated circuit of production itself

In this reply I try to show that, contrary to Milberry’s apparent assertion, the general intellect of the multitude does not have the explanatory robustness she accredits to it. Digital network technologies are currently overwhelmingly effective in proletarianizing and disempowering the cognitariat and only an active technopolitics of deproletarianization could reverse this hegemonic situation. In my response to Verbeek, I attempt to correct his misinterpretation of the Stieglerian approach as being dialectical in nature and show that, far from reinstating the humanist dichotomy between human beings and technologies, my analysis assumes their original, albeit fundamentally ambiguous and even ‘uncanny’ [unheimlich] interconnection. I conclude with pointing out some implications of this view for a ‘really realistic’ political theory of technology

To be alive is to be vulnerable. That is probably the most basic truth all living creatures confront, from the smallest to the greatest and from the most primitive to the most complex. As Hans Jonas states in the introduction to his wonderful treatise, The Phenomenon of Life, the paradoxical, still enigmatic fact that vital substance by some original act of segregation has isolated itself from the general fabric of things and set itself over against the world introduced the tension of ‘to be or not to be’ in the indifferent continuum of material existence. With life, Jonas observes with Friedrich Nietzsche, being appears as being in an emphatic sense for the first time. Life means mortality, it is existence affirmed but as such, given the inherent and continuous threat of relapsing back into non-being (all living creatures’ ultimate fate anyway), it is existence as concern. Being alive as being free from the identity with matter implies having its own being as a burden and this means—h