The secret of technics: Toward an ethical politics of technological society (Francis Bacon, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt)

The questions critics have typically asked of modern technology have focused on whether we are in control of our machines or whether they now have control over us. And questions concerning the ethics of technology have tended to revolve around some form of this conceptual approach. My dissertation, in contrast, argues that the ethical problematic of technology must begin from the question of how technology fundamentally affects ethics and how ethical relation happens under these technologically affected conditions. The dominant critical view of technology as a process or operation aimed at securing greater control and mastery is no doubt correct, but if technology tends to proceed by substituting for one activity or arrangement a more manageable and predictable system or technical artifice, this substitution itself does not always generate the desired or expected results. Indeed, technological substitution can be responsible for a variety of emergent social arrangements and practices far more contingent, equivocal, and unpredictable than many critics tend to recognize. The consequences of this strange characteristic of technology for selves and social relations is what this dissertation analyzes. It argues for a new techno-ethics of public political life, that strives to be responsible to what resists the transparency of publicity, to the emergent secrecy of technologically affected selves, society, and social relations.; Chapters I and II argue that a more robust critical theory of technology must rethink the relation of technological transparency to secrecy by examining the operations of substitution and artificial duplication through which technology essentially proceeds. Chapter III sets out on this trajectory with an analysis of the thought of Martin Heidegger. It is what I take to be the limits of Heidegger's philosophy that directs chapter IV to consider Jacques Derrida's work on the logic of repetition and substitution. Chapter V develops from Derrida and Hannah Arendt a notion of technological spectrality as a new premise of ethical and political relation. I argue that in the equivocal play of transparency and secrecy, technology becomes a rich resource for reimagining public life and for the invention of potentially more ethical and just socio-political associations.