Arthur Kroker

What to Make of Thought?

Dr. Arthur Kroker has concentrated for many years on questioning the presence of technology in our lives. What is modern technology? Is it merely gadgetry and machinery, cell phones and excavators and heart rate monitors, or is there something essential about technology? These are difficult questions to answer, but it helps to consider the path that Dr. Kroker has established through thinking about technology over the course of his career. It is a path that holds particular interest for Canadians. Early in his career he wrote one of the most stimulating books in Canadian intellectual history, Technology and the Canadian Mind, a sustained examination of the writings of three storied Canadian scholars, Harold Innis, George Grant, and Marshall McLuhan. With this groundwork in place, he moved on to contemplate deeply the work of several European thinkers, notably Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault.

Currently Dr. Kroker holds the Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture, and Theory at the University of Victoria. In conversation recently in the Technology Enterprise Facility at the university, he explained the arc of his work in this manner: “I began with a book, Technology and the Canadian Mind, which articulated a problem that traces its ways through all my later work, namely how do we mediate dependency, freedom, and community in the midst of the fully realized technological society.” His desire to address this problem led him, instinctively at first, to study the artistic imagination in order to gain insight into the restrictiveness and banality of technological culture. On this subject Dr. Kroker studied intensely the work of Heidegger, for it is there that one encounters the thought that, in the realm of art, the essence of technology may be reflected upon and even confronted.

What does it mean to question technology? What is the role of the artist in technological society? Much of the following conversation with Dr. Kroker revolves around such questions. In his answers he draws on the work of others extensively, yet his unique approach to thinking about technology has permitted him to engage with flexibility the different conditions and arrangements that technological culture presents. “Confronted by the powerful framework of knowledge implicit to the operation of technological culture, I wanted to develop a form of thought which was simultaneously critical of the drive to technological mastery yet sympathetic to that which is un-thought in the question of technology.” It is this commitment to that which has the potential to keep us truly human in the midst of technology, as well as his appreciation for ‘the singularity of life itself’, that makes the work of Arthur Kroker very valuable when we contemplate the way our society functions.

CI: One strategy that you have employed over the years is to use pieces of art as ways to introduce the complex thoughts of particular thinkers. I am thinking of the Manitoba Mining Mask by Don Proch as it relates to Harold Innis, and also that interesting painting, Untitled, by Tom King, that you put forward as an indication of the culture of boredom. In your work, as you have studied technology, have you made sure to keep that strategy up over the years because of the potential importance of art as a counterbalance to technology?

AK: The answer is yes. There is a reason for doing it, which I discovered only afterwards since my turn to the sphere of artistic imagination was done at first instinctively. The American theorist, Judith Butler, encouraged critical thought to focus on disturbing what she described as prevailing ‘regimes of intelligibility’. That’s technology: technoculture always presents itself as a restrictive and very powerful regime of intelligibility, one that imposes its assumptions silently, but no less pervasively. Confronted by the powerful framework of knowledge implicit to the operation of technological culture, I wanted to develop a form of thought which was simultaneously critical of the drive to technological mastery yet sympathetic to that which is un-thought in the question of technology.

Consequently, following Heidegger, how do you act to allow your mind to be caught up in the drift of technology, particularly in the drift of that which is ‘unquestioned’ in the question of technology, what Jean-François Lyotard would describe as its moments of incommensurability. The artistic imagination has always focused on bringing to the surface of consciousness that which is silent, incommensurable, and unconscious. The most creative tendencies in the artistic imagination today, as always, trace the implicit price to be paid for our passive acceptance of the drive to the fully realized technological society. For example, the Tom King painting is truly iconic. It captures the rage and tedium and boredom that, as Nietzsche hinted in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, are preludes to an increasingly nihilistic future.

CI: When Nietzsche says that art is the potential ‘countermovement to nihilism’, and when Heidegger says that art is something ‘akin to technology’ yet distinct from it, and he holds it out as the gateway to a ‘saving power’, I am curious what you think is meant by ‘art’. Toward the end of your book The Will to Technology and the Culture of Nihilism, you write about ‘an art of electronic perception’. You discuss art in that book in the age of the ‘post-human’. What I am trying to get at is the different ideas of what art means. For Nietzsche and Heidegger, how do you take art in their thought? Are they talking about paintings and music and writing, or are they talking about something else?

AK: The particular form of art changes. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger thought deeply about the question of art in the age of representationality. My starting-point is the art of digital reality, a form of art that expresses evocatively and with uncanny complexity the codes of postmodern culture. Studying electronic art takes one’s thinking immediately and deeply into the silent codes of technoculture, those moments between received cultural consciousness and that which has not yet achieved consciousness, namely the unfolding consequences of technicity. For example, the art of cell phones has much to tell us about what is gained and lost in a culture of ubiquitous connectivity. The art of digital surveillance expresses in chilling detail what it means to live with an electronic trail that can be monitored, identified, and archived.

Heidegger says that the artistic imagination is the saving power, but it is the saving power precisely because it allows us to be caught up in the drift of the flight of the gods from the earth. Nietzsche comes to the language of art and says the language of art is akin to challenging the will to truth. The artistic imagination allows the singularity of life itself to be expressed in all its deepest inflections and multiplicities and mysteries of understanding. My understanding of art is very similar to that. For myself there is no particular contradiction between moving from paintings and music to what I find really interesting in electronic or digital art. The impulse remains the same.

CI: When I ask whether they are talking about what we would think of as the traditional arts, or are they thinking of something else, the reason why I ask is because of Heidegger especially, and the way that he writes about how technology is a mode of being in which the real is ordered as a ‘standing-reserve’. I have always taken that to mean that ‘the real’ includes human beings. There is an ordering of human beings by technology. When I read Heidegger, the different sections of his work on art, I somehow come to the thought that perhaps he was trying to suggest a sort of art that used human beings as the medium. Is there some way for an artist, a particularly extraordinary artist, to bring human beings into an order which might direct them to a different purpose other than the technological, other than to being ‘standing-reserve’? Is that something that you have ever thought about in relation to Heidegger, or am I out in left field?

AK: No, I have always thought that in relation to Heidegger’s writings because it does not begin with the question of art. It begins with the question of technology. When Heidegger thinks the question of technology, he thinks of technology in the language of ‘framing’, which gives us the standing-reserve, which gives us a structure of ethics. … At the same time as Heidegger is saying that, he is saying that the meaning of technology itself is deeply paradoxical and ironic because the very same logic that gives rise to it always has the possibility of overcoming itself and giving rise to the possibility of the language of poetry, the language of difference, the language of drawing away and trying to find a dwelling-place within the language of technology. For Heidegger it is not about getting outside the question of technology, it is to try to better answer the question of how do you open up the self-overcoming of technology. That is why he was interested in Nietzsche. He says, well, Nietzsche is the one thinker who was intent on self-overcoming the question of technology, although Heidegger felt Nietzsche never really reached a satisfactory conclusion in this.

CI: Let me ask about George Grant for a moment. In the wonderful chapter that you wrote on Grant in Technology and the Canadian Mind, you demonstrate how he examines and brings forward in clear detail what the Nietzschean world is like, but in the end he turns away from it because he had a certainty and faith in Christianity. Therefore he was able to examine what modern technological life entails, but at the same time he always holds himself back from it. As you started thinking about these things and reading these thinkers, did you ever have a moment, perhaps after reading Grant, in which you were tempted similarly to find that position where you could retreat a bit? It seems from your writing that you are quite comfortable trying to inhabit the technological world to give some account of what you are seeing inside it. Is that fair?

AK: Definitely fair. I went the opposite way that Grant pursued. Grant’s thought moved through Heidegger and, to a lesser extent, Nietzsche, before he reverted to Platonic kind, confessing his deeply Christian faith. I began with religious faith [Catholicism], and moved to a more secular understanding of the human predicament. While Grant did not in the end consider religion deeply problematic, I have always been fascinated with the deep historical relationship between western religious faiths and nihilism.

Grant is a deeply authentic Christian philosopher. I am more sympathetic to Nietzsche’s critical account of the entwinement of faith and ressentiment. Of course, growing up in a small industrial town in the Laurentian shield, you develop what W.L. Morton once described as a certain form of skepticism. Harsh winters and uncertain political economies for Northern people have a way of doing that. While I fully sympathize with Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche, namely that Nietzsche may have demanded our self-overcoming but in the end still remained loyal to the language of values, I am in the end skeptical both of Heidegger and Nietzsche. Unlike Nietzsche, I think that technological reality is an important part of the reality that has powerfully shaped us as North Americans. Unlike Heidegger, I do not think that the gods have abandoned the earth. On the contrary, the gods are always very present. We have simply lost our capacity to hear that which has been lost with the triumphant blast of technology.

CI: Heidegger in his origins was Catholic as well, and I guess followed a similar pattern where he moved through it.

AK: That would be true.

CI: Is that part of what you recognized in his work, the movement from a Catholic worldview to a technological worldview?

AK: I suppose, but I don’t know if Heidegger ever really successfully broke with Catholicism. It is one weakness that he has in his thought. There is a thinker who is really consequential in thinking through this question, a Canadian, Charles Norris Cochrane, who wrote Christianity and Classical Culture. Even beyond the writings of Hannah Arendt, Cochrane is the one thinker who understood deeply and well the generative origins of Christianity as a response to a larger cultural crisis that secular thought, whether Roman or Greek, could not solve for itself. At the same time, Cochrane recognized in full detail the coming crisis of Christianity and nihilism. He is definitely Canada’s leading metaphysician.

CI: In Canada surveys turn up regularly, always on Canada Day, giving an explanation of how Canadians do not know their own history. If you narrowed that down to our intellectual history, we would probably find that most people know very little about some of our very good thinkers. In Technology and the Canadian Mind, when you look at Innis, Grant and McLuhan, did you find one of those thinkers in particular very helpful as a foundation for you as you went on to read the French postmodernists, and Nietzsche and Heidegger? The reason that I ask the question is because I think we need to do a better job in this country of introducing students to those foundational Canadian thinkers as a way of opening up the western tradition.

AK: A twofold answer: I didn’t find any one of them, but I found all three of them in combination, helpful. Innis’s theory of technological dependency, McLuhan’s version of technological humanism, Grant’s critical understanding of technological dependency were distinctly different reflections on the question of technology. No single one of the three thinkers embraced the totality of the question. I always viewed my thought as in some ways representing a mediation of the three thinkers.

It is a very nice comment that you make about Canadian thought. The real curiosity about Canadian thought is that serious Canadian thinkers often begin their work and earn worldwide reputations – and I am not putting myself in this category, but it is just a fact – oftentimes beginning with the ‘Canadian book’, which is then promptly sometimes forgotten. It is later that you can go back and find that Canadian book and connect it to the larger project. Charles Taylor, a well-known political philosopher of eminent international stature, especially in his examination of Hegelianism, began with The Pattern of Politics, or C.B. Macpherson and Democracy in Alberta. The intellectual life of these thinkers always begins with the Canadian book. The book is not an add-on. The Canadian book represents a core philosophical project. However, the fundamental political, philosophical or ethical questions that are raised in the Canadian book cannot then be answered simply within the terms of Canada. Charles Taylor in The Pattern of Politics really is looking at the difference between the communities based on communitarian [ideas] or power, the possibility of an ethically informed rational society on the one hand, versus communities founded on some version of coercive state power or identity politics. In my reading, Taylor turns to Hegel’s phenomenology to answer a broader question about politics, which he first realized in his brilliant account of ‘the pattern of politics’. In his book on democracy in Alberta, C. B. Macpherson first articulated the problem of ‘possessive individualism’ that would haunt all his later writings. Ironically, my writings fall into this Canadian pattern as well. I began with a book, Technology and the Canadian Mind, which articulated a problem that traces its ways through all my later work, namely how do we mediate dependency, freedom, and community in the midst of the fully realized technological society.

CI: It is interesting that Innis is the same way as well. He starts off with all these studies of the economic history of the country …

AK: The cod fisheries, the dairy industry, the CPR – fabulous!

CI: … and then he makes his way to the study of world communications.

AK: Yes, The Bias of Communication and others. If you look at Innis’s project, there is a straight line between The Cod Fisheries and his later texts including Empire and Communications. Innis always explored fully the issues of dependency, materially at first in terms of his analysis of the fur trade, agriculture, and forestry, and later in terms of the power of technology as radically rewriting the framework of time and space. Like many other Canadian thinkers, Innis deepens and really broadens his thought, and I found that that is part of Canadian political discourse, to find somehow in Canada world problems that you cannot solve here. This is an interesting intellectual phenomenon. As thinkers, we are haunted by problems based in Canadian culture and history, but which can only be solved by developing a more global understanding of power, technology, and culture.

CI: George Grant wrote about the need for a ‘language of good’. I read an interview with you from quite a few years ago where you spoke of the need for a ‘language of resistance’. At this point, do you feel that you have developed for yourself, for your own thinking, an adequate language of resistance to help you to get to that clearing in which you can think about the technological civilization around you?

AK: I don’t think it is useful today to develop only one language of resistance. We need multiple languages of resistance. The world situation really changes. In my lifetime it has changed rapidly. Every time there is a different discourse of power that emerges with its own assumptions, you have to work and think anew to develop a language of resistance that is equal, and relevant, to its operations. For example, in the eight dark years of the George W. Bush regime, the question of the relationship between religion and politics was very proximate, and the language of resistance had to begin to absorb that. During that period, I studied the origins of evangelical Christianity and its relationship to the larger formations of imperial power. For myself, resistance to the Bush regime required a deeper understanding of what I called ‘born again ideology’, that powerful fusion of evangelical religion and empire politics that formed American foreign policy during the Bush regime. Without an understanding of religion and politics and its different formations in popular culture, critical thought has no purchase on the world of popular political struggle.

It’s different, of course, with the election of Obama. While he is truly a transformational figure, I notice that key items in empire politics have not changed. I think it might be a good time to dust off the books written by an earlier generation of American pragmatists—John Dewey and William James—in order to remind ourselves of the limits of pragmatism. For all that though, Obama touches on the great questions of world history. His administration occurs at a decisive moment in American culture. Is the United States fated to a slow decline as an economically over-burdened power, or will the power of creative transformation itself allow the United States to reinvent itself anew in a world of multiple poles of power? For the first time in my life, I find myself agreeing with the cultural critiques of an American President. While I’m sure that the United States will remain a vengeful imperial power with a predatory economy, it just might be that Obama is appealing to the ‘better angels’ of American identity. Anything that places limits on the will to (American) power can only be good for the world as a whole, and certainly for Canada, a country on the northern tier of the world’s leading technological empire.

CI: As you know, and I am sure you have seen the changes in the students that have come through your classes over the years, students at this point are very adept at using technological devices, cell phones, laptops, social networking sites, and on and on and on. Do you find it to be increasingly challenging to prepare students to think about technology in the way that Heidegger means when he says that the essence of technology is nothing technological, to think about it as a mode of being? Has it become more difficult to get young people to think about it in that way?

AK: I teach undergraduate courses on technology and politics, and graduate seminars on the question of technology. The students themselves really are adept at social networking and using different technologies. It has actually become easier because you don’t have to teach students anything about technology as creative instruments. Everyone is literally saturated today with the question of technology. Consequently, we can immediately begin to reflect on the complex meanings of the question of technology. The first assignment that I always give to the undergraduate class is to ask students to write their technological autobiographies, three to five pages, and they can’t talk about it descriptively. It has to be how the question of technology has deeply mediated their life situation. The essays consistently that I get are phenomenal. Students are just deeply, deeply connected, and often really creative in trying to think about technology and its impact on their life circumstances. I have been teaching for a long time but I am just always amazed at the brilliance, seriousness, and creative engagement of every new generation of students.

CI: The last thing that I want to mention is that there is a video online of a presentation that you and your wife gave fairly recently in which you were talking about ‘code drift’. One of the phrases that you used in that presentation was the idea of being ‘tethered to mobility’. I thought that, in that quick phrase, you really gave a very stark image of what we are all doing as we are wandering around with our cell phones and always connected. It seems liberating in a sense to be able to talk anywhere, but at the same time we are ‘tethered to mobility’. It struck me that that image was one that students right now would find interesting and maybe help drive them in their understanding of technology.

AK: The paradox of technology is that it creates these wonderful opportunities for serious thought. ‘Tethered to mobility’ speaks to the contradiction between the society based on mobile communications and social connectivity, one where everyone is increasingly obsessed with the prospect of becoming a technological prosthetic: Facebook as our social identity; cell phones as a dominant medium of social communication; GPS technologies as our electronic history. Confronted with the power and pervasiveness of technological reality, Marilouise Kroker and myself in our recent writings suggest a different political strategy, namely understanding critical thought as ‘code drift’; that is, a form of technological imagination that is fully sensitive to the increasing complexity of technological life, matching its speed with slow, yet deeply rooted, thought, its distractions with the spotlight of theoretical analysis, its determinism with creative choices. Heidegger might have left us stranded in a culture of the ‘standing-reserve’. Our challenge is to transform human subjectivity as ‘standing-reserve’ into something critical, creative, and engaged. In other words, to make of thought a way of becoming truly human once again.

Date of Interview: 07/17/2009
Location: University of Victoria, Victoria, B.C.
Link: www.krokers.net