We maintain that the Frankfurt School critique is limited by its failure to grasp the evolutionary tendency inherent in the technoscientific organization of life. Their account of the technocratic organization of work, satisfaction and desire presents a snap shot of the high point of mechanical production, without expressing the emergent forms of social, psychical and cultural life that are implicit in the industrial manipulation of desire. We believe that the task of philosophy is now that of thinking through the effects of technoscientific capitalism, and in particular, of sketching out the folds and spaces that virtual, aesthetic and informatic technologies open up within the hermetic reproduction of life and desire.
- This project will involve the following modes of philosophical investigation:
- The future of philosophy in the epoch technoscience
- The evolution of the interface between human beings and technological programmes
- The relationship between biotechnologies and the capitalization of life itself
- The impact of virtual and informatic programmes on the symbolic order of human culture
- The evolving relationship between neoliberalism and technological transhumanism
- Marxist critique in the time of programming industries, flexible labour and proletarianized consumption
- The future of politics in the sphere of virtual-aesthetic sociability
- The evolution of ‘technoscience’ as an instrumental paradigm and its effect on the organization of the social, biological and psychical life of human beings
- Globalization, conflict and the geopolitics of remote controlled warfare
- Surveillance and the end of private life
- The medicalisation of human society
- Cosmesis, immortality and the culture industries