Foucault’s and Heidegger’s arguments are not about the autonomous self, but relate to a particular engagement with being which is fundamentally pre-subjective and pre-ethical. In both cases, I will argue, care of the self concerns a certain openness within the closure of modern technologically conditioned experience; an openness that is resolutely indeterminate. This openness is not something that exists outside technology; rather it is technology’s very possibility, but considered in terms other than those prescribed by technology itself. I will argue that access to this openness, which is, in effect, an indeterminacy of the self, should be the goal of critique as a praxis of self-discovery.
This praxis is not to be considered in terms of an individualistic ethics, but as an aesthetics of existence, in the sense of (i) a resistance to the already constituted modes of selfhood made available through technological practices, and (ii) an openness in being itself as a possibility or chance for the creation of new modes of being within the being-together of human existence. As I have already suggested, this possibility of new being needs to be grasped from within the technological environments that already exist and lay claim to us in specific ways, and not from some outside position. That is, we need to consider how we can redeploy technology against itself in a creative way to make possible new modes of being.

Poiēsis and technē in Foucault and Heidegger: Towards an Aesthetics of Free Being

Warwick Mules

School of English, Media Studies and Art History

University of Queensland

Paper presented to  “Tekhne, Technique, Technologie”: 17th Annual Conference of the Australian Society of French Studies, 15-17 July 2009, University of Queensland.

Thanks to wildcat2030

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