The Need of a Critical Theory of Digitalization (Remark on the Point of

Technologization in the Manifesto)

Alexandra Colligs

Krisis 2023, 43 (1): 117-119.

Abstract

The prior issue of Krisis (42:1) published Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto, with the aim to

instigate a debate of the issues raised in this manifesto – the necessary re-thinking of the role

(and the concept) of nature in critical theory in relation to questions of ecology, health, and

inequality. Since Krisis considers itself a place for philosophical debates that take contempo-

rary struggles as starting point, it issued an open call and solicited responses to the manifesto.

This is one of the sixteen selected responses, which augment, specify, or question the assump-

tions and arguments of the manifesto.

Keywords

Critical naturalism, Digitalization

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.43.1.40935

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

117

The Need of a Critical Theory of Digitalization (Remark on the Point of

Technologization in the Manifesto)

Alexandra Colligs

Even if it seems correct that the hope for liberation cannot be placed in the acceleration of

technological development, an answer is still needed to the question of how the utopian pro-

spect of a third nature as a relation of care can be related to the current technological apparat-

uses and the power relations that pervade them. How, then, can the intertwining of nature,

culture, and technology be critically described and re-perspectivized? To pursue this question,

Critical Naturalism must incorporate the reflections of a Critical Theory of digitalization,

which critically points out how Big Tech has reduced the promise of technological liberation

to consumerism, and pushes a posthumanism in which the human mind is reduced to behav-

iourist predictions of behaviour.

That the relentlessly driven technological development which launches the super-rich into

space and yet abolishes neither hunger, nor disease, nor misery, does not strive for the best for

all, is by now probably obvious. However, this does not dispense us from a close analysis of

how our development into cyborgs (Haraway 1991), i.e. the intertwining of our way of being

with technological apparatuses, mediates our relationship to inner and outer nature. And how

this change is accompanied by the construction of an immense surveillance apparatus, which

on the one hand ensures the (bio-)political controllability of the population, and on the other

hand drives the production of ever new needs by evaluating the “behavioral surplus” (Zuboff

2018), the endless multiplication of which serves the purpose of new markets. Following the

reflections of the older Critical Theory, it is important to understand how the totality of the

technological mediation of our self-relations, as well as our social relations through the en-

compassing digitalization, reshapes and changes these relations. And how, in turn, they pro-

duce our inner nature, our needs, and, relatedly, our relationship to outer nature in a way that

structures these modes of relating in terms of domination and commodity form. In order to

pursue the questions further, it is necessary to take a closer look at the ways in which the

digitalization of the world intervenes in processes of subjectivation. It has to be considered

here in particular how our existence as avatars, i.e. as formalized, standardized, and disembod-

ied forms of representation of our selves in virtual space, relates to non-virtual reality. It seems

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

118

that our avatar existence not only represents us but has begun to form our real existence in a

way that transforms us into real avatars, i.e., leads to our embodiment of our abstract and

virtual existence (Stederoth 2022). The identity of such a subject thus decisively constituted

in the virtual world loses individuality to the extent that experiences not mediated by techno-

logical standardization become more and more impossible. This concerns not only the experi-

enceability of our needs, which are reshaped by permanent technological and market mediation

and aligned according to the logic of profit and growth, but also our relationship to external

nature, which is increasingly immaterialized and devalued as a mere background for instagram

pictures or as a supplier of raw materials for technological progress; and whose laws are not

to be respected but best broken (hence the excitement for nuclear fusion experiments that

promise to generate more energy than is expended). The virtual transformation of our mode of

existence not only contributes to the fact that we can more strongly disregard our entanglement

with and dependence on external nature, but also entangles us more deeply in the promises of

a green capitalism which pretends to avert the climate catastrophe by individual consumerism

and by the means of digital tools that pick out emission-saving flights, offer environmentally

friendly produced clothing, or encourage us to buy electronic cars. The herein complicit forms

of subjectivity have to be addressed and criticized in order to create other forms of collective

self-preservation that relate differently to inner and outer nature.

Some questions which have to be addressed in this process would be: is there still a remainder

of nature that is able to escape the almost inescapable digital constraints of standardization?

At what point could resistance against our continual constitution as deficient beings be located,

which revolts against the self-optimization impositions of morning routines, fitbits, and cos-

metic surgery which all reduce the body to nature that has to be controlled? How do we rescue

the mind against its assimilation to procedural schematization and algorithmization and the

reduction to affirming that what already is? And: if there is no longer a “backstage”, i.e. no

place where the subject still knows itself unobserved and safe from others, what does that mean

for the possibility of political agency and radical change?

Krisis 2023, 43 (1)

119

References

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Rout-

ledge.

Stederoth, Dirk. 2022. Reale Avatare. Zur Versponnenheit in Netzkultur. Berlin: J.B. Metzler.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2018. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier

of Power. New York: PublicAffairs.

Biography

Alexandra Colligs is a postdoc at the University of Kassel in the department of Practical Philosophy. She studied

philosophy, german language and literature, and psychoanalysis at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, where she

also received her doctorate with a thesis on the relationship between liberation and identity in Judith Butler and

Theodor W. Adorno. Her doctoral thesis Identität und Befreiung was published 2021 (Campus-Verlag). Last

year, she co-edited a volume on Critical Theory and Feminism with Karin Stögner (Suhrkamp, 2022). She is

currently working on her postdoctoral thesis on a materialist perspective on the theory of mind.