Virtual Dialectics and Technological Aesthetics

Technology has in general been seen as opposed to humanity: its object, even its enemy. The Grundrisse suggests, however, that technology can be understood as the actualized form of accumulated social knowledge. This actual form can then be understood from the standpoint of a dialectic in which the actual is capable of action only if it can convert its actuality into virtuality, that is to free itself for a future other than its actual present. Critical to this political project is work at the aesthetic level of media and communications technologies.