Technology, Technics, and Time: Where are “We?” with Michael Pelias

This 10-Week Course organized by Left Forum and the Institute for the Radical Imagination intends to explore our contemporary liminal and psychic position(s) in relation to the onslaught of technological overload and its determinate domination over our everyday lives. Through selected readings from Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology and the Age of the World Picture to Benjamin’s seminal and often optimistic take on technical reproduction, we will frame some modern thinkers’ (Stiegler and Kittler) response to the problematic of the metaphysical and epochal thinking of Heidegger and the historical materialist approach of Benjamin.

A series of serious questions will be addressed: In the pandemic era, are we now passively resigned to the new order of the Screen and its new deals, or can we forge a liberatory response through original engagements with the “wired” economy? Can we find a line of flight from ensnarement and enframing so pervasive and encompassing in our everyday lives?

Is a new avant-garde of thinking as (and) acting a real possibility and what categories need to be overturned in order for this emergence to occur? What new weapons are needed for interpretation, understanding, and concurrently (and most importantly) transformation?

*The single fee of $175-$225 covers registration for the entire 10-Week Course*

Readings will include:

Heidegger, Martin. “The Age of the World Picture”

Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology”

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproduction”

Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time, Volume 3: Cinematic Time and the question of Malaise

Stiegler, Bernard. “The Automization of the super-Ego and the passage of Desire as Original Diversion of Libidinal Energy” in The Lost Spirit of Capitalism

Kittler, Friedrich. Optical Media