Next Exit: Drift Culture

If the profound and enduring influence of the work of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan, and George Grant allows us to assert that there exists a distinctive “Canadian discourse on technology” (Kroker 1984), then surely Arthur Kroker is to be regarded as one of the leading contemporary exponents of this line of thought. Claiming that this project involves theorizing a middle way between an unbridled American technological imperative and a nostalgic European lament for that which has been suppressed by the technological will to power, Kroker focuses his own research effort on rearticulating a Canadian critical theory of technology that takes full account of the accelerating pace of technological change brought about by the digital revolution. This is an urgent task, because perhaps nothing characterizes the present era more than its insatiable drive for accelerated technological innovation. Each new day brings technological advances that render obsolete existing technologies and force the social, economic, cultural, and political arrangements structured around them to either adapt or disappear at an increasingly rapid pace. Yet while this process toward a permanent state of innovation, in which “all that is solid melts into air,” has already been under way since the first industrial revolution, we now seem to have reached a point in history where all traditional marks of the human itself are on the verge of being swept away by the inexorable advance of digital devices, distancing technologies, virtual augmentation, artificial intelligence, digital archives, social-networking technologies, cloud computing, and recombinant genetic technologies. Indeed if, of late, a global fascination with the trope of the “posthuman” has emerged, it is because under the present conditions the human itself is about to become an outdated, obsolete, or—in Günther Anders’s words—“antiquated being” (1956).

While much of the recent academic and public debate over the effects and implications of the ongoing digital revolution remains couched in terms of the potential costs and benefits associated with the adoption of a particular new technology, often resulting in either utopian or dystopian speculations about its future impact and development, Kroker’s long-awaited Exits to the Posthuman Future presents us with a much more complex, and definitely more profound, analysis of the emerging posthuman condition. Motivated neither by a nostalgic yearning for what has been left behind nor by an unbridled optimism for what the fully realized technological society will bring, Kroker seeks to draw closer attention to the essentially elusive character of a future shaped by technologies that thrive on the liminal, the uncertain, and the indeterminate. According to Kroker, what renders the emerging era truly posthuman is that it is no longer possible to extend our existing humanist vocabularies to encompass the possibilities of the new digital technologies, since our traditional frameworks of interpretation are themselves radically destabilized by the continuing advance of these technologies. If, as Kroker notes, the global diffusion of digital technologies has resulted in the “eclipse of clearly definable boundaries between bodies and machines, the interpellation of human perception and algorithmic coding, [and] the active remixing of borders among humans, animals, plants, and inanimate objects” (12), then it is indeed clear that the present era can no longer be understood within the modern conception of technology as a neutral means to a human end. Rather, what is at stake in these developments is the very definition of what it means to be human in an increasingly digitized world. This doesn’t mean that the current digital revolution is no longer permeated by the modern drive to the technological mastery of social and nonsocial nature, but it does mean that its most powerful driving forces—virtual capitalism and the disciplinary state—now face increasing resistance from previously marginalized collective agents that seek to mobilize the transformative possibilities of these very same technologies in search for alternative exits to the posthuman future. Therefore, technological posthumanism could be defined as “that site where the algorithms of virtual power and the liquid flows of the undecidable, the liminal, the remainder, and...