The World Through Technology: The Possibility of Politics in Modernity

This thesis examines how technology underpins our modern understanding of self and other as political actors. My paper begins by accepting as a basis the phenomenological approach to fundamental ontology and technology put forward by Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Heidegger, I contend that man and his world have been enframed. Following this, I venture to pinpoint why man have been delivered to this technological destiny. In the third chapter, I examine the polis/oikos distinction, and reason that political action in a world given over to technology is that which exposes, disrupts, and resists the parameters of thought and action determined by technopower. In the final chapter, I examine how modern political institutions stifle the possibility of politically acting. I conclude by determining that all true political action in the modern age must take place over - and against - technology.