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TECHNOLOGIES IN PRACTICE
Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Technique
Eoin Carney
________________________________________________
May, 2018
Table of Contents
_________________
Introduction
.. Technologies and practical self-understanding
.. Ricoeur and the Philosophy of Technology
.. The philosophy of technology and Ricoeur
.. Overview of Sections
1. Ricoeur and Technology
.. 1. Hermeneutics and the Question of Technique
..... 1. A Hermeneutic Critique of Technology
..... 2. The Art of Hermeneutics
........ 1. Relating Technology to Practice
........ 2. Application and the Machine
2. Application and Distanciation
.. 1. Signs, Structures and their Applications
..... 1. Distance and Communication
........ 1. The Hermeneutic Problem of Signs
..... 2. Structuration and Participation
........ 1. Meaning and Significance
........ 2. The Spiral of Understanding
3. Hermeneutic Technique
.. 1. Technique and Psychoanalysis
..... 1. Technique and Interpretation
..... 2. Technique and Nontechnique
..... 3. The Playground of Transference
..... 4. The Fractured Dialectic
.. 2. Narrated Worlds
..... 1. Technology and Time
........ 1. Time and Planning
........ 2. Technology and Worldhood
..... 2. Features of the Narrative Object
........ 1. Integration
........ 2. Intelligibility
........ 3. Production
........ 4. Retroaction
4. Technological Application
.. 1. The Device
..... 1. Things and Devices
..... 2. Uncertain Applications
........ 1. Designing with Conviction
........ 2. Deinon Phronēsis
.. 2. The Interface
..... 1. The Utopia of Functionality -- Interface and Representation
..... 2. The Utopia of Dysfunctionality -- Interface and Presentation 1
..... 3. Constructing a Common Ground -- Interface and Presentation 2
.. 3. Appropriating Technics
..... 1. The World of the Text and the /Associated Milieu/ of Technology
..... 2. Emancipation through Appropriation
........ 1. Play: Transformations of Technology
........ 2. Play: Transformations of the Self
Concluding Comments
Bibliography
Abstract
========
The problem that this thesis seeks to address is the hermeneutic
tension between practical reason and technology. According to
hermeneutics, the types of knowledge associated with practical
understanding incorporate questions of the self and lived experience.
In contrast, the types of knowledge and capability associated with
modern technology are independent of questions of self-understanding.
Technical approaches to practical dilemmas produce generalizable,
detachable solutions, thereby disavowing the central role of
hermeneutic appropriation in the process of understanding meaning. If
a technology works in the same way across different contexts and
applications, the notion of an interpreting, appropriating self seems
superfluous to the question of technology.
However, following an analysis of Paul Ricoeur's distinctive
understandings of hermeneutic distanciation, appropriation, and
technique, I argue that technologies can become objects of hermeneutic
engagement once we recognize their variable and uncertain nature at
the practical level. Using Ricoeur's conception of the productive
circle between distanciation and belonging, the alienating distances
associated with technologies can be re-read as moments of
distanciation, i.e., as reflective outcomes of practical engagements
that, in turn, project new possibilities for action an understanding.
This means that our practical self-understanding is as bound to
techniques and technologies as it is to more conventional hermeneutic
objects like a text, narrative or artwork. For Ricoeur, hermeneutic
techniques are meaningful because they reveal possibilities for action
that would otherwise remain concealed. Likewise, subjects engaging
with technologies develop unanticipated applications and functions at
the practical level through appropriating technologies in novel,
creative ways. In this way, practical self-understanding and
technologies depend on one another for development. This mutual,
interpretive interaction reveals a hermeneutic circle between the
practical self and the technical devices and artefacts that mediate
self-understanding at a distance.
Acknowledgements
================
No work is completed in isolation. I could not have reached this point
without the support and guidance of the following people.
Firstly, I wish to thank my supervisors: Todd Mei, Nicholas Davey and
Dominic Smith. All of whom contributed greatly to the subject matter
of this thesis. As primary supervisors, Nicolas and Todd have
participated in innumerable discussions with me. I will continue to
reflect on and be thankful for these conversations and insights well
into the future. In particular, I would like to thank Todd for his
perfect mix of rigour and care, and for sticking by me even after
moving universities, Nicolas for his challenging brilliance, and Dom
for his kindness and imagination.
I would like to thank the Ricoeur Society and all its members for
making me feel at home, especially Professors Maureen Junker-Kenny,
George Taylor and Brad DeFord. Ricoeur conferences were always a joy
to attend, thanks to the friendship of Marjolaine, Andrew, Geoffrey,
Christina, Paulo, Camilla, Maria, and many others.
I would also like to acknowledge the debt owed to all my close friends
in Dundee who supported and entertained me over my years of study,
especially my wonderful flatmates Mehdi, Scott, Tomas, Magda, Ainur,
Mercy, Juliet and Neil, as well as all the great characters of Dundee
who continually influenced and surprised me; Amelie, Adam, Hannah,
Rogi, Greg, Austin, Josie, Stephen, Domenico, Susanna, Martin, and the
sunny city of Dundee itself. I am also grateful to Linda Bolsakova for
constantly inspiring and weathering me. I would not have found myself
on my current path were it not for the belief and long-term friendship
of Inna, Kate, Aidan, Paddy, Fionnuala and Feiolim.
It is difficult to express the extent of gratitude owed to my family
who have unconditionally supported me through many detours; from civil
engineering, to film studies, to theology, and finally arriving at
philosophy. Although with each step I moved farther from their
understanding, they continued to accept and affirm me as their son and
brother.
Finally, a special debt is owed to the philosophy department at the
University of Dundee. The regular seminar series was an invaluable
point of contact for a variety of academic discussions and
perspectives. Its members of staff - Ashley Woodward, Oisin Keohane,
and Tina Röck - have always strived to inspire and encourage any
students lucky enough to study philosophy at Dundee, and it has been a
joy to know them. I am also grateful to the department for its
generous funding opportunities, both in terms of conference funding,
as well as for providing me with a stipend and fee waiver, without
which this thesis would not have been possible.
I declare that I, Eoin Carney, am the author of this thesis, and that,
unless otherwise stated, I have consulted all cited references. I
declare that I have completed all the work of which this thesis is a
record, and that it has not been previously accepted for a higher
degree.
Introduction
============
\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{Introduction}
At first look, the work of Paul Ricoeur has nothing new to say about
technology. When Ricoeur does refer to modern technology, he tends to
simply repeat the criticisms of technological rationality put forward
by thinkers such as Heidegger, Habermas, and Marcuse. By situating
many aspects of his work within the tradition of modern hermeneutics,
Ricoeur was destined to repeat these views of technology since
hermeneutics, as I read it, gains much of its critical power through
its opposition to modern technology. I suggest that, against the
perceived /impracticality/ of technology, hermeneutic philosophies
call on the renewal of /practical/ forms of reason. Whereas
technology, according to these thinkers, is often defined by its
univocity and utility, practical reason works through the assumption
that the practical world is variable and uncertain. To paraphrase
Habermas, technologies are seen as representing a decontextualizing,
reductive mode of reason that "colonizes the lifeworld",[1] while
hermeneutic modes of reasoning treat the lifeworld as a dialogical,
/living/ environment, in which meanings are disclosed contextually by
vulnerable, capable selves.
However, more recent approaches to the philosophy of technology have
turned their focus to aspects of technology which seem to be denied by
the hermeneutic critique, i.e., their /practical,/ socially-embedded,
variable features. Through postphenomenological approaches, for
example, technologies are seen as being /multistable,/ and reflective
of questions of embodiment.[2] Areas of Actor-Network Theory treat
technology through performative, interpretive concepts.[3] Beyond the
philosophy of technology, the field of STS focuses on empirical
analyses of technologies in relation to society. All these approaches
suggest that technologies, rather than exhibiting an over-arching
essence or logic, are pluralistic and integrated within a social,
historical horizon of meaning. Far from being a demonic `other',
technologies are seen as being as `readable', or as open to
interpretation, as texts and discourses.
Ricoeur's work, I argue, has much to contribute to both a critical and
appropriative account of technology. Indeed, since for Ricoeur
critical distance and practical appropriation are related moments of
understanding, Ricoeur's work offers a way perceiving the dialectical
unity of both perspectives. Although Ricoeur does not thematically
discuss modern technology, he does discuss the role that /technique/
plays in relation to understanding (in his work on Freudian
technique). I suggest that Ricoeur's understanding of /technique,/ as
a mode of distanciation related to practical questions of meaning and
understanding, holds the key for developing a Ricoeurian approach to
contemporary technology. Ricoeur's understanding of technique that I
shall outline emphasizes the interrelationship of the two key
concepts: /distanciation/ and /appropriation./
Against Heidegger and Gadamer, Ricoeur aims to rehabilitate the notion
of distanciation by arguing that an alienated, distanced perspective
is potentially a point of /reflection./ Although, in the hermeneutic
sense, to participate in, or /belong/ to, a tradition, conversation,
event, etc., is to be open to /understanding/ it, Ricoeur suggests
that to distance oneself from a direct experience is also a productive
way of bringing oneself closer to it, since the perspective of
distanciation is a way of disclosing new possibilities for action and
understanding. Distanciation has both a /reflective/ and /projective/
character. The text, as the paradigm of distanciation, translates
immediate, living understandings implicit in discourses into a
relatively fixed, systematic mode of representation. However, Ricoeur
stresses the /dynamic/ nature of this distancing - texts are always
open to /interpretation/ and /appropriation./ The hermeneutic circle
between belonging and distanciation means that practical experience is
/mediated/ by the text. Furthermore, due to the /difference/ between
distanciation and belonging, the mediation process is a difficult one.
The difficulty renders understanding a perpetual task or effort.
Ricoeur often highlights the generative nature of this circular
relation.
Appropriation, in Ricoeur's sense, is an indeterminate but productive
task. It is related to practical understanding because it /tests/
practical understanding. When encountering a text, a reader must
account for not only the way the text speaks to them or reflects their
practical concerns, but also the way that the text, in its integrity
and distance, differs from them and challenges their concerns.
Appropriation, understood in this sense, involves an /enlargement of
the self;/ a reader expands their horizon of understanding by exposing
it to the projected world of the text. Distanciation is also a
condition for understanding (along with belonging) because a "naïve"
understanding, for Ricoeur, is a deficient one, prone to the illusions
of the ego. Through testing these illusions against the distanced
world of the text, the reader is open to the transformative potential
of the text. However, any `new' understanding itself must be
understood as subject to further testing, at the practical level, or
in relation to new moments of distanciation, and so the whole process
is relativized. In short, the process of /learning,/ of understanding
/better,/ involves alienation and transformation, provoked through the
dialectic of distance and belonging.
The question that I will pursue over the course of this thesis is
whether this dialectic of distance and belonging can be applied to our
understandings of contemporary technological phenomena. The
hermeneutic critique or suspicion of technology allows for the
highlighting of the difference between practice and its corresponding
forms of reason and understanding, and the technologies that mediate
and affect these understandings. However, whereas hermeneutic
approaches tend to emphasize the /negative/ effects of this
difference, I aim to argue that this difference can be conceived along
the lines of a productive distanciation. That is, technologies are
related to practical understandings through their distance from them.
The positive side of the negativity of technological distanciation
lies in its ability, like the text, to create new possibilities for
action.
Just as the text is the "destination" of discourse, [4] technological
designs and solutions are a possible destination of practical wisdom.
Whereas discourses and practical wisdom are situated, concrete, living
phenomena, their insights demand to be realized, transmitted, and
communicated in a structural form. However, just as the act of
translating or inscribing discourse in a textual form is a process of
differentiation and distanciation that opens new questions and
problems (through the configurational, /projective/ character of the
text), technological devices and solutions themselves have their own
projective character and demand re-appropriation. In this way there is
a hermeneutic circle between practices and techniques. Techniques are
the outcome of practical engagements and questions but they also, in
turn, raise further questions and challenge practical understanding.
This thesis, firstly, examines features of Ricoeur's work that are
relevant to elaborating this circle between practices and techniques,
and then explores approaches to contemporary technological phenomena
from other thinkers whom I argue help articulate the hermeneutic
tension between practice and technology.
Technologies and practical self-understanding
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ricoeur's concept of appropriation borrows from Gadamer's
understanding of /application./ For Gadamer, application is a
necessary feature of hermeneutic understanding, and is distinguished
from a cruder sense of application that is at work in the concept of
"method". Whereas a method treats application as a separate moment --
a method is developed according to rational principles or observations
and then later applied in different contexts -- hermeneutic
application asserts the coinciding of truth and application. In
ancient Greek philosophy, the exemplary case of the hermeneutic sense
of application was found in Aristotle's account of /phronēsis.
Phronēsis,/ or practical wisdom, involves a mediation between general
or formal rules and singular cases. A practical judgement involves
grasping the /significance/ of a rule in relation to a concrete
situation, just as hermeneutic application involves mediating the
distance between a text and the concrete situation of the
interpretation. Rules, principles, texts, and so on, can only appear
significant in light of living, singular practical concerns.
Therefore, application is a hermeneutic /condition/ for understanding
-- it is only against the background of present pre-understandings,
concrete concerns and norms that a distance is capable of being
bridged.
The intellectual virtue of /techne/ is seen by Gadamer as similar to
practical wisdom in that it deals with variable subject matter.
However, it differs when it comes to the question of application.
Since application involves the mediation of /self/-knowledge by
distance (the other, the text, history), /techne,/ an impersonal form
of knowledge, is given less hermeneutic weight. In this sense, it is
closer to the modern sense of "method" that Gadamer associates with
the sciences. Practical wisdom arises from the living /experience/ of
the practicing self. Its knowledge cannot be `detached' from the
context of this experience and be transmitted or communicated to
others in the same way that knowledge of how to make or produce can.
Gadamer's relating of the question of contemporary /practical wisdom/
to classical questions of /techne/ and /phronēsis,/ helps to highlight
the continuity and depth of a tension that continues to influence the
relation between technologies and our human, practical understandings
of the world.
In the context of a technological age, the hermeneutic tension between
/techne/ and /phronēsis/ takes on a renewed significance. At a time
when the types of knowledge associated with /techne/ seem to be more
pervasive and ubiquitous in post-industrial societies, the hermeneutic
emphasis on /phronēsis/ and /application/ possesses a critical tone.
To highlight this critique, I explore the perspectives of Albert
Borgmann, Lorenzo C. Simpson, and others. According to these
approaches, technologies not only oppose the types of understanding
associated with practical wisdom but threaten to conceal the human
/capacity/ for practical wisdom. As devices and systems grow more
sophisticated and /effective,/ we become `disburdened' from the daily
practical tasks that had constituted much of human experience. For
hermeneutics, /practices/ involve difficult, arduous, "non-identical
repetitions", and it is this "working-through" character of practical
engagement that is eclipsed by the modern technological devices that
render many of these tasks and relations obsolete. Our daily, habitual
modes of engagement have been transformed by technologies into modes
of engagement that foreground functionality and utility.
On the other hand, a line of thought pursued by Pierre Hadot, Michel
Foucault, Bernard Stiegler, Peter-Paul Verbeek, and others, suggests
returning to the ancient concept of /techne/ in order to stress the
interrelationship between /techne/ and the /self,/ the relationship
that Gadamer denies. From this perspective, all human customs,
practices, social actions, and so on, are mediated by the techniques
that condition and enable the transmission of these practices.
Self-formation and learning always involves apprenticeship and
training in particular techniques, training which then affects our
possibilities for action by shaping our /habitus./[5] Self-reflection
plays a crucial role in this approach, since it is through reflection
or distanciation that features of practice and the self that require
development or transformation are identified. Techniques of the self
are methods of training which aim to operate on these aspects of the
individual in order to transform the self and render it more capable
or moral.
Both approaches to /techne/ seem to emphasize different features of
the self, features that are related to one another in Ricoeur's work.
Gadamer's account of /phronēsis,/ and its opposition to /techne,/
suggests a /vulnerable/ or fragile self -- it is through the concrete
experience of uncertainty that practical wisdom is achieved. "Truth",
in this sense, is not something that can be produced or aimed toward,
it appears at the `limits' of a method or principles, in the
singularity of the unanticipated case. A /technologies of the self/
approach suggests that /techne/ complements and cultivates the
/capacities/ of the self. The self is not something `given', it is
something that must be created and formed through training and with
the aid of techniques. For Ricoeur, the self is constituted both
through its belonging to a tradition or world, and through its
capacity to produce reflective variations on this tradition, i.e., by
its vulnerability and capability. He accepts that our understanding of
the world is /mediated/ by the institutions, works, and productions
that guide our actions and shape meaningful relations in the
lifeworld, and yet aims to stress the difficult nature of this
mediation process. The self is also something that surpasses these
mediations, it is always also `other' than the customs that shape it.
This approach allows us to develop a /dialectical/ account of
technique and practical understanding, where practical understanding
highlights the vulnerable, fragile aspects of the self, and technique
its reflective capacities.
Combining a hermeneutic critique of technology with an appropriative
account of technology means that in practical appropriation a
difference is retained, between the human and the machine.
Technologies, as seen through the hermeneutic critique, cannot be
reduced to "technologies of the self", i.e., systems or techniques
that form and shape the /habitus/ of the self, since there is always
something in practical understanding that /exceeds/ the technological
enframing. Modern technological phenomena, such as the device and the
interface, help highlight this feature since, while related to
practical understanding, they also remain at a distance, they possess
a `life' or world of their own. A technology of the self will never
completely transform the individual because the application always
remains incomplete. The transformative possibilities of technologies
or techniques must be /appropriated,/ a process which, in Ricoeur's
account, retains the /distance/ between the thing being appropriated
and the self. The model for technological engagement, then, is not the
transformation of the human /habitus/ through technologies of the
self, but the playful, hermeneutic appropriation of /significant/
features of the world of technics.
Ricoeur and the Philosophy of Technology
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ricoeur's concepts of /distanciation/ and /appropriation,/ when
extended to modern technologies, allow for a middle position between
two, polarized approaches to technology. These approaches are labelled
by Borgmann as "substantivism" and "instrumentalism".[6] Many features
of a hermeneutic critique of technology, including Ricoeur's own
remarks on technology, can be seen as expressing a /substantivist/
account of technology; individual technologies are determined or
shaped by a common essence. Technological devices and processes are
simply the concrete manifestations of an ontotheological mode of
viewing the world and therefore can be reduced to this perspective.
This essence, furthermore, extends to the world of human affairs and
conditions how we are in the world. On the other hand, an
/instrumentalist/ approach asserts that there is no inherent meaning
in different technologies, and certainly not a shared one. Instead,
the meaning of a technology is exclusively related to its utility,
i.e., technologies are mere /means/ for achieving an end. Technology
is seen as being neutral.
The concept of distanciation is intended to respond to the /suspicion/
of technology that arises due to a substantivist account of
technology. Distanciation, when applied to technique and technologies
implies two things. Firstly, the `distance' or difference of
technology is a /relative/ or /reflective/ distance and, secondly, it
is potentially a productive distance, enabling new understandings to
emerge. Technologies can indeed by seen to be `autonomous', but in a
sense that is similar to the world of the text. Accepting the
distanciating effect of technologies also means that engagements with
technologies need to go beyond a `literal' or `everyday' interaction,
they demand a degree of decoding and interpretation.
The concept of /appropriation/ responds to the instrumentalist claim
that technologies are neutral. If application were conceived of as a
separate moment, distinct from technological design, then technologies
indeed would be neutral tools within the lifeworld. What they embody
would be the `objective' forms of knowledge that Gadamer associates
with /method,/ i.e., knowledge that is not value-laden, is purely
rational, and so on. However, viewing technologies as things that are
/appropriated/ in the hermeneutic sense means accepting that they
possess inherent horizons of possible meanings and uses. Furthermore,
technologies themselves have an appropriating relation to practice;
they are reflective of questions and concerns that initially arise
within the lifeworld. Technologies, in this sense, are historical,
meaningful, things.
The philosophy of technology and Ricoeur
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In analysing Ricoeur's work alongside questions of technique and
technology, I hope to demonstrate Ricoeur's distinctive approach to
praxis and practical understanding. Ricoeur's attempts to highlight
the productive value of both a participatory account of belonging to
practices, traditions, and cultures, on the on hand, and critical
reflections on these practices, on the other, leads to a robust,
adaptive understanding of practice that is capable of incorporating
multiple forms of knowledge. Technological and scientific innovations
can be evaluated both in-themselves and in relation to how they can be
appropriated by actual, living subjects. Although Ricoeur himself
stresses the negative impacts of modern technology, as post-industrial
societies become more dependent on technologies, questions of its
transformative effects on human cultures and practical understandings
become more complicated and arguably cannot be reduced to their
harmful or destructive tendencies. In light of these historical
developments, Ricoeur's work offers a way of negotiating technology
that keeps in view both immediate, practical questions of human
understanding in the face of devices, interfaces, systems, etc., and
more general questions of the meaning of technology as a whole.
In the wake of the deaths of both Ricoeur and Gadamer, it is important
to map new paths for hermeneutic philosophy. The future of
hermeneutics, following both thinkers' productive criticisms of
Romanticism and the hermeneutic tradition as a whole, is in question
again. This thesis asks whether, following the paths opened up by
Ricoeur, the future of hermeneutics lies in its understanding of
praxis as reflective belonging. Technology, in its threatening but
intimate relation to human practice, acts as a point of confrontation
and re-invigoration for this tradition.
Overview of Sections
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The first three sections of the thesis present readings of Ricoeur's
work, while the fourth section aims to situate Ricoeur's work within
more recent discussions of technology.
The first section is an introductory section that examines the
hermeneutic question of application and the potential this question
has for investigating technology. Although a hermeneutic critique of
technology operates on many levels, I focus on the tension that
emerges through the different senses of application found in
hermeneutic approaches to language and a scientific understanding of
method. Whereas methods and techniques seek to establish objective
forms of knowledge, i.e., knowledge that remains constant regardless
of contextual variables, a hermeneutic account of application
emphasizes the guiding role of the concrete /question/ in the
production of knowledge and understanding. What is significant is not
the constant themes or ideas of a tradition or text, for example, but
the way in which these themes are reflected in the current concerns of
the reader. This means that application involves /practical reason,/ a
mode of engagement that is capable of productively bridging the
distance between a text, theory, principle, law, etc., and the
variable demands found in the lifeworld. However, whereas certain
approaches to hermeneutic application emphasize the way that
/technological rationality/ is opposed to practical modes of reason, I
suggest that reading technologies in terms of their practical effects
helps to bring them into dialogue with hermeneutics. The modern
hermeneutic tradition, which emphasizes the difference between
explanation and understanding, objective knowledge and practical
knowledge, is taken up by Ricoeur in order to highlight the
dialectical unity of these two forms. This provides an opening for
considering the ways that technologies, even in their objectifying
character, can be related to the task of practical understanding. A
hermeneutic approach to technological application should challenge
both the assumption that technologies remain wholly foreign to
practical experience, as well as the assumption that a radical
difference exists between the modes of application associated with
`objectifying' approaches (technologies, explanations, methods) and
those associated with more `established' hermeneutic subject matters
(artworks, narratives, texts). The unifying theme across both the
sciences and the arts is the phenomena of reflective distanciation.
The second section explores Ricoeur's own understanding of application
as /appropriation/ that aims to account for the dual nature of
practice as distanciation and belonging. For Ricoeur, hermeneutic
belonging, a key feature of application, is mixed. It is always
mediated by linguistic structures and therefore always involves a
displacement or distance. This means that we are also capable of
/explaining/ our practice, or of translating practical experience into
structural, communicative modes of expression. However, Ricoeur also
stresses that if the /question/ of belonging is lost sight of, for
example in Husserl's idealism or the abstracting tendencies of a
structuralist science, then explanations run the risk of becoming
/insignificant./ Therefore, although the experience of belonging in an
unmediated way is potentially unreachable, it becomes a guiding
question for all modes of hermeneutic understanding. Explanations have
to be understood as reflective of these questions.
Section 3 examines, what I am calling, Ricoeur's account of
/technique./ This section acts as a bridge between the first part of
the thesis, an exegetical account of aspects of Ricoeur's theory, and
the second, an examination of the practical features of contemporary
technologies. It remains within the bounds of Ricoeur's thought, but
it seeks to extract a hermeneutical account of /technique/ from
Ricoeur's readings of psychoanalysis and his understanding of
narrative distanciation. Although overtly critical of modern
technology, Ricoeur nevertheless develops an alternative understanding
of /technique/ that escapes the hermeneutic suspicion of technology.
He does so by dialectically relating technique to practical
understanding. In his discussion of Freud's psychoanalytic writings on
technique, Ricoeur's own bias towards techniques and technologies is
revealed when he develops a positive account of technique but calls it
a /nontechnique./ That is, psychoanalytic techniques are not
hermeneutic, in the sense of being directly related to questions of
meaning and interpretation, but neither are they `technological', in
the sense of being representative of a dominating attitude towards
nature. Instead, they are /indirectly/ related to questions of meaning
and practice. The have a positive relation to practical understanding
because they unmask or reveal already-present practical understandings
that are hidden or buried. These implicit understandings, or
`repetitions' in Freud's terms, can only be disclosed or `remembered'
with the aid of techniques. Yet, techniques alone are not sufficient.
It is only through the dialectical relation between techniques and
practical understandings, a relation that is a struggle or
/working-through,/ that techniques are seen as productive.
As with psychoanalytic techniques that deal with the quasi-object of
the human unconscious, Ricoeur's account of narrative highlights that
way that the function of the plot is to configure the quasi-object of
the narrative world. Narratives are distanced from the living world of
action through these configurational or artificial features. Their
temporality more closely resembles a /time of works,/ as opposed to a
living, historically-effected /time of action./ Ricoeur draws on the
work-like, distanciated character of narrative and highlights the ways
that narrative mediation is /active./ It is open to application
(/mimesis_{3}/), a process that translates the world of narrative into
concrete initiatives for action and understanding. As with
psychoanalytic techniques, questions concerning the configuration or
organisation of narrative structures are inseparable from the
practical questions of meaning and intelligibility. This understanding
of a productive tension between a configured, autonomous work, and the
modes of action it engenders in living subjects, is mirrored in
accounts of technologies explored in Section 4.
Section Four directly considers questions of modern technological
phenomena. Since Ricoeur did not engage with technology in terms of
its practical manifestations, I turn instead to the works of recent
philosophers. Albert Borgmann and David Lewin provide examples of the
hermeneutic critique of modern technologies in their analyses of the
device and the interface. A contrast to these approaches is provided
by Peter-Paul Verbeek, Alexander Galloway, and Brenda Laurel, who all
emphasise the practical, variable nature of technological mediation.
This second set of thinkers provide a better account of the role
technologies play in practice, which can be understood along the lines
of Ricoeur's understanding of /technique,/ i.e., just as structures,
psychoanalytic techniques, and narratives both enable and challenge
human understanding by mediating at a distance, technological devices
and interfaces can be seen to have a challenging and transformative
effect on our /practical/ understandings of the world. In Ricoeur's
account of technique, /appropriation/ is also required in the task of
understanding (otherwise techniques risk becoming methods of
adaptation and domination). Similarly, accounts of technologies in
practice emphasise the way that our appropriations of technologies are
crucial for understanding their meaning. The meaning of technology is
not located in a transcendental essence, but in the concrete
interactions between technological designs and artefacts, and the
subjects who engage with them. In the final chapter of this section I
also examine the work of Gilbert Simondon, whose account of the
autonomy of the technical object resembles Ricoeur's account of the
autonomy of the text. Just as a /playful appropriation is/ required in
traversing the distance between the world of the text and the world of
the reader, a similar approach to technologies should be adopted
following Simondon's analysis. The hermeneutic attitude that we began
with, the critical suspicion of modern technology, is capable of being
transformed through practical engagements with technologies,
engagements that accept both the distanciated and practical features
of technical becoming.
1 Ricoeur and Technology
========================
The following section examines some of the questions and challenges
that arise when hermeneutic theory is placed alongside a consideration
of technology. Key aspects of the hermeneutic projects of Heidegger,
Gadamer, and Ricoeur, especially when articulating the /value/ of
hermeneutics with regard to ethics and practices, operate through a
/critical opposition/ to `modern technology'. It is within the context
of an age dominated by technologies and technocratic forms of
reasoning that the hermeneutic call to an embodied, contextual form of
/practical reason/ gains significance. For Ricoeur, the technological
age coincides with the age of demythologization and the "desert of
criticism"[7], and threatens to eclipse or conceal the sacred
dimension of being-in-the-world. For Gadamer, technological and
scientific understandings of application obscure the hermeneutic idea
application always involves selection and interpretation. Technology
works by eradicating the need for deliberating, participating subjects
when being applied. A technological `application' will perform in the
same way no matter how often it is repeated or in which context it
operates. Practical wisdom, on the other hand, can be seen as the
paradigm of what Catherine Pickstock calls "non-identical repetition";
applied iterations of a tradition work to deepen and unfold it, often
in unexpected or novel ways. [8] Ricoeur also embraces this
understanding of hermeneutic application in concepts such as
appropriation and /mimesis_{3.}/ On the other hand, within the history
of modern hermeneutics there have also been some attempts to consider
the role of /technique/ in the process of practical application. This
alternative understanding of technique allows for a hermeneutic
reconsideration of modern technologies through shifting focus from
their transcendental essence, towards the ways that they depend on
practical application in their functioning. Grasping the significance
of technological application is achieved against the background of an
understanding of technologies as pluralistic, unfinished outcomes of
practical engagements with the world.
1.1 Hermeneutics and the Question of Technique
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
/I don't want to imply that practicality is another word
for comfort. I rather mean that it brings us closer to the
work, establishing a rapport with it, rather than
encouraging a network of ideas that keeps us outside it./
/This is where the practical differs from the technical.
The technical, no matter how foolproof, is always in the
realm of the speculative - a notion about perfection - the
system. But what happens when these gods fail us?/[9]
The first part of this chapter will explore some of the hermeneutic
criticisms of technology. I intend to retain an important feature of
these criticisms, namely, the hermeneutic emphasis on practical
understanding that acts as a valuable corrective to technologies.
However, I aim to read practical reason not as an alternative to
technology, but as an integral part of technology (and /vice versa/).
This perspective can be achieved, I argue, by taking into account more
recent approaches to technology which emphasize the /uncertain,/
interpretation-dependant nature of technological design and
application. These approaches will be explored in more detail in
section four of the thesis (Technological Application). In part two of
this chapter I examine the ways that hermeneutic approaches (Ricoeur,
Schleiermacher, Foucault), already contain the resources for thinking
about the dialectical relation between technologies and practical
application.
1.1.1 A Hermeneutic Critique of Technology
------------------------------------------
An aspect of Gadamer's hermeneutics that has been the subject of
criticism and close examination is his rehabilitation of the concept
of application (/Anwendung/), an approach shared and extended by
Ricoeur in his use of the term appropriation (/Aneignung/) and in
related concepts such as /mimesis_{3}./ In /Truth and Method/ Gadamer
identifies application as the "central problem" of hermeneutics, which
is "to be found in all understanding".[10] It is an idea that, for a
time, was `forgotten' due to the "aesthetic-historical positivism"
branch of the hermeneutic tradition that drew an equivalence between
/understanding/ and /interpretation (explication)./ What Gadamer calls
/aesthetic differentiation,/ allows for a bracketing of the question
of application. For example, when I consider an artwork from a
historicist or aesthetic perspective, I interpret it according to the
theories and knowledge I have of art history and aesthetics. The
`truth' of the work follows the /logic of correspondences,/ certain
features of the work match with other works of that period or with
expected explorations of thematic forms, and so on. The goal of
hermeneutic methods, understood in this way, was to overcome
historical distance and understand the author better than they
understood themselves. In Ricoeur's terms, questions of the work
itself were bypassed in favour of the "Romantic pretension of
recovering, by congenial coincidence, the genius of the author: from
genius to genius!"[11]
However, against this approach to understanding, which ends at the
level of explication, Gadamer emphasizes that the more fundamental
/truth/ of the work is found in its /contemporaneity./ The work is not
only a set of relations that correspond to a certain period or genre,
it is also something which /addresses/ the spectator, i.e., the
aesthetic experience is also an /event/ that incorporates both the
work and the spectator. Hermeneutic application is still a response to
the problem of historical or cultural /distance,/ yet, in place of the
idea of overcoming distance, distance is seen as a conditional,
mediating factor for understanding. The figure of the author is no
longer that of another `mind' to be understood, but that of an /other/
who addresses me at a distance. Application or appropriation, in this
sense, "takes the place of the answer in the dialogical situation, in
the same way that `revelation' or `disclosure' takes the place of
ostensive reference in the dialogical situation."[12]
Traditional hermeneutic theories distinguished three elements of
interpretation; /subtilitas intelligendi/ (understanding), /subtilitas
explicanda/ (interpretation), and /subtilitas applicandi/
(application). Gadamer argues that these three moments are related and
inseparable -- to understand is to already have explicated, and to
explicate involves questions of application (whether consciously
acknowledged or not). For Gadamer, "we consider application to be just
as integral a part of the hermeneutic process as are understanding and
interpretation."[13] What this revision is explicitly aimed at
correcting is a view that sees an interpretation as something that is
first arrived at, and then later applied in various contexts. This
view is represented most strongly by /techne/ and scientific forms of
reasoning, where application appears as a separate moment, distinct
from a theory, skill-set, technological design, and so on.
The reason why this aspect of Gadamer's hermeneutics has been debated
and challenged (for example by Habermas, Emilio Betti and Hirsch) is
because linking application to interpretation and understanding
implies that all interpretation is related to the context of the
interpreter, i.e., it becomes very difficult to externally /validate/
the claims of an interpretation or appropriation since they are
/bound/ to the experience of the event/engagement itself. Habermas,
for example, challenged this view on the grounds that it does not take
into account power-dynamics in social settings, which are alien and
violent in relation to particular interpreting subjects, and which
require a distanced, rigorous critique (explication). If all
interpretation involves appropriation, how is it possible to develop
an emancipatory critique? Habermas, instead, developed a "depth
hermeneutics" which combined hermeneutic interpretation with a
critique of the underlying deep structures of the text (for example,
the ideological functions).[14]
The two approaches, critique and application, are not entirely
incompatible, a fact that is attested to by Ricoeur's attempt to
incorporate both. What Gadamer's concept of application succeeds in
articulating is the productive (and arguably critical) role of
/phronēsis/ in the task of understanding. The concept of /phronēsis/
includes within it the difficult but crucial feature of human
/solidarity./ For example, in a letter to Richard J. Bernstein,
Gadamer writes,
I am concerned with the fact that the displacement of
human reality never goes so far that no forms of
solidarity exist any longer. Plato saw this very well:
there is no city so corrupted that it does not realize
something of the true city; that is what, in my opinion,
is the basis for the possibility of practical
philosophy.[15]
In place of the figure of the `ideal' city, Gadamer suggests that
/concrete/ reality of the corrupted city is the locus of true
understanding. Viewed from the perspective of critical theory,
hermeneutic application is read as a submission to the status-quo,
which leaves the vulnerable, interpreting subject in a position of
dependence. Yet, as Gadamer highlights, this emphasis on the
centrality of practical application in understanding is also necessary
to affirm the solidarity that is crucial in any work of understanding.
Furthermore, in the context of an age dominated by technological forms
of rationality, the emphasis on /phronēsis/ serves as a critical
corrective to an attitude that is forgetful of the power of
application in the determination of meaning.
Solidarity with a work or with others is something that can only be
cultivated through a practical engagement with the world, since
through the repetitions of practice relations of concern and belonging
are established. These features of practice and hermeneutic
application are threatened by what Habermas and Gadamer discuss as the
dominance of a scientific attitude to understanding, an attitude which
is linked to the rise of modern technology. Modern technology is seen
as an expression of the interests of scientific method, which centre
on the desire to evaluate and control a set of practical relations by
reducing them to a theoretical perspective. Whereas practice, in the
hermeneutic sense, is aimed towards developing a /mastery/ of a
situation, through subjecting oneself to a set of conditions or
constraints, technology aims towards /control./ For example, mastering
the skill of surfing does not imply control of the sea.
A practical application is seen by hermeneutics as a way of unfolding
or deepening an already-present historical thread through the act of
repeating something in a new way, for example, the way a law appears
in light of an unanticipated case or the way a biblical verse can gain
new significance and power in light of contemporary political
situation. In contrast, technology works by presenting history as
controllable and even as something we can overcome. Since both
technologies and practical reason operate at the /practical/ level,
albeit guided by different concerns, discerning the difference and
appropriateness of either perspective becomes tricky in cases where
technology takes over from practical reason. Habermas summarises this
perspective as follows:
The real difficulty in the relation of theory and practice
does not arise from this new function of science as a
technological force, but rather from the fact that we are
no longer able to distinguish between practical and
technical power. Yet even a civilization that has been
rendered scientific is not granted dispensation from
practical questions. Therefore a peculiar danger arises
when the process of scientification transgresses the limit
of technical questions, without, however, departing from
the level of rationality confined to the technological
horizon. For then no attempt is made to attain a rational
consensus on the part of citizens concerning the practical
control of their destiny. Its place is taken by the
attempt to attain technical control over history by
perfecting the administration of society, an attempt that
is as impractical as it is unhistorical.[16]
For both Habermas and Gadamer, technology, whilst being related to the
practical field, is entirely /impractical/ and /unhistorical/ in its
execution. Gadamer presents the same contrast through the different
senses of `application' found in the arts and the sciences,
The problem of the application of science already
presupposes that science as such possesses its
self-certain and autonomous existence prior to all
application and free from all reference to possible
application; but thanks to just this freedom from purpose,
its knowledge is available for any application whatsoever,
precisely because science has no competence to preside
over its application.[17]
For Habermas, the execution of a technological project of controlling
society fails due to its impracticality, and for Gadamer, the forms of
knowledge associated with scientific theory fail according to
hermeneutic standards due to the lack of "competence" required in
determining the practical application of theoretical models. The
result is that knowledge gained through theoretical projects and
applied through technological means of control either fails completely
at the practical level, or else works /too/ well, in that its
functionality conceals the fragile practical relations at work in the
application. So, technology is both /impractical/ in that it is prone
to failure, and /anti-practical/ in that the functionality it offers
draws subjects away from a deliberative, living relation with their
environment.
A simple example of the skewed relation between technological
rationality and practical application is found in a recent product by
the company Juicero. The product was a juice machine that cost $400.
You inserted pouches of juiced vegetables into the machine that would
then squeeze them for you. The product failed, and the company went
out of business, when people quickly realised that simply squeezing
the pouches by hand proved far more effective than using the machine.
Even the wifi-connectivity of the machine, which allowed the machine
to notify you when the pouch is out of date, was rendered pointless by
the expiration date printed on the pouches themselves. As with the
classic myth/joke about the Americans spending one million dollars to
develop a space-pen while the Russian used a pencil, the Juicero
juicer failed because it strayed too far from the instruction of
practical wisdom and common sense, "Juicero has since become something
of a symbol of the absurd Silicon Valley start-up industry that raises
huge sums of money for solutions to non-problems."[18] Application, in
the hermeneutic sense, refers to the primacy of the concrete
/question/ or problem that guides the work of interpretation.
Technological "solutions to non-problems" are symptomatic of the
forgetfulness of this point in modern forms of reasoning. For Gadamer,
"understanding...involves something like applying a meaning to our
situation, to the questions we want answered...Motivated by the
particular questions of the moment, understanding is not just
reproductive but, because it involves application, always also a
productive activity."[19]
However, technological forms of rationality are especially problematic
not because they are vulnerable to failure, but because they cause us
to become forgetful of the practical questions and problems that guide
interpretation. As the quote at the beginning of the chapter by Morton
Feldman suggests, a "network" of ideas and technologies, or, as
Borgmann writes, "the tightly-patterned character"[20] of modern
technology, can end up serving as a /distraction -/ a set of
meaningless processes that nevertheless work. As Todd Mei has pointed
out, the /work/ done by the machine or device comes at the /cost/ of
becoming forgetful of our dependency on being.[21] For example,
although the presence of satellite-navigation systems in our cars save
us from the work and hassle of consulting maps or locals, our prior
awareness of a dependency on environmental `symbols' and cues, such as
landmarks, terrains, local knowledge, and so on, is lost. A hard-won
practical skill -- the ability to read and decipher maps -- is traded
for the relative ease and comfort of the GPS device, which requires
relatively little skill to operate. The ontological cost is in terms
of our living relation to our environment, which can only be disclosed
by /working/ through it, by being personally invested in it. When we
allow a device, for example a microwave, to do the work on our behalf,
our own relation to the world is destabilized (we no longer need to
engage in the difficult and transformative practice of learning to
cook, for example). In Morton Feldman's case, he is asking whether
musical `ideas' or systems (he is writing in the shadow of Schoenberg,
Boulez, Stockhausen, etc., as well as the `historicist' account of
musical development in general), which promise perfection and
intellectual mastery, actually end up keeping the composer outside the
work they are aiming to produce. His alternative, which is similar to
Gadamer's, is to instead return to an engagement with the /practical/
dimension of composition, in order to build a /rapport/ with the work.
He considers the type of chair he sits in to write, the type of pen he
uses and so on, features which from a purely `musical', theoretical
perspective seem irrelevant, but from the perspective of the actual,
living composer are essential.[22]
Although both Habermas and Gadamer have similar criticisms of the
cultural dominance of a scientific/rationalistic view of the human
world, their responses to the issue, as we have seen, differ. This is
especially true with regard to the question of hermeneutic
application. Habermas' "depth hermeneutics"[23] or critical
hermeneutics is, as Ricoeur argues, guided by the attitude of
/suspicion./ It entails a direct confrontation with the structures and
traditions that mediate and distort our understanding of ourselves.
Therefore, it embraces the alienating function of critique; we must
distance ourselves from the practices and traditions we perpetuate
unknowingly, in order to perceive them with a more critical eye. A
hermeneutic approach, on the other hand, advocates a positive recovery
of already-present resources in the lifeworld, and especially those
found within tradition. The two approaches first appear as
"alternatives", one negative and the other positive, "In contrast to
the positive assessment by hermeneutics, the theory of ideology adopts
a suspicious approach, seeing tradition as merely the systematically
distorted expression of communication under unacknowledged conditions
of violence."[24]
Ricoeur's own approach wishes to retain both modes of interpretation.
Gadamer's concept of application outlines a hermeneutic project for
the productive /recovery/ of meaning. However, for Ricoeur, a project
of recovery must also be the act of a capable agent, that is, an agent
who is able to evaluate, reflect and discern /appropriate/ meanings.
Every act of hermeneutic recovery, in this sense, includes the moment
of reflective distanciation. According to Ricoeur, Gadamer presents a
false alternative, either a fully committed participation in the event
or occasion of truth, or the isolation and alienation of method, an
antinomy that,
seems to me to be the mainspring of Gadamer's work,
namely, the opposition between alienating distanciation
and belonging. This opposition is an antinomy because it
establishes an untenable alternative: on the one hand,
alienating distanciation is the attitude that renders
possible the objectification that reigns in the human
sciences; but on the other hand, this distanciation, which
is the condition of the scientific status of the sciences,
is at the same time the fall that destroys the fundamental
and primordial relation whereby we belong to and
participate in the historical reality that we claim to
construct as an object. Whence the alternative underlying
the very title of Gadamer's work /Truth and Method:/
either we adopt the methodological attitude and lose the
ontological density of the reality we study, or we adopt
the attitude of truth and must then renounce the
objectivity of the human sciences.[25]
Ricoeur's hermeneutics instead attempts to incorporate the act of
alienation or distanciation from oneself as an integral moment on the
path to appropriation. Distance becomes a necessary condition for
understanding, due to the nature of what Ricoeur calls the "shattered
cogito".[26] Since who I am is already dispersed or diffracted among
conflicting institutions, works and cultures, appropriation is not
only an alienation from oneself, but an encounter with oneself in
other forms. Ricoeur, a close follower of the "masters of suspicion",
affirms that the greatest threat to self-understanding is the
narcissism of the ego. For this reason, Ricoeur reads appropriation as
an act of /enlarging/ the self. Both Ricoeur and Gadamer understand
appropriation in terms of /concreteness/ (i.e., whereas explication
alone is abstract, appropriation is concrete and living), but
Ricoeur's metaphor of enlargement suggests that a process of
concretization is as much a dissolution of identity as a convergence -
"alienation" and "appropriation" remain dialectically bound,
"understanding is as much disappropriation and appropriation."[27]
However, whereas Ricoeur embraces the /distanciation/ produced by an
objectifying approach, he is consistent with Gadamer in rejecting the
mode of rationality associated with modern technology. Ricoeur seems
to differentiate between knowledge gained through distanciation (for
example, insights which emerge from the methods of the social
sciences) that can be productively related back to a practical
understanding of the world, and a technological rationality that
operates according to a logic that no longer has any relation to human
understanding. The distanciation caused by technological rationality
results in an /endless/ detour with no return, since it is a type of
knowledge which remains forgetful of its relation to the hermeneutic
question of being-in-the-world.
Both Ricoeur and Gadamer develop the idea of practical
appropriation/application in direct response to forms of rationality
that they see embodied in technology, i.e., rationality that is
independent of appropriation. For example, when Ricoeur is discussing
globalised, economic forms of rationality, and the negative effect
that these have on our understanding of /work,/ he links this
phenomenon to the rise of modern technology,
In a word, labor, on the level of economic society as
such, appears at once as technically rational and humanly
unreasonable. Moreover, the individual is dissatisfied and
even torn in the labor force of modern society because he
finds no /meaning/ in the simple struggle against nature
nor in the apology of calculating efficiency. This is so
true that in advanced industrial societies, at least,
meaning is sought more and more outside work, and work
becomes merely a means to gain leisure time, which, in
turn, is organised along the lines of the technical model
of work. In brief, work, in advanced societies, has ceased
to be the great educator in the ways of rationality that
Hegel and Marx saw it as.[28]
Practical reason and the task of interpretation involve difficult and
arduous /work,/ yet it is a form of work that stands radically opposed
to the types of work associated with modern economic society. The
conflict here, between the "technically rational" and human reason, is
similar to the conflict outlined by Gadamer and Habermas. The
implication is that in an age dominated by a technical/economic
enframing of "labour", we have forgotten the /hermeneutic/ notion of
work, which involves building a relation with the land so that
truthful dwelling and /thanking/ can occur.[29]
Furthermore, whereas practical wisdom is bound to self-understanding
and the development of a self (/Bildung/), the skill of /techne/ is
something that I can learn, apply, and then discard or forget. This
contrast between repetition of the same (technological production) and
repetition of the different, makes the subject matter of this thesis
difficult. The hermeneutic concept of practice, elaborated by Ricoeur
and Gadamer, is developed in order to suggest an alternative mode of
engaging with the world than the one we are currently presented with
through the modern dominance of science and technology. As Paulo Cesar
Duque-Estrada writes, this conflict between two forms of rationality
is an old one and provides the foundation for Gadamer's understanding
of practical philosophy,
One can say, in this way, that the fundamental topic which
correlates hermeneutics and practical philosophy is the
problem of the preservation of one type of rationality
against the totalitarian tendency of another type of
rationality. In the context of practical philosophy, we
find Aristotle's critique of the formal universalism of
Plato's ideas, and the useless character of the idea of
the good (/idea tou agathou/) regarding the concrete
demands of the "here" and "now" proper to the practical
realm.[30]
If Ricoeur and Gadamer's view of practical wisdom is developed
/against/ the types of rationality they see embodied in technologies,
how can these two types of reason be brought into dialogue? While
wishing to maintain this timely critique of technological rationality,
I suggest here that practical philosophy cannot escape the question of
/technique/. Just as living, participating subjects are appropriators
of tradition and future meanings, techniques, and by extension
technologies, can be seen as modes of appropriating practices through
offering new solutions and unanticipated possibilities for action.
This means that they themselves require further appropriation and
development. The resources for thinking through this relation are
already present in Ricoeur's understanding of the circle of alienation
and belonging. Ricoeur himself seen texts and linguistic structures as
operating through economic, technical relations of exchange and
codification. A detour through such structures is necessary for any
genuine appropriation to occur. If, like the text, we read
technologies as reflective of living, embodied practical concerns,
then they too can be seen as appropriative of life. That is, the act
of designing or constructing technological solutions to practical
problems is not simply a negation of the human capacity for practical
reason, as the hermeneutic thinkers suggest, but also an affirmation
of questions and perspectives that remain unanticipated by the `naïve'
perspective of a practicing, unchallenged subject.
1.1.2 The Art of Hermeneutics
-----------------------------
As I have suggested above, this thesis moves in the direction of
taking the alienation that hermeneutics associates with technology in
a positive sense. However, two features of the hermeneutic critique
outlined prevent us from doing so, since alienation is only conceived
as productive for Ricoeur when it is linked to the practice of
interpretation. When linked to systematic forms of oppression and
de-humanization, alienation is seen as negative. The two features of
the hermeneutic critique that cause us to read technology as a
negative mode of alienation are, firstly (1) is the link proposed
between the /interests/ guiding technological production and those of
scientific rationality. Linking technology to science in this way
leads to the view that the concerns underpinning technology cannot be
reconciled with the concerns originating in the lifeworld. The
technological concerns adhere to the demands of objectification
associated with scientific method, while the concerns in the lifeworld
are grounded in forms of intersubjectivity and interpretation. The
second (2) is the presupposition that the modes of /application/
associated with technology differ from those of an artwork or text,
for example. Technological applications aim towards generalizable,
decontextualized outcomes, while hermeneutic applications found in
aesthetic encounters are singular and bound to the context of the
engagement. In order to begin to consider technologies as hermeneutic
objects, it is necessary to overcome both these hermeneutic
presuppositions about technologies. The first objection is overcome,
as David Kaplan argues, by acknowledging the pluralistic, material
nature of technological /mediation/. Furthermore, I suggest that
technologies should be read as emerging from practical experience,
rather than from abstract forms of reasoning.
In view of Kaplan's concerns about Ricoeur's disposition toward
technology, the second subsection will highlight what exactly makes
Ricoeur's hermeneutics meaningful for understanding technology. The
relation between technological solutions and practical experience
forms one part of a hermeneutic arc, with the other being practical
re-appropriation. This leads us to overcoming the second objection
mentioned above. The work of Friedrich Schleiermacher, which provides
a background for Ricoeur's project, will be examined due to its
acknowledgement of the role of technique in application. However, his
preference for a /general/ model of hermeneutic seems to sublate the
question of technique. Ricoeur's hermeneutics (along with Gadamer and
Foucault), in insisting on the centrality of practical appropriation,
brings the question of technique back into view.
1.1.2.1 Relating Technology to Practice
The link, established by Habermas, Gadamer, Heidegger, Ricoeur and
others, between technology and rationality has been challenged by many
recent approaches to technology. These approaches will be explored in
more detail in Section 4, but here David Kaplan's reading of Ricoeur's
work as providing resources for moving beyond a transcendental
critique of technology towards an engagement with its material
configurations will be highlighted. [31] Aside from the invaluable
work of Don Ihde, who incorporated aspects of Ricoeur's hermeneutic
phenomenology into his work on technology, there has been a relatively
minor impact of Ricoeur's work on the philosophy of technology.
Whereas Kaplan does not directly explore the full implications of a
Ricoeurian approach to technology, he does lay out a thorough and
useful roadmap of potential points of intersection between Ricoeur and
questions of technology. In key ways, this thesis attempts a journey
along this possible path that is gestured towards by Kaplan.
At the outset of his article "Paul Ricoeur and the Philosophy of
Technology", Kaplan states the problematic nature of combining Ricoeur
with questions of technology bluntly:
On the few occasions when Ricoeur did discuss technology,
he generally agreed with Heidegger, Marcuse, and Habermas,
each of whom contrasts the dehumanizing characteristics of
technology and technological reasoning with more humane
forms of experience and action. Ricoeur incorporated the
views of these philosophers without adding much new to the
study of technology.[32]
Kaplan laments this point, because in the latter half of the twentieth
century, as technology became more integrated into social life,
thinking about technology shifted from a critique of the
transcendental essence of technological modes of relating to the
world, to an empirical approach which advocated contextual,
narrative-based understandings of technologies as they operate in the
lifeworld. Or, in other words, the philosophy of technology itself
began to incorporate a hermeneutic approach:
The problem with [Ricoeur's] pessimistic view is that it
is unoriginal, limited, dated, and false. There are too
many different things we call technology to be captured by
a notion of a single technological rationality that
ostensibly underlies them all. The empirical approach to
technology studies understands it hermeneutically and
contextually: technology must be interpreted against a
cultural horizon of meaning, like any other social
reality.[33]
Given the centrality of a hermeneutic perspective in many current
approaches to technology, it is disappointing that there was not a
deeper, more /appropriating/, reflection on technology given by the
three most influential hermeneutic philosophers; Ricoeur, Gadamer, and
Heidegger. Indeed, since many approaches to the philosophy of
technology adopt key hermeneutic concepts (for example, the
influential work of Bruno Latour which accords "narrative description"
a role in its theory), a renewed examination of the nature of
hermeneutics itself seems necessary in order to reflect on the
conditions of much of our contemporary understandings of
technology.[34]
Kaplan demonstrates the various areas of Ricoeur's large body of work
that could be productively combined with contextual, empirical
accounts of technologies.[35] Although Kaplan mentions a variety of
areas, the key area I focus on is Ricoeur's hermeneutics and its
thesis that distanciation and belonging are two separate moments of a
broader dialectic of understanding. My investigations are guided, to a
certain extent, by the following claim: "If the password for Ricoeur's
hermeneutics is "mediation," then it might help us to interpret the
various ways that artifacts mediate experiences -- and the ways we can
respond to it given our limitations."[36] In particular, I focus on
the configurational and disfigurational aspects of mediation, brought
about by the interaction of experiencing subjects and designed
artefacts.
When considered in isolation or in terms of its broader, guiding
/interests,/ technology can appear monolithic and threatening.
However, when considered in terms of its /mediating/ effects,
technology becomes more unstable and uncertain. At times, devices and
technologies work to productively /configure/ and order our
understanding of the world. They guide and shape human action.
However, just as with narrative configurations, technological
configurations are equally disfigurational. A technological design or
solution, understood as a creative response to practical needs,
proposes a new mode of action and understanding, which both disfigures
prior understandings and is itself open to re-figuration through
uncertain application processes. For example, according to the
hermeneutic suspicion of technology, we could imagine a tractor as the
product of agricultural /theory/. Whereas, an immediate encounter with
and experience of using a tractor might not tell us as much, the
suspicion would be that as an /optimized/ mode of agriculture, it
would fit within a broader technological tendency which aims to
progressively rationalise a practice. However, as with narratives that
emerge as distanciated reflections of human concerns with temporality,
I argue that we can view the tractor as emerging from the practical
experience of farming - as an inventive, creative response to problems
that arise within that experience. Furthermore, we can view it as both
related to farming-practice, and as differing from it, through its
`technical' or `configured' features. It both arises from a practical
experience and has a transformative effect on that practice. As a
technical object it also contains its own possibilities for use that
remain distinct from the initial needs and experiences that gave rise
to its invention. Therefore, it presents a technical solution to a
practical problem, but acknowledging the /individuality/ of the
solution, and even its /ingenuity,/ means acknowledging its productive
limitations or horizons. These horizons should not be too-quickly
reconciled with the picture of technological rationality presented by
the hermeneutic suspicion.
To understand the dialectical nature of the relation between
technologies and practical experience, a key tension must be retained,
one advocated by hermeneutic theories but often neglected empirical
approaches to technology. The tension is created due to what Kaplan
calls the "Romanticist legacy" of Ricoeur's hermeneutic. It is
identified as a weak point in Ricoeur's thought by Kaplan, "The second
way philosophers of technology add to Ricoeur's work is through their
challenge to the Romanticist legacy in Continental philosophy that too
sharply distinguishes between persons and things."[37] Kaplan admits
that much of Ricoeur's work is aimed towards developing a partial
reconciliation of this aporia (between explanation and understanding),
but that there persists a dualism between the natural and social
sciences, "From the perspective of the philosophy of technology
Ricoeur remains trapped in the Romanticist legacy. Though
dialectically related, persons and things belong to ontologically
distinct realms."[38]
I will instead argue that this distinction needs to be maintained, as
the difference between the two is the condition for appropriation. It
can be broken down in various ways, and Ricoeur himself does challenge
this division, but at a certain point we run up against the problem of
what Ricoeur calls a "semantic dualism" between the language of
persons and the language of things.[39] Kaplan argues that technology
is so integrated into social life that the traditional paradigms of
natural and social sciences no longer make sense; to segregate
technology to the realm of "science" is to abstract it from its
inherent social dimension. While agreeing with the dangers of
abstraction presented by a transcendental critique of technology, the
latent dualism between persons and things adhered to by Ricoeur still
remains productive for thinking about the /alterity/ of technological
development in relation to human-based practices and traditions. My
intention is to re-read this alterity as dialectically related to the
formation of practices. Technologies are still read as being
integrated into society, but the continuity between persons and things
remains problematic, precisely due to the role of mediation. For
example, I will argue that the work of Gilbert Simondon (Chapter 7)
provides a useful model for thinking about human-technology relations
that insists on the difference between human concerns and the way that
technologies develop and evolve.
Paying closer attention to the contextual, historical features of
individual technologies allows us to perceive that technologies can be
linked to /practices,/ as opposed to abstract, theoretical interests.
The hermeneutic critique remains operative, but instead becomes a way
of discerning the difference between the individual, practical
features of technologies, and the general, theoretical features. We
will see this division presented by Ricoeur himself in Chapter 3, when
he distinguishes between an understanding of psychoanalytic technique
that associates it with theory, and one that associates it with
practical experience.
1.1.2.2 Application and the Machine
Accepting Kaplan's suggestion that technologies should be understood
in terms of their mediating effects, we can still ask whether this
mediating process is one-sided. That is, do technologies mediate our
understanding and actions in univocal, programmatic ways? This seems
to be suggested by the hermeneutic suspicion of technology. Whereas
artworks, texts, discourses, and so on, address and implicate us in
the event of interpretation and practical negotiation, technologies
treat us as mere `users' -- we navigate menu systems or interfaces in
a relatively unambiguous way. As David Lewin suggests (Chapter 6),
hermeneutical reasoning involves /phronēsis,/ a capacity that seems to
be denied by the logic of the interface, which aims to eradicate the
need for deliberation and the experience of uncertainty.
Nevertheless, hermeneutic approaches themselves cannot avoid the
question of /technique./ Not only are artworks and texts constructed
with the aid of techniques, but the practice of interpretation itself
often involves the development of a technique or method to reach
beyond the immediate level of what is said. As we will see below, for
Schleiermacher, hermeneutics itself was an /art/ that had to be
practiced. Certain works, due to their individuality, /demand/ a
corresponding mode of engagement from the subject attempting to know
or understand them. For example, a particularly difficult piece of
music, which may at first sight appear `impossible' to play, demands
of its performer the training and development of certain physical
techniques in order to perform and interpret it. Technique, understood
in this sense, is the emergent outcome of practical, interpretive
interactions.
Techniques seem to go against the /universality/ of the hermeneutic
problem, since they are often creative responses to regional
questions. As the product of attempts to resolve localized
interactions and engagements, they tend to be surpassed by the
interpretations themselves. Ricoeur's approach to hermeneutics,
however, is careful to assert the inseparability of the result of an
interpretation and the /mediating/ factors that lead to a particular
result. The tension, between the regionality of technique and the
universality of the hermeneutic problem, is an old problem for
hermeneutics, treated extensively by Schleiermacher. For Ricoeur, this
tension becomes a productive condition for understanding. Explanatory
accounts of phenomena help us /understand better./ That is, there is a
link between regional phenomena and understanding-as-whole. The art of
hermeneutics consists in attesting to this relation and drawing out
its implications. At first sight, this framing of hermeneutics places
weight on the power of understanding to reconcile and draw together
pluralized, conflicting accounts. For example, at one point Ricoeur
defines philosophical hermeneutics in the following terms:
It begins by an expanding investigation into symbolic
forms and by a comprehensive analysis of symbolic
structures. It proceeds by the confrontation of
hermeneutic styles and by the critique of systems of
interpretation, carrying the diversity of hermeneutic
methods back to the structure of the corresponding
theories. In this way it prepares itself to perform its
highest task, which would be a true arbitration among the
absolutist claims of each of the interpretations. By
showing in what way each method expresses the form of a
theory, philosophical hermeneutics justifies each method
within the limits of its own theoretical
circumscription.[40]
This "highest task" of "true arbitration" can be read in two ways. One
the one hand, it could represent the task of gathering together
diverse forms of knowledge and relating them to the central question
of human, existential self-understanding in a totalizing way. On the
other hand, it could represent the task of hermeneutics to attest to
the /impossibility/ of this very project (or at the very least, the
/difficulty/ of such a project).[41] Taking the thesis of hermeneutic
application/appropriation seriously means that the conflict of
interpretations is irreducible, and therefore gives more credence to
the second of these readings. The figure of the "true arbitrator",
then, would be that of a self possessing practical wisdom, i.e., the
ability to perceive and negotiate the tension between a general rule
or theory and the demands of the singular case. /Technique,/ a type of
regional knowledge, according to hermeneutics, should then be seen as
contributing positively to the revelation of this difficult situation.
Within the history of modern hermeneutics, `know-how', or technique,
has been associated with the individuality of the work, rather than
with generalizable knowledge. In other words, technique is more
closely related to a practical understanding of truth as opposed to a
scientific understanding (/episteme/). This point is raised by
Schleiermacher to highlight the aesthetic or artful nature of
understanding. General rules of interpretation do not suffice, due to
the contingent nature of cultural backgrounds and norms which affect
both the author and reader. For this reason, a "general hermeneutics"
needs to include both analytical and /skilful/artful/ elements. That
is, a reader needs to grasp both the grammatical aspects of a work and
the way that these "mechanisms" have been /applied./ All understanding
involves a simultaneous grasping of rules and the significance of the
rules for a particular application. Ricoeur's own contribution to this
view of hermeneutics is to claim that not only are both features
/necessary,/ but that the difference between the two is a /productive/
difference, since rules generate new possibilities for applications,
while applications generate new understandings of the rules.
For Schleiermacher, the application of the rules of language must be
something different than the rules themselves, otherwise there would
be an infinite regress of rule-following. Andrew Bowie points out that
this argument by Schleiermacher is present in Kant (and also
associated with Wittgenstein),
If general logic were to attempt to show in general how
anything should be subsumed under these rules, that is,
how we should distinguish whether something falls under
them or not, then this could only take place by means of
another rule. This rule, because it is a rule, requires
new instruction from the power of judgement; and we thus
learn that, whereas the understanding is capable of being
instructed by and equipped with rules, the power of
judgement is a special talent which cannot be taught, but
can only be practiced.[42]
It is due to the difficulty of reconciling the difference between a
rule and the know-how regarding the application of the rule that
Schleiermacher's "general hermeneutics" adopts its double nature. As
Kant argues, the problem of application can only be resolved by
recourse to a "particular talent" developed through practice.
Schleiermacher's own term for the study of the nature of application
in light of the internal laws of language is /Kunstlehre,/ which
Ricoeur translates into French as /technologie/:[43]
Grammatical interpretation is based on the characteristics
of discourses that are common to a culture; technical
interpretation is addressed to the singularity of, indeed
to the genius, of the writer's message...The first
interpretation is called `objective,' since it is
concerned with linguistic characteristics distinct from
the author, but also `negative', since it merely indicates
the limits of understanding; its critical value bears only
upon errors in the meaning of words. The second
interpretation is called `technical,' undoubtedly owing to
the very project of a /Kunstlehre,/ a `technology.' The
proper task of hermeneutics is accomplished in this second
interpretation.[44]
Ricoeur's reading of Schleiermacher sees his work as being in response
to Kant; an attempt to combine a formal approach to meaning with an
approach which acknowledges the art of application, which is always
carried out by an /individual/. What is at stake is two views of
knowledge. The first type is the knowledge associated with reason and
common sense, which can be formalized and discerned through
grammatical analysis. The truth of this kind of interpretation is
determined through the logic of correspondences, `errors' are at the
level of grammatical usage or deviations from common understandings of
terms. The second type of knowledge is the knowledge associated with
`technique', which is a knowledge of the style or art of writing. This
is still a comparative type of knowledge, yet the truth of the
interpretation is not determined by how much a style corresponds with
already existing models, but by how it /differs/ from them by
producing imaginative variations. Both modes of interpretation are
necessary in the process of understanding in order to account for the
double nature of language as a medium that is both grammatical and
communicative. That fact that communication is an activity carried out
by individuals within concrete cultures and societies means that
grammatical structures will affect various receivers of a message
differently due to these "organic" features of human life,
The aspect of endless difference in the way the world
affects each organism in receptivity is what
Schleiermacher refers to as the `organic function'.
Meaning and truth, though, rely upon the establishing of
identities from what is given as difference in the organic
function. The `formal', in Schleiermacher's terms, is the
`intellectual' `principle of unity', as opposed to the
organic, the principle of `multiplicity', and knowledge is
constituted by the intellectual activity underlying the
principle of unity. The formal and the organic meet in the
judgement.[45]
The intellectual principle of pure reason is never fully realized in
concrete linguistic structures, due to their "organic" nature, and for
this reason the truth of language can only be grasped at the practical
level, and only ever imperfectly. A "technology" of interpretation is
a higher-level understanding of the role of technique/application in
the construction of meaning. It is a "general" guideline that claims
that language-as-such (beyond the individual techniques/styles) will
always be incomplete with regard to the question of "unity". So, a
"technology" of interpretation is a practical corrective to pure
reason. The failure or incompleteness of pure reason in terms of
linguistic presentation (the organic function of language) means that
the art of hermeneutics is also the art of avoiding misunderstandings,
Reason for Schleiermacher, then, is really the potential
for using the principle of unity to arrive at true
knowledge, a potential which relies on the organic
function as well as on the activity of the formal,
synthesising capacity of the mind. Both the organic and
the formal, of course, are necessary for language, which
must be instantiated as object in the physical world that
is given in the organic function. This means, therefore,
that language blocks the possibility of access to `pure
reason': pure reason would entail a `purely formal',
`general' language, but how would we ever learn it?[46]
In lieu of a "general" language, a "general hermeneutics" arises as a
corrective. The comparative and divinatory aspects of hermeneutics
remain distinct but inseparable for Schleiermacher, and this is what
makes every work of interpretation contain both regional and universal
aspects. Importantly, the regional or divinatory aspects of
interpretation accounts for its /worldly/ character, since it is
directed towards the way that language affects us as embodied,
cultural agents. This, early, account of hermeneutic technique,
distinguishes `technique' from `method' and aligns it more closely
with sensitivity and skilfulness. The association of hermeneutics with
technique even renders the work of interpretation itself as a "work of
art": "The complete task of hermeneutics is to be regarded as a work
of art, but not as if carrying it out resulted in a work of art, but
in such a way that the activity only bears the /character/ of art in
itself, because the application is not also given with the rules,
i.e., cannot be mechanised."[47] The ambiguous nature of the
/application/ of language to the organic world, is what gives rise to
the need for an accompanying technique or /Kunstlehre./ Technique and
the question of application are inseparable.
The later work of Michel Foucault, in its turn to a "hermeneutics of
the self" and a "technique of the self", could be seen to be a
continued reflection on Schleiermacher's division. However, whereas
Schleiermacher posits a principle of unity, Foucault rejects the
"generality" of hermeneutics, in favour of a practical, regional self.
Like Schleiermacher, Foucault associates "techniques" with the
individuality of a self, and with a type of knowledge that is produced
through practical differentiation and divination, rather than through
formal principles. "Truth", for Foucault, is not a rich,
universalizable principle, to be discerned using the resources of
grammatical analysis (a determining of correctness or error), instead,
it is something that can only be grasped through a practical
transformation, for example, through the deployment of techniques of
the self.[48] In contrast to the repeatability of a general
hermeneutics, the consistency of a style, gesture, or habit, brought
about through repetition, produces an effect which differentiates
(transforms) the self, and therefore prepares it for greater access to
a regional truth. In this sense, techniques are not directed towards
the production of knowledge (/episteme/), or at the production of an
interpretation (as in the case of a /Kunstlehre/), they instead
represent an alternative, practical understanding of truth; a
"know-how" that is localized, contextualized and bound to the
individuality of the practicing self within a certain epoch. Foucault
inverts the project of a general hermeneutics; knowledge is
inextricably linked to the techniques that gave rise to its
`discovery', therefore the task of producing knowledge or
understanding involves the development and creation of more techniques
of the self.
Ricoeur follows a similar path to Foucault, in that he rejects the
Schleiermacher's project of a "general hermeneutics", at least at the
level of philosophical method or reflection.[49] In place of
Foucault's self that transforms itself through habit and technique,
Ricoeur's "regional" model is of the self before the text. For
Ricoeur, the task of interpreting oneself (or the other) must move
from the psychological attempt to know the `who' of the text (the
author), towards a practical appreciation of the /what/ of the text.
The enterprise of Dilthey and Schleiermacher "remains fundamentally
psychological...because it stipulates as the ultimate aim of
interpretation, not /what/ a text says, but /who/ says it."[50]
Instead, "the text must be unfolded, no longer toward its author, but
toward its immanent sense and toward the world it opens up and
discloses."[51] Hermeneutic /appropriation/ supplements any
reconstruction of the past or the author. There can be no
understanding of the /who/ in absence of the mediating distance of the
text that stamps any interpretation with the mark of practical
appropriation. Ricoeur differentiates his approach from that of
Gadamer - whereas Gadamer emphasizes the centrality of
/Sprachlichkeit,/ or subject matter, that is at play in a process of
understanding, Ricoeur instead adopts the idea of a /Schriftlichkeit,/
or matter of the text. That is, Ricoeur places "what is said", the
goal of interpretation, at a distance from the subject. The text, more
so than the "Word" or speech, stands for the "fundamental
characteristic of the very historicity of human experience, namely,
that it is communication in and through distance."[52] Placing the aim
of interpretation, the retrieval of what is said, at a distance means
that any work of interpretation entails some kind of movement or
transformation. What is to be understood is never directly within my
grasp, since it always caught within a process of mediation.
The point here is that, although the language of technique and
technology is dropped from Ricoeur's appropriation of Schleiermacher,
his model for hermeneutics embraces the challenges of distanced
communication and mediation as productive factors in our understanding
of the world. The key ideas that are retained from Schleiermacher are
the notions of the centrality of practical application for
hermeneutics, and the idea that understanding is a /task/ that
involves some degree of cultivation or effort.
Technological artefacts, according to the hermeneutic critique,
mediate our action and interactions in a less ambiguous, less organic
way than language, therefore eradicating the need for interpretation
in an application. However, I will argue instead that, like language,
technology possesses its own organic character, revealed through the
problems of practical application. Just as Ricoeur conceives
linguistic mediation as necessary in the task of hermeneutics,
technological mediation is necessary in the construction of practical
meaning, even if this means that it disfigures or problematizes
practical understanding. The hermeneutic link between /technique,/ in
the sense of an art, or style, but also in the sense of a method of
interpretation that responds to the organic character of language (a
/Kunstlehre/), and /application/ is key for attempting to
understanding the technique-character of modern technologies, i.e.,
the way that at the practical level their interpretive character is
revealed.
On the other hand, aside from the recognition of the crucial role of
technique in the art of discerning meaning, Schleiermacher also helps
emphasizes that an understanding of an individual technique depends on
a comprehension of the internal dynamics of the language-systems that
mediate these applications. These grammatical or `mechanistic'
features of language cannot be neglected in a hermeneutic account of
language. So, there is a productive tension, between the fully-formed
`mechanisms' of language and the singularity of individual
applications of these mechanisms. Understanding the latter involves
training and practical experience while understanding the former also
involves a detour through grammatical, technical analysis.
The art of hermeneutics, then, involves a degree of cultivation and
self-transformation, with the aid of techniques, set against the
background of a grasping of the internal structures of language
systems themselves. Hermeneutic application is never simply the
intuitive or divinatory work of a singular individual, it also
incorporates explanatory moments. In this way, grasping the
significance of an artwork or text, does not exclude considerations of
its mechanisms and technologies. There is a productive opposition
established, which will be discussed further in the next chapter,
between interpretations of the internal /meaning/ of a work (produced
through its grammars and structures) and the skilful, experienced
grasping of the /significance/ of this meaning within singular
contexts and horizons. Hermeneutics, understood in this sense, is the
art of drawing out the significance already present within the
machine.
For example, in conversation with Gadamer, Ricoeur discusses the role
of distanciated analyses of the deep structures and mechanisms of
texts. He wishes to highlight the productivity of these detours in the
process of transforming our understanding of the works themselves. As
an example, he discusses a Beethoven symphony: "It's not lost time to
see how the first phase and the second theme work out in the
composition, and finally in the coda -- that does not spoil our
pleasure. On the contrary, the understanding of the underlying
structure comes also to underlie our pleasure."[53] Detours into the
technical or structural features of a work lead to /better/
understandings, since the detour itself generates new perspectives and
interpretations. If I want to understand the truth of a particular
work better, it is not enough to approach it with a `general'
understanding. Instead, I must engage with it on its own terms, terms
which may at first be unfamiliar to me and will therefore require
training and education. A naïve understanding would not necessarily be
that of a listener unfamiliar with the compositional techniques of the
Classical and Romantic periods of music, but rather that of a listener
who disavows the work-character of the piece and appreciates only the
individual /behind/ the work (Beethoven). In this way, Ricoeur's
emphasis on the importance of detour through the structures and
mechanisms that make up a work, shifts the hermeneutic emphasis from
the /genius/ of the author to the /ingenuity/ of the work.
Are these technical or mechanistic features of works and languages
only meaningful because they reflect the concerns of authors and
readers, albeit indirectly? What stops us from moving from an
appreciation of the ingenuity of a symphonic technique employed within
a work towards an appreciation of a technological design that, beyond
its utility, exhibits a degree of inventiveness and creativity that
could only be the product of a living, questioning human agent?
Reconceiving devices and technologies as the products of practical
experience allows us to see how understanding them or appropriating
them can potentially move beyond the level of utility and
functionality. Their /work/-like character needs to be brought to the
fore.
In this way, the difference between a technique and modern
technological devices can be seen to be bridgeable. Ricoeur's
hermeneutics, following Schleiermacher, embraces interpretation as a
double-sided process. Technological applications can be conceived
along similar lines. There is, on the one hand, the internal logics
and dynamics of individual machines, which work together to produce a
certain function or application. However, since no technological
device or design is total (just as there is no `pure' language there
is no `pure' technology), the applications of technologies presuppose
a level of interpretive skill or competence on the part of the user.
Just as the applications of language systems involve degrees of
experience and training, technological products educate their users in
their applications using various techniques -- supplementary
instruction-manuals, online forums, customer service, interface
overlays, and even at times the know-how needed to use the technology
is built into the design itself. However, these prescribed forms of
application that accompany the design of the technology often
encourage `literal' interpretations of the machine. It also possible
to widen the scope of technological application by inquiring into the
design and configuration of devices themselves, to go against their
`intentional' use, in order to respond more appropriately to the
singularity of an invention. Designers, engineers, computer scientists
and so on, aim to gradually improve machines in this way, while
hackers, hobbyists, artists and everyday users often investigate the
internal design in order to produce unanticipated applications. These
alternative, singular forms of application and interpretation attest
to the /symbolic/ features of individual devices, i.e., their latent
ambiguity that is often concealed by everyday, literal
interpretations.
Even accepting the difference between a traditional understanding of
technique as a skill or art, integrated meaningfully within a
practice, and an understanding of modern technology as more
/displaced/ from practices, through its adherence to its own logics or
essences, it is possible to read this difference as productive. For
example, a positive feature of learning a craft or technique is that
it challenges me productively, I am forced to transform my habits and
cultivate dormant capacities and understandings. However,
technological devices and machines, whilst displacing this
working-through character of technique, challenge me in a different
way. They are challenging because, through their displacement and
alienation, their applications are more /uncertain/ and open.
With Ricoeur's understanding of the distanciation-appropriation
dialectic as a guideline, I suggest that we can move beyond the
hermeneutic suspicion of the colonizing force of technological forms
on the lifeworld. Viewing technological constructions as the outcome
of practical engagements sets up an alternative, dynamic relation
between practical understanding and technology. At the regional level,
individual technological designs and solutions are seen to be both
displacements and reflections of particular human practices. However,
these constructions, which are made according to their own logics and
concerns, never totally resolve the problems of a practice, even if
they present themselves in the guise of totality. This displacement
both marks the incompleteness of individual technologies and the
possibility for new, unanticipated applications. At the broader level,
we have a hermeneutic circle that moves between historical
understandings, technical practices, and historical circumstances.
Novel, unforeseen circumstances and situations, which are the outcome
of a historical movement that cannot be encompassed by a technology
(or any distanciated perspective), overturn established technical
solutions, or unfold previously unnoticed features of technologies in
new ways. By characterizing technology as a form of /distanciation,/
as opposed to a radically distanced, alien form of rationality, we are
able to grasp the fundamental question-answer structure that governs
both human understanding and technological evolution.
The notion of distanciation also acts as a corrective to the features
of technology that the hermeneutic distinction between the practical
and the technical helps to highlight. These features are related to
the tendency to present localised or `regional' technological designs
as /universal/ solutions. If we read technologies as the inventive
outcomes of historical and social reflections and interactions, then
their dependency on this prefigurative space of experience cannot be
neglected. The notion of `generalizable applications' remains
problematic for hermeneutics, whether it be in relation to
interpretations of a text, another person, a function, and so on.
To understand the non-hierarchical, relational nature of the
distanciation-belonging dialectic further, Ricoeur's work on
linguistic structures (Section 2) and technique (Section 3) will be
examined. These areas of Ricoeur's work help highlight the
inseparability of regional and general features of understanding. They
allow us to develop a way of thinking about distanciation that
reconceives self-/alienation/ as a positive and necessary feature of
self-understanding. Distanciation becomes an integral feature of
hermeneutic consciousness, meaning that the task is not to radically
oppose it to belonging, but to multiply it as a way of uncovering
hidden possibilities in hermeneutic and technological agency. I focus
on three key areas of Ricoeur's work where distanciation is integral
to practical understanding; his approach to the symbol, which
articulates the fragile, perpetual dialectic at work between signs and
symbols, functionality and ambiguity, that underpins human
understanding; his readings of Freud, which insightfully articulate
both the foundational ambitions of psychoanalysis to provide a
`technique' by which the human mind could become conscious of itself,
whilst at the same time showing how this insight is only achievable
through the confrontation of this ambitious technique with the, far
more murky, experience of practical understanding; and the field of
narrative, the human technique /par excellence/ for making sense of
time. The ideas articulated by Ricoeur in relation to these phenomena,
serve as the basis for then considering the uncertain relationship
between technologies and their practical applications.
2 Application and Distanciation
===============================
Section two focuses on Ricoeur's distinctive contribution to a
hermeneutic account of application. For Ricoeur, hermeneutic
application involves mediating between a concrete apprehension of
meaning, and a reflective awareness of the structures and paradigms
that condition this meaning. In relation to language, the two examples
that Ricoeur studies to examine how a reflective awareness emerges are
Husserl's phenomenological reduction of signs, and a structuralist
account of language systems. Ricoeur is critical of both approaches,
but his criticisms are aimed towards recovering the productive
features of their analyses at the practical level. Signs and
structures /aim/ toward order and univocity, but can never fully
achieve this aim. This is due to the fact that while /distanciated/
from the world (in their aim toward univocity), they also /belong/ to
the world through their /communicative/ function. The communicative
features of language systems mean that their objectivity needs to be
rethought as in terms of intersubjectivity. A hermeneutic account of
/belonging,/ expressed here in terms of the /symbolic/ dimension of
language and the /events/ of language-use, acts as a corrective to a
purely phenomenological or structuralist account of language.
Nevertheless, Ricoeur also stresses that, once a hermeneutic
understanding of belonging is incorporated into a phenomenological or
structuralist perspective, the distanciation of these perspectives can
also become a productive way of transcending a naïve understanding of
the world.
2.1 Signs, Structures and their Applications
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This chapter seeks to articulate what I believe is distinctive about
Ricoeur's approach to the concepts of practice and belonging, and
which will later become relevant for thinking about the ways that
technological forms of distanciation can be seen to be integral to
practical understanding. As already mentioned, in contrast to both
Gadamer and Heidegger, Ricoeur seeks to incorporate an explanatory
approach into the general project of human understanding. I will argue
here that the way that he achieves this is through /relativizing/ the
idea of explanation, so that the distance we associate with
methodological approaches becomes a /reflective distance./ I focus on
two ways that he does this. The first way (1) is through a critique of
the phenomenological account of the `ideal' sign. For Ricoeur,
Husserl's aim of providing a ground for science and philosophy fails
due to the communicative dimension of the sign. This allows Ricoeur to
retain the notion of a sign, but free it from its idealist
connotations. Instead, it is placed in dialectical relation with the
/symbol./ Signs retain their function, which is to clarify, but this
function is relativized through its relation to ambiguity, which
persists across all intersubjective, historical communication.
Secondly, (2) Ricoeur's readings of structuralism perform a similar
critique. The idealistic attempt of structuralism to provide an
atemporal model of language is rejected based on the concrete
experience of intersubjective communication, which is constituted not
only through structural features, but also as a living, creative
/event./ Both these critiques draw on the hermeneutic notion of the
power, or centrality, of application. I have chosen these particular
areas of Ricoeur's work since the /univocal/ nature of the sign, and
the determining role of structuration, is mirrored in the way
hermeneutics conceives of technologies. Therefore, Ricoeur's
highlighting of the crucial role that these linguistic tendencies or
operations play in relation to the practical task of understanding
will be repeated in the relationship between technologies and
practices.
Across both sections, there are two key features of hermeneutic
application that are relevant for a consideration of the relationship
between technologies and practice - the autonomous nature of language
and the incomplete nature of language. That is, Ricoeur aims to
account for the /dual/ nature of language as being both closed (fixed,
structured) and living/dynamic (open to interpretation). Hermeneutic
approaches must embrace both features - the contingent, variable
features of language-events, grounded in the understanding of a
singular self or community, and the structural, explainable aspects of
linguistic systems and traditions.
Ricoeur's use of the hermeneutic concept of application aims to
combine these two approaches. Since language possess its own set of
logics or protocols, lending it an objective character, meaning is a
property of language itself rather than something we can attribute to
a speaker or outside ground. However, as a dynamic or open medium of
intersubjective communication, language remains an incomplete object.
Every attempt to map or codify a system of linguistic relations fails
unless it takes into account the temporal aspect of linguistic
utterance. In response to this inability to grasp language in its
totality, the idea of hermeneutic application lends a sense of
temporary completeness to our understanding of language. If a speaker
can nevertheless utter meaningful statements in view of the
impossibility of understanding/explaining language as a whole, then
the speaker must be /bringing/ something to language in order to
render it significant within a particular context.
Ricoeur's understanding of the `sign' prefigures his later work on
writing and discourse. He begins from a phenomenological standpoint,
and problematizes it using insights drawn from a hermeneutic
conception of meaning. Like writing, signs are firstly the result of
an attempt to fix or record the `said' (/Aus-sage/) of the `saying'
(/Sage/). The structure of this relation is phenomenological -- the
act of saying possesses an intentionality so that "inscription, in
spite of its perils, is discourse's destination."[54] However, due to
the autonomous nature of the sign and structures, explored further
below, the distance produced by writing/the sign, in turn negates the
intentionality of the act of saying, and opens up a world of its own.
In this way, the encounter with a text or system of language is
firstly an encounter with the `said' -- what the text projects or its
`world' - which results from the system or order of writing itself,
rather than the intentionality of the author. Importantly, the
distancing effect of signs and writing is hermeneutical rather than
phenomenological, that is, it is a result of the /mediating/ or
/communicative/ aspect of language, rather than being /ideal./ In this
way, `distance', for example the kind of distance that might be
associated with phenomenological reduction or with a scientific
attitude, is seen as a perspective that /complements/ (but in doing so
also problematizes) a concrete understanding, rather than serving as a
superior viewpoint.
2.1.1 Distance and Communication
--------------------------------
Ricoeur's early turn to hermeneutics is marked by its investigation of
the /symbol/. Symbols, in Ricoeur's specific use of the term, are
formally defined by their semantic ambiguity. That is, they possess a
double, or composite, meaning -- a primary, literal meaning, and a
secondary, figurative meaning. The hermeneutic approach to language,
which accounts for this symbolic dimension, arises at the limits of
the phenomenological method, which Ricoeur claims is concerned
primarily with /signs --/ univocal expressions of meaning. Husserl's
phenomenological method, which through its reduction tends towards
abstraction, cannot account for the phenomena of symbols, which remain
/concrete/ for Ricoeur, i.e., bound to a specific tradition, culture,
practice, place, individual, etc., by way of their figurative meaning.
Any abstracted account of the symbol denies its living, revelatory
nature.
Outside of the formal definition of the symbol as semantically
ambiguous, it may be useful to provide a more concrete example of the
symbolic. For example, a drop of wine spilt on a white tablecloth can
be read in two ways. Taken literally, it is simply a sign of what has
occurred, a material process governed by the laws of physics,
chemistry, and so on, or perhaps it serves to differentiate the
colours `red' and 'white' that now appear on the surface of the table.
However, as an /image/ (symbol) it also carries further connotations.
It can also signify, for example, a /stain,/ along with the
historical, religious, psychoanalytic, etc., connotations that the
image of a stain may bring forth. There is a difference between the
literal meaning and the symbolic for Ricoeur, although both are
inseparable. Whereas the literal meaning can be /explained/ (up to a
point), to understand or apprehend the symbolic meaning one has to
have already been conditioned to see it (historically, culturally,
experientially). Importantly, this does not mean that the symbolic
meaning is secondary or a mere cultural derivative of the literal
meaning, instead, Ricoeur sees it as at once being both highly
contingent and fundamental, "There is no symbolism before man speaks,
even if the power of the symbol is grounded much deeper."[55]
Language, for Ricoeur, is made up of a mixture of signs and symbols,
i.e., of systematic or structural relations (signs) and their residues
(symbols). In order to understand language a hermeneutic phenomenology
is required -- a mixed approach which recognizes both the structural
(unbound, autonomous) and concrete (bound) aspects of language.
Since it is Ricoeur's approach to the role of explanatory methods
(phenomenological reduction, structuralism) that distinguishes him
from his hermeneutic contemporaries, these aspects of his thought will
be explored in the following subsections. Ricoeur agrees with
Heidegger that philosophical `explanations' (for example, metaphysical
theories) can remove us from the direct encounter with being that is
found along the "short-route of understanding".[56] Nevertheless, he
deems these 'detours' necessary. There are multiple reasons for this
approach, which continue to inform Ricoeur's philosophy throughout his
career, and are therefore difficult to enumerate. Within the context
of this thesis, I will focus on the reasons for Ricoeur's "long route
of understanding" that relate to the question of practice and
practical understanding.
Heidegger's above-mentioned problem with philosophical
explanation/clarification (as Ricoeur sees it), regarding the
"distance" it introduces, is both lamented and /embraced/ by Ricoeur.
It is lamented because the direct confrontation with the truth of
being (/aletheia/) encountered along the `short-route of
understanding', which provides an existential grounding (or
un-grounding) for thought, remains perpetually out of our grasp.
However, the attempt to explain the structures mediating our
experience itself /animates/ the quest for understanding. Ricoeur
conceives the distance introduced by the detour through the mediating
structures of experience and action as a /reflective/ distance. New
questions and insights that were previously concealed now emerge and
feed-back into our understanding. Practical understanding involves
both the way that an individual apprehends or participates in the
world, and the knowledge that the individual possesses of the
structures that mediate the interaction. Ricoeur views both these
types of awareness as distinct and irreconcilable. As in a football
match, the perspective of the spectator differs from that of the
player. The spectator can speculate about the game from a distance,
perceiving broader strategic patterns, and so on. The player, through
their direct participation in the game, possesses their own unique
perspective, which allows them to engage with the practice of football
in a more direct, unmediated way. We typically expect the types of
skills and practical wisdom possessed by the players to differ
radically from the distanced speculations of the fans -- it would be
difficult to imagine a knowledgeable fan stepping down off the stands
to join a professional match and doing well. However, Ricoeur's
approach, which acknowledges the difference between participation and
distanciation, yet stresses the interrelationship /across/ the
difference, would view both spectators and players as /belonging/ to
the wider practice of the game of football. The players belong in a
more immediate and participatory sense, but the spectators belong
through their distanciation. Just as writing is the "destination of
discourse", commentary is the destination of the game -- through
commentary the game is realized not only as an event but as an
/enduring/ event, it is repeatable in a different, but related, form.
The fundamental difference between distanciation and participation
means that practical self-understanding is conceived of as an
interminable /project/ for Ricoeur. The "I" of the self is both a
subject and an object. It is composed of two incommensurable forms of
understanding -- embodied, practical wisdom and reflective, distanced
knowledge-of. Both forms remain distinct but are reciprocal (we
explain more to understand better). Due to this dualistic
understanding of selfhood that sees the self as both something we
/are/ and something we /have,/ the category of self-understanding or
self-identity for Ricoeur is mixed -- the self in not as a substance
or entity but is a /work/ or /task,/ and therefore as inherently
practical.
Again, this approach, which embraces both embodied, practical
knowledge (belonging) and reflective, theoretical knowledge
(distanciation) as constitutive of the practical self, means that
Ricoeur's notion of practice is distinctive. Using Ricoeur's work as a
foundation, I suggest that practices should not be understood in the
sense of embodied, repeatable procedures, for example, a
well-practiced figure skater whose movements are only achievable
through embodied, habitual knowledge. Instead, practical understanding
includes both this sense of practice, and the reflective, theoretical
dimension outlined in Ricoeur's account of explanation or
distanciation. Therefore, although repetition is crucial in the
formation of practical understanding, Ricoeur's account includes the
added dimension of the pattern of repetition (or spiral of
understanding[57]) that takes place through the back-and-forth
movement of explanation and understanding (participation and
distanciation). This form of repetition is one which strengthens
understanding by differentiating it; the distance gained through
reflection is both an alienating distance and a /productive/ distance.
This is one of the ways that Ricoeur advocates the "long route of
understanding". It is important to mention these points here as they
will become important later when considering the way that technologies
produce distanciating effects in relation to on-going practices or
traditions. It is also important since the following subsections
consider Ricoeur's account of the "sign". As I mentioned at the
outset, Ricoeur claims that hermeneutics is defined in relation to the
symbol (ambiguity). For Ricoeur, this approach alone is limited, since
symbols do not appear in a `direct' unmediated manner. They always
appear within an economy or system of relations. Therefore, he
advocates a hermeneutic phenomenology. This distinguishes him as a
hermeneutic thinker, since he is not only concerned with the problems
of `saying' (poietic showing) or of `Truth', which would be the realm
of the symbol, but also with the question of the how these moments of
saying are /constructed/ through the structures and paradigms that
/mediate/ this saying process. As I have outlined above, the reasons
for this relate to his conception of practical self-understanding.
Below I will examine further the reasons for this approach by
considering further the distinction between signs and symbols, and
structures and their applications, and why it is important to take
both these separate but related aspects of language into account when
considering the question of interpretation (taken in the broad sense
to include application).
2.1.1.1 The Hermeneutic Problem of Signs
One of the key ways Ricoeur defines the sign is by its /function/,
which is to /clarify/. Clarification involves abstraction, mapping,
codifying, building up a system, etc. Considered by way of its
function, the sign is an `object', a signifier. It is fixed and
reliable, it enables communication and fosters agreement. A fluid and
effective exchange of univocal signs is necessary for the daily work
of social beings. They help establish a commonality of sense and, in a
technocratic manner, are necessary to produce social, as well as
linguistic, order. Considered in isolation, signs are univocal, which
means that they do not need to be interpreted, their meaning is
immediately apparent. They work because they are `invisible' as signs,
and this invisibility is crucial for their effect. If one were to
spend too long deciphering or trying to understand the full scope of
the reason for the traffic light to be green, or for the speed bump at
/this/ location, our everyday worlds would become dysfunctional. In a
sense, signs /respond/ to this dysfunctional aspect of the human, the
interpreting animal. For example, the well-known Nudge theory argues
that our actions and choices should be guided through external,
invisible sign-systems ('choice architecture') because, left to our
own devices, we tend towards biased and irresponsible choices (at the
collective level).[58]
The other key aspect of the sign, though, is its relation to the
symbol, i.e., to its /origin/ and /end/, or its /concrete/
functionality in the world. The symbolic meaning is the latent or
figurative meaning of a sign, a meaning that requires interpretation
and deciphering. Whereas signs, as described above, work through
striving to eliminate the need for interpretation, the symbol is
fundamentally ambiguous and provokes interpretation. However, although
signs may not /immediately/ give rise to interpretation they do invite
suspicion. It may not be possible to question a sign on its own terms,
by way of its rational/univocal place within a structure, but it is
always possible to question it with regard to either where it arises
from (e.g., a particular/historical cultural milieu) or where it leads
us (what the sign means for me, or us, as we appropriate it). These
two temporal `directions', which are often separate from a sign's
intended meaning, correspond to the two inseparable hermeneutic
attitudes for Ricoeur: suspicion and trust. The authors of /Nudge/
implicitly appeal to a hermeneutics of hope/faith in their argument;
we accept, often blindly, handing over control of our decisions to a
/fairer/ procedure, because we trust in the value of fairness and, in
this case, in the ability to arrive at a just outcome using rationally
constructed procedures.
Nevertheless, what first appears in its ready-to-handedness as fixed,
univocal and determined in advance, is surrounded on both sides by
uncertainty and interpretation. For example, the interface (Chapter 6)
appeals to this logic of the sign in its design. I will argue, though,
that by articulating the dialectical relation between the apparent
certainty of these devices and sign-systems, and the symbolic,
uncertain lifeworld from which they emerge and in which they operate,
we can begin to see the inherent instability of all functionality.
This instability returns us to ourselves, as it is only we who can
ground an interpretation in an attitude of either hope of suspicion.
One of Ricoeur's reference points for articulating his understanding
of the sign is Husserlian phenomenology. Ricoeur is both critical and
appropriative of Husserl. Rather than rejecting phenomenological
notions of method and certainty completely, Ricoeur instead
demonstrates the way that all methods and techniques encounter the
need for a `hermeneutic supplement'. No system of signs or ideas is
total, meaning that a structuralist account will encounter opacity and
ambiguity at its limits. Therefore, interpretation, which is a
/practical/ activity perpetuated by participating subjects stands in
relation to technique. However, Ricoeur's use of the term grafting
should not mislead us as to the order of events. Interpretation does
not come afterward; similar to Derrida's understanding of the
writing-supplement for speech, hermeneutics is also an /originary/
grafting. Hermeneutics and phenomenology presuppose one another.[59]
As with many areas of his work, Ricoeur takes up this, at first sight,
`vicious' circularity and aims to show how it is virtuous. The
confrontation between hermeneutics and phenomenology leads to a
deepening of both; practical understandings are enriched by
reflective, distanced descriptions, and theories, methods, and
techniques are unfolded through practical applications; they are
deepened by becoming more /effective/.
Ricoeur founds his hermeneutic project not on the sign, and the
difference of the sign, but rather on the `symbol', and its excessive
ambiguity. To an extent, he accepts the structuralist claim that signs
can operate in a univocal way within a fixed system of identification,
and then proceeds from this assumption to show that symbols
fundamentally complicate this picture by introducing the problem of
'surplus' meaning which disrupts structures. The effect of the symbol
on language and structures is dialectical; the symbolic allows for
innovation to emerge from within tradition, rather than marking the
point at which the structure disintegrates completely. A hermeneutic
method still allows for some semblance of continuity even in the
radical disfiguration and re-figuration of traditions and structures.
For Ricoeur, Husserlian phenomenology marks an important turning point
for a philosophical investigation into signification and meaning.
Outside of a solely logical or semantic investigation into the sign,
and the process of signification, Husserl's attempt to understand
signs within his broader phenomenological project proved to be crucial
in understanding the relation between linguistics and lived
experience, between intentionality and the materiality or `givenness'
of the lifeworld. What is most relevant to Ricoeur is the failure of
the phenomenological project to provide a ground or foundation for all
thought.
In Jacques Derrida's reading of Husserl, the phenomenological attempts
to escape metaphysical speculation and, in particular, Platonism (in
/The Origin of Geometry/), are shown to result in a paradox. Due to
Husserl's starting point, the method of phenomenological reduction, he
arrives at a theory that still privileges /presence/ over absence or
alterity. Ricoeur, too, demonstrates that we need to abandon the
phenomenological attempt to ground all meaning in relation to the
identity of the constituting ego. However, instead of replacing
'identity' and `sameness' with pure difference, Ricoeur tries to
complicate the notion of identity itself by `grafting' the idea of
interpretation onto the phenomenological method.[60] From a Derridean
point of view, Ricoeur remains within the confines of a discourse on
identity and on the ideality of meaning. For example, as with Husserl,
Ricoeur does occasionally define `writing' as the condition for the
'repetition of the same':
Like Husserl, Ricoeur subsumes transference under /that
which/ is transmitted. Discourse can be identified and
reidentified as the same: the repeatability at stake in
Ricoeur's account of the text concerns the repeatability
of the same meaning. With these similarities in mind,
Derrida's questions with respect to Husserl become
questions with respect to Gadamer and Ricoeur as well: Are
they capable of doing justice to the primordial
contamination of writing and meaning if they consider
interpretation as a process that aims at manifestation of
the same meaning or subject matter?[61]
However, even though Ricoeur emphasizes that there is a continuity or
relation between distance and belonging, for example between writing
and discourse, he also works to demonstrate that it is a relation that
maintains a difference or distance in its operation. In this way,
there is indeed a repetition of the `same meaning', but we could term
it, instead, a /non-identical/ repetition.[62] Writing repeats
meanings which emerge through discourse, but it does so in another
register. Therefore, as Ricoeur emphasizes, writing is not only a
vehicle for repetition, but also projects its own world. The aim of
interpretation is never to repeat the meaning exactly, but to
articulate it in a way that is most /appropriate/ to the distance that
governs all interpretation.
One of Husserl's main contributions to the tradition of philosophical
semiotics comes at the beginning of /Logical Investigations/ when he
distinguishes between two distinct types of signifying functions:
"expression" (/Ausdruck/) and "indication" (/Anzeichen/).
"Expressions" are related to intentional meaning, whereas
"indications" are forms of signification in which the intentional
meaning is absent. This definition links expression of meaning to
speech acts and, "Such a definition excludes facial expression and the
various gestures which involuntarily accompany speech without
communicative intent, or those in which a man's mental states achieve
understandable `expression' for his environment, without the added
help of speech."[63] Even if one were to interpret unintended signs,
such as our involuntary ticks, body language, stutters, and so on, the
interpretation would not be of the same order as the interpretation of
someone's speech, which is more expressive of the persons inner state
at the level of `meaning', "[our involuntary manifestations] `mean'
something to [the observer] in so far as he interprets them, but even
for him they are without meaning in the special sense in which verbal
signs have meaning: they only mean in the sense of indicating."[64]
Expressive signs are linked to the ideality of meaning, the meaning
that can be separated from its material conditions of presentation.
For Husserl, both types of signification, indication and expression,
are in a state of "entanglement" (/Verflechtung/),
As such, the distinction sometimes leads Husserl to
describe their relation as an "entanglement" -- an
"interweaving", or "contamination" -- and even that such
an entanglement is a "/de facto/ necessity". In fact, the
distinction between the two is only effected /de jure,/
and /in/ /language --/ which is itself always already
"infected" by the "contamination" of the two.[65]
It is the communicative function of language that binds expressivity
to indication, since an expression initially appears to the other, and
vice versa, through indication. However, in order to investigate
expressivity free from the contamination of indication, Husserl posits
a bracketing of the communicative function. He claims that expressions
can be separated from the process of indication in the case of
isolated mental life, "/Expressions/ function meaningfully even in
/isolated mental life, where they no longer serve to indicate
anything/."[66] As Derrida points out, there is a certain linguistic
contradiction here in that, "By a strange paradox, meaning would
isolate the concentrated purity of its /ex-pressiveness/ just at that
moment when the relation to a certain /outside/ is suspended."[67] In
other words, a methodological account (presentation) of /meaning/
(/vouloir-dire/) can be misleading -- it claims to have located the
essence of meaning (what it /expresses/) by abstracting it from the
contingent, variable network of /indications,/ and yet in doing so it
deprives meaning of its /meaningfulness,/ i.e., its function of not
only "expressing", but of indicating, communicating and affecting. In
hermeneutic terms, acknowledging the communicative or expressive
dimension of language leads to the idea of appropriation.
For James K. A. Smith, the main thrust of Derrida's reading of Husserl
is to /ethically/ raise the question of the /other/ against
phenomenology.[68] Derrida's readings of Husserl focus to a large
extent on a critique of Husserl's valuation of speech over writing,
"When Husserl considers expression, his focus is on /speech/ because
it is in speech that we find /intention/: a speaker, by means of a
sign, means to communicate something to a listener."[69] With Husserl,
we find a repetition of the oft repeated Platonic suspicion of writing
as secondary to speech. For Derrida, Husserl is not really concerned
with an analysis of signs themselves, despite his initial attempts to
distinguish between expressive signs and signs as indications. This
distinction gets lost in Husserl's privileging of intentional meaning,
"For it is more and more clear that, despite the initial distinction
between an indicative sign and an expressive sign, only an indication
is truly a sign for Husserl."[70] What results is an avoidance of
'otherness', of the `contamination' associated with writing and
indication, in favour of a phenomenological analysis of what is most
present, or most my `own'. The voice, as the most `pure' or
uncontaminated vehicle for expression then becomes designated as my
'own' space, free from contamination,
So `expression', in a sense, does not employ signs. And
yet, expression remains linked to the /voice/ and speech.
The result is what Derrida calls `phonocentrism': the
determination of being as presence of ideality and the
valorization of /speech/ as the site of presence (in
contrast to writing) and therefore immediacy.[71]
Instead, for Derrida the seduction of language, or the contamination
of intention by signs, is not an /external/ problem for intention, but
rather is constitutive of meaning itself. By refocusing on the problem
of signs themselves Derrida shows how every reading and every
interpretation is itself contaminated and open to the ruptures and
singularities associated with the dissemination of intention through
material signs,
Every reinterpretation or reactivation of a text has to
deal with unaccountabilities and undecidables. These
elements are indeed added by language as writing, but they
cannot be opposed to a language devoid of these elements:
a language purified by a philosophical /logos/ or a
hermeneutic decipherment might be the dream of
(hermeneutic) philosophy but is never a present
actuality.[72]
In Ricoeur's account of the sign, he indeed differs from Derrida in
that he accords its functionality a crucial place in the project of
understanding meaning. Yet, his dialectical approach to signs and
symbols still attempts to overcome the problems of a presence that
would be free of the contamination of writing that Derrida identifies
in Husserl. The contamination of ideal meaning by its material
expressions, which Derrida stresses guarantees the failure of a
"hermeneutic decipherment", is re-read by Ricoeur as leading to the
hermeneutic problem of application. As with Schleiermacher's account
of the 'organic' function of language discussed in Chapter 1, the
hermeneutic appropriation responds to the impossibility of extracting
(deciphering) a `pure' meaning from language (its /vouloir-dire/),
turning instead to the search for interpretive resolution at the
practical level.
In contrast to Derrida, Ricoeur's work is marked by an attempt to
remain faithful to key insights arising from phenomenology. Ricoeur is
critical of "Husserlian idealism,"[73] but wishes to demonstrate that
both hermeneutics and phenomenology are conditions (presuppositions)
for one another. What will be most relevant for this thesis is Ricoeur
and Derrida's mutual rejection of the telos of the Husserlian approach
to language, which involves a privileging of the `logical' or the
'univocal' in signification. Both thinkers respond similarly to this
feature. For example, Derrida writes:
being interested in language only within the compass of
rationality, determining the logos from logic, Husserl
had, in a most traditional manner, determined the essence
of language by taking the logical as its telos or norm.
That this telos is that of being as presence is what we
here wish to suggest.[74]
And Ricoeur:
Of course, Husserl would not have accepted the idea of
meaning as irreducibly non-univocal. He explicitly
excludes this possibility in the First Investigation, and
this is indeed why the phenomenology of the /Logical
Investigations/ cannot be hermeneutic.[75]
The suspicion aimed towards a reduction of language to univocity
mirrors the hermeneutic suspicion of technological rationality.
Indeed, it may be asked whether by reducing technology to its univocal
essence, hermeneutic thought denies the /communicative/ feature of
technological mediation, in the same way that Husserl bracketed the
effects of the sign.
Understanding how Ricoeur responded to the problems of Husserl's
idealism is key to understanding how to respond to Ricoeur's own
reductive comments on technology. Ricoeur's way out of the Husserlian
problem of /Verflectung,/ of the contamination of meaning by systems
of indication, is first of all, like Derrida, to accept that the
entanglement is inescapable. This is because, for Ricoeur, language is
always "bound" (to contexts, cultures, lifeworlds, etc.) and, also,
language always precedes or gives rise to thought. Ricoeur not only
denies that there could be a reduction of meaning to pure
"expression", but he also adds that the phenomena of language is more
complex than the problem of signs suggest, due to the semantic weight
of symbols. Symbols fundamentally complicate the Husserlian notion of
meaning since they are defined by their "double meaning". Even at the
intentional level (the level of /vouloir-dire/) they can mean two
opposing things at once. Signs are bound in the sense of the
"entanglement" outlined above, but symbols are bound in a double
sense:
Bound /to/ and bound /by./ On the one hand, the sacred is
/bound to/ its primary, literal, sensible meanings; this
is what constitutes the opacity of symbols. On the other
hand, the literal meaning is /bound by/ the symbolic
meaning that resides in it; this is what I have called the
revealing power of symbols, which gives them their force
in spite of their opacity. The revealing power of symbols
opposes symbols to technical signs, which merely signify
what is posited in them and which, therefore, can be
emptied, formalized, and reduced to mere objects of a
calculus. Symbols alone /give/ what they say.[76]
Therefore, although Ricoeur speculates that signs can be reduced to
their formal structure and become `technical', symbolic language is in
principle non-reducible to a technical language of concepts or
operative signs, since their logic prompts `reflection' and not just
identification. Languages not only have an ideal sense, but also a
/practical/ sense. It is through practical usage that languages are
both communicative and structural.
Although, the question of intentionality is still key for Ricoeur in
the consideration of semantic meaning, what symbols complicate is the
idea of a transcendental ego that constitutes meaning. Intentionality,
as revealed through the analysis of symbols, is not only a property of
subjects, but is also an internal aspect of configured language. Later
this will be crucial for Ricoeur's development of the notion of the
autonomy or world-like character of linguistic works, whose
intentional relations move beyond the intentionality of the "author".
Ricoeur is suggesting that the way in which meaning unfolds in
language is /independent/ of a central constituting ego. The symbol's
`power' or 'force' always exceeds, and ultimately de-centres, any
attempt to bracket the logical or univocal meaning. In contrast to
Derrida, it is not that the sign is conditioned by an absence which
would make any attempt to render it transparent or fully `present'
fail, it is that even the presented meaning of the symbol always
escapes full conceptualisation, and in a sense resides /elsewhere/,
outside of the phenomenological field constituted by the individual
ego.
2.1.2 Structuration and Participation
-------------------------------------
As we have seen, whereas Ricoeur and Derrida are both critical of
Husserl's aims, Derrida takes a more radical approach to the problem
of signs and their meaning. Both agree that meaning can never be fully
disentangled from the materiality of its expression, since the
'interiority' of meaning proposed by Husserl denies its inherent
/communicative/ function. Meaning must exist in and through the world
if it is to be meaningful in the world, i.e., have an effect. However,
for Derrida, the logic of indication (/Anzeichen/) underpins, and
surpasses, what Ricoeur calls the referential function of language.
This difference hinges on the status of the `other' in hermeneutics
and deconstruction. For Derrida, the other (never) appears by way of
the material trace, whereas for Ricoeur the referential function of
language acts as an opening for the possibility of reconciliation and
understanding. Ricoeur takes the epistemological route; we can never
know for certain whether the world to which language refers is a
common, shared one, yet the idea of a referential function acts as a
productive regulative idea in the task of understanding. Both thinkers
accept the unsurpassable fact of /distance/ in any communication
process, but whereas for Derrida this distance guarantees that a
communication will never arrive at its intended destination, for
Ricoeur distance is conceived as /distanciation;/ the condition for a
belonging which is struggled for and worked-through. As Richard
Kearney notes, the difference here is between a "perhaps"
(hermeneutics) and "perhaps not" (deconstruction) in relation to
whether Godot will arrive.[77]
Whereas both Ricoeur and Derrida are in strong agreement when it comes
to the /difficult/ nature of language, arising due to the materiality
of its expression, they diverge when it comes to the role of the work
of interpretation. To over-simplify their approaches: whereas Derrida
stresses the /disfigurative/ work of language (indication) on itself,
Ricoeur stresses its /configurative/ aspects. It is by cohering into
the semblance of a `whole' that language realises/actualises its
capacity for productive understanding.
However, the configurative power of language, which remains threatened
but never fully eclipsed by disfiguration, is not attributed to the
author. It remains a property of language itself, understood as work.
In a sense, it remains the promise of the /technique/ that underpins
the construction (configuration) of language, since techniques involve
assemblies and configurations. Ricoeur's first step in developing this
thesis was, as we saw above, putting forward a critique of a purely
phenomenological account of the `sign', through resituating it within
a network of indications. In this way, `meaning' is no longer
synonymous with the intention of a speaker. Yet, neither is it
endlessly deferred. The "network of indications" is, Ricoeur posits,
still decipherable, using the resources of structuralism, "Separated
from speaking subjects, a language presents itself as a system of
signs."[78]
Within the context of this thesis, the role structuralism plays in
relation to language will be taken as analogous to the role that a
technique plays in relation to practice. The structuralist approach,
whose conclusions are in many ways redundant (this will be discussed
further below), nevertheless represents a certain way of posing
questions to language. It embraces methods of the natural sciences,
and develops "a kind of intellectualism which is fundamentally
antireflective, anti-idealist, and antiphenomenological."[79] However,
Ricoeur's re-reading of structures as processes of /structuration/
means that it is possible to account for both the /practical/ and the
/configurational/ aspects of meaning. That is, it will become possible
later to re-situate technologies and techniques, understood as modes
of structuration and configuration, alongside practical understandings
of the world. In the final part of this chapter I also discuss the
ways that this relation is a /productive/ one, through reference to
the work of Wolfgang Iser, and a study conducted on architectural
students to examine the relevance of Ricoeur's theory for
understanding the productivity computational moments in the
design-process.
2.1.2.1 Meaning and Significance
The antireflective mode of inquiry that structuralism adopts is
Ricoeur's primary reason for rejecting it as an adequate account of
how language works. Yet, what it succeeds in articulating is the
/autonomous/ nature of linguistic structures. We can no longer rely on
practical understandings alone, which arise due to our participation
in a linguistic community, but instead must also approach language in
the mode of distanciation, since language, through its structures and
techniques, remains distinct from speaking subjects.
Structuralism's weakness lies in the way it hierarchizes synchronic
models over diachronic events of usage, and therefore tends towards
abstraction and neglects the concrete nature of words. Ricoeur does
not wholly reject the idea of structure derived from synchronic
models, rather he insists on the conflictual and dialectical relation
between linguistic systems and the lived, concrete, and eventual
nature of linguistic utterance. For this reason, he adopts the term
/structuration/ in place of `structure', to better reflect the dynamic
nature of linguistic systems.
It is because linguistic systems are dynamic that they are /usable./
Whilst the opposition between synchrony and diachrony is illuminating
at a conceptual level, as a way of explaining the difference between a
system and its practical applications, in /practice/ these two aspects
of linguistic structures are intimately intertwined in the /word./ The
word, a communicative medium, contains both `eventual' and
`structural' characteristics. It possesses both a /significance/ and a
/meaning/. For Ricoeur, these terms represent two stages of
comprehension; we are capable of grasping both the meaning-content of
the word, its structural value, as well as a more innovative,
apprehension of the words significance in /this/ context, to /me/. In
relation to a text, drawing out its `significance' means, "the active
taking-over of the meaning by the reader -- i.e., the meaning taking
effect in existence."[80] If we want to account for all aspects of
meaning we also need to account for its concrete /effects./ In this
way, `application' or linguistic usage, is not something simply `added
on' to a structure, as if there was a complete system of language and
sign relations which we then apply in order to communicate and,
correspondingly, it also means that linguistic models, while useful
explanatory tools, can never fully abstract or separate themselves
from instances of usage. Much like the way that the metaphor of an
interface or computer `user' is misleading (Chapter 6), so too is the
idea of a language `user'. Instead, Ricoeur's statement here regarding
"meaning taking effect in existence", points us towards the
inseparability of structures and their applications. Meaning and
significance cannot exist independently of one another, a linguistic
'structure', or `structuration', only `exists', in a concrete sense,
when it is in use. There is no fixed meaning prior to use, only
potential points of significance. Similarly, significance cannot
appear as such in the absence of perceived/comprehended meaningful
relations. Wolfgang Iser highlights this point well when discussing
Ricoeur's distinction between meaning and significance in relation to
the act of reading:
Meaning is the referential totality which is implied by
the aspects contained in the text and which must be
assembled in the course of reading. Significance is the
reader's absorption of the meaning into his own existence.
Only the two together can guarantee the effectiveness of
an experience which entails the reader constituting
himself by constituting a reality hitherto unfamiliar to
himself.[81]
As we can see, meaning and significance remain distinct but
inseparable. The act of combining both, in this case achieved through
the experience of reading, is a /transformative/ activity; an
alteration is effected in the reader's consciousness through being
brought into contact with an unfamiliar reality (the world of the
text). Crucially, it is not that the mind of the author is unfamiliar
to the reader, but that the /reality/ presented in the text is
unfamiliar. That is, `meaning' is not something shared between two
psychological egos, the author and the reader, but is located within
the network of indications (world) of the text itself. Furthermore,
meaning appears, in its concreteness, through appropriation and is
linked to the idea of self-transformation. Since transformation refers
to a process of alteration, from something familiar to something new,
there is always something unfamiliar or uncanny about meaning, since
it is the meaning of the reality of the work that provokes
self-transformation. In order to understand appropriation as an active
bridging of the familiar and unfamiliar, it is important to grasp this
unfamiliar status of meaning which plays a role in constituting an
appropriation and distinguishes it from mere projection or reception.
It the phenomenological sense, meaning is both related to and distinct
from the intentionality of an ego, "The notion of meaning...adds to
intentionality a relation to something other -- a relation of
otherness. A relation of otherness obtains when something "applies to"
or "is applied to"."[82]
Through emphasising the transformative potential of meaning,
hermeneutics remains distinct from semantics; meaning is not only
something identifiable through analysis, it is also something that
potentially affects us individually. The implications of this approach
to language, which advocates the distinctness but inseparability of
structures and practical lifeworlds, will be explored throughout the
thesis, with emphasis on how structures and systems depend on
activities of appropriation. For now, it is necessary to explore
further the other side of the relation, that is, why appropriation and
self-understanding depend on structures that are unfamiliar or
distant.
Scott Davidson has argued that Ricoeur's focus on structure and
structuralism has become outdated in light of developments in literary
theory.[83] In place of the structuralist paradigm, he argues
hermeneutics should instead opt for the intersectional paradigm. I
believe that this is a good way to counteract the homogeneity of the
text when viewed through a structuralist lens. Through this paradigm
shift, the text ceases to become an interconnected system of
significations, and instead becomes a cacophony of competing voices,
whose different volumes are regulated by social power dynamics. In
this case, the reader's task is to listen more closely to suppressed
or misrepresented voices. This task is more ethical (practical). It is
guided by the social and political concerns of the critical reader,
rather than the pseudo-scientific concerns of a structuralist
analysis. However, I do not think we can discard the notion of
structure entirely. More precisely, I do not think we can discard
Ricoeur's own appropriation of structure as /structuration/ entirely.
A hermeneutic account of structuralism never argues that the text
in-itself is a closed totality. As the above quote by Iser highlights,
the work of reading/interpretation involves the assemblage of the
/implied/ referential totality of the work.
Although there is indeed a level of violence implied in this
understanding of hermeneutics, a violence that could be productively
counteracted by incorporating insights from intersectional theory, the
idea of structure is necessary to account for the fact that a work
always /presents/ us with something, a limited range of readings. It
is this limitation, or pattern, of the work that constitutes its
`horizon', and therefore the possibility of a fusion of horizons.
As Davidson notes, Ricoeur's readings of structuralism, although
critical, never leave structuralism behind. For example, towards the
end of "Structure and Hermeneutics" Ricoeur writes: "I assert that
there is no recovery of meaning without some structural
comprehension."[84] In the context of Ricoeur's essay, the reasons for
this are based on the deficiencies of a "naïve" (unmediated)
participation in symbolic meaning. On the one hand, Ricoeur criticises
structural, atemporal models on the basis that they disavow the
symbolic "saturation" of the models themselves; every explanation is
founded through prior understandings or lived relations. For example,
commenting on the interpretation of the "rites of eagle-hunting in the
Hidatsa tribe" in /The Savage Mind,/ Ricoeur writes,
the constitution of the high-low pair, from which are
formed all the differences, including the maximum
differences between the hunter and his game, provides a
mythological typology only on the condition of an implicit
comprehension of the surcharge of sense of the high and
the low. I grant that in the systems studied here this
affinity of the contents is in some sense residual --
residual, but not null. This is why structural
comprehension is never without a degree of hermeneutic
comprehension, even if the latter is not thematised.[85]
The idea of a "symbolic residue" at play in every system of
representation is central to Ricoeur's hermeneutics of the symbol and
is what gives rise to a conflict of interpretations. In this way,
understanding the symbolic residue (internal hermeneutic
comprehension) of all structures is necessary for understanding why
they always remain incomplete at the conceptual or analytic levels,
and instead can only be resolved at the level of practical judgment.
However, the symbol itself cannot appear /as/ symbolic (and, in
particular, as /conflictual/) independently of its appearance as
surplus/residue in these different signifying systems. Structures
provide a differentiated articulation of symbols by incorporating them
in an "economy of the whole".[86] This economy, understood against the
background of the interpretations and narratives of an "ordered
community" avoids the false extremes of what Ricoeur calls (in this
essay) "imagination" and "allegory". The term "imaginary", here, is
taken from Edmond Ortigues, "A single term can be imaginary if one
considers it absolutely, and symbolic if one understands it as a
differential value, correlative to other terms which limit it
reciprocally".[87] Separated from its role in particular structures,
which as we see is also an aspect of its /valuation,/ the symbol's
overdetermined richness can lead "naïve symbolists to impertinence and
to complacency".[88]
In these senses, the notion of structure is necessary to account for
the phenomena of a conflict of interpretations, and as a point of
detour which would avoid a naïve elevation of singular terms taken
independently of their place within "ordered economies". An act of
appropriation that does not take into account the reflective,
structural awareness that always accompanies it is in danger of
misunderstanding the act as purely subjective or individualistic. This
process is one of /demythologization,/ and is crucial for
understanding how hermeneutics conceives of novelty. Striving for
novelty and innovation occurs against the background of structural
comprehension, and in this way an explanation and investigation into
structure is integrated into the emancipation from particular
structures or traditions. This dynamic is also what links a
deconstructive hermeneutics of suspicion with an appropriating
phenomenology of the sacred.
Ricoeur expands on this dialectic between structures or systems and
the practical renewal of these systems in "Structure, Word,
Event".[89] One the one hand, `structure', as defined by
structuralism, serves as a foil so that Ricoeur can present an
alternative understanding of discourse. On the other, Ricoeur does not
discard the notion of structure entirely. Instead, he aims to
transition from the `ideal object' of structuralism, an atemporal and
fixed set of relations, towards an understanding of structure as a
dynamic process. The mistake of structuralism was not necessarily its
casting of language as an 'object', but its elevating of this object
to the status of an absolute object. For Ricoeur, language has a
structural autonomy, but its autonomy is that of the phenomenological
/thing,/ a concrete entity,
That language is an object goes without saying, so long as
we maintain critical awareness that this object is
entirely defined by the procedures, methods,
presuppositions, and finally the structure of the theory
which governs its constitution. But it we lose sight of
this subordination of object to method and to theory, we
take for an absolute what is only a phenomenon. Now the
experience which the speaker and listener have of language
comes along to limit the claim to absolutize this
object.[90]
Here, Ricoeur suggests that the objectifying gaze of the social
sciences can be useful as long as a "critical awareness" is maintained
regarding the limitations of this perspective. In Chapter 5,
Peter-Paul Verbeek's similar objection to transcendental approaches to
technology (which would include many of Ricoeur's own comments) will
be raised. It will be argued that, just as language-as-thing is
revealed not only through the theoretical perspective but through the
actual "experience of the speaker and listener", technologies also
need to be understood from the perspective of the experience of users
and interactors. Ricoeur's criticism of the structuralist negation of
this fact can be potentially applied to transcendental accounts of the
essence of technology, as Verbeek demonstrates.
Symptomatic of the absolutizing tendency of structuralism is a
semiotic account of the sign, which is built on Saussure's system of
distinctions; /langue-parole,/ signifier-signified. In this account, a
sign is defined by way of its absence from the thing it refers to,
i.e., it is no longer a thing /in/ the world. It stands outside, or at
a distance to, the world of things. Its difference is an /immanent/
difference; the sign is different in-itself, both from the thing it
refers to and from the other signs in a structure. Ricoeur, by
contrast, wishes to restore the transcendence of the sign; its
capacity to refer back to the world. The referentiality of a sign can
be seen as a gesture of transcendence if we reconceive the `distance'
between sign and thing as an intermediate, negotiable distance, as
opposed to an `absolute' distance. The sign both is and is not related
to the thing it refers to. It is, as structuralism has shown, part of
a finite system of differences (/langue),/ and can be accorded a place
in a dictionary. However, it can also be applied in an infinite
variety of ways through practical usage. This, second, transcendent
aspect of the sign comes from its function within a sentence, the
fundamental unit of discourse. Its practical usage within a sentence
reveals that "the sign is not only that which is lacking to things, it
is not simply absent from things and other than them; it is what
wishes to be applied, in order to express, grasp, apprehend, and
finally to show, to manifest."[91]
Outside of the sentence, "the sign says nothing"[92]; a lexicon is a
system of potential meanings and is lacking in semantic weight. On the
other hand, Ricoeur also insists that this logic
(potentiality-actuality) works both ways. A word, or sign, is also
capable of surpassing its role in the event of discourse through its
relation to a system, which it has the power of operating on, "But it
[the word] is more than the sentence from another point of view. The
sentence, we have seen, is an event; as such, its actuality is
transitory, passing, and ephemeral. But the word survives the
sentence. As a displaceable entity it survives the transitory instance
of discourse and holds itself available for new uses."[93]
As usual, Ricoeur advocates the in-between position; signs are both
explainable and understandable. We explain signs using notions of
structure, and understand them through events of usage. Both
approaches are seen as valuable and interrelated; it is only through
an event of actualisation that a sign's intention to `say something'
is fulfilled, albeit in an indeterminate and sometimes unexpected way,
and it is only through structures, traditions, norms, that an event in
turn becomes actualised /as/ event, rather than a
`transitory/ephemeral' moment. This dialectal approach to signs and
their usage is captured concretely in metaphors, which are types of
signs that work, or operate, on the basis of this logic.
To repeat Ricoeur's claims about structuralism: firstly, structures
are carriers of potential /meaning;/ yet meanings also have concrete,
practical, /effects./ These effects appear through the work of
interpretation, a work that includes appropriation by a participant or
subject. Secondly, these effects are /transformative;/ both
participants and structures (or structuration processes) are
transformed through interpretation. This transformation is an
innovation; a new configuration emerges from a sedimented tradition.
There is a fundamental distance or difference between a participant
and structures, which allows for concretization to become a dynamic,
transformational, process. In this way, meaning, an aspect of the
value of structures is something `other' or unfamiliar, something
which `stands-against' the participant as something they must
confront, rather than something identifiable or catalogable.
Significance, in contrast, is the concrete realisation of meaning
against the background of symbolic understandings. If we think about
technology along these lines, as a structuration process, then we see
that its essence only comes into existence (becomes concrete) through
practical usage by subjects and participants. Often, this process is
less of an interpretation than a simple `operation' or using of the
technology, but the point is that this relation has the potential to
be destabilized, due to the distance between the ordering, structuring
activity of a technology, and the appropriating, transforming activity
of a participant.
2.1.2.2 The Spiral of Understanding
One last point must be mentioned about Ricoeur's account of the
dialectic between distance and belonging, explored above in the
relation between signs and symbols and structuration and
participation. It concerns the /nature/ of this relation. Ricoeur aims
to demonstrate the /productive/ aspects of a mode of interpretation
which accounts for both the /meaning/ and /significance/ of language.
Both types of analysis or interpretation not only presuppose one
another, but enrich one another by developing insights in
unanticipated directions. Ricoeur famously asserts that "to explain
more is to understand better".[94] This statement, at first sight,
places him in opposition to Gadamer, who famously claims that "we
understand in a /different/ way, /if we understand at all/."[95] We
could say that this is one of the reasons that `truth' and `method',
according to Ricoeur, are presented as alternatives - the mode of
interpretation associated with method is radically different from that
of truth or direct participation/engagement. An understanding or
insight which remains within the bounds of a method can never be
reconciled with an understanding gained from a direct experience. For
Ricoeur, on the other hand, both attitudes are related to one another.
However, it is not simply, "we explain, to understand", it is "we
explain /more,/ to understand /better/", i.e., the terms `more' and
`better' suggest a mediational relation between the two modes, rather
than a direct one. Our understanding of the world remains perpetually
caught between the two perspectives, which means, on the one hand, the
task of understanding is potentially interminable, but, on the other,
we are capable of drawing on resources gained from both explanation
and understanding, and of relating them to one another.
One way to think about the relation between the /more/ and the
/better/ of Ricoeur's dictum is through Wolfgang Iser's use of the
term /recursion./[96] For Iser, differing subject matters and contexts
call upon varying registers or frameworks of interpretation. The
subject matter and the register of interpretation mutually influence
one another interminably so that, again, what is at stake for
hermeneutics is not necessarily a disclosing of a prior meaning, but a
practical recognition of the types of meanings which emerge from this
interaction or tension itself. The act of making distinctions,
inherent in any course of explanation, is an entirely practical
procedure,
the act of distinction lies at the foundation of any
description. The most fundamental operation is that of
distinguishing the `it' to be studied from its background.
A distinction emerges out of the observer-community that
decides the sense in which a distinction is performed.
Thus we have physical boundaries, functional groupings,
conceptual categorizations, and so on, an infinitely
variegated museum of possible distinctions.[97]
Distinctions establish boundaries which can then be explored to find
out what is entailed if boundaries are crossed. Importantly,
"Distinctions allow us to conceive as unities what they have
separated, and these tend to become reciprocal foils for one another.
[Francisco J.] Varela calls these unities systems, whose internal
structure and external relations present themselves as targets for
exploration."[98]
Following the systems biologist Francisco J. Varela, Iser suggests
that the nature of the interaction is not "cybernetic" (with the
explanation acting as an external control for the subject matter, or
/vice versa/), but /autopoietic --/ the relation is productive and
self-generating. An "autopoietic machine" or system is a set of
distinctions whose boundaries are constantly renegotiated without
recourse to an external 'essence' or `identity' of the system.
Autopoietic systems instead generate their own identities internally.
It is not a simple assembly of components, but rather "operates as a
process that produces its own components, which, through their
reciprocal interpenetration, bring forth a dynamic network."[99] This
process of internal exchanges which generates new forms or subject
matters, and which Varela himself likens to a `conversation', is
explained by the idea of recursive looping.
The hermeneutic strength of these explanatory metaphors of system and
recursion is that rather than professing to provide direct and
unmediated descriptions of the world as it is, they work precisely by
the persistence of a gap between system and the actual world. If
reality as a structured order were to exist, systems as a mode of
construing it would be redundant. Therefore, Varela states:
All of this boils down, actually, to a realization that
although the world does look solid and regular, when we
come to examine it there is no fixed point of reference to
which it can be pinned down; it is nowhere substantial and
solid. At best the world can only be disclosed as an
emerging phenomenon, to be fathomed by recursively
operating systems.[100]
Crucially, "For this reason, we are bound to reflect on the
recursivity of these explanatory constructions, and hence what we call
the "observer community" becomes of paramount concern."[101] So, not
just the exactitude or epistemological validity of a systematic
representation is of interest, but also the ways in which it is
presented, which reference points are discerned, which selections are
highlighted by the observer community, and so on. Ricoeur's own
emphasis on the relation between explanation and understanding means
that what is at stake in an explanation is often not what it
/represents,/ but what it /presents/ us with, since the insights
gained from reflection are always grasped against the background of
hermeneutic questions of /application./ If we view a system or
structure as an ordering of elements and their relations, then earlier
forms of hermeneutics aimed to understand how these orderings left
traces of the individual minds or intentions 'behind' the structures,
or how particular forms of ordering aimed to represent certain natural
phenomena better. However, if we conceive of systems as also being
/presentational,/ then the system becomes less of a representational
medium for understanding, but rather a form of ordering which allows
for the `emergence' of new meanings into the world. These (what I am
calling) presentational aspects of systems and structures means that
the task of understanding is not simply about interpreting what has
already been given, but rather about understanding life and systems as
recursively unfolding processes.
An example to illustrate the productive nature of the
explanation-understanding dialectic (and, by extension, the relation
between signs and symbols, and structures and practical usage), can be
found in a study conducted by Gürer, Özkar, and Çağdaş.[102] Their
study investigates the role that `computation' plays in design
activities, with `computation' taken in the broad sense to include the
/explanatory/ moments in design practices -- the way that creative
moments or insights that emerge from within a design process are
related to more general rules or frameworks regarding principles of
design. Drawing on Ricoeur's work, they argue that these explanatory
or computational reflections are inseparable from the `play' or
'understanding' of the designers. That is, design computation does not
exist `outside' of the practical, embodied, interpretive experience of
design, but is integral to the overall process, "this paper considers
computation not as an isolated and external structure borrowed and
used by the designer but rather as a part of the activity in practical
regard which is inseparable from design acts."[103] Ricoeur's model of
the hermeneutic spiral of explanation-understanding is their reference
point for their experiments -- we begin with naïve understandings,
which we attempt to formalise through explanation, these explanations
then generate new understandings, which in turn lead to further
explanations, and so on.
Using Ricoeur's model, they argue that computational moments are not
simply ways of monitoring, codifying, etc., the work. Instead, due to
the projection-character of language, reflections work to open new
possibilities of play and engagement. The particular mode of
reflection/computation they focus on is writing -- subjects in the
study are given design tasks, with one group asked to record their
operations in writing after each decision, and the other group asked
to provide a written account of their decisions only at the end. They
explore the claim that:
Writing (in action) offers both a fixation for our ways of
seeing the world in an explanatory way and a network of
possibilities for our future acts. Thus acting accompanied
with writing can both bring sophistication to a naïve
understanding since writing concerns articulation of acts,
ideas etc. and determines fixation levels to operate on
for future acts.[104]
The results of their study suggest that the integration of
writing/computational moments into the design process enables the
emergence of new meanings and pathways for design-actions,
the more design actions are externalized by writing (and
inevitably by reading), the more meanings are uncovered in
writings and carries to future actions and
writings...Computation does not only involve bringing a
design situation or action in a rule-based form. It also
involves interpreting something as an eventuality. [105]
The interplay of writing (distanciation) and action (play, belonging),
allows `novice' designers (the subjects of the study) to develop a
deeper awareness of their practical understanding and explore new
perspectives on design that could only have been grasped by
translating their intuitive relation with things into a more formal,
reflective language. This means that we should think about
computational moments of design not as tools for avoiding thinking (by
automating, or providing fixed rules to follow), but as partners in
the creation of meaning, "computation is emphasized as an act that
augments designer activities and thinking rather than automating
them."[106]
Recourse to structural models and, more generally, the sign, is
necessary in the attempt to clarify and understand better. However,
this effort introduces a /distance/ between the world, in its symbolic
richness and ambiguity, and our explanations of it. This distance, for
Ricoeur, is not absolute - signs and process of structuration also
contain resources for /future/ applications and actions. Application
is a mode of re-situating structural meanings in the lifeworld, albeit
in a new and re-configured way.
The next section will examine the way that Ricoeur applies a similar
logic to the field of psychoanalysis, which more explicitly raises the
question of /technique./ Again, Ricoeur is critical of an absolutizing
sense of psychoanalytic technique and theory, but, situated alongside
practical, intersubjective understanding, psychoanalytic technique
becomes a useful framework for disclosing features of the self which
cannot be anticipated at the level of intuition alone, since
psychoanalysis suggests that our conscious understandings are affected
not only by our practical understanding of the world (relations of
meaning), but also through underlying forces and drives which are
better understood using a framework that embraces the "technical"
features of the human (an "economics of desire"). Continuing from the
above discussion, within the context of psychoanalysis technique is
read as being related to practical understanding through the way it
recursively interacts with it.
3 Hermeneutic Technique
=======================
Although the hermeneutic concepts of application and appropriation are
central to 20^{th} century hermeneutic thought as a whole, we have
seen that Ricoeur's work is distinctive in its attempt to thematise
the role of /distanciation/ in relation to appropriation. This means
that, although application is as central to Ricoeur's work as it is in
Gadamer's or Heidegger's, it remains ambiguous for Ricoeur.
Application/appropriation is a product of both the practical
understanding of an embodied individual and the distancing effect of
the text. Therefore, it remains a /mixed/ and incomplete process,
since the two perspectives explored by Ricoeur, distanciation and
belonging, are theoretically irreconcilable.
In spite of the irresolvable tension between the two perspectives,
Ricoeur nevertheless works to trace points of productive interaction
between them. For Ricoeur, distanciation and belonging are conditions
for one another. As was outlined in the previous section, structures
and events are distinct but inseparable, the act of rendering
something significant is always achieved against the background of a
broader, structural meaning that remains operative. Similarly,
structures are open to reinterpretation through individual acts of
appropriation that can permanently alter the shape of these
structures. Both these operations are poietical for Ricoeur, they do
not offer theoretical resolution since the tension between distance
and belonging still persists, but they do offer practical,
interpretive resolution.
In this section, I consider two ways that the theoretical aporia
between distance and belonging is rendered productive at the practical
level. The first is in the case of psychoanalytic experience, while
the second is in relation to narrative understanding. Both cases, as I
read them, place emphasis on the role of artifice or technique in the
process of understanding. When discussing psychoanalysis, Ricoeur
makes the important distinction between positive and negative senses
of technique. Psychoanalytic techniques and theories, when applied at
the `cultural' level, are seen by Ricoeur as tools of adaptation and
domination. They reduce the human person to a `thing', controlled by
desires and drives, which can in turn be controlled by psychoanalytic
method (and by extension; advertisers, propagandists, and so on).
However, in the context of analysis, which is a dialogical,
intersubjective scenario, psychoanalytic techniques are instead read
by Ricoeur as a productive dialectical counterpart to practical
self-understanding. The thing-character of the unconscious is still
thematised, but in the context of analysis its practical elements are
highlighted. It only becomes meaningful through the activity of a
living, intersubjective dialogue. This crucial distinction between
taking psychoanalytic technique in isolation, on the one hand, and
preserving the productive difference between interpretation and
technique, on the other, will become useful for thinking about how to
conceive of technologies in Section Four. I suggest that this,
dialectical approach to technique, counts as a /hermeneutic/ account
of technique.
Furthermore, Ricoeur's account of narrative mediation thematises the
productive relation between a /work/ and practical understanding.
Narratives are productive for Ricoeur because they convincingly
combine two types of temporality -- the time of /muthos/ or
/emplotment,/ which resembles cosmological time, and the living
durational time of action, reflected within the structures of
narrative as well as in its relation to /mimesis_{1},/ the
prefigurative space of action from which narrative draws its content,
and /mimesis_{3}/ the refigurative space of reading and application.
The first time, the time of emplotment, or the simple order of events
and their causes and effects, can be compared to the understanding of
time that critical hermeneutic approaches associate with technology.
Time, in this account, is revealed through the objectification of the
world, i.e., through representing it as independent of a living
subject who constitutes it. In this way it can be reduced to its
logical structure and even `controlled' through the use of various
technologies (from calendars to microwaves). The alternative,
phenomenological account of time stresses the interrelationship of
subject and world in the disclosing of time. Time, in this account, is
durational, flux-like and non-linear. These two perspectives on time
will be explored with reference to Lorenzo C. Simpson's book
/Technology, Time and the Conversations of Modernity/.[107] For
Simpson, the time of technology, in modern societies, threatens to
overthrow a durational understanding of time, which is necessary for
meaningful participation in practices.
Ricoeur's account of narrative, which argues that both understandings
of time are productively mediated in the narrative form, offers a way
out of what he sees as an aporia between these two understandings of
time. The time of emplotment, when placed in dialectical relation to
the mimetic activity of narrative, is seen, not as a de-personalizing,
controlling attitude, but as a framework through which an
/alternative/ temporal reality can be constructed. Narrative modes of
expression, which combine artifice and intelligibility, demonstrate
the ways that a technique can be seen to be at once autonomous and
open to interpretation. Not only do narratives need to be placed in
relation to the reader (/mimesis_{3}/), as in the case of
psychoanalytic technique, but the idea of an /integrity/ of technique
also emerges through an account of narrative. That is, narratives,
through unfolding a world of their own, introduce a distance which
renders an encounter with this world an encounter with the strange or
unfamiliar.
These aspects of Ricoeur's work present an alternative understanding
of /technique/ that dissociates it from the hermeneutic critique of
modern technology, whilst also emphasising the tension that remains
between hermeneutic understandings of meaning and the artificial
nature of technique. The /distance/ associated with /method/ and
modern technology is re-read as distanciation, thus opening a space
for a consideration of both the distinctness of techniques and their
relation to practical understanding. For example, Ricoeur
distinguishes the positive, dialectical understanding of
psychoanalytic technique from the idea of method in behavioural
psychology, a characterization that resembles Simpsons' critique of
technological time. The `distance' associated with the methods of
behavioural psychology and modern technology is rejected in favour of
a middle position which places psychoanalytic technique and the
narrative work at a /relative/ or relational distance from human
understanding. In both cases, the key concept that allows for a
technique to be reconceived as operating at a /reflective/ distance in
relation to practical understanding is the hermeneutic idea of
application, which highlights the dialectical, working-through
character of the technique-practice relation.
These understandings of /technique/ aim to highlight its /practical/
and /variable/ nature. Furthermore, the /differentiating/ effect of
technique is retained for Ricoeur; it is related to practical
understandings because it lies at a distance from them, in the form of
another register. Techniques do not directly disclose meanings, they
/indirectly/ mediate our practices. Therefore, the meanings and
relations that are disclosed are a product of both the techniques used
and the practical understandings of the subjects engaging in the task
of understanding. Narratives, for example, are not only capable of
reflecting or mirroring our actions and capacities, they also
challenge us by presenting new possibilities for action and
understanding.
3.1 Technique and Psychoanalysis
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
For Ricoeur, any study of Freud, or of psychoanalysis more generally,
needs to take into account the crucial dimension of the /analytic
experience/ itself. It is in the context of this experience that the
two hermeneutic attitudes of suspicion and trust become intertwined
through the respective figures of /technique/ and /practice./[108] The
"school of suspicion," represented primarily by Marx, Nietzsche, and
Freud, is characterised by its attempt to explain the dynamic forces
underlying presented "meanings" or truths.[109] These explanatory
frameworks are then utilised in a critical way in order to demonstrate
the contingency and fallibility of thoughts, opinions, or beliefs that
are typically taken to be transparent for the subject. Ricoeur's
readings of these positions aim to demonstrate that works of protest
and deconstruction, guided by attitudes of suspicion, always
presuppose corresponding works of reconstruction and re-figuration.
This chapter will explore some of the differences between the two
types of knowledge or skills associated with techniques and practices.
Psychoanalytic /technique,/ I will argue, should be understood as a
type of skill or art, one that is less concerned with hermeneutic
questions of meaning than with quasi-scientific questions of /force,/
feedback, struggle, and process. In contrast, the practice of
psychoanalysis deals with the ways in which these forces or drives
become significant for a particular subject, and within a singular
context or history, "Broadly speaking, we may say that the
investigatory procedure [psychoanalytic practice] tends to give
preference to relations of /meaning/ between mental productions, while
the method of treatment [psychoanalytic technique] tends to give
preference to relations of /force/ between systems."[110] If we wish
to pursue questions of hermeneutics after Ricoeur and Freud, these two
types of practical skills, technique and practical understanding,
should be taken as two incommensurable but interrelated moments of a
general process of understanding.
Taking the relation between /technique/ and understanding seriously is
also relevant at a broader level. What the Freudian project does, at
least in terms of its reflection on its own practice, is thematise the
person as a technical being, that is, as a being who in the process of
trying to understand also employs certain techniques, ways, or modes
of action which can be explained and even, to an extent, codified.
Recognising this aspect of anthropological existence means that any
hermeneutic account of human understanding requires detours through an
analysis of the various structures or paradigms of action. This does
not mean that we need to take the term /technique,/ and its
associations with /techne,/ in a narrow sense. /Techniques,/ when
understood as being dependant on wider practices or horizons of
application, should themselves be understood as incomplete. In Iser's
sense of the term they are recursive, that is, they are structured
like coherent systems, but gain traction through feedback procedures
that constantly alter and reshape these structures. This view of
technique is also present in Freud's understanding of the term, since
for Freud it is strongly linked to the notion of /work/ and to a type
of work which is a clearing away of resistances so that paths to
memory and narrative (to meaning), can be carved out.
The main claims pursued throughout the chapter will be: (1)
Psychoanalytic techniques do not arise in relation to hermeneutic
questions of /meaning./ That is, they are not aimed at making a
meaning explicit, rather, they are concerned with the more `technical'
questions concerning desire and its mechanisms. However, (2) neither
are they /instrumental./ They should not be linked to coercive methods
of adaptation nor with the "observational" attitude which Ricoeur
associates with behavioural psychology. Instead, (3) they should be
understood as critical-hermeneutic; they are a type of /register/
which enables the emergence of meaning through processes of
application. [111] Finally, (4) a question remains as to the extent to
which the two fields of practice and technique can ever be reconciled.
This question is posed by Freud himself in "Analysis Terminable and
Interminable", in which he reflects on the aim of therapy, finding a
cure, and whether this aim can ever be achieved. [112] For Freud, the
question remains open at the theoretical level, but in practical
experience some form of closure /can/ be achieved. However, this is
always a /poetic/ closure -- a practical response to a theoretical
/aporia./ In this sense, any reconciliation or cure is always a
fragile one, grounded in the judgement of the participating subjects,
rather than on the theoretical or technical foundations of the
practice.
Technique is strongly distinguished from psychoanalytic `theory'
which, for Ricoeur, often remains blind to insights arising from
practical application. In this regard, Ricoeur is in agreement with
Jean Laplanche in taking Freud's reflections on the analytic situation
to represent an "anti-hermeneutics"*.*[113] Psychoanalytic practice,
as opposed to its theory, is an anti-hermeneutics to the extent that
it resists the idea that there could be a metapsychological "code" or
"key" (e.g., the oedipal complex) that would serve as an interpretive
framework for directly translating the analysand's discourse. For
Laplanche, psychoanalytic `theories', which are often constructed or
built independently of reflections on the analytic experience,
misunderstand the fundamentally deconstructive, "unbinding" process of
the analysis itself, which proceeds via isolated, regional
associations and dissociations rather than via over-arching
explanatory frameworks or "codes". In fact, "the application of a new
code to an old one, subjecting the manifest to "rereading", can only
amount to the redoubling of repression."[114] As mentioned above, I
will argue that Ricoeur is also critical of /this/ understanding of
hermeneutics, whereby interpretation is synonymous with explication.
Yet, Ricoeur has a much broader hermeneutic philosophy, which includes
the crucial practical moment of appropriation, and it is in the sense
of appropriation or practical application that psychoanalysis remains
hermeneutic.
Considering the practical-hermeneutic questions of psychoanalysis
means considering the interrelationship of psychoanalytic /techniques/
and their /applications./ Hermeneutics, following Ricoeur, encompasses
both these features of the analytic experience, not just the
relationship between interpretation and explication. Psychoanalytic
practice, which is intersubjective and situated, is fundamentally open
and indeterminate, but if it can be said to have a defining aim or
identifying reference point it is in its combination of a
philosophical conception of the nature of consciousness and a clinical
claim about human "health" or flourishing in relation to desire. A
psychoanalytic practitioner (an analyst), while armed with useful
techniques, is always confronted anew by this situation and a
diversity of cases. Techniques must be rewritten or retooled if they
are to remain effective. Psychoanalysis, as conceived by Ricoeur,
should not be understood as the /direct application/ of a set of
methods or techniques to particular situations, but is conceived of as
a two-way relation between the types of hermeneutic consciousness
associated with practice and the set of techniques associated with
this process. I argue that this interrelationship between techniques
and their applications constitutes psychoanalysis as a strong example
of a hermeneutic practice, and can inform our conceptions of the
practical features of technologies.
3.1.1 Technique and Interpretation
----------------------------------
Freudian psychoanalysis is a mixed discourse that aims to take into
account human consciousness/mental activity, largely concerned with
questions of meaning, and the human /unconscious,/ which behaves /as/
a /thing/.[115] As Habermas points out, this distinguishes
psychoanalysis from "traditional" hermeneutics and explains its
emancipatory character.[116] It differs from traditional hermeneutic
or philological questions of interpretation as they are seen as
remaining at the level of the "mental" life of a subject, whereas
psychoanalysis, through incorporating questions of force and the
unconscious into its theory becomes a /depth hermeneutics;/ it aims to
interpret not only the mental and public utterances of a speaker or
author but also the private, censored, unconscious life of a subject,
because these private, "split-off" symbols have an affective or
distorting role in relation to public forms of discourse. It counts as
an emancipatory project due to the therapeutic clearing away of
"split-off" symbols, removing distortions from communication and
allowing subjects to engage with one another at a more transparent
level.
While largely in agreement with Habermas and Alfred Lorenzer,[117]
Ricoeur's approach to psychoanalysis differs in a key way. He reflects
on psychoanalysis from /within/ the Freudian framework, where the
forces or drives associated with the unconscious and desire are not
something which can ever be fully "normalised" or translated into
cultural or rational expression, but rather must accompany the
"working-through" of the patient indefinitely. If there is an
emancipatory character to the Freudian dictum "Where the id was, there
ego shall be," it is not, as in Habermas' case, the cultural or
communicative project of overcoming instinct, but rather in overcoming
the prejudice that views the rational and irrational elements of
discourse as separable. This approach is similar to Simondon's
(Chapter 7) and, indeed, Ricoeur does reference Simondon in
characterizing the `technical' features of the human (found in the
unconscious). As with Simondon's approach to technology, the task is
not to either disavow or fear the thing-like character of the
unconscious, but to become more aware of its effect and to learn to
work /with/ it.
If the person is alienated from their own hidden motives, the
psychoanalytic task is not necessarily one of enlightenment, whereby
the hidden causes of action would become explicated through
interpretation, but rather is one of appropriation. Characterizing the
work as /appropriation/ as opposed to /explication,/ implies that what
is being revealed or appropriated, with the aid of techniques, is
something which is already present or intelligible, albeit in a
repressed form. In this way, the /technique/ of psychoanalysis is not
something external to the practice, but deals with already-present but
concealed features of the practice itself. The technique and practical
elements are complementary in this sense, techniques aid in the
process of drawing out what has already been implicitly understood,
and therefore work to advance practical understanding.
Appropriation is brought about by way of a struggle to remove the bar
between the conscious and the unconscious, and in a sense, challenge
the misunderstanding that there is a radical separation between
(rational, motivated) "person" and (irrational, casual) "thing". The
person must first recognise their own technicity in order to begin the
work of "handling" it well. The notion of `technicity' should be taken
in a metaphorical sense, as a way of disclosing the thing-like
character of the unconscious, i.e., the unconscious, according to
Freudian thought, behaves in a way similar to Simondon's "technical
object" -- it follows an internal or systematic logic as opposed the
types of logic/motivations we would generally associate with classical
concepts of agency. Ricoeur draws directly on the work of Simondon to
highlight this point:
We can now complete our description of psychoanalysis as
technique. Its technical object (to use Simondon's term as
a designation of the respondent or opponent of the
psychoanalytic manoeuvre) is man insofar as he himself is
a process of deformation, trans-position and dis-tortion
applied to all the presentations (whether affective or
ideational) of his oldest wishes, those which /The
Interpretation of Dreams/ calls "indestructible" or
"atemporal" and which the article on "The Unconscious"
declares to be /zeitlos/ or timeless. Psychoanalysis is
constituted as technique because, in the process of
/Entstellung,/ man himself behaves as a mechanism, submits
to an external law, and "condenses" or "displaces" his
thoughts...In this way the psyche is itself a technique
practiced on itself, a technique of disguise and
misunderstanding.[118]
/Freud/'s own papers on technique trace a developmental movement,
guided by concrete experiences with patients, from an understanding of
technique as interpretation and explication, towards an understanding
of technique as a type of system or register. Technique, understood in
this way, aims only /indirectly/ at questions of meaning and
interpretation. These papers on technique are notable for their
departure from speculations regarding theoretical hypotheses in favour
of a turn to practical questions regarding issues such as structures
of appointments, "I adhere strictly to the principle of leasing a
definite hour. Each patient is allotted a particular hour of my
available working day; it belongs to him and he is liable for it, even
if he does not make use of it...No other way is practicable."[119] The
concern here is with how psychoanalytic therapy can become more
effective, not with general questions of human psychology. For
Ricoeur, the "/genre/" of these papers is an important aspect of their
practical relevance, "I consider these texts to be of an exemplary
clarity. They suffice to open an abyss between everything that
reflection can draw out of itself and that which only a craft can
teach."[120]
In one of these "exemplary" essays, "Remembering, Repeating and
Working-Through", Freud charts three "phases" of psychoanalytic
technique, whose progression goes from a model close to that of
behavioural/observational psychology, towards the dialogical model of
exchange that Ricoeur associates with a hermeneutic understanding of
technique. The first phase is that of Breuer's cathartic method, which
uses hypnosis to encourage the remembering of past, repressed events.
This method of remembering is rejected by Freud on the basis that its
focus on the isolated event of trauma does not take into account the
crucial aspect of "repeating" associated with the formation of
symptoms. Furthermore, the method of hypnosis displaces the work
aspect of analysis onto the hypnotic technique itself. This `external'
foray into the patients unconscious is closer to a technological
(taken in Ricoeur's negative sense of the term) mode of manipulation,
than a genuine psychoanalytic encounter.
The second phase involved a "/deciphering/" of the patient's free
associations on the part of the analyst, who would then communicate
the interpretations to the analysand. Once again, this method did not
utilise the working-through aspect which the analysand themselves must
go through in order to become conscious. Instead, the analyst
performed the bulk of the work of interpretation. More importantly, if
an "/interpretation/" or even a "guess" regarding the patient's
symptom is presented to them before the transference process has
begun, it will be as if an external observer has communicated to them
their inner-workings and fantasies, and will seem like a violation
which provokes aggression and resistance, "[Premature diagnosis] will
completely discredit oneself and the treatment in the patient's eyes
and will arouse the most violent opposition in him, whether one's
guess has been true or not; indeed, the truer the guess the more
violent will be the resistance."[121] Whereas "in the earliest days of
analytic technique we took an intellectualist view of the
situation,"[122] increased knowledge of the "/mechanisms/" of the
unconscious and of the topographical differentiation of mental
processes lead to the psychoanalytic insight that a "conscious"
recognition did not necessary imply an unconscious transformation,
especially if that area of the mind had been strongly encrypted: "The
strange behaviour of patients, in being able to combine a conscious
knowing with not knowing, remains inexplicable by what is called
normal psychology."[123] In other words, Freud arrives at a
hermeneutic insight regarding the limitations of theory, taken in
isolation. In response to this aporia, a technique must be developed
which takes into account the dynamic and productive nature of
practical working-through. This practical working-through abandons
theoretical goals in favour of cultivating a relationship between both
the patient and analyst (transference) and between the patient and his
or her unconscious. Any external `interpretations' or suggestions on
the part of the analyst must become secondary to their own task of
recognising the occurrence of transference, "When are we to begin
making our communications to the patient?...Not until an effective
transference has been established in the patient, a proper /rapport/
with him."[124]
The idea of `technique', then, had multiple senses throughout the
early history of psychoanalysis. It was firstly associated with
mechanisms or operations that could be performed to manipulate the
analysand (hypnosis). Following this it was seen as the clinical
manifestation of psychoanalytic or psychological theories, as a `key'
or `cipher' that could be applied to unlock the secrets of the
analysand's discourse. Finally, it was dissociated from both `method'
(in the sense of a repeatable procedure) and theory, and was seen as
an accompaniment to the dialogical setting of the analytical
experience. This, final, concept of technique is founded on the idea
that the unconscious works in and through /language./ More precisely,
in and through /intersubjective/ language (language mediated by
desire). Since what is being `worked-through' is already present in
the discourse of the analysand, albeit in a concealed form, the
`technique' does not need to supply or supplement the analytic
experience with anything, it simply has to work on making what is
already implicit, explicit. Freud defines this sense of technique as a
/struggle against resistances./ This final phase of technique, which
Freud himself advocates, redistributes the types of labour associated
with psychoanalytic practice and recognises the role of repetition in
both the formation and overcoming of symptoms. The work becomes a
/shared/ work, and energies which would have been previously directed
at processes of free-association or recounting, are now directed also
at the processes of repeating and working-through. The analyst no
longer does the work of remembering /on behalf/ of the patient (either
through inducing/guiding hypnosis, or by suggesting interpretations to
the analysand), but instead aims to /clear away/ the patient's
resistances so that they can perform the work of remembering
themselves,
Finally, there was evolved the consistent technique used
today, in which the analyst gives up the attempt to bring
a particular moment or problem into focus. He contents
himself with studying whatever is present for the time
being on the surface of the patient's mind, and employs
the art of interpretation mainly for the purpose of
recognising the resistances which appear there, and making
them conscious to the patient. From this there results a
new sort of division of labour: the doctor uncovers the
resistances which are unknown to the patient; when these
have been got the better of, the patient often relates the
forgotten situations and connections without any
difficulty.[125]
In hermeneutic terms, the analyst is no longer concerned with
"reconstructing" a past event using interpretive methods, but rather
focuses on the contemporaneity of the patients discourse as it
presents itself in this new, analytical experience. They, in a sense,
cease to be directly interested in the patient themselves, that is in
terms of their "psychological" life, and rather become interested in
the ways that this psychological life is presented through language in
a dialogical situation.
3.1.2 Technique and Nontechnique
--------------------------------
Although psychoanalytic methods of treatment are different than those
associated with hermeneutic "explication", they cannot be separated
from the procedure of investigation itself. The procedures of
psychoanalysis remain hermeneutic for Ricoeur, since the
psychoanalytic situation is intersubjective. The dialectic between the
quasi-mechanistic technique and its practical application in a
dialogical situation leads to another important distinction for
Ricoeur. Psychoanalytic technique is not an instrument for `adapting'
the analysand or for producing a `normalised' self. It operates on
linguistic structures, retaining both its hermeneutic and technical
character. This relation with practical, hermeneutic questions of
truth and meaning renders it "non-technological": "In this sense,
psychoanalysis is more an anti-technique...When I say that
psychoanalysis is not a technique of domination, I wish to emphasize
its important feature of being a technique of veracity."[126] In other
words, Ricoeur distinguishes the two senses of technique according to
the classic Heideggerian distinction between truth as correspondence
and truth as unconcealment -- psychoanalytic technique, in being
related to the uncovering of already-present practical meanings, more
closely follows a process of unconcealment. Ricoeur's use of the term
"non-technique" is instructive in this sense. Psychoanalytic technique
both is and is not related to the question of modern technology. It is
also important to note that what Ricoeur is calling "non-technique" --
a technique grounded in practice instead of being circumscribed by
theory -- I am calling "hermeneutic technique". This will become the
focal point for claiming that the practice-based features of
hermeneutic technique are shared by aspects of modern technology.[127]
Freud's own reflections on technique are also expressions of a
'non-technique', in that the analyst moves from being a figure who
administers a cure (through hypnosis, for example), to the figure of
the 'expert' (who explicates and explains your symptoms on your
behalf), to the figure of a dialogue partner who simply listens,
points out resistances, and encourages the patient to work-through the
past according to their own terms. With the receding of the centrality
of a technique or method, the corresponding emergence of practical
understanding is seen. The singularity of the patient can only appear
in the absence of a more dominating technique. Although Ricoeur
provocatively labels this approach a `non-technique', it still retains
many technical features (discussed above), but these features are
placed in a dialectical relation with practical understanding,
rendering them more `truthful'.
The art of interpretation is indeed replaced with the task of
"handling" the patient. However, if, with Ricoeur, we aim to recognise
the phenomenon of /distanciation/ in any realisation of language as
discourse, then a productive understanding of /technique/ can be
adopted without it having to constitute a violation of the patient's
singularity. For example, a patient's dreams, which are always
intimate and personal, are admitted into the analytic situation /via/
the process of recounting. That is, what is subjected to the technique
of the analyst is the dream content /as it is told/ by the analysand,
or in other words the dream-content realised as discourse. The analyst
is not interested in naturalistic questions concerning the actual
dream itself, but rather with the way in which the patient recounts it
to her. This conversational setting for examining an intimate aspect
of the patient's life could be contrasted with an analysis of a dream
in a neurological study. Again, through replacing the `art' of
interpretation with the work of handling resistances, Freud is
ascribing psychoanalytic technique the role not of understanding the
patient better (as a singular individual), but of understanding their
particular form of /discourse/ better. To draw on Ricoeur's
hermeneutics of the text, the analyst as technician is no longer
directly concerned with the psychic life "behind" the patient's words,
but rather becomes concerned with the types of worlds and meanings
opened up /in front of/ the patient's /text/.
Psychoanalytic technique does depend on, and gain its specificity
from, a series of "technological" metaphors, which perhaps at first
sight lead it to be confused with a method of controlling or mastering
natural drives: "It is a technique, by its character as work and its
commerce with energies and mechanisms which are attached to the
economy of desire."[128] But it nevertheless is more concerned with
the "derivatives" of instinctual representatives, "The analyst never
handles forces directly but always indirectly in the play of meaning,
double meaning, and substituted, displaced, or transposed meanings. An
economy of desire, yes -- but across a semantics of desire. A
dynamics, yes -- but across a hermeneutics."[129] In this way,
psychoanalytic technique is related to the act of distanciation. By
acting on linguistic manifestations of desire (as opposed to
addressing the desire /directly/), it is reflective of the distance
already produced between a person's understandings (unconscious or
`pre-understandings') and their representations of these
understandings to themselves or another.
It becomes a "technique of veracity" through this interrelationship
between a hermeneutics of discourse and a technique of "handling"
resistances. The goal of the handling is "access to true
discourse,"[130] and not necessarily finding a "/cure/" for the
analysand. Although psychoanalytic treatment does aim to move
progressively from the pleasure principle towards the reality
principle, the "reality" in question here has to be distinguished from
"homologous concepts such as stimuli or environment."[131] Instead,
"this reality is fundamentally the truth of a personal history in a
concrete situation; it is not, as in psychology, the order of stimuli
as they are known by the experimenter but rather the true meaning
which the patient must arrive at through the obscure labyrinth of the
fantasy."[132]
This aspect of Freudian psychoanalysis is attested to most strongly
through the way in which it conceives of the work of mourning. This
work does not consist in a complete "destruction" or annulling of the
fantasy object which gives rise to melancholia, but rather in
demonstrating the complicity of a fantasy object with the real-life
resistances that it gives rise to. Once these resistances have been
removed, the fantasy is not dispelled but /unmasked./ It can then be
resituated at the appropriate level, that of the imaginary, and can
accompany the patient in their working through without giving rise to
further resistance,
Far from restricting itself to vanquishing the fantasy to
the benefit of reality, the cure also recovers it as a
fantasy to situate it, without confusing it with what is
real, on the level of the imaginary...I will venture to
say, in summation, that what is psychoanalytically
relevant is what a subject makes of his fantasies.[133]
Furthermore, Ricoeur situates the Freudian approach within a
philosophical tradition concerned not with mastering or dispelling
desire, but with redirecting and working with human desire in the
project of becoming a subject. For Ricoeur, the analytic experience
aims to recover two aspects of human existence, the /ability to speak/
and /the ability to love,/[134] aspects of the self that have become
detached and dispersed among various idols, pasts, or dogmatic forms
of discourse. This "exteriorisation" of desire is what has to be
worked-through, via detours, so that the subject can find themselves
again: "The thesis of the anteriority, the archaism, of desire is
fundamental to a reformulation of the /cogito:/ like Aristotle, like
Spinoza and Leibniz, like Hegel, Freud places desire at the centre of
the act of existing."[135] The project is not one of `freeing' the
will, which would be associated with a technological project of
mastering nature, but rather, following Spinoza, "psychoanalysis
proceeds...by suspending consciousness and thus rendering the subject
equal to its real slavery. It is precisely by beginning with the level
of this slavery, by delivering oneself without restraint to the
imperious flux of deep motivations, that the true situation of
consciousness is discovered."[136] If we associate technological
rationality with the will to power, as Heidegger does, then the
psychoanalytic method must be understood as a "nontechnique", as
resisting this approach to human nature.
3.1.3 The Playground of Transference
------------------------------------
It should be clear at this point that Ricoeur's understanding of
technique is complex. Along with Freud he sees it as being something
distinct from an "interpretive" method of explication, and indeed as
arising due to the need to resist a too-quick interpretation of
symptoms, but also as being separate from "technology", taken in the
sense of being a controlling attitude indifferent to human or
culturally specific questions of meaning. In order to explore the
function of technique more fully it is necessary to shift focus away
from psychoanalytic discourse and towards the hermeneutic sphere of
practice, where technique becomes meaningful in relation to human
action and understanding. Psychoanalytic technique is not an
`instrument', but rather as a type of /register/ which guides the
recursive unfolding of experience throughout the course of analysis.
The recursivity takes place between concrete subjects, with
corresponding (partly concealed) life histories, and the framework
represented by the /technique,/ whose purpose is to gradually clear
away built up resistances so that new meanings and practical
orientations can emerge.
One of the guiding motives here will be that, following Ricoeur,
critical theory and hermeneutics must be taken as inseparable. A
technique of unmasking, led by a critical attitude of suspicion, can
never become meaningful or effective until it is situated in a
relation which is fundamentally one of /belonging,/ "for when all is
said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone /in absentia/ or /in
effigie./"[137] Practical understanding cannot occur independently of
application, and a situation in which an interpretation is applied is
always one to which a subject always already belongs. Of course,
analytic experience presupposes the persistence of (historical)
distance due to the nature of repression. It is an /archaeology/ of
desire as much of its work involves forays into past, distant events,
such as those of childhood. But this archaeology is always accompanied
by a corresponding /teleology/ which aims to resituate these past
experiences in the present contexts to which the subject belongs and
participates in. The patient's life history is the context for the
application; they have not understood an interpretation of their
symptom fully if it has not begun to affect their life. This is why
the analytic experience has as one of its central forms of "work" the
task of forming an appropriate narrative.
Application here must be taken in the traditional, but `forgotten',
sense that Gadamer outlines in /Truth and Method./ Rather than being a
separate, secondary moment, whereby knowledge or an interpretation is
first gained and subsequently applied or "tested", it should be seen
as an integral moment in a process of understanding. The same is true
of Ricoeur's concept of appropriation; a text will remain
misunderstood until the horizons of the world of the text and the
horizons of the world of the reader have been brought into dialogue.
This aspect of understanding is also what renders interpretation
perpetually incomplete. There will always be the possibility that a
text will be understood in a new way through future processes of
application or appropriation. As already discussed in Chapter 1,
Gadamer points out that application was, for a time, a central concern
for hermeneutics "it was considered obvious that the task of
hermeneutics was to adapt the text's meaning to the concrete situation
to which the text is speaking."[138] This was clear both in cases of
legal and biblical hermeneutics: "A law does not exist in order to be
understood historically, but to be concretized in its legal validity
by being interpreted. Similarly, the gospel does not exist in order to
be understood as a merely historical document, but to be taken in such
a way that it exercises its saving effect."[139]
In relation to psychoanalysis, we could say the same about the `genre'
of the life or case history of a patient. It is an unsettled text, a
narrative that has beneath it the force of traumatic or repressed past
events which have a ripple effect on the surface, literal narrative.
Through the lens of psychoanalytic technique this narrative, at first
appearing as nonsensical and disconnected, becomes re-read as being
subjected to these forces, with the result that seemingly disparate
moments become signs of a repetition of the same event. Through the
work of reflection, they cease to become `literal' and instead become
'symbolic'. However, this re-telling process can only take place at
the level of analytic experience itself, and therefore takes on a
fundamentally /applied/ character. It is not an instantaneous moment
of revelation, but rather a constant and enduring working-through of
resistances. The patient's text is not something which has to be
`mined' for meaning, it is not a series of symptoms which merely have
to be reconnected to an original event in order to be overcome, rather
the analysis takes place in an /intersubjective/ or dialogical setting
and it is this context which sets the scene for the working-through.
In this way, Freud's metaphor of translation should be compared with
Gadamer's understanding of the translators task, "the interpreter's
task is not simply to repeat what one of the partners says in the
discussion he is translating, but to express what is said in a way
that seems most appropriate to him."[140] The analyst struggles to
translate the analysand's utterances into the appropriate register of
the technique, but the analysand must also struggle to find a way to
render the technique /meaningful/ in relation to their own life, a
life which contains a much larger set of involvements and experiences
than can be incorporated into the psychoanalytic situation and its
techniques. Divorced from its dependency on practical application,
technique can become a dangerous tool for moulding the patient as an
"object", for example in the case of Dora (Ida Bauer),
As several of Freud's successors noted, the "talking cure"
did not actually work for Dora for the probable reason
that Freud construed her story according to his own
unconscious identifications -- in particular with the
virile Herr K., whom Freud believed Dora wished to
marry...The problem with Dora's case may well be that it
was treated by Freud less as a life in search of a history
than as a (case) history in search of a life.[141]
This radical distancing on the part of the therapist, the refusal to
recognise the claims of the patient /as/ another, and not just as a
"case" to submit to a technique, can be as therapeutically negligent
as a situation in which a technique aiming at a cure is abandoned
altogether.
Freud's outline of /transference/ serves as a unique and productive
contribution to a critical-practical understanding. Characterising
psychoanalytic technique as a struggle against resistances means
putting transference at the heart of psychoanalysis, since, "finally
every conflict has to be fought out in the sphere of
transference."[142] Transference is significant for the wider
consideration of the relation between technique and practice because
it productively combines aspects of technique (struggle against
resistances, "handling" of the patient) and practical understanding.
In terms of practical understanding, it plays on key aspects of
dialogue, understood in a hermeneutic sense. As was mentioned above,
Freud's own term for the type of relationship established through
transference is one of /rapport/ between two partners. Furthermore, it
draws implicitly on hermeneutic conceptions of /play/ and /history./
The theoretical claim underpinning transference is that a subject,
shaped by childhood experiences, carries with them a type of template,
which contributes (often negatively) to the formation of relations
with others. The mixture of innate characteristics and early formative
experiences "produces what might be described as a stereotype plate
(or several such), which is constantly repeated -- constantly
reprinted afresh -- in the course of the person's life."[143] The
analyst becomes inserted into this series via transference,
Thus it is a perfectly normal and intelligible thing that
the libidinal cathexis of someone who is partly
unsatisfied, a cathexis which is held ready in
anticipation, should be directed as well to the figure of
the doctor...the cathexis will introduce the doctor into
one of the psychical "series" which the patient has
already formed.[144]
The technique of transference, which is developed around this insight,
consists not in a critical "removal" of stereotypical models, but
rather in a /bringing into play/ of these models in the context of a
situation that is guided by a technique of unmasking.
This bringing into play of the fore-structures of the patient, so that
they can be transformed through application, is what renders analytic
experience a /hermeneutics/ of suspicion, i.e., the investigation into
the psychic life of the patient is not carried out by a distant
observer but by a distanciated participant. The analytic experience
involves a "staging" of a repetitive series, a "transposing [of] the
drama that generated the neurotic situation onto a sort of miniature
artificial stage,"[145] This characterization of transference draws on
similar features of /play/ and /appropriation/ that Ricoeur adopts
from Gadamer.[146] By putting a subject matter in /play,/ you are at
once distancing yourself from your everyday self/concerns, whilst
allowing a /deeper/ or concealed truth to be brought into focus. For
Gadamer, it is only in /play/ that these concealed /truths/ can
appear, since, in contrast to regimented, ordered, everyday existence,
ontological truths are dynamic and `playful'.[147] This means that
transference is not just projection; it is also an /exposure/ to the
other within oneself. In a similar way to engaging with a text,
putting one's own assumptions or life history in play is what is
required for transformation to occur, "To understand is not to project
oneself into the text but to expose oneself to it; it is to receive a
self enlarged by the appropriation of the proposed worlds that
interpretation unfolds...The metamorphosis of the world in play is
also the playful metamorphosis of the ego."[148] This hermeneutic
approach, of exposing oneself to the text as opposed to examining it
from a distance, captures the dialectic of distanciation and
belonging, since even at a reflective distance one is exposed to the
consequences of the reading. The same dialectic is at work in
psychoanalysis, where past patterns are brought into play in a
distanciated or reflective mode (the analytic situation), but in such
a way as to re-appropriate these patterns by transforming them through
novel insights. The /play/ or /staging/ of transference is a feature
of psychoanalytic /technique/ at work in practice, i.e., technique,
regarded as a method of reflective distanciation as opposed to
domination is seen as something that enables a productive
self-distancing in the project of revealing significant truths.
Technique and practical understanding are complementary in this sense.
However, if the technique complements practical understanding in
certain regards (as a mode of productive distanciaiton), there remains
a fundamental /difference/ between practical understaning (of
meanings, interpretations, etc.) and the discourse of the technqiue
(which is concerned with "economies of desire"). This difference
itself is also key to how the technique-practice dialectic is rendered
productive. Psychoanalytic technqiues, in this sense, can be
characterised as a type of /register,/ whose technological metaphors
aim at bringing to light aspects of the analysand's motivations and
desires that remain hidden to them. Every case of psychoanalysis
begins with or is founded on a recognition of suffering and a
corresponding motivation to alleviate or better understand this
suffering. Taken on their own, these motivations or resources found in
the suffering person are not sufficient to overcome the psychic
conflict. The right paths to follow on the way to the `cure' are
opaque. The technique of psychoanalysis aims to gradually bring to
light which paths will work through the clearing away of resistances,
and a corresponding "handling" or redirecting of libidinal energies
toward these paths (or a "storing up" of libidinal energy for this
purpose through various techniques, e.g., abstinence), "Two things are
lacking in the [motive force to annul suffering]: it does not know
what paths to follow to reach this end and it does not possess the
necessary quota of energy with which to oppose the resistances. The
analytic treatment helps to remedy both of these deficiencies."[149]
Arguably, the type of work involved in this clearing away of
resistances is one that is fundamentally /recursive./ The analytic
experience takes place over a long period of time, and involves many
alterations to the techniques being employed as the subject matter of
the analysand shifts and more layers of their history and condition
unfold. For Wolfgang Iser, Ricoeur's reading of Freud succeeds in
drawing out the specificity of psychoanalytic theory as being
fundamentally concerned with /hidden/ or obscured subject matters and
which has therefore developed a corresponding mode of interpretation
which is that of a /transactional loop,/
The looping operation is designed to regain what is lost;
by making the repressed return, it clears blockages, thus
recovering what the subject had been striving for when
losing itself to the otherness of life. What is glimpsed
of the hidden /archê/ is to be fed forward into a surmised
/telos,/ from which a feedback will be received.[150]
This necessary "feedback" process, characteristic of a recursive
procedure, is caused by the nesting of the method of treatment
(technique) into the investigatory procedure of analysis. The
investigatory procedure, the field of meaning and discourse, and the
methods of treatment, which are concerned with questions of force and
the struggle against resistances, are two fundamentally
incommensurable modes of practical understanding. This is what gives
rise to "feedback" and the characterisation of the experience as
recursive. Arguably, Ricoeur's readings of Freud work to thematise
this incommensurability by demonstrating the ways that a hermeneutics
of suspicion presupposes a phenomenological understanding of meaning
and consciousness. Ricoeur's grafting of both the Hegelian and
Husserlian understandings of intersubjectivity and the process of
becoming conscious onto Freud's archaeology of desire aims to
destabilise "dogmatic" interpretations of Freud and show instead the
fundamentally /regional/ aspects of Freudian methods of
interpretation. The psychoanalytic experience itself depends on the
incommensurability between techniques and practical investigation
since the /working-through/ aspect of understanding proposed by Freud
is something that explicitly resists `instant' or immediate events of
comprehension in favour of the gradual, and potentially interminable,
process of clarification. The tension between the technique and
practice opens what Iser refers to as a "liminal" space in which
conflicts are constantly negotiated and renegotiated. The technique
conditions the quality or nature of this liminal space, whilst also
providing a means of access or "pathway" to hidden motivations
The register brought to bear in such an [interpretive] act
is marked by a basic duality: (a) it is meant to provide a
means of access to what is interpreted, but (b) it is also
the framework into which the subject matter is translated.
These two functions of the register are interdependent,
and this holds true -- at least up to a point -- even if
the register is more or less superimposed on the subject
matter. In this case, the framework nevertheless functions
as a means of access.[151]
This point also marks the limits of psychoanalytic technique. The
regional, practical "subject matter" to which the technique is
employed is one that extends beyond the analytic experience. It
incorporates the life histories of both the analyst and analysand. As
Vinicio Busacchi notes, the particular framework of the method of
treatment proposed by Freud was seen, to an extent, as being
surpassable by Ricoeur, through an alternative framework derived from
narrative understanding:[152]
It is no longer possible to preserve the economic, I would
even say quasi-energetic model of Freudianism. It is
necessary to reincorporate the linguistic element, the
dialogical element, the element having to do with the
relation between appearance and truth in the imaginary (an
element one can call Platonic), and the narrative element,
and to coordinate these four elements to make up the basis
of a theory appropriate to the analytic experience, a
hermeneutics.[153]
Nevertheless, there is a crucial concept of /work/ captured by the
technological, energetic metaphors of technique. The hermeneutic
reading of the psychoanalytic experience aims to draw out the value of
this work in-itself, as opposed to seeing it simply as a means of
production:
For its part, the work of mourning, since it requires
time, projects the artisan of the work ahead of himself:
he will have to continue, one by one, to cut the ties that
hold him in the grip of the lost objects of his love and
his hate; as for reconciliation with the loss itself, this
will forever remain an unfinished task.[154]
Recognising the /work/ character of mourning means recognizing the
figure of, what Ricoeur calls here, the "artisan", i.e., of a figure
who is to some extent equipped not only with self-knowledge but with
knowledge of /how/ things (in this case, the unconscious) work. In
other words, when it comes to practical knowledge of oneself,
immediate self-knowledge does not suffice. Due to the intersubjective
nature of desire, some degree of distanciation is required in the task
of understanding oneself. Psychoanalytic technique, understood as a
register or framework to aid in the clearing away of resistances, is
still invaluable when considering the above "artisanal" task of
"cutting the ties" between oneself and the fantasy objects which have
been "unsuccessfully" mourned. However, beyond the figure of the
"artisan" or the therapist, it is only immediate self-understanding
(reflected in the experiences of vulnerability and capability) that
can accompany the patient beyond the therapy room and which
anticipates the fundamental negativity of experience and the
impossibility of total reconciliation.
3.1.4 The Fractured Dialectic
-----------------------------
One final, key feature of the technique-practice relation in the
analytic experience must be pointed out. This is the feature that is
suggested by the difference between or incommensurability of the
practice and the technique. Within Freud's own writings, he puts into
question the therapeutic status of psychoanalysis by investigating
whether it is "terminable" or not.[155] In the context of the current
investigation, this question relates to whether the practice-technique
dialectic can be seen as commensurable or incommensurable, i.e., as to
whether the struggle and working-through carried out by the analyst
and analysand, with the aids of techniques, can be resolved and
overcome in the figure of a `healthy', or `cured' patient.
As we have seen already, what gives technique its vitality is its
subject matter - the (ego) life of the patient, which is both
anticipated by, and exceeds, the limits of the technique. Freud even
acknowledges that, if a technique is a struggle against resistances,
the ego is something that struggles against this very struggle.[156]
Psychoanalytic technique is not applied to the `human mind', as in the
case of behavioural psychology, but to the life-history of a human.
With behavioural psychology, the completeness of the method and its
outcome is determined in advance, by focusing on abstracted, objective
characteristics of behaviour, such as measurable response to stimuli,
etc. The outcome of analysis, by contrast, is not known in advance,
the facts dealt with are those submitted by the analysand themselves,
and by the varying practical contexts over the course of treatment.
The wager of psychoanalysis is that this, more practice-based,
selection process is more `truthful', in the sense that what emerges
in analysis, by conscious or unconscious selection, will be what is
more relevant or meaningful to this particular case or person. This is
the type of dynamic we have explored above. Freud himself
characterises the two types of procedures as id-analysis (explication
of hidden motives using techniques and interpretation), and
ego-analysis, which is a determining of the character and
particularities of the current patient, i.e., an analysis of the
features which emerge through the practice of psychoanalysis. The
therapeutic effort is always a work of mediation between the clinical
and personal, "During the treatment our therapeutic work is constantly
swinging backwards and forwards like a pendulum between a piece of
id-analysis and a piece of ego-analysis."[157]
Whereas the id-analysis is directed at the `mechanical' workings of
the unconscious, the practical subject matter, the life-history of the
analysand, must be grasped in its properly /historical/ character,
that is, in its processual and developing nature. Psychoanalytic
technique, which is directed towards putting the past in play, to
explicate and overcome it, finds within this aim its own
incompleteness. By encouraging, or provoking, the work of remembering,
understood as anamnesis, it constitutes its subject as a historical
subject. Or, in other words, as an /unfinished/ subject. As Gadamer
writes, "To exist historically means that knowledge of oneself can
never be complete [ /Geschichtlichsein heisst, nie im Sichwissen
aufgehen/ ]"[158] Technique, as an aid to memory, brings with it all
the ambiguities of Plato's /pharmakon/.
Aside from these philosophical understandings of history and
incompleteness, the reasons Freud himself examines for the difficulty
of the ego in relation to its own `completeness' are numerous, and
range from `innate' factors and dispositions (depending on their
libidinal type, patients may be as `granite' or `soft clay', with the
first type being strongly resistant, and changes to the second type
being impermanent), to external factors such as stress and aging
("psychic entropy"). Persistent throughout Freud's essay is a tension
between his reflections on psychoanalysis (and its technique) and his
reflections on the unavoidable question of `human nature', especially
in its historical character. This is another instance of what Ricoeur
maintains throughout his readings of Freud - that psychoanalytic
reflection always leads towards philosophical speculation, that
encounters with Freud lead us to encounters with Hegel. Freud's own
terminus of philosophical reflection is Empedocles whose fundamental
principles of love and strife resonate with Freud's own conflicting
cosmic forces; Eros and `destructiveness', which underpin the
development of the ego, and guarantee its forever unsettled state. All
these characterizations result in a crucial point; if there existed an
`ideal ego', an ego which would embrace therapy wholly, psychoanalytic
technique would indeed find completion. Instead, all ego states are
already "altered" states. They have their own patterns, peculiarities,
investments, traumas, and so on. In this sense, technique does not
operate in an `ideal' setting, such as a laboratory, but takes place
in the real world and through real structures and living processes.
Any alterations effected during therapy are always /alterations of
alterations./ Freud describes this point as follows:
We know that the first step towards attaining intellectual
mastery of our environment is to discover generalizations,
rules and laws which bring order into chaos. In doing this
we simplify the world of phenomena; but we cannot avoid
falsifying it, especially if we are dealing with processes
of development and change. What we are concerned with is
discerning a /qualitative/ alteration, and as a rule in
doing so we neglect, at any rate to begin with, a
/quantitative/ factor. In the real world, transitions and
intermediate stages are far more common than sharply
differentiated opposite states. In studying developments
and changes we direct our attention solely to the outcome;
we readily overlook the fact that such processes are
usually more or less incomplete -- that is to say, they
are in fact only partial alterations.[159]
Pushing this point even further, and coming close to Ricoeur's own
thoughts on the symbol and mythology, Freud suggests that
`alterations' to understandings, such as therapeutic insights and
transformations, /conserve/ prior alterations in their structure.
Developments are not 'successive', "...replacements do not take place
all of a sudden, but gradually, so that portions of the earlier
organization always persist alongside of [sic] the more recent
one...What has once come to life clings tenaciously to its existence.
One feels inclined to doubt sometimes whether the dragons of primeval
days are really extinct."[160] Owing to these factors, which render it
extremely difficult to "quantitatively" assess analysis, the question
of whether analysis is terminable or interminable is left open at the
theoretical level. Furthermore, it implies that no technique or
technology will ever be total, at least when it comes to questions of
human understanding.
Nevertheless, even when questions remain open at the theoretical
level, this does not exclude a resolution at the practical and
technical levels, by bringing about a sense of /mastery/ (as opposed
to control). To introduce this question in the essay, Freud quotes
Sándor Ferenczi: "analysis is not an endless process, but one which
can be brought to a natural end with sufficient skill and patience on
the analyst's part."[161] For Ferenczi, improvements in skill and
discipline /can/ yield positive results, a view which resonates with
Foucault's /technique de soi./ Freud, though, always the humanist (and
pessimist), calls this recourse to technique a "comforting assurance",
and asserts, instead, "Analysts are people who have learned to
practice a particular art; alongside this, they may be allowed to be
human beings like anyone else."[162] Being practiced by flawed human
beings, analysis never /guarantees/ a resolution, and can always elude
mastery, yet it does /promise/ resolution and mastery, a fact that
cannot be disclosed through theory or technique, but only through
/practical experience,/ for example in the case of /agreement,/
I am not intending to assert that analysis is altogether
an endless business. Whatever one's theoretical attitude
to the question may be, the termination of analysis is, I
think a practical matter. Every experienced analyst will
be able to recall a number of cases in which he has bidden
a patient a permanent farewell /rebus bene gestis/.[163]
Determining whether "things have gone well", is a matter of practical
wisdom (/phronēsis/). On this point, Freud and Ricoeur are in accord
with one another. One of the returning motifs in Ricoeur's work is the
notion of a `poetic resolution' to a `theoretical aporia'. Despite the
inscrutability of time, we create works which express temporal
experience (narratives); despite the heterogeneity of meanings across
languages, we translate; despite the impossibility of forgiveness, we
forgive; despite the persistence of trauma, we heal. These examples
all attest to the fact that an artful or poietic work does not belong
to the theoretical structures that it responds to (otherwise it would
be impossible). Instead, it emerges through the experience of
working-through aporias at the practical level.
I have aimed to elucidate three key features of psychoanalytic
technique that demonstrate the ways in which it should be moved from
being taken in a /general/ sense as a method or art of discerning
hidden meanings in human consciousness, toward a greater appreciation
of its fundamentally /regional/ character. The evolution of
psychoanalytic technique, guided by insights from this region of
analytic experience and the concrete work of engaging with patients,
shows that it becomes less and less an intellectual tool of
explication, and more of a /techne/ or skill of handling the
"thing-like" character of discourse, that is, those aspects of
language which behave in ways not bound to relations of "meaning", but
which still are /recognisable/ as forces, displacements, distortions,
and so on. The wager of psychoanalytic technique understood in this
sense is that if one pays attention to the (technical) ways in which
resistances form, and aims to address /this/ aspect of the analytic
experience, new narrative paths and orientations will /emerge/
organically.
However, the task of working-through resistances is not one of
moulding or adapting the patient's identity, but rather a redirecting
of desires and motivations in new directions. This means that the
analysand's concrete life history must be taken as the start and
end-point for the technique. The technique does not `suggest' or
impose a model of health or flourishing for the analysand, but rather
works with, and through, the pre-given material found in their life
history and self-understanding. It does not aim to totally nullify or
demythologize idols, but rather to situate them on a more appropriate
plane of understanding, through which they become /unmasked/ and seen
as scattered aspects of the imaginary and therefore of oneself.
Psychoanalytic technique is inextricably linked to the practical tasks
of application and understanding. It remains distinctive from
practical concerns with meaning, but is fundamentally bound to the
symbolic, lived experience of the psychoanalytic procedure of
investigation. Techniques of transference consist in bringing into
play aspects of the implicit understandings of the analysand so that
these understandings can be made more explicit and worked through.
This conception of technique is instructive for hermeneutics more
generally, as it highlights the recursivity of experience, especially
practical experiences which are mediated by various registers or
frameworks. The persistent tension between the /techne/ or craft of
psychoanalysis, involving a handling of and struggle against
resistances, and the field of meaning (the analysand's life history)
to which it is applied, gives rise to a form of hermeneutic
understanding which is not one of interpretation as "explication", but
of interpretation as involving a mixture of tasks of clarification
alongside a "playing with" prehistories and hidden subject matters.
The meanings which emerge through this process are different from the
types of meaning which emerge from an "intellectual" or philological
interpretation of a text.
Finally, we must ask if there is not an asymmetry between
psychoanalytic technique and practical understanding. The practical
understandings of a subject will always involve `concealed' elements,
and will always remain subject to change and transformation through
encounters with a plurality of frameworks and registers. In this way,
psychoanalytic technique can only go so far in the important works of
mourning, remembering and becoming a subject. Outside of the analytic
experience, these tasks must be continued indefinitely, "Melancholy is
not simply a psychic disturbance. It is a threat inscribed in each of
us, once we begin to consent to sadness, to fatigue, to
discouragement. Its name then is despair, the "sickness unto death"
described by Kierkegaard."[164] The struggle for resolution undertaken
by a person entering a course of therapy, aided by the analyst, is
both terminable /and/ interminable. Simple alterations to our
self-understanding are often sufficient to determine that a course of
therapy has finished, even if the over-arching (metapsychological)
goal of technique is to effect a more fundamental cure. This, of
course, leaves us vulnerable to regressions, new problems, new forms
of repetition, and so on, but recognising this vulnerability is
crucial to understanding the limits of any technique applied to
historical subjects. If the human self is defined in relations to its
practical, /historical/ character, then all techniques that are aimed
at altering or effecting human life are bound to fail or remain
"incomplete".
Extrapolating from these readings of psychoanalytic technique by
Ricoeur, it is possible to suggest a hermeneutic account of technique
as being both related-to and different-from immediate practical
understanding. Ricoeur's positive account of psychoanalytic technique
allows us to consider the /productive/ and /dynamic/ roles that
techniques play in uncovering practical meanings at a distance.
Ricoeur's view of technique, here, also suggests its /critical/
function -- it is also a "nontechnique", a mode of distanced
reflection on practical understanding that opposes itself to the more
radical 'distance' of modern technology. In the next chapter, these
features of hermeneutic technique will be explored in relation to
narrative distanciation. Narratives works, like psychoanalytic
techniques, can be considered along the lines of a `technique' that is
also a 'nontechnique'. In the context of "modern technology" and its
approach to time, narratives offer a productive distanciation of our
experience of time.
3.2 Narrated Worlds
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It has been argued so far that techniques and practical understanding
are two related but irreconcilable moments of the dialectical
unfolding of meaning in a given situation. Meaning cannot appear
independently of the techniques which anticipate certain kinds of
meanings or productions. However, due to the singularity and
variability of practical application, the boundaries of a technique
are constantly renegotiated. Linguistic structures are systematic
(sign-based) reflections of symbolic, lived experience. Similarly,
psychoanalytic technique involves a set of instruments for bringing
lived, experiential aspects of unconscious forces and drives into the
field of speech and language so that they can be analysed, reflected
on, diagnosed, and so on. Linguistic ambiguity and unconscious drives
are two aspects of 'life' (/bios/) which lie outside of our control,
yet which we constantly aim to understand and clarify through
interpretation (/logos/). This chapter will seek to explore a third
key aspect of lived experience for Ricoeur; temporality, and its
corresponding technique of clarification - narrative.
The aim of this chapter is to explore the productive tension that
Ricoeur identifies between the /time of works/ and the /time of
action./ For Ricoeur, narratives are works. They stand against the
world of action, possessing their own structural integrity and
/world./ The work-character of narrative is brought about through the
technique of /emplotment,/ which, for Ricoeur, is an operation that
remains distinct from the /mimetic/ function of narrative. Mimesis
renders narrative relevant for understanding action, but emplotment,
as reflective of cosmological time, differentiates and transforms the
imitation of action into a concordant whole that is autonomous.
Although narratives are related to action through mimesis, they are
distanciated from action through the configurational thrust of
emplotment. It is emplotment that grants narrative a world, and it is
mimesis that helps bridge the distance between this world and our own.
As with the use of psychoanalytic techniques in analytic experience,
narrative emplotment provides an /indirect/ disclosure of lived
meaning and understanding. Both psychoanalytic techniques and
emplotment depend on /systematic/ approaches to the world, their work
is a dynamic ordering of relations between things, causes and effects.
Yet, through being related to practical understanding, these
systematic approaches to the un-systematic, discordant /experience/ of
time are nevertheless seen as productive.
For Ricoeur, narrative is defined in relation to /time,/ therefore the
distanciation it produces is due to a practical, human attempt to
resolve the problems associated with time and temporal, lived
experience. For example, the idea of a narrative self is crucial for
Ricoeur to bridge the different, opposing senses of the self-identity
that are disclosed by an objective analysis of action and identity
(the /idem/ self), on the one hand, and the ethical, practical
analysis of the self as capable and suffering, on the other.[165]
Narratives reflectively and poetically combine both these dimensions
of the self using a form that synthesizes the activity of tracing
events and causes (/emplotment/) with the articulation of agency and
singularity (through developing characters, for example). In
narratives, both these operations are intertwined - to develop a plot
or sequence of actions is also to develop a character, and vice
versa.[166] Against Aristotle, who places plot at the pinnacle of the
narrative form (so that there could be a plot that is devoid of
characters), Ricoeur insists on this mixed nature of narrative -- as
creatively combining both an understanding of the human experiences of
capability/suffering, on the one hand, and the technical or objective
task of arranging events, causes, effects, and so on, on the
other.[167] Beyond these compositional features of narrative, it is
also seen as being grounded in the human experience of time due to the
fact that the narrative, whilst possessing its own world and horizon,
is also intended to be /read/ or followed (/mimesis_{3}/). The act of
reading is an attempt to fulfil the internal intentions of the
narrative projection, rather than a supplemental action. In other
words, the perspective of the reader or interactor is as integral to
the narrative form as the world projected by the narrative itself.
A contrast to the narrative framework for disclosing the temporal
features of human experience is found in Lorenzo C. Simpson's work on
technology and time. For Simpson, technologies also translate
practical concerns into a different register. However, whereas
narrative modes of expression aim to unfold already-present /meanings/
(associated with human understanding and comportment) found in
practices and actions, technologies reduce a practice to its /value,/
and then work to utilize or optimize this value. Technologies are
devoid of the /character/ or 'human' features of narrative mentioned
above -- they do not represent human suffering or capacity for action,
rather they are simply concerned with determining the most optimal or
efficient arrangement of a sequence of events. As Simpson argues, a
practice, whilst always aiming towards particular ends or outcomes, is
constituted by the temporal /flux/ that is sustained by capable and
vulnerable participants over the course of a practice. The meaning of
a practice is located in this indeterminate space, i.e., it cannot be
anticipated in advance. A technological attitude misunderstands this
feature of practice.
For example, the practice of the `family dinner', whose ends to indeed
include the simple need to feed the members of the family, is replaced
by the microwave, the T.V. dinner, the fast-food restaurant, and the
drive-through window. These innovations are representative of the
increasing need to control and shorten the time taken to reach the
representable `goal' of the family dinner. However, what constitutes
the family dinner as a /practice,/ is, to use Catherine Pickstock's
term, the /non-identical repetition/ of the family meal. That is, even
though the same goal is repeated at a similar time every night
(feeding the family), the non-identical nature of this repetition is
what constitutes the family as a /family/ (a "thing").[168] It is by
way of the fluctuations and variations occurring over the course of an
indeterminate temporal duration that a meaningful and identifiable
practical relation can emerge. In contrast, using a microwave and
sitting in front of the television, or choosing the drive-through
option at a restaurant, indeed reduces the time taken to prepare a
meal, eat, converse, argue, and so on, but the family-as-a-thing is
reduced to an identical repetition, it cannot grow or evolve over
time. For Simpson, the repetitions associated with practices become a
productive form of critiquing the technological rationality which
threatens to eclipse our meaningful relation to our environments, "the
growing hegemony of the temporality of making (/techne/), at the
expense of temporalities of doing (/praxis/), stands as a threat to
the continued presence of meaningful differences in our lives and to
there being meaning in a life as a whole."[169]
However, a question which will be raised in the second part of this
chapter, and which will influence the arguments of Section Four, is:
are narratives associated with a "temporality of doing (/praxis/)" or
a "temporality of making (/techne/)"? I will argue that narratives,
according to Ricoeur, contain both modes of temporality, and that it
is the difference between the two that constitutes appropriation /as/
appropriation, since it is the /techne/ character of narrative which
also renders it `foreign'.
In terms of /representing/ the mode of non-identical repetition
associated with practice, narratives are more likely to succeed
compared with technologies. This is due to the /mimetic/ character of
narrative representation. Narratives themselves are already
constituted through a series of non-identical repetitions -- the
patterned repetitions of everyday life (/mimesis_{1}/), are translated
into a narrative mode (/mimesis_{2}/), which are then repeated through
the act of reading (/mimesis_{3}/). Each stage is different from the
other, but each also attempts to /fulfil/ the other, therefore there
is a /productive circularity/ -- circular in that the pre-figurative,
figurative, and re-figurative moments are all related by referring to
the same thing, and productive in the sense that the /differences/ and
variations of each stage unfold or deepen this `same' reference. For
Catherine Pickstock, non-identical repetition precedes in a
"serpentine" manner; in order to move forward through time whist
remaining constant, the thing must repeatedly turn back on itself, and
then forward again, "A snake moves by twisting itself up to marshal
energy, and by untwisting itself in order to deploy energy to move
forwards. Unlike a motor car, it has to bend and twist itself
internally in order to inscribe its snake-like passage
externally."[170] The same is true here of the /mimetic/ character of
narrative, in order to become disclosive, the same reference is
repeated in different ways across the stages. The detour through
Simpson's highly critical account of technology helps to highlight the
ways that Ricoeur's hermeneutic approach, in contrast, remains open to
questions of technique, considered at this mimetic level.
3.2.1 Technology and Time
-------------------------
As with Ricoeur's critical account of psychoanalytic technique taken
in isolation, Simpson's analysis of technologies and time argues that
the problem with modern technology is that it /alienates/ us from the
temporal flux of /practice./ Similar to psychoanalysis, where
/meaning/ is a feature of the dialogical, analytic experience, Simpson
reads practice as a human space where meaningful relations can be
disclosed. Meaning cannot be anticipated in advance. It can only be
encountered in the concrete experience of learning through
non-identical repetitions. Whereas technology approaches time through
the attitude of linear /planning,/ the meaningful repetitions of
/practice/ follow the serpentine motion non-identical repetition
outlined by Pickstock. Practical repetitions contribute to the
formation of a self that is more concrete and inscribed within a
particular outlook, one the one hand, and more adaptive and capable of
bearing change and variation, on the other, "The mark of strength of a
thing as an ingrained habitude would be its spontaneity and
adaptability, since a string disposition is not merely fixed and
stubborn but capable of originality and improvisation."[171] According
to Simpson, modern technology alienates us from these experiences
since it offers easy applications and displaces the need to
"work-through" a situation. A practice-oriented approach recognizes
that meaning is a complex phenomenon that is arrived at through
deliberations and practical judgements originating from /within/ the
procedure or practice itself, rather than being derived in advance
using an external theory or method.
This approach to practice is continuous with a hermeneutic one.
Hermeneutics is firstly a confrontation with actual texts and
discourse, not a confrontation with theoretical structures. Owing to
the temporal nature of the reading experience, time is an immanent
property of meaning, one which cannot be reduced through systemization
or rationalization. A text or situation cannot be read
`instantaneously'. There is always the synthesizing activity of a
subject/participant (comportment), as well as the variable nature of
practices themselves (history, dialectic of tradition/innovation).
Both processes are always 'in-between', and resist any unmediated
grasping of their contents.
As Michel Foucault has noted, hermeneutic understanding, then,
involves a degree of `subjection' to these indeterminate features of
practice.[172] In order to become a subject, one has to `subject'
oneself to external constraints. The hermeneutic wager is that giving
up 'control' of a situation allows one to perceive and understand it
better. Control, in this sense, would refer to `knowledge of' a
situation, especially theoretical knowledge (/episteme/). Giving up
the types of control gained through the certainty of theoretical
knowledge leaves one in a vulnerable, uncertain position, but it is
this uncertainty that allows an individual to develop a mastery of a
practice. One becomes a hermeneutic subject through this process of
subjectivation; by allowing a text to instruct, to subject oneself to
it rather than having it as an object of study, its full implications
are allowed to unfold. It becomes not only a source of knowledge and
information, but also a potential source of transformation.
This approach embraces vulnerability as a necessary condition of
understanding and self-transformation. In contrast, the technological
attitude, according to Simpson, views the experience of vulnerability
as 'alienating', and as something to be avoided when possible. Simpson
writes:
Technology, in its attempt to subdue time's characteristic
flux, aims to "domesticate" time by harnessing the future
predictability and reliability to the present. As a
result, being in time comes to be viewed as an alienating
rather than as a productive condition. I suggest further
that, in predisposing us to experience time as the "other"
to be subdued or annihilated, technological civilization
threatens to marginalize project of meaningful doing, the
stuff of which stories are made.[173]
Here, we can see that what Simpson sees as threatened by technological
civilization is what Ricoeur calls /mimesis_{1},/ the living, material
configurations from which narratives are drawn. As technological
attitudes become more dominant, we become more alienated from, and
inclined to guard against, all those `chance' aspects of lived
experience, the twists and turns of human life that are not
'preprogramed' or ordered through the technological representations of
time, that provoke reflection on ourselves and the formation of a
narrative self. For example, not so long ago travelling across the
Atlantic Ocean involved boarding a ship and journeying for a long
period of time. Upon arrival at your destination, your life may have
been profoundly altered, you arrive in a `new world', both in the
sense of a new geographical location, as well as potentially having a
new 'worldview'. Today, the journey has been transformed by
technology; you board a plane and the journey lasts only several
hours. You are served refreshments and watch a few movies. Your
arrival in a `new world' is no longer an event of the same
proportions. In this sense, the symbolic networks of the lifeworld
have indeed been altered through multiple technological innovations.
For Simpson, these alterations are ultimately nihilistic - a
prenarrative field of experience whose codes encourage us to act in
uniform, efficient ways ultimately eclipses, precisely, the
'prenarrative' sense of this field. `Potential' stories, as Ricoeur
calls them, begin to fade away.
In short, like the long journey across the Atlantic, we /endure/
praxis; repetitions are not carried out to better `optimize' an action
leading to a production, but rather are carried out for their own
sake, so that one can learn a practice well and better understand it.
It is in this sense that practice always has a duration, and
technology, according to Simpson, views this duration as dangerous
because of the threat of alienation it implies. A hermeneutics of
practice, on the other hand, views the encounter with the other
(including the self as other) as necessary in the process of
self-formation and transformation. Practical understanding is powerful
/because/ it often `alienates' us from ourselves, allowing previously
unseen or unfelt expectations to come to the fore and be productively
challenged.
Below, Simpson's critique of technology will be explored further. His
reading helps to articulate crucial features of hermeneutic practice,
and the way in which these features provide a strong foundation for a
criticism of modern technology. Importantly, technologies and
practices are drawn closely together in certain respects -- both
involve relations to history, meaning, and representation. In the end,
what differentiates them is a question of attitude or comportment. It
is not technology as such that is a problem, but the way in which it
becomes a part of the fabric of everyday life, and in doing so
alienates us from a risky confrontation with practices. However, it
will also be suggested that Simpson's strong approach, which argues
that technologies alienate us from practice, ultimately conceals the
way that technologies depend on practical applications and regulation
by human interlocutors. This line of thought follows Simondon's lead,
who argues that fears regarding the 'automatic' nature of technology
end up alienating us from understanding them better. Like narrative,
many technologies depend on a process of /concretization/, a process
that occurs in practice and over time (Chapter 7).
3.2.1.1 Time and Planning
For Simpson, the time of technology and the time of practice are in
tension with one another. Although the following terms are not
Simpson's own, the time of technology is seen as `nonsensical' or
paradoxical, while the time of praxis is a time of `sense-making'.
Simpson introduces the distinction by drawing on Kierkegaard and the
difference between an internal and external history, "In the case of
external history, time is that through which we must move in order to
achieve a goal or realize a moment of significance."[174] An internal
history is instead marked by /repetition,/ which "moves through time,
where it is at home, grappling with time and exposing itself to the
latter's flux; its task is to persevere in time and to maintain its
singleness, identity and continuity within the flux."[175] Drawing on
hermeneutic theories, Simpson parallels repetition in this sense with
/application,/ that is, it relates to actions that are at once
continuous with tradition and the already given, whilst also being
unique appropriations of these pasts. In this sense, it is never a
"repetition of the same", but "effects a fusion of the horizons of the
past and the future."[176] In other words, the repetition of praxis
views time as a continuum, with the past and future seen as being
immanent to the present, not as that which can be escaped from or
progressed towards. Transmission of tradition through repetition
allows for the explication of prior pre-understandings, whilst also
carrying them forward toward future repetitions and revisions.
Technology, on the other hand, has the opposite attitude to the past
and future. The temporality of technology (of the technological
project) appears through the temporality of /planning./ The notion of
planning is important since it is what distinguishes technology from
science and metaphysics. Whereas science and metaphysics view time as
"a series of wholly indifferent `nows'",[177] that is, they remain
indifferent to questions of /history,/ plans require an anticipation
of and concern for the future, "The time of planning is a time of
reckoning, where it is always a matter of its being `time for'
something, where it makes sense to speak of the `right time'."[178]
Furthermore, ideas of `progress' and `innovation' that also underpin
the technological project, imply an incorporation of a concept of the
future: "The possibility of progress presupposes the possibility of
novelty and the reality of becoming. The idea of progress presupposes
an understanding of the future as the locus of that which does or can
differ in some essential respect from that which now is or which has
been."[179]
However, even though technology anticipates a future, it
simultaneously aims to "domesticate" it. That is, it does not
anticipate the future as such, but only the linearly conceived future
that is the successful outcome of a program or plan. The /need/ for
planning presupposes an 'open future', whist the attitude of progress
presupposes the future is controllable (closed). In other words, the
concern for control and progress arises from a recognition of the
effects of history, as an attempt to erase them by removing
contingency,
This understanding of the future is compromised by
technology's rancour against the uncontrolled past and its
concern with predicting and controlling the future...This
can be argued to be the will for the closure of history...
/Technology is fundamentally an expression of and response
to the "terror of history."/ It represents our quest for
security against novelty, through control and order, while
presupposing the possibility of novelty. It is the use of
created novelty to forestall or defuse contingent
novelty.[180]
In this sense, technology and praxis both differ from science and
metaphysics in that they are responses to history. However, whereas
technology aims to "domesticate" this historical time, praxis aim to
actualise it further and deepen it. The problem here, for Simpson, is
a conflict of /interests/ or attitudes. Praxis is not only a mode of
productive transmission of the past, it also produces
/self/-knowledge: "The implicit or latent self is brought forward in
action and experience which render it explicit or manifest. The
explicit "presentation" allows self-recognition which, when
appropriated, effects a "return to the self," but a self that has been
transformed through its newly appropriated self-understanding."[181]
Because of this, praxis is also more /binding,/ since our own
self-understanding and identity is at stake, for example, when making
promises. Technology, on the other hand, has no place for the `self'.
Whilst all historical projects, even technological ones, cannot avoid
the necessity of human actors and participants, technological projects
reduce the singularity of a self and replace it with the "human
factor",
[Technology] promises to grant us autonomy, make of us
wholes. Yet it requires that we remain parts, that we
subordinate ourselves to larger wholes. As Jacques Ellul
and others have amply documented, progress in the control
of objectified natural and social processes requires
techniques for integrating the "human factor" into the
whole in order to fully realise technology's
potential.[182]
These differing attitudes to time, history, and the self are important
for the discussion of narrative. Narrative structures and techniques
do indeed `reckon' with time, they render it linear
(beginning-middle-end), manipulate it to effect pleasure in us
(delays, suspense), and even, at the level of `meta-narratives',
interpellate us and render us "subordinate to larger (ideological)
wholes." On the other hand, aside from these rational, structural
characteristics, they are also /intelligible,/ or readable. It this
way they presuppose a `who' in the process of actualisation, whilst
according to Simpson, technology treats us only as a `what'.
To identify technology with planning helps us to situate it in
relation to history, tradition, and innovation. However, we must ask
whether the reckoning that is associated with technology is entirely
justified. We could say that /technological rationality/ fits well
into this description, but the practical concerns of a craftsman or
engineer are perhaps not as bound to this understanding of planning.
Certainly, the figure of a `social engineer' fits well here, and in
this sense, it is appropriate that Simpson references Ellul. However,
as we will explore in later chapters, the indeterminacy of
technological application is often openly accepted as a positive
factor by designers. Planning is a feature of human life, and whether
it arises due to our tool-use is an open question. More important than
recognising the contradictions in planning is recognizing the
/horizon/ or limit of any plan. As Gadamer writes, parents may often
try to `spare' their children certain experiences, but "experience as
a whole is not something anybody can be spared."[183] Just as planning
provides us with a sense of security and `domesticity', inherent in
any plan is a negative experience of its limits, and through this
negative experience we gain a sense of both of our finitude and the
infinitude of the `whole' of experience. In Ricoeur's terms, we
understand ourselves /better./ As was explored in previous chapters,
the dialectic between distanciation and belonging can also become a
/virtuous/ circle, in that distanciated representations or valuations
can become relational moments of praxis (as in the case of
psychoanalytic technique).
However, for Simpson, it would be impossible to experience the failure
of a technological plan in the reflective sense, since technologies
are essentially /worldless./ Failures in technologies occur at the
level of /valuation/ rather than /meaning./ Even if the technological
device that I am working with breaks down, I will simply seek a way to
repair or replace it; my /self-identity/ is not at stake (this is the
dangerous attraction of technology for Simpson). If I am profoundly
altered by an encounter with a narrative, on the other hand, failures
caused by this new worldview will provoke self-reflection and
revision. In this way, technology provokes a worldless mode of
engagement with practice and history.
3.2.1.2 Technology and Worldhood
One of the reasons why technologies threaten narrative and practical
understandings of the world, is because they tend to conflate
`meaning' with `value'. For Simpson, meaning has "the character of the
`always already' in which processes of life and action `dwell'."[184]
Meaningful experiences are something that happen /to/ us, or that we
participate /in,/ rather than being something we can have before us,
as a "pseudo-object that we can approach or recede from".[185] Values,
on the other hand, are /derived/ from practices and relations of
meaning, they are interpretations and representations of practices.
The relationship between the two is one of "conditioning to
conditioned" - just as the Kantian categories cannot be experienced,
meaning cannot be represented.[186]
In this way, an evaluation or representation of a practice always
involves a transformation of its meaning. The result of this
transformation process is a `rationalization' of practice,
As meaning becomes thematized as value, the manifold
connections which operate in part "behind our backs" and
which, through informing and shaping our experience,
predispose us to experience in a characteristic way, are
transformed into premises. The validity of these
value-premises, apart from the referential anchoring in
the meaning which gave rise to the value, stands or falls
with the rational evaluation of those premises.[187]
An `evaluation' of a practice is a form of rational anticipation. Our
practices always have limits and contours that enable the emergence of
meaning. The shift from participation to valuation, though, involves
representing these limits as separate, and separable, from practices.
The goal or outcome of a practice is one such limit, with a finished
product, for example, standing as a measurable unit of value, a
conditioned outcome of the conditions of the practice. Isolating and
evaluating this product using rational or scientific criteria is a way
of framing practice that eschews its meaning. According to Simpson,
"Technological activity is result-anticipating activity. It success is
assessed in terms of the efficiency and effectiveness with which it
achieves its result."[188] We could imagine, as simple example, early
agricultural practices as emerging from the given conditions of the
land, climate, seasonal cycles, needs of a particular community, etc.
When the `product' of these practices is valued in-itself, rational,
technological methods of producing the same product can be derived,
and the prior forms of `dwelling' become `redundant' from a
results-oriented perspective. The example Simpson provides is of the
family meal, whose technological value lies in the ends associated
with `feeding the family'. This end, once represented as such, can be
condensed through various technological systems such as microwaves.
Why `sit-in' at McDonalds when there is the `drive-through'
option?[189] The problem here is that `ends' cease to become
ends-in-themselves, and instead are transfigured into means to further
ends. By removing the indeterminate, uncanny, time-relations of
practice, technologies collapse the `world' of a practice, and, "when
ends become worldless they can collapse into means."[190]
That is not to say that technology and technological development do
not possess a `life' of their own. But this life is a shallow,
worldless life; "We might well understand science and technology as
forms of life, but they are forms of life lacking in "depth"; that is,
they are essentially worldless."[191] They are worldless because, like
signs, they proceed through the logic of "univocal
determination".[192] For example, the world of a narrative is
constituted through both events /and/ characters, whereas, it would
seem from Simpson's perspective technology deals with /events,/ and
renders `characters' as mere 'operators'. Events become separable from
the agents that bring them about, agents with particular motivations
and worldviews. Human repetition is marked by the process of
/Bildung/, or self-formation, where each repetition is part of a wider
experience of learning and transformation, while technological or
scientific repetitions are repetitions of the same process regardless
of contexts or agents. Every time you switch your computer on it runs
the same set of operations, with, significantly, no variations in the
time-taken to run these operations, and no difference in the quality
or understandings of this time. In this sense, for Simpson,
technological rationality is a fixed, homogenous structure defined
through a single purpose; the transfiguration of an indeterminate
(flux-like) whole of praxis into the linear succession of a technical
operation. Rather than feeling `at home' with technologies, we should
return to our more originary `home' of meaning and practice.
Yet, does this approach not alienate us from the technologies
themselves? Technologies become `inhuman', incapable of extracting the
same relations of meaning from praxis as humans are, incapable of
anticipating human vulnerability and finitude. The other option, which
I am advocating, is to shift our perspective so that we extend our
same understandings of practice and worldhood to the technologies
themselves. To see technological relations as /living/ and therefore
as indeterminate and open as human relations. And, vice versa, to
recognize more fully what Ricoeur calls the `sedimented' aspects of
human practice and action itself, that is, those aspects of action
which are codified and already `technical' or systematic. Simpson is
right in that there is a `culture' of technological rationality that
needs to be challenged, yet this culture exists at the ideological
level. It is manifested in an overly-/literal/ reading of technology,
as opposed to an encounter with its /symbolic/ features. Technologies
also exist /within/ practices and history, and in this sense, they are
as vulnerable to the uncertainties of application as humans are.
Technologies also `fail' to reach their intentional ends, and these
failures become conditions for better designs, or for different kinds
of applications than those which were intended.
The ultimate problem with technological representation (the
world-picture it creates), as Simpson sees it, is that is /distances/
us from an immediate participation in a practice, "Such a world, a
product of our representing activity, loses its claim on us. /The
commitments, concerns and interests which root us can find no place on
this canvas,/ even though they may be constitutive of its
production."[193] However, Ricoeur continually places emphasis not on
commitment as such, but on /renewed/ commitment, a commitment that has
been returned to again following a detour or reflection. Narrative is
so important, not because it represents the world directly, but
because it takes us /away/ from our worlds and the situations we
belong to, so that we can return again with an alternative
understanding of those worlds. Just as narratives appropriate human
time by translating and transforming it into a narrative mode, why not
see technologies as modes of appropriating time? From Simpson's more
humanist perspective, technologies indeed seem to threaten human
commitments, however, technologies themselves have their own
individual commitments and logics, expressed through the uniqueness of
a design, for example. This internal technological commitments will be
explored further in Chapter 7, in relation to Simondon. Accepting
these features of technologies means that the hermeneutic task would
involve finding ways to engage meaningfully with this novel modes of
commitment and logic. One way of finding renewed commitments within
the alienated commitments of technologies would be in re-appropriating
technologies back into praxis. This would enable subjects to exploring
the unanticipated applications opened up by the distanciating effects
of technologies. According to Ricoeur's hermeneutics, this is possible
at the practical or poetic level. Narrative understanding is one such
way of mediating a relation between distanciated representations and
the modes of understanding associated with practical
being-in-the-world.
3.2.2 Features of the Narrative Object
--------------------------------------
Simpson's characterization of the technological attitude to time as
standing against the practical understanding of meaningful duration
recalls Heidegger's criticism of `ordinary' time that stands against,
and causes forgetfulness of, our more `authentic' relation to the
world as revealed through care (/Sorge/).[194] While Ricoeur agrees
with Heidegger's claim that our relation to the world is
/fundamentally/ one of care, he disagrees that this mode of being is
more authentic than existing within the `everyday' or derived time of
modern society. As has already been discussed, Ricoeur aims to account
for the mixed nature of practical understanding as involving relations
of both belonging (care) and the distanciated structures that mediate
this belonging. Structures and representations that mediate our
practical participation in the world, for example clocks and
calendars, indeed displace us from a more 'primordial' relation to the
world, but in doing so also disclose new possibilities for action.
Furthermore, the co-existence of distanciated forms of mediation and
immediate, practical concerns is /inevitable/ for Ricoeur. Practical
relations with the world always have an intentional structure that can
be clarified and translated into structural modes of expression. A
farmer who participates `authentically' in the tending of the land and
growing of crops, even independently of the support of calendars and
clocks, does so in a way that "non-identically repeats" a relation to
the world (i.e., through relations of anticipation and retention), and
therefore, over time would inevitably develop a recognition of certain
features that could be separated from this experience and identified
as constants,
Thus, Dasein's "being ahead of itself," for instance, can
already be seen to harbor certain features of
datability---it seems unlikely that after several seasons
of planting my crops, after all, I should fail to notice
/some/ recurrent markers of seasonal change corresponding
to my actions---and with them the beginnings of an
inevitable fall into Heidegger's external or "ordinary"
time.[195]
Therefore, a purely phenomenological account of temporality leads to
an encounter with the question of the time that persists in the
material world, independently of me, since this time effects temporal
experience externally, or at a distance, and provides a framework for
translating lived experience into a repeatable, identifiable format.
However, these external, derived representations of lived experience
are themselves limited by the continued interactions of living, acting
subjects. For Ricoeur, calendar time opens out onto the time of the
/now,/ or the time of /initiative./ For example, certain dates are
rendered /significant/ through the actions and histories of particular
communities.
Narratives, in contrast to both the time of technology ("time of the
world") and the lived experience of time ("time of the soul"), offer a
"third time" that mediates both. The /totalizing/ tendency of the
"time of the world" (the time of the plot which renders each event of
a narrative meaningful in relation to the whole), is /frustrated/ by
the "time of the soul" that is inscribed within the plot in narrative
time,
It is the `objective', cosmological time onto which lived
time is inscribed which provides the basis of its
totalization; and the fundamentally open structure of
lived time itself, however successfully refigured, that
frustrates it. The totalizations of historical narratives
(mimesis 2) are fractured as they run up against the open
futural time of the active reader, which they refigure
(mimesis 3), but which, ultimately, they can never fully
enclose. Or, to put it another way, the present is
characterised by the basic autonomy of a de-totalizing
`space of experience'.[196]
Ricoeur's understanding of narrative mediation provides a way of
reconceiving the tension outlined by Simpson between the time of
practices and the time of technology. The /application/ of a narrative
work within the world of action (/mimesis_{3}/) is understood as a
"de-totalizing" act because it productively /responds/ to the
totalizing features of narrative. The features of narrative that lead
to this conception of the space of application as an open,
indeterminate negotiation between works and human actions will be
highlighted here. Firstly, narrative emplotment is conceived of by
Ricoeur as a dynamic /integration/ or configuration of heterogeneous
parts into a concordant whole. This activity differentiates narrative
from life and constitutes it as a /work./ Secondly, as a work it
produces its own temporality that mirrors human action and therefore
renders it /intelligible./ This means that any structural
comprehension of narrative must be related to hermeneutic questions of
understanding and reception. Finally, narrative application is
understood as a /productive/ activity. The re-appropriation of
narrative worlds back into the lifeworld is a difficult procedure --
the nature of hermeneutic application, which renders certain features
of a work significant or insignificant, means that every act of
reading /generates/ a new understanding of the same work.
Ricoeur's work on narrative in /Time and Narrative/ centres around the
thesis that, "/Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated
through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when
it becomes a condition of temporal existence."/[197] Narrative and
time are, for Ricoeur, locked in a relation of mutual becoming. The
first part of the statement continues Ricoeur's break with Heidegger
by advocating the crucial, epistemological function of mediation in
relation to our `human' understanding of temporal being. Temporality
is not only lived and felt and the level of primordial
being-toward-death, it is also an everyday, common, and historical
phenomena, that is 'counted' or articulated through a plurality of
finite, and shifting, modes of representation, with the most exemplary
of these being narratives. This first part of the statement also has a
bearing on our understanding of the human-technology relation. If
technologies do not articulate time through a `narrative mode', does
that mean their time is non-human? This, precisely, may be the power
of technology, from a post-modern or post-structuralist perspective.
It allows for the exploration of an `inhuman', or posthuman, space of
becoming. We are no longer bound to narrative forms of the past and
their corresponding understandings of (human) temporality, and are
instead free to travel along inhuman time-scales, intense `lines of
flight' and so on. On the other hand, this is also something to be
cautious of when it comes to technology. As we saw, for Simpson the
time of technology is a linearized time that alienates us from the
temporal flux of human practice. In this account, the time of
technology is the time of "planning", whereas the time of practice is
one of learning and meaningful repetition. Narrative, seen as a
practical (poietic) way of appropriating and rendering-meaningful
cosmic time, would be seen from this perspective to be opposed to
technological time. The repetition and transmissions of narratives is
different to the repetition encountered with technological processes.
The second aspect of the quote, where narrative becomes a condition
for temporal existence, is also important. Narratives are not only
ways of appropriating and making sense of temporal experience, they
also affect and condition our experience of the world. They can do so
in a more immediate sense, as in the case of the transformative
experience of a powerful work of literature, or they can do it in a
more `invisible' or unconscious sense, as in the case of ideological
narratives or even the narratives underlying the constructed apparatus
for measuring time (the mythological and cosmological roots of
calendar time, etc.).
It is the productive circularity of Ricoeur's core thesis on narrative
and time that is of interest here. Narratives are not only practical
means of rendering time sensible, they are also objects that stand
against experience, possessing a life of their own and a series of
effects that reach beyond the temporal relations they aim to
represent. They not only imitate human affairs, they also form worlds
of their own. The logic at work here is similar to the logic we have
been exploring already. However, what the discussion of narrative adds
is a particular emphasis on the way in which acts of /configuration/
inform our understandings of time. Technologies, too, gather together
heterogeneous parts and relations into concordant `wholes', which
initially emerge from practical experience, but also stand against it
in their artificiality. In this sense, both narratives and
technologies share in the process of what Gilbert Simondon calls
`concretization' (Chapter 7). The way they are formed is both
inventive and natural; inventive in the sense that narratives involve
productive imaginative leaps beyond current norms and understandings,
yet natural in the sense that as configurations they gain an
independence from both author and context, they become autonomous,
transmissible units or `worlds' in themselves. Similar to the way a
natural scientist approaches an autonomous living being, the reader of
the text approaches something which at first is unknown, has a
life/world of its own, is falsifiable, and so on. For Simondon,
technologies follow a similar path to narratives, from abstraction to
concrete existence. The /configurational/ features of narrative,
highlighted by Ricoeur, have already been applied as a framework for
understanding the ways technologies, against Simpsons'
characterization, also possess modes of temporal organisation that are
/mimetic,/ i.e., that correspond with human understandings of time.
With these points in mind, this section will explore the features of
narrative techniques of configuration, with emphasis on the
practical/intelligible character of narrative representation.
3.2.2.1 Integration
What Aristotle refers to as a plot is not a static
structure, but an operation, an integrative process, one
that, I hope to show, is completed only in the reader or
spectator, that is, in the living receiver of the told
story. By an "integrative process" I mean the work of
composition that confers on the narrated story an identity
that we can call a dynamic one.[198]
A much focused on aspect of Ricoeur's theory of narrative is its
emphasis on the /ordering/ function of emplotment. When linked to
questions of the philosophical identity of the self, this ordering
principle can become a powerful way of describing the coherency of a
self. On the other hand, the image of `continuity', and even grandeur,
which emerges from a narrative understanding of the self can
potentially be linked to a needlessly excessive concern with the self.
It is also easy to see the difficulty of Ricoeur's emphasis on order
and plot in light of actual genres of narrative which work to
undermine and deconstruct their own totality, for example, the
`antinovel'. Ricoeur's own reply to works like /Ulysses,/ in which the
configurative function of narrative is constantly interrupted, is that
"in such an extreme case, it is the reader, almost abandoned by the
work, who carries the burden of emplotment."[199] This statement, at
first sight, seems to undermine the intention and radical impact of
these works.
However, as indicated by the opening quote, the purpose of this
section is to explore the /dynamic/ aspects of this ordering, which
would challenge any association of it with an easy-won
`reconciliation', 'agreement', `self-assurance', etc. What is at stake
is Ricoeur's understanding of `repetition', designated by the concept
mimesis, and the implications this approach will have on the types of
repetition associated with technology. Repetition is what disrupts the
order of the plot, and, likewise, the order of the plot is what
disrupts the similitude of repetition.
In Ricoeur's theory of narrative, repetition occurs at three levels.
The first is the pre-figurative level, the level of participatory
being-in-the-world. If there is structuration at this level it is in
terms of /habit,/ or of the `involuntary' aspects of movement and
repetition, to use Ricoeur's category from /Freedom and Nature./[200]
These repetitions are marked by /contingency;/ be it in terms of
contingent customs or environmental restrictions, and it is the
"sorrow" of this contingency that gives rise to the will to
narrate.[201] Narration in this sense becomes a mode of re-marking, or
recording, via language, already marked out territories that have been
created through habit and custom, so that they can be clarified and
translated into a reflective mode of understanding.
This re-marking of previously established paths or traditions is,
again, a form of repetition. Yet, it is a repetition that necessarily
fails, since it is carried out in another register, one whose form
arises within linguistic modes of articulation, rather than `lived' or
habitual modes of being. It is precisely this difference or failure
that renders the configurative act of narrative /productive/ in terms
of understanding. As Gert-Jan van der Heiden points out, /mimesis_{2}/
is both a displacement of prior, implicit relations, and an /origin/
point for the understanding of these relations, "mimesis is
presupposed in the understanding of the sameness and the otherness of
the life world and the historical past with regard to the fictional
world and the historical narrative. Hence, Ricoeur's mimesis is an
original mimesis, but in a particular sense: /the understanding
originates in mimesis./"[202] Narrative, understood in this productive
sense, provides a figure against which we can understand a succession.
It gathers together successive, disparate events and characters into a
meaningful whole, aiming to replicate the successive events under the
guise of unity. However, the nature of the `figure' itself is also in
question, since it is defined as an "integrative process", not a fixed
representation.
The reason Ricoeur highlights this dynamic or processual character of
narrative representation is so that he can account for the two
distinct, but interrelated, compositional operations: imitation and
emplotment. Both terms remain in dialectical tension with one another
and, hence the dynamism of narrative. The conflict between imitation
and emplotment originates in Aristotle. As with Ricoeur's reading of
structuralism earlier, he aims to understand both these terms as
/operations/ rather than fixed structures.[203] When Aristotle defines
muthos (emplotment) as "The organisation of the events" (/ē tōn
pragmatōn sustasis/), Ricoeur stresses that composition/organisation
is not a `system' but an act, "the active sense of organizing the
events into a system, so as to mark the operative character of all the
concepts in the /Poetics./"[204] Whereas /mimesis,/ or imitation,
refers to the activity or replicating or `representing' human actions,
muthos/emplotment refers to the activity of organising these
representations into a coherent system. Drawing on the metaphorical
implications of the semantic equivalence between `emplotment' and
'composition', Ricoeur, following Aristotle, also stresses the musical
aspects of this work; it is achieved through the medium of "metrical
language". Its order is the order of `harmony' or concordance. There
are central melodic keys; tragic, comic, epic, which will govern the
process of organisation.
In the poetic activity of narrative, then, there are two competing
structuring operations. Imitation refers a narrative back to its
context, the world of human action, while emplotment works through its
reference to the final concordance of the narrative itself. These
conflicting references combined produce the effect of a /translation/
of action, rather than a replica. Just as the translator's task
involves serving "two masters",[205] the work of narrative composition
struggles between the replication of human action and the "melodic"
demands of the plot, akin to a language, with its own rules and
customs. Importantly, it is the ordering activity of emplotment, the
wandering search for harmony in the act of composition, that
establishes the crucial, productive difference between the work and
its intended objected, human action. Although Ricoeur does insist on a
correlation between imitation/repetition and emplotment, so that
"action is the 'construct' of that construction that mimetic activity
consists of"[206], the distinctiveness of each term in the pair
mimesis-muthos means that the correlation "must not be pushed too
far"[207]. If an accurate representation of human action is what is
aimed for in mimesis, it is a noesis that is left "unfulfilled" in the
Husserlian sense, "Aristotelian mimesis is not exhausted by the strict
noematic correlation between representation and what is represented,
but rather opens the way to an investigation of the referents of
poetic activity intended by emplotment on the two sides [ /en amont et
an aval/ ] of mimesis/muthos."[208]
Ricoeur's definition of narrative as a /concordant discordance/
expresses this internal, conflictual struggle. Just as we saw earlier
with the task of reflection and its struggle for clarity in spite of
ambiguity, the work of narrating is a struggle for temporal unity `in
spite of' the successive nature of time. Narratives may be both
concordant and discordant, but these terms represent /operations/ or
/progressions/ in relation to the whole of the work. Whereas the aim
of reflection is clarity of sense, the clarity of narrative is a
`harmonic' one; structural, yes, but a structure which incorporates
both concordance and discordance. Arnold Schoenberg, in /Structural
Functions of Harmony,/ opens the book by distinguishing the act of
composition from succession in a way that mirrors Ricoeur's
understanding of structuration,
A /succession/ is aimless; a /progression/ aims for a
definite goal...A /progression/ has the function of
establishing or contradicting a tonality...The centripetal
function of progressions is exerted by stopping
centrifugal tendencies, i.e., by establishing a tonality
through the conquest of its contradictory elements.[209]
The narrative object, for Ricoeur, also possesses this logic of
'progression'; shifts in tone or course of a plot are reflective of
the internal demands of the plot to render discordances concordant,
and it is these features which both render a narrative /worldly/ and,
by implication, unfamiliar or different (in relation to our own
experience).
However, the structural or harmonic aspects of narrative composition
must not be pushed too far. The arrangement of a story is not only
determined internally, as a negotiation between centrifugal and
centripetal forces, between mere `episodes' and a larger whole. It is
also arranged so that is /followable./ That is, the act of composition
is not only technical (artful), it is also /practical;/ it must be
capable of being received and grasped by an audience. The `figure' of
narrative is both organised/complete and open to
interpretation/engagement. The art of narrating is the art of
composing a means of communication.
Since narrative, as a mode of organisation, strives towards a `key' it
differentiates itself from the temporal experience of life, which
Ricoeur argues, via Augustine, is marked by a fundamental discordance.
The difference is not arbitrary, though. It is the condition for both
the life of the narrative and for our understanding of lived
experience. The difference conditions the life of the narrative
because the "unfulfilled" content of narrative leaves open the
possibility of future appropriations. A narrative ceases to be an
object closed in on itself, bound to a certain historical time, and
instead becomes a process, capable of being taken up again and again
in different contexts. The 'action' it imitates is also the /future/
action of readers or listeners who will be influenced by its content
in radically new situations. From the other side, lived experience is
also conditioned through the difference of narrative articulation
because, although discordant and lacking in narrative phenomena such
as `closure', life is also a "story in search of a narrator."[210] In
this sense, the act of narrative is an entirely practical, and even
natural, `response' to questions or problems posed by lived
experience. It is not an artificial escape into a fantasy-world, but
rather emerges through practical experience with others which is
always fraught with problems demanding a poetic solution. The
`discordances' of life, the lack of closure, the distended soul, the
impossibility of a `present', the frustrating lack of closure, are all
also temporally constituted. Life is not `totally' discordant, in a
metaphysical sense, only our experience of it.
3.2.2.2 Intelligibility
Highlighting further the inherent /practical/ character of narrative
organisation, it is important to emphasise the nature of the narrative
object itself (/mimesis_{2}/), which for Ricoeur is not a structure
but a process of structuration, and therefore is identified not
through its rational features, but through its intelligibility.
Whereas narrative rationality arises from taking /mimesis_{2}/ in
isolation, accounting for the intelligibility of narrative means
acknowledging the interlocking of all three stages (/mimesis_{1, 2,
3}/). Taken as a structure, /mimesis_{2}/ can be explained using the
scientific methods of linguistics. Taken as an intermediary position
between /mimesis_{1}/ and /mimesis_{3}/, a narrative work can only be
explained through the lens of practical intelligibility.
The term /mimesis_{2}/ designates the literary work or product itself.
As a finished work, it possesses an objective character. It lends
itself to scientific analysis and dissection. According to Ricoeur,
this objective aspect of /mimesis_{2}/ is linked to "narrative
rationality", to the codified (semiotic) structures found expressed in
narrative traditions, but ultimately located at the synchronic,
virtual level. Semiotic approaches are distinguished by Ricoeur from
his own through his understanding of the lived temporalities that are
irreducibly inscribed in narratives. Whereas, at the level of
linguistics, narrative structures can be rationalised and codified,
their temporal character resists being reduced to a "simple
chronology".[211] Although, structurally, central moments of a
narrative can be isolated and identified, the /passages/ of time that
hold these structural points together are far more indeterminate and
`irrational' for Ricoeur. Detours and procrastinations, on the way to
fulfilling a "quest", for example, are evidence that a narrative is
never a simple sequence of events, but also a configuration or whole.
In other words, the time taken between being given a quest/contract,
and the successful fulfilling of this quest, is not presented, by
narrative, as being linear; it involves distension, delay, suspense,
and so on.[212] Two competing temporalities are always at work within
the narrative, which Günther Müller calls /erzählte Zeit/ (the actual
time taken for the events described to unfold.) and /Erzählzeit/ (time
taken to recount these events). The plot not only orders events and
causes into a representable form, it also does so in /teleological/
way. The objective time of the world (/erzählte Zeit/) is translated
into narrative time (/Erzählzeit/) in a way that draws out the
/significance/ or /intelligibility/ of these events. Events that, in
`real time' may have taken years to occur can be reduced to a sentence
in narrative, and similarly, an event that may have taken only a few
seconds can be extended and described over the course of many pages,
"Müller calls this process of transmutation /Raffung,/ which may be
translated as 'pleating' or `folding.' For Ricoeur, its primary
importance is that it represents a break or rupture with linear time,
a transformation of Aristotle's cosmic time into a time of human
preoccupation or concern."[213]
For Ricoeur, any attempt to explain narrative structures using a
rational framework is always a second order description, since the
operations of inscribing lived time within narrative time are
reflective of hermeneutic questions of belonging and tradition. The
rules that govern the structure (second order) aspects of narrative
are a "simulation of a narrative intelligence already there, a
simulation that puts into play deep structures unknown to those who
tell stories or who follow stories."[214] Narrative intelligence, on
the other hand, which is a practical intelligence and awareness of
both the history and future of narrative, acknowledges that a
narrative /work/ is never a 'finished' product, since an inherent
feature of the work is its capacity to /re-figure/ life (the life of a
reader). Narrative intelligence is the object of a hermeneutic account
of narrative,
My enterprise differs from what many theoreticians of the
text call textural semiotics. In my opinion, these
theoreticians build up an abstraction, that of
/mimesis_{2},/ by considering only the internal laws of
the literary work. It is the task of hermeneutics, on the
contrary, to reconstruct the set of operations by means of
which a work arises from the opaque depths of living,
acting, and suffering, to be given by an author to readers
who receive it and thereby change their own actions.[215]
Only a hermeneutics of the text is capable of grasping the relation
between the "internal laws" of the literary work and the nature of the
interaction between the work and the embodied, historically-situated
reader.
Due to this aspect of narrative temporality, which renders
intelligible the human experiences of suffering and being capable,
constructing a well-formed narrative is not only a technical project
of rationally connecting together events, effects, characters, etc.,
so that the story as a whole `makes sense'. Rather, the construction
of narrative is also a pragmatic endeavour. The delays, suspense, and
distorted feelings that we experience through narrative are what bind
us to it at a different level, a `human' level. The `gathering
together' of disparate elements, the act of narrating, is both a play
with structures /and/ a play with temporality. Emplotment is also
reflective of
an act of judgement, one arising from an act of "grasping
together." Or to put it another way, plot stems from a
/praxis/ of narrating, hence from a pragmatics of
speaking, not from a grammar of /langue./ This pragmatics
is presupposed by, but cannot be produced within, the
framework of the grammar of roles.[216]
The work of emplotment combines a know-how of structures (genres,
figures, etc.), with a practical wisdom that grasps the /temporal/
nature of narrative. This difference, between `knowing how' and
`knowing when', will be taken up again in Section 4 with regard to the
design of technologies.
3.2.2.3 Production
So far, Ricoeur's theory of narrative has helped us outline two
dynamic aspects of a poetics; firstly, the integrated activity of
representing and translating, which moves both toward life (imitation)
and away from it (emplotment), secondly, the character of the work
itself, whose communicative function is fulfilled /in time,/ according
to the variable laws of practical judgement, rather than in isolation,
as a fixed, rational structure. This second feature, especially, leads
us to the third. Narrative is on the one hand a `production', an
integrated whole with a beginning, middle, and end, but, it is also
something that /produces/. This feature of narrative returns us again
to our recurring theme of hermeneutic application.
Narrative production/appropriation is twofold; it is both anticipatory
and retroactive. Its anticipatory character is manifested in what both
Ricoeur and Wolfgang Iser discuss as the /activity/ of reading. This
activity is a negotiation process between reader and text, a dynamic,
creative activity that produces a situation. The retroactive character
of narrative production is revealed through its capacity to not just
create new reading experiences, but to /transform/ a tradition. This
aspect of narrative production or application is what prevents it from
becoming a vicious circle of repetition. Instead, Ricoeur speaks of
"an endless spiral that would carry the mediation past the same point
a number of times, but at different altitudes."[217]
/Anticipation/
The significance of the literary object, for Iser, lies in its
creative force. Its creative power is due to its capacity to
persuasively challenge accepted or implicit conventions. Beginning
with Austin's well-known analysis of speech acts, he highlights what
Austin terms the "parasitic" nature of the poetic utterance. For
Austin, the effect of an illocutionary act is not guaranteed by its
utterance. Rather, its success is conditional; it must be
appropriately acknowledged by the recipient in order for the act to
have taken place, for the language to have `done' something. A
successful acknowledgment involves an awareness of the specific
/situation/ that the speech act is uttered in, "the precise nature of
the /illocutionary force/ in the speech act is something the recipient
can derive only from the situational context...Only when the recipient
shows by his /responses/ that he has correctly received the speaker's
intention are the conditions fulfilled for the success of the
linguistic action."[218] By contrast, as we have seen above,
narratives and literature work by displacing and transcending
contexts. But, as both Ricoeur and Iser demonstrate, a variety of
rhetorical and persuasive strategies are adopted throughout the modes
of communication employed by fiction, and, in this way, they possess a
performative /force/ in the same way as regular illocutionary speech
acts do. There is, nevertheless, a strong degree of uncertainty in
their reception; which situation and conventions are being indicated
through a fictional perlocutionary act? Narratives employ rhetorical
and pragmatic strategies to convince us, but what exactly they are
aiming to convince us of remains unclear. Austin himself writes:
a performative utterance will, for example, be /in a
peculiar way/ hollow or void if said by an actor on stage,
or if introduced in a poem, or spoken in a
soliloquy...Language in such circumstances is in special
ways -- intelligibly -- used not seriously, but in ways
/parasitic/ upon its normal use...all this we are
/excluding/ from consideration. Our performative
utterances, felicitous or not, are to be understood as
issued in ordinary circumstances.[219]
Poetic utterances are not counted as speech acts because they do not
produce a linguistic action, yet, they are also /parasitic -/ they
imitate the qualities of speech acts but `fail' at the level of
application, "literature imitates the illocutionary speech act, but
what is said does not produce what is meant. This raises the question
of whether nothing at all is produced, or whether what is produced can
only be regarded as a failure."[220] It is this so-called "failure"
that Iser draws on to argue for his, more dialogical, model of
production. Whereas `ordinary' speech acts produce action within
acknowledged contexts, poetic acts work to produce new situations or
variations on contexts, by initiating a dialogue between the
dislocated text and located reader. It is precisely the
/indeterminate/ aspect of this dialogue that renders the act of
reading a "situation-building" process.
Both Ricoeur and Iser, when discussing the act of reading, focus in on
the significance of the relative indeterminacy of the process. For
Iser, holes, lacuna and blanks in the text can help "stimulate" the
creative response of the reader,[221] and for Ricoeur, his formula for
narrative -- concordant /discordance/ -- is intended to highlight the
disruptive effect of narrative strategies, as much as their ordering
function, with the most classic of these strategies being
/peripeteia./ Unlike an `object' given in the phenomenological sense,
the text is an incomplete object. The incompleteness is both
structural, as in the case of systemic `noise' and deviations, aimed
more towards the response of the reader than the structural
coherence/closure of the text itself,[222] as well as temporal -- the
subject that perceives the object is a "wandering" one, "The relation
between text and reader is therefore quite different from that between
object and observer: instead of a subject-object relationship, there
is a moving viewpoint which travels along /inside/ that which it has
to apprehend."[223] This incompleteness renders the reading process
one of /concretization,/ "For Ingarden, a text is incomplete, first,
in the sense that it offers different `schematic views' that readers
are asked to `concretize'...However well-articulated the `schematic
views' proposed for our execution may be, the text resembles a musical
score lending itself to different realizations."[224] In this way, a
narrative gathers together, or arranges, incomplete worlds, whose
significance only appears (becomes concrete) via a fusion of horizons
between text and reader.
At the same time, fictional works are also "/rival/ worlds"; they
challenge current, practical understandings by presenting imagined
alternatives. They gather together features and norms from ordinary
lived experience and are seen as proposed solutions to ongoing
questions. As we saw earlier, the /meaning/ of a text, as opposed to
its significance, also plays a role in the reading process. The idea
of hermeneutic application and the fusion of horizons should not be
separated from the processes of understanding and explanation. Reading
is not only a "situation-building" process, but also a process of
recovery or restoration. A text is not only a medium for communication
between implied author and implied reader, but also has its place
within a context or history. This feature is revealed through a
reflective exegesis, and leads us to the question of the retroactivity
of the text. That is, the "situation-building" process affects not
only the self-understanding of the reader confronting the text, but
also our understanding of the reality of the world of the text itself.
3.2.2.4 Retroaction
If the world of the text is something that is perpetually open to
future readings, for Ricoeur this does not mean that its significance
is endlessly deferred. Application is, indeed, a making concrete of
the text's meaning through the reading process, but this activity is
always informed by the history of the text. In this sense, it is not
only that the narrative acts as a set of `instructions' which guide
the reading process, but also, the reader brings to bear her own
`concordances' onto the discordances of the narrative. As with the
case of the wandering viewpoint and the collapse of the subject-object
distinction, from the perspective of history, text and reader are
mutually determined and determining; both represent a history of
effects whose interaction establishes a productive outcome on each
side. On the side of the reader, the world of the text is
appropriated, and the reader is transformed through this activity. On
the side of the text, its meaning is also transformed, its past
structures alter in a recognisable way.
Ricoeur's three phases of narrative can be seen as three different
forms of enactment. /Mimesis_{1}/ refers to the pre-narrative,
implicit, enactments carried out in lived experience. /Mimesis_{2}/,
the enactment of these pre-narrative experiences in plot-form.
/Mimesis_{3}/ the re-interpretation of plot through re-appropriating
it back into the lifeworld. As Ricoeur recognises, there is a circular
relation between the three, yet he insists it is not a /vicious/
circle. The re-appropriation of /mimesis_{3}/, essentially a
repetition of /mimesis_{1}/ mediated by /mimesis_{2}/, is not a
repetition of the same. Instead, Ricoeur insists on the dialectical
character of the process. The formula, though, is not: `disorder
(life) -- order (plot) -- ordered life (narrative understanding)'.
Instead, we are first faced with the various paradoxes of time,
presented by Augustine and others. To see life as /purely/ discordant
or chaotic, would level out this paradox.[225] These paradoxes are
primarily speculative or theoretical, and without resolution at this
level. In this sense, they open a space for a poetic solution. This
solution does not seek to fully resolve the problems of time, in a
theoretical sense, but to dramatize them and render them practically
intelligible. The relation between time and narrative is indeed one of
question and answer, or problem and solution, yet it is not one of
discordance-concordance. This would lead to the `violence of
interpretation', to imposing a solution where there is none, i.e.,
imposing artificial order on disorder, "this is how it consoles us in
the face of death."[226] Neither is the act of narrating `redundant',
due to the `prenarrative' aspect of life.
So, Ricoeur insists on a continuity across the difference between
narrative and life, one which guards against a view of
narrative-as-order, on the one hand, and of life-as-disorder, on the
other. Instead, narratives, due to their poetic, as opposed to
theoretical, nature, succeed through resisting closure, through being
both concordant and discordant. Time, although seemingly unknowable
and discordant, also presents us with a myriad of `potential stories',
or potential points of configuration and construction.
One of Ricoeur's concrete examples for this phenomenon is taken from
psychoanalysis.[227] Here, narrative understanding plays a crucial
role, precisely because of its relation to time. In psychoanalytic
theory, there is often a temporal distance between an actual traumatic
event, and the event taking effect in the subject's consciousness.
This may be due to various reasons, but for Lacan and Freud it is
caused by the relationship between language and trauma; a traumatic
event takes effect once we have a /name/ for it (or understand that it
ought to have a name). For this reason, Lacan speaks of a `fall' into
the symbolic network. Freud's term for this process is
/Nachtraglichkeit/ - "afterwardness" or retroactivity. In other
domains, too, the production of a new work can potentially alter our
understanding of all that has come before it retroactively.
In this way, the /meaning/ of a narrative, whilst possessing its own
integrity and autonomy, cannot be grasped outside the space of
application. There is always a lot `at stake' in any application or
appropriation process; the transformation of a self or a context
cannot be separated from the transformation of an entire history of
effects. Hermeneutic appropriation always needs to be accompanied by a
reflective understanding of the history of the work. This does not
subtract from the appropriation process, it deepens it, since
uncovering the history of effects is understanding better the
foreignness/otherness of the work. With technologies, too, they at
once contain innovative communication and situation-building
strategies, but also a /history./ The development of solar power
retroactively affects our understanding of coal. Returning to a
typewriter in the age of digital computing is retroactively figured as
an act of `nostalgia'.
Narratives, at the level of application, or `production', maintain
their dialectical character. They are distanced from the lifeworld in
that they do not refer directly to a situation, but due to their
`parasitic' character they also play a crucial role in the lifeworld
through the process of situation-building. The task of concretisation
through application is ambiguous. It involves the active appropriation
of a distanced or foreign world (the world of the text) on the part of
the reader, but the text, too, is never wholly other. It is also a
medium of communication. It belongs to the lifeworld in and through
its distance from it. It is not only a series of material traces and
operations, it also has a reflective aspect - it anticipates a reader
or listener.
We will see in the following section that these features of
narratives; integration, intelligibility, and production, also relate
to the way technologies function in the lifeworld. They, like the work
of emplotment, `gather together' and integrate heterogeneous elements
of practices and represent them in a more codified, structured mode.
They are not only `rational' structures, but also intelligible,
requiring users and designers to follow a line of thought, to
understand the overall aim or function, as well as the individual
parts that, gathered together, work toward the realisation of this
aim. Finally, they are also application-oriented. Whereas, it may seem
at first that, unlike a narrative which invites multiple
interpretations and revisions, technologies aim toward /direct,/
unmediated (via a reader or user) application, technologies often
possess the same communicative features of narrative. That is,
application in the case of technology is often as uncertain and
indeterminate as in the case of narratives. Technologies can be seen
as inviting users to participate in a mutual process of
concretization, with the user often having as much say in the outcome
as the intended aim of the technologies themselves. Furthermore,
engagement with technologies, as with narrative, always has the
potential to retroactively affect our understanding of a particular
technological design.
I have focused on the three above features of the narrative work,
integration, intelligibility, and production, because they are all
related to the ways that narrative affects practical understanding /at
a distance./ The integrative force of narrative, caused by the demands
of the plot, arises from the desire to render time in a more
presentable form. As we saw in the first part of this chapter,
technologies aim to perform a similar operation, and this was seen by
Simpson as a negative aspect of modern technology.
Yet, by drawing on features of narrative understanding, we can
potentially re-read technologies in their practical, intelligible, and
productive dimensions. The relationship between the narrative object
(/mimesis_{2}/) and technological forms of configuration has already
been productively explored by Mark Coeckelbergh and Wessel Reijers, as
well as by Bruno Gransche in considering the /mimetic/ character of
computer simulations.[228] These approaches emphasize the ways that
technological configurations cannot be reduced to the linear,
technological model of time that Simpson associates with modern
technology. Instead, their structures more closely resemble the
configurational form of emplotment, i.e., they are also teleological
ordered and aimed to be /followed/ or engaged with by human
interlocutors. In this sense, they also contain traces of
phenomenological or /lived/ time inscribed within their structures.
For example, Coeckelbergh and Reijers stress that technological
configuration involves both chronological and a-chronological aspects.
The a-chronological aspects of narrative are what distinguish it from
a mere description of a chain of events, since they work to relate
individual parts of a narrative to the whole. For example, this is
what allows for a `sense of an ending' to emerge from overlapping
series which, from a purely causal perspective, seem unrelated.
Coeckelbergh and Reijers argue that technologies also contain an
"a-chronological" sense of configuration, due to the necessary
presence of a /user/ or human interlocutor. For example,
when using a car a driver enters the car, puts his seat in
the right position, adjusts the mirrors, starts the
engine, is given visual feedback about the amount of gas
in the tank, drives away from the parking spot. These
events are implied in the way the technology is
constructed and the way the human understands it, the car
/configures/ them. However, the sequence is not strictly
chronological. Some events are determined in a
chronological order, like starting the engine /before/
driving away. In contrast, adjusting the seat of the
mirrors can be done in many different orders; such events
are organised according to an a-chronological
dimension.[229]
Ricoeur's understanding of narrative configuration provides a
framework for interpreting technologies that encompasses both their
constructed, artificial feature, and the /linguistic,/ living aspects
of these constructions. The linguistic, or narrative, features of
technological configuration highlight the way that technologies are
readable, or re-configurable, by the subjects engaging with them.
However, whereas these authors aim to develop a direct theory of
technology through drawing parallels between /mimesis_{2}/ and
technological devices and systems, in the following section I will
focus on the relation between application, or /mimesis_{3}/, and
technology. Just as the /meaning/ of the narrative work is only
disclosed through appropriation, I will focus on the meaning of
technologies understood from this perspective.
Both Ricoeur's account of psychoanalytic technique and his outline of
the narrative work stress the dangers of taking these phenomena `in
isolation'. Techniques, following Ricoeur, cannot be /objectified,/
since their meaning depends on a dynamic process of application. Given
that Ricoeur stresses the dangers of objectifying approaches that
neglect the question of practical appropriation, it is unfortunate
that he himself seemed to adopt an `objectifying' account of modern
technology. Technologies, as we will see in the next section also
/integrate/ and re-configure lived practical understandings. Just as
/mimesis_{3 }/ is integral to the narrative understood as a /work/,
technological devices and interfaces depend on the configurational
input of users in their practical applications. Although technologies
/anticipate/ or /intend/ certain responses, in practice living
engagements with technologies will potentially transform these
anticipations.
4 Technological Application
===========================
This following section charts the implications of Ricoeur's
understanding of technique and distanciation for a consideration of
technology. Although there may seem to be a divide between Ricoeur's
notion of /technique,/ as a practical method of clarification and
unmasking, and the question of /technological/ approaches to practice,
I aim to demonstrate that technological applications retain many of
the characteristics Ricoeur associates with technique. Although this
approach, which reduces technology to the question of its /hermeneutic
application,/ misses out on key aspects of modern technology that
would arise from a more encompassing viewpoint (for example, the
Actor-Network Theory approach, a postphenomenological analysis, and so
on), the aim of this section is not to present a definition of
technology or its essential features, but rather to draw out its
aspects that resonate with Ricoeur's productive account of technique,
that is, its conflictual and revelatory characteristics that appear
through its practical application. Nonetheless, in adopting this
limited perspective, I hope to highlight both the essential
limitations of technology (its constitutive dependence on interpretive
engagements of interacting agents) as well as its transformative
potential in relation to human understanding.
As was outlined in previous chapters, hermeneutic perspectives that
emphasize the centrality of practical understanding tend to be
critical of the /alienating/ distance produced by modern technology.
Whilst accepting this approach to the extent that it articulates an
important and fundamental tension between the practical understanding
of a self (/phronēsis/) and the types of knowledge gained through the
distance of theory or method, I argue that these two fields of
understanding, the practical and the evaluative, are integral to one
another. For this reason, my discussions of contemporary technologies
focus on thinkers who aim to draw on the productivity of the
difference between technologies and human practical understanding.
Key technological phenomena, such as the device and the interface, can
be analysed from a perspective of a hermeneutics of suspicion. Their
logic or mode of representation is seen to be guided by an
over-arching aim to render a functional, univocal reality. These
features of technology, which are linked to how we define the purpose
of technology (to make our lives easier, to solve certain problems
more efficiently, and ultimately, to control the world and its
variations), do indeed possess a certain /intentionality./ This
intentionality or attitude which guides technical progresses is,
following Heidegger, related to a mode of comportment towards the
world, the mode where the object is constituted as being
present-at-hand.
Whereas, to a degree, the essence of technology is constituted through
this mode of comportment, technological devices themselves, within the
context of history and practice, more commonly display modes of
/multistability./ To draw a parallel, if one of Ricoeur's main goals
in developing his theory of textual distanciation was to replace a
"hermeneutics of the author" (a reconstructive project) with a
hermeneutics of appropriation,[230] which placed emphasis on the
/productive/ and generative role of the reader/interpreting agent,
then my goal here is to replace a focus on the "author" of technology
(the designer, engineer, modern science, etc.) with a focus on the
"user" of technology who renders a technology significant (or
insignificant) according to the practical concerns of an individual,
community, or tradition. The reasons why this shift in perspective is
possible is due to (1) the multistability of the device, (2) the
"unworkability" of the interface, and (3) the relational difference
between technological ensembles and human understanding.
Chapter 5 and 6 will follow a similar format. They will begin with a
critique of technology that draws on hermeneutic understandings of
practice, which will then be followed by contrasting perspectives that
highlight the practical and uncertain features of technological
devices themselves. Chapter 5 begins with Albert Borgmann's argument
that practices involve relations between agents and meaningful
/things./ Modern technological /devices/ on the other hand are
distinct from things. They are designed in relation to a single
purpose (providing comfort by making something more available), and
therefore the /interpretive/ features of things are negated, i.e.,
whereas things contain the possibility to be read and used in multiple
ways depending on the practical concerns of human agents engaging with
them (for example, the hearth of a home), devices can be reduced to a
univocal, technological logic (for example, a radiator, whose purpose
is to provide heat in the most `invisible', unburdening way possible).
In contrast, the work of Peter-Paul Verbeek argues that the practical
hermeneutic feature of /things --/ their power to mediate in fluid,
variable ways -- can also be associated with technological devices.
Verbeek argues that by approaching devices from the perspective of how
they /mediate/ human action and understanding, rather than by their
univocal intentionality, we can begin to design better devices that
shape our moral environments in more productive ways.
In Chapter 6, I examine David Lewin's critique of the interface, which
is similar to Borgmann's critique of the device. Both thinkers
emphasize not only the way that these technological phenomena exclude
the need for human deliberation and practice, but also the way that
they conceal the alternative, i.e., in a world populated by devices
and interfaces we no longer feel the desire to build a practical
relationship with our environments or ourselves. Instead, we forgo the
difficult praxis of self-creation and understanding because it seems
difficult and uncertain in comparison to the "utopia of functionality"
that the device and the interface offer us. However, this approach
will also be contrasted with those of Alexander Galloway and Brenda
Laurel, who, as I read them, allow us to shift the perspective from a
focus on the /representational/ features of technologies, towards
their /presentational/ features. For Galloway, the /aesthetic/
dimension of the interface reveals its inconsistent and /unworkable/
nature. For this reason, it ought to be understood more through its
practical /effects/ than its underpinning logic or over-arching
purpose. For Laurel, the interface should be understood as a process
of mediation, its purpose is to guide and support meaningful action in
the world. As with a theatre production, there is a tension between
the messages or themes being expressed and the performative features
of the expression (set design, actors, the flow of the narrative,
etc.). In the same way, human-computer interactions cannot be reduced
to questions of /function/ or utility. Instead, the interface places
users at a hermeneutic distance from a direct understanding of the
computer by inserting performative, dialogical features into the
interaction.
The tensions explored in chapters 5 and 6, between definitions of what
technologies /are/ (their logic, how they conceal, etc.) and what
technologies /do/ (how they mediate practical action) will be explored
further in chapter 7. As with Ricoeur's description of a /conflict of
interpretations,/ it seems that we are faced with two hermeneutic
alternatives, either practice a hermeneutics of suspicion, aimed at
unmasking technological modes of domination, or a (post)phenomenology
of hope/faith, which would restrict itself to the revelatory qualities
of technologies, i.e., their practical, mediational dimension, the
aspect of technology which /addresses/ me and calls me to act.
Arguably, technologies have both an objective and a practical
dimension. Their essence or logic, as the hermeneutic thinkers
explored here suggest, progressively aims towards univocity,
functionality and the elimination of the temporal flux of practice.
However, their practical, living features also suggests a degree of
variability and multistablity when this logic is concretely applied to
the lifeworld. Just as Ricoeur is critical of approaches which tend
towards abstraction, the hermeneutic critique of technologies tends to
reduce it to only one side of its meaning (its logic). One way to
think about a more productive relationship between the alterity of
technology (in relation to practice) and the practical variability of
concrete instances of technologies, is to assert the /limits/ of a
suspicion of technology. The work of Gilbert Simondon allows us to do
this, since he argues that /technics/ is always in a process of
coming-to-be, i.e., its essence is not fixed or fully knowable. This
enables us to see the meaning of technology, on the one hand, and the
practical manifestations of technologies, on the other, not as polar
opposites, but as two sides of the same process. Such an approach
allows us to begin to talk about the possibility of a playful
/appropriation/ of technologies, which would retain both a critical
distance and an engaged participation. Ricoeur's understanding of
appropriation, linked to self-understanding, provides a framework for
thinking about the hermeneutic circle between the self and technology.
As a postphenomenological account suggests, practical engagements with
technologies are required to unfold the different meanings and
intentionalities of technological devices. However, hermeneutic
appropriation adds to this the idea that, in drawing out the untried
applications of technological designs, the practical /self/ also
becomes enlarged. Uncovering the untried possibilities of technologies
implies the disclosing of future possibilities for practice and the
types of selves who participate in those practices.
4.1 The Device
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
/A crucial feature of a technological device is that it
makes something available to us in a comfortable way. You
don't have to work for it. It's there at our beck and
call./[231]
/Every/ techne /poses an intrinsic limit: its knowledge is
not a full uncovering of something because the work it
knows how to produce is delivered into the uncertainty of
a use over which it does not preside./[232]
The two above quotations represent a key tension that will be explored
in this section. The first quote, taken from an interview with Albert
Borgmann, reflects his criticism of the technological /device/. The
device, in contrast to the focal thing, is dangerous because it
discourages us from developing meaningful practices around it. It does
'work' on our behalf, but in doing so deprives us of valuable
experiences that can only be gained by working-through a situation.
Its supposed practicality, framed here in terms of the `comfort' it
provides us, actually ends up threatening our practical understanding
of situations, therefore rendering the device an /impractical/
artefact that conceals this nature through its functionality which
appears as practical (albeit, a different, utilitarian sense of the
practical). As with Simpson in the previous chapter, the comfort and
availability of the device /alienates/ us from the uncertainty of
practice.
The second quote, by Gadamer, presents a similar division, but one
which incorporates the broader sense of /techne./ For Gadamer, the
inherent /uncertainties/ of human practices can never be resolved
through recourse to /techne -/ there is always an ambiguity that
persists between a concrete, practical formation and the formal rules
and guidelines that mediate practices. The ambiguity can only be
resolved by an act of interpretation or judgment, guided by
/phronēsis./ That is, it is only a /self,/ existing among a community
of other selves, who is capable of at once perceiving the
particularity of a concrete historical moment and the relevance (or
irrelevance) of the formal rules that might apply to this moment.
Although we learn a skill or /techne/ to /apply/ it in various
contexts, the demands encountered within the contexts themselves will
potentially escape the limits of the skill or knowledge we have
learned, and therefore will involve a synthesis or mediation which
acknowledges these limits. In other words, like the device, knowledge
associated with /techne/ can appear highly functional and useful, but
within concrete contexts /uncertainties/ persist which can only be
resolved through /phronēsis. Techne,/ from the perspective of
practical wisdom, can appear entirely /impractical/ due to its
internal limitations and inability to anticipate uncertainty.
For Borgmann, to overcome the hermeneutic impracticality of the device
we must begin to cultivate alternative human practices which embrace
the notion of the /focal thing./ That is, through purposeful and
communal action we can reconstitute (re-territorialize) our practical
environments as spaces of meaningful, uncertain relations between
persons and things. However, in the second part of the chapter the
work of Peter-Paul Verbeek is explored in order to ask whether this
person-thing, practice-based ontology is the only way to approach the
'limits' of technological devices. According to postphenomenology,
technologies themselves, in their multistability, present their own
set of uncertainties requiring practical negotiation. From this
perspective it is possible to challenge the notion that there is a
fundamental division between /phronēsis/ and /techne./ That is, we
ought to ask whether practices are only constituted through the
activity of human, interpretive agents (capable of practical wisdom),
or whether practical self-understanding can also be seen as a product
of /techne/. This perspective is advocated by Foucault and Pierre
Hadot, for example, where the idea of /technology/ is combined with
the idea of a /self/.[233] Selfhood, on this account, is always linked
to the external skills and techniques we learn throughout life. Once
this constitutive role of external techniques is recognized, we can
begin the task of designing /better,/ more moral, techniques of the
self. This view of practice, which aims to encompass both the
activities of agents and the devices and artefacts that mediate and
even enable these activities, is more closely related to Ricoeur's
account of practical understanding as involving both distanciation and
belonging, i.e., we do not only belong to a milieu through our
practical relations with things and others, we are also always already
/distanced/ from it. A hermeneutics of distanciation suggests that
stepping away from a practice, in order to analyse or examine its
features, can also draw us closer to it. It accepts the fact that, as
Ricoeur writes, every proximity or relation of belonging is already
mediated by a "secret" distance.[234] The work of Verbeek draws on a
similar view of practice and emphasizes the role that /technologies/
play in everyday modes of practical mediation. Recognizing this
feature of practice, the interrelationship between distance and
belonging, allows Verbeek to develop an ethics of design.
4.1.1 Things and Devices
------------------------
For Borgmann, in a similar sense to Simpson in the previous chapter,
our traditional senses of practice are in danger of being overturned
by modern technology. In particular, practice as a way of developing
/focus/ is threatened by modern technology. Once again, it is not
necessarily technology or /techne/ in-itself that is being questioned,
but the "tightly patterned character" of a society dominated by
technology. Indeed, techniques have always accompanied human life, but
when technology becomes more effective and general, it transforms our
relation to it in a negative way. Borgmann argues that the greatest
danger posed by technology is that we become `alienated' from our
practices. The comfort of the device renders practical
being-in-the-world a `burden' in contrast, an approach that is similar
to Simpsons (we are alienated from practices),
As long as we overlook the tightly patterned character of
technology and believe that we live in a world of
endlessly open and rich opportunities, as long as we
ignore the definite ways that we, acting technologically,
have worked out the promise of technology and remain
vaguely enthralled by that promise, so long simple things
and practices will seem burdensome, confining and drab.
But if we recognise the central vacuity of advanced
technology, that emptiness can become the opening for
focal things. It works both ways, of course. When we see a
focal concern of ours threatened by technology, our sight
for the liabilities of mature technology is
sharpened.[235]
Focal concerns require time to develop. The `promise' of technology,
which appears infinite, perpetually distracts us from the time of the
present. Why take the time to develop a meaningful, focused relation
with a milieu, when the milieu is constantly being transformed and
updated by technological innovation? Even if we were to consider that
there are many reasons why doing so might be beneficial, we are
persuaded by the rationality perpetuated by the "tightly patterned"
technological network of devices that affects our worldview and makes
focused practice seem `obsolete' or irrational.
Borgmann utilizes hermeneutic understandings of practice and /praxis/
to develop a critical account of modern technology. What is at stake
is the practical relation between persons and things. In the case of
the technological device, the person is no longer a part of the
relation - the device does all the work, is pre-programed to disclose
certain features, contains its own promise, and so on. In the case of
the 'thing' as a feature of practice, on the other hand, the relation
between humans and objects becomes crucial. Things are transformed
from utilitarian devices into `focal things'. It is practice, with all
its associated features - the motivations and actions of an agent, the
indeterminate flux of time, patterns of meaningful, differentiating
repetition -- that enables the thing to `thing' (emanate), in
Heidegger's sense of the term.[236] Truths are revealed that are the
product of interlocking phenomena - subject, environment, qualities of
the thing - rather than the rational, `comforting' truths of the
device. In short, "what must be shown is that focal things can prosper
in human practices only."[237] Devices that alienate us and eschew
practical understanding can find no place to flourish.
As with Ricoeur's distinction between the univocity of the sign and
the equivocity of the symbol, the device is distinct from the thing
due to its singular or specialized functionality. Whereas signs tend
towards abstraction, symbolic meaning is /bound/ to a context or
interpretation. For Borgmann, the thing is bound in a similar sense,
A thing, in the sense in which I want to use the word
here, is inseparable from its context, namely, its world,
and from our commerce with the thing and its world,
namely, engagement. The experience of a thing is always
and also a bodily and social engagement with the thing's
world. In calling forth a manifold engagement, a thing
necessarily provides more than one commodity.[238]
Whereas a thing will contain multiple, and even ambiguous, meanings
depending on contextual and interpretive factors, devices tend toward
a logic of /availability./ That is, over the course of many historical
iterations, devices work to make a single function more and more
available to the user. Rendering a /single/ function accessible
entails concealing the corresponding functions that are needed to
produce it (the machinery of the device for example). The ubiquity and
ease of obtaining warmth in industrial societies is a product of this
technological tendency, "We get a first glimpse of the distinctiveness
of availability when we remind ourselves that warmth was not
available, e.g., in Montana a hundred years ago."[239] In this time,
warmth was neither "instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, [nor] easy".[240]
As different technological solutions progress, the various /means/ of
achieving the goal of making heat more available recede, and what
remains is a single, univocal function, "The wood-burning stove yields
to the coal-fired central plant with heat distribution by convection,
which in turn gives way to a plant fuelled by natural gas and heating
through forced air, and so on."[241] In contrast, the stove or hearth
is considered a proper /thing,/ since it contains multiple functions
which are unfolded by the actors engaging with the thing,
Thus a stove used to furnish more than mere /warmth./ It
was a /focus,/ a hearth, a place that gathered the work
and leisure of a family and gave the house a centre. Its
coldness marked the morning, and the spreading of its
warmth the beginning of the day. It assigned to the
different family members tasks that defined their place in
the household. The mother built the fire, the children
kept the firebox filled, and the father cut the firewood.
It provided for the entire family a regular and bodily
engagement with the rhythm of the seasons that was woven
together of the threat of cold and the solace of warmth,
the smell of wood smoke, the exertion of sawing and of
carrying, the teaching of skills, and the fidelity to
daily tasks.[242]
The hearth, due to this ordering and revealing power, is a /focal/
thing. The idea of a focal thing is appropriated from Heidegger. It is
something that "gathers the relations of its context and radiates into
its surroundings and informs them."[243] Borgmann points out that the
Latin word /focus/ means hearth, and he takes the example of the
fireplace as paradigmatic of pretechnological modes of focus, "the
fireplace constituted a centre of warmth, of light, and of daily
practices."[244] In contrast, the device paradigm is represented by
the heating plant; decentralized and foreboding.
Importantly, the device is constituted through the /promise/ of
technology.[245] The promise of technology is found in the criteria of
availability mentioned above, and in order for this promise to
succeed, the means of obtaining the promise must be concealed, since
they are difficult, uncertain, burdensome and un-available, "A device
such as a central heating plant procures mere warmth and disburdens us
of all other elements. These are taken over by the machinery of the
device. The machinery makes no demands on our skill, strength, or
attention."[246] Therefore the device, no matter how complex, can be
reduced to its univocal purpose of making its function more available,
and indeed all industrial technologies can be reduced to the same
process or tendency, resulting in a technological /pattern/ that
persists across heterogeneous artefacts.
Both Borgmann and Ricoeur's comments on technologies and technological
rationality, suggest that all devices and technological systems
manifest the same, univocal essence. Generating more forms of
technologies, or finding new ways to apply existing technologies would
not advance or subtract from this essence, it would simply count as
"identical" repetitions of the same that would contrast with the
"non-identical" repetitions of practice and practical understanding.
For example, Catherine Pickstock discusses the logic of identical
repetition in a way that corresponds to the proliferation of many
commercial forms of technology. Things that repeat identically proceed
"via an accumulation of differences, united by their identity as
expressing a univocal being in a successive orientation, and by the
asyndetic successivity itself."[247] Whereas, what Borgmann calls
/focal things/ are the foundation for practices, a practical relation
with devices that repeat identically is more akin to a Sisyphean
struggle, since the things or devices themselves have no inherent
meaning and therefore,
none of them would be more than itself, rich with a
plenitude of significance to which neither they nor we are
equal, yet the more themselves for that very reason, and
so the better to guide us. Instead, they could only be
moved about, or swapped one for the other in an attempt to
relieve tedium, a process which Kierkegaard described as
the `rotation of crops'.[248]
To avoid the nihilistic `rotation of crops' implied by forms of action
corresponding to the device paradigm, Borgmann argues that our
response should lie in a rehabilitation of social practices, a
resoluteness and focused awareness of things, "The turn to things
cannot be a setting aside and even less an escape from technology but
a kind of affirmation of it."[249] Focal activity involves a "vow" or
commitment to the power of human action, i.e., it involves developing
a new way of social life. [250] For Borgmann, "the peril of technology
lies not in this or that of its manifestations but /in the
pervasiveness and consistency of its pattern,"/[251] and because of
this, "technology must be countered by an equally patterned and social
commitment, i.e., by a practice."[252]
However, as I have been discussing so far, /practical understanding,/
following Ricoeur's hermeneutics, incorporates both distanciation and
belonging. In Ricoeur's sense, a focal thing would also be an
/appropriated/ thing, its focal characteristics might not only be due
to human practice, but also to internal features of its design. There
would always be aspects of the thing that transcend our practical
engagement and demand a critical evaluation. The question is, does
this critical, distanced reflection on the thing disrupt our focus of
it? As we have seen, the disruption of distanciation is also the
condition for a renewed belonging. If we see technological devices as
the product of a distanciated perspective on a practice, then we can
begin to trace the ways that they are reflective of practice. As
explored in Chapter 1, David Kaplan has argued that hermeneutics needs
to go beyond the transcendental approach to technology (in this case
an analysis of its tightly patterned character) and embrace the
empirical turn in the philosophy of technology. Meaning is not only a
product of practical comportment, but also of material relations
between things and technological configurations. In relation to
/phronēsis,/ a crucial feature of practice that will be discussed
below, Kaplan discusses the idea of `tact' in a situation. Tact is a
skill learned through experience, and something which may be
instructed by technologies, which often provide practical solutions to
problems,
This connection between tact and practical wisdom has
completely dropped out of the contemporary conversation of
technology. But what is largely at issue in questions
concerning the good life in a technological age is the
notion of appropriateness of conduct. Technology is shot
through with tact. It answers key questions such as how
things ought to be designed, how they should be used, how
they should affect others, how they should be
governed.[253]
In other words, the immanent features of devices themselves contain an
'ought', both in terms of their design and how they suggest certain
uses. The questions is whether this ought is straight-forward and
univocal, or whether it genuinely addresses a subject and provokes
meaningful engagement. Since Borgmann correctly points out that the
more /functional/ and comfortable a device is the more it recedes from
view and negates engagement, the task is to discover ways that the
device is also /dysfunctional/ and provokes a practical response.
As I have argued in previous sections with regard to hermeneutic
application and appropriation, /unstable/ features of practice are
also essential in our understandings of meaning. Practical
understanding also involves broken vows and disturbed focus.
Discourse, case-histories, and narratives are all fragile worlds whose
shape is determined as much by how they are appropriated as by their
own, internal, rational structures. However, what I have also tried to
show is the productivity of technique, which is always also distinct
from singular practical scenarios. An aspect of this productivity is
the /alterity/ implied by the distance of technique, a distance which
makes application a /process/ or struggle, rather than an unmediated
grasping of meaning. In this sense, focus is powerful, when held,
because it is always /threatened by disruption./ This threat is an
aspect of the nature of focus and the `present' of practice, and is
what makes appropriation a /task/ rather than something immediately
given. The /truth/ of practice is given as much by the device that
draws us away from it, as the focal thing that we are already related
meaningfully to.
For Ricoeur, who emphasises the inescapable fact of mediation and
condition of the `shattered cogito', it might be more appropriate to
speak of the /refracted focus/ of practices and things. The thing that
is fully in focus is held in that place by the `distractions' kept out
of focus. For this reason, Ricoeur criticises Heidegger's `direct'
ontology, revealed in this case by the focal thing emanating, and
suggests instead an `indirect' ontology. In order to understand the
focal thing it is necessary, also, to explain, from a distance, those
features that are `unfocused' or on the margins. To clarify the
structures and frames which are mediating our focus and `belonging'
without us being aware of it. A reflective engagement with the
workings of devices, as Kaplan suggests, can reveal their /practical/
value beyond the impracticality that appears through a consideration
of their function or `promise'.
Peter-Paul Verbeek argues that Borgmann achieves a significant
departure from Heidegger in that his analysis of devices and the way
they shape human behaviour and action counts as a more concrete
account of technology. However, whereas Borgmann predominately focuses
on the negative consequences of the device paradigm, Verbeek aims to
articulate the /productive/ capacities of the device,
Borgmann's conclusion that only nontechnological things
have the ability to engage human beings and that
technological artifacts only invite disengaged
consumption, however, is too hasty, as I shall shortly
show. He focuses too narrowly on the forms of engagement
that technology discourages or renders impossible, while
ignoring that devices can indeed promote engagement as
well.[254]
In the second part of this chapter I explore Verbeek's alternative
account of the `device', in order to examine how devices can also
"promote engagement". Verbeek aims to draw out the /thingly/ character
of technological artefacts. He utilizes an example of what we could
call a focal /device/ - a ceramic heater design by the collective
Eternally Yours. This device, a product of modern technology, plays on
the exact features of practice that Borgmann is advocating. Rather
than designing a heater that would be `invisible', a Dutch design
collective created a heater that would have to be placed in the
/centre/ of the room and require engagement. They recreate the `focal
thing', the hearth, in the figure of the device, and in doing so,
bring what was once at the margin into focus. This, I argue, should be
the critical approach of a practice-oriented philosophy in relation to
technology -- not pushing modern technology further away from the
sphere of practice and focus, but bringing it into direct
confrontation with practice, to see if practical engagement will have
anything productive to say.
4.1.2 Uncertain Applications
----------------------------
Here, I aim to examine the question of the limits of /techne,/
gestured towards by the opening Gadamer quote, by focusing on the ways
in which uncertainty and wisdom relate to each other in practical
settings.[255] The work of Aristotle, which never ceases to be a
source of philosophical reflection and innovation (virtue ethics,
virtue epistemology, etc.), will provide the background for this part
of the discussion. The fields of technology and postphenomenology lend
themselves especially well to an Aristotelian understanding of ethics.
In particular, this subsection will argue that the intellectual
virtues of /techne/ and /phronēsis/ as described by Aristotle feature
prominently in Peter-Paul Verbeek's postphenomenological approach to
technological mediation and morality. I will argue that Verbeek's work
aids in collapsing distinctions between these virtues, with the result
that our practical and ethical deliberations about technologies can be
reconceived in a more productive way. However, I will also point to
the limits of this approach by drawing on Ricoeur's link between
practical wisdom and tragic wisdom.
Aristotle's distinction between the practice-based virtues of /techne/
and /phronēsis/ suggests that in processes of application there are
two types of `skill' at work. On the one hand, there is the know-how
associated with /techne,/ knowledge relating to how technologies work
or operate. On the other hand, there is the /wisdom/ associated with
application. It is not enough to simply understand the operations or
design of technologies; we must also have a sense of the horizon or
context in which these technologies may function. In this way, the two
fields of application, designated in this section through the virtues
of /techne/ and /phronēsis,/ could be delineated by the skills
associated with knowing /how/ (techne) and knowing /when/ (practical
wisdom). Furthermore, whereas /techne/ pertains to operations
knowledge, /phronēsis/ is linked to orientations knowledge. The
strength of Verbeek's work, I argue, lies in the way that it draws out
the interrelationship between these two types of skills and knowledge
sets. For Verbeek, understanding what technological mediation /does/,
in a practical sense, means understanding both how (moral) subjects
are shaped by technologies, and also how technologies themselves work
and are shaped in relation to interpreting and acting subjects. He
brings to the foreground the productivity of the tension associated
with application, taken in its hermeneutic sense, and demonstrates how
this tension can be put to work in relation to our moral
self-understanding.
However, this differentiation between knowing /how/ and knowing /when/
also leads to a recognition of a fundamental incommensurability
between the two types of skills. There is always a `technical
ignorance' that no amount of wisdom can overcome. Similarly, practical
wisdom is challenged by shifting contexts and horizons due to new
developments in technologies and technical knowledge. Because of the
conflictual and often asymmetric nature of these two types of
practical skills, there persists what Ricoeur calls the "tragedy of
action" in all practical life.
With these points in mind, this part of the chapter is divided into
two subsections. The first (1) examines the ways that wisdom and
technologies complement and presuppose one another in practical
settings, while the second (2) provides further reflections on this
approach by drawing a link between /deinon/ and /phronēsis./ I argue
that, although Verbeek's account of technological mediation succeeds
in reconciling the types of skills associated with design and /techne/
with the moral insight associated with practical wisdom, his approach
does not go far enough. Against the backdrop of a
post-phenomenological understanding of technologies it is important
also to recognise the inherent tension or /fault/ at the heart of
practical life and application, a fault which cannot be simply
overcome through wisdom, but rather persists due to the
incommensurability between wisdom and technologies.
4.1.2.1 Designing with Conviction
For Gadamer, whose subject in /Truth and Method/ is hermeneutical
consciousness, both /techne/ and /phronēsis/ appear at first sight as
analogous in relation to the central hermeneutic problem of
/application./ Gadamer notes the initial difficulty of distinguishing
between /phronēsis/ and /techne/ from an ontological perspective, "if,
with Aristotle, we define the `object' of this knowledge ontologically
not as something general that always is as it is, but as something
individual that can also be different."[256] Both are categorised as
types of knowledge, yet knowledge that cannot be dissociated from
experience. Even in cases where one has a prior knowledge of a craft
or moral system (for example), the task of application will remain as
open in each new case. Therefore, increased instruction, or even
increased levels of experience, will never fully solve the problems of
application.
However, although both intellectual virtues deal with variable subject
matter and questions of application, Gadamer also identifies three
primary tensions between the two concepts. Firstly, "We learn a techne
and can also forget it. But we do not learn moral knowledge, nor can
we forget it. We do not stand over against it, as if it were something
that we can acquire or not, as we can choose to acquire an objective
skill, a techne."[257] So the problem of applying moral knowledge is
more ambiguous, since application implies that the knowledge is
somehow already possessed or learned before the application process.
Whereas /techne/ is largely concerned with /direct/ application,
practical wisdom arises due to the incommensurability between the
general, "perfect" system of rules or laws, and the singular practical
situations which appear imperfect or /exceptional/ in light of these
laws.
Secondly, /phronēsis/ always includes a component of
/self/-deliberation, and therefore it is a type of knowledge that is
always bound to the experience of a moral subject. The "seeing"
associated with practical wisdom is not necessarily a seeing of what
is right or wrong, but a seeing of oneself and the relevance of one's
own life experience. The opposite of a wise or "correct" judgement is
not a false judgement or a judgement made in "error," but rather a
/blind/ judgement. In the case of /techne,/ by contrast, a failed
application can be put down to error or incomplete knowledge. When
assigning responsibility or a cause to practical errors, we say that a
poor judgement is the result of inexperience, a passionate
disposition, blindness, and so on, whereas a poor product which
results from a craft can either be the result of an inexperienced
maker /or/ a faulty or incomplete /method./ There is no analogous
objective correlate in the case of practical wisdom: "It is pointless
here to distinguish between knowledge and experience, as can be done
in the case of a techne. For moral knowledge contains a kind of
experience in itself...compared with which all other experience
represents an alienation, not to say a denaturing."[258]
The third key distinction Gadamer makes between /techne/ and
/phronēsis/ is in relation to the phenomena of terror and
forgiveness/empathy. I will return to this distinction in the
following section on /deinon phronēsis/. Here, I challenge the first
two divisions Gadamer makes between /techne/ and /phronēsis/, the
directness of technical application and the type of moral self
suggested by /phronēsis,/ with reference to Peter-Paul Verbeek's
alternate understanding of technological mediation. Technological
applications, according to Verbeek, are neither direct, nor unrelated
to questions of the moral self. There is a fundamental uncertainty
associated with self-knowledge and interpretation, an uncertainty
which seems to be in contrast with the types of knowledge associated
with /techne,/ which can be learned, transmitted, improved on, applied
directly, and so on. However, a postphenomenological analysis of
technologies aims to bring to the fore the /uncertainties/ immanent in
the act of producing and designing things. This uncertainty is drawn
on in order to demonstrate the ways in which design and morality are
intertwined.
Although Verbeek does not discuss /phronēsis/ thematically, there is
arguably some overlap between his understanding of morality and the
concept of practical wisdom as it has been used in recent literature
(on the role of /phronēsis/ in the social sciences[259] and in
professional practice.[260]) One of the clearest reference points for
Verbeek's use of the term "morality" is found in the later work of
Michel Foucault, and from this we can see that Verbeek is relying on a
very specific, practice-based, and critical understanding of morality.
The central parallel between the Aristotelian concept of practical
wisdom and Verbeek's attempt to conceive the relation between
technology and morality is found in the rejection of episteme as the
privileged form of knowledge for discerning "truth," especially moral
truths. Foucault's work on /technologies of the self/[261] aims to
demonstrate what could be termed the "impersonal" or "unconcerned"
dimension of episteme. The imperative associated with the truth of
episteme is summed up in the command /know thyself/, a command which
Foucault argues was classically circumscribed by the imperative to
/care for oneself,/ a nesting of theoretical knowledge which has been
forgotten with the modern dominance of the natural sciences and their
corresponding methods.[262]
Following Foucault, Verbeek argues that what is called for in a moral
consideration of technology, seen as a practical and inevitable form
of mediating reality, is giving closer attention to the role of
technology in practices, and to the way that it shapes or /forms/ our
everyday moral selves and contexts. He rejects approaches that
advocate a distanced ethical evaluation of technology in-itself, for
example in relation to its essence or to human nature. The model of
morality under investigation is a form of /ascesis/,
Technological /ascesis/...consists in /using/ technology,
but in a deliberate and responsible way, such that the
"self" that results from it -- including its relations to
other people -- acquires a deliberate shape. Not the moral
acceptability, then, is central in ethical reflection on
technology use, but the quality of the /practices/ that
result from it, and the /subjects/ that are constituted in
it.[263]
For the purposes of this chapter, I assume an affinity between the
above understanding of technological ascesis and practical wisdom.
This relation would need to be explored further, but the fruits of
such a linking have already been demonstrated in Flyvbjerg's work on
/phronēsis/ and the social sciences: "Foucault is the genealogist of
the variable /par excellence/; his works are elaborate exercises in
making that which appears invariable variable...It would, perhaps, be
an overstatement to say that Foucault's ethics /is phronēsis/, but
there is certainly more than a faint similarity between Aristotelian
/phronēsis/ and Foucauldian ethics."[264]
Appropriately, Verbeek chooses the practice of /design/ to investigate
the relation between technology and morality in practical settings. In
contrast to a `technician', a `designer's' concern is not solely with
functionality but rather with the overall experience produced through
technologies. Designer-knowledge is in some ways closer to /techne/ in
the sense of an art, craft, or technique, rather than in the sense of
a specialist type of knowledge relating to the functioning of
technical systems. A designer must nevertheless engage with and be
somewhat proficient in the types of technical knowledge associated
with the practice they are trying to shape.
It is because of the plurality of contexts and settings in which
technologies are deployed that a more complex picture of design has to
be developed. This fundamental ambiguity of technical knowledge in
relation to its applications is described well by Don Ihde's term
/multistability/: "a technology can have several stabilities,
depending on the way it is embedded in a use context."[265] This
description of technologies points to their /interpretive/ aspects;
their intended use, or "intentionality," might at first appear
univocal or deterministic in terms of the ways that they shape action,
but within the history of technology we can see that there is also an
openness in technological devices. Ihde uses the classic examples of
the telephone and typewriter, which "were not developed as
communication and writing technologies but as equipment for the blind
and the hard of hearing to help those individuals hear and write. In
their use contexts, they were interpreted quite differently,
however."[266]
This ambiguous or multistable aspect of technological
design/intentionality means that the role of interpretation becomes
more relevant in considering the practical use value of technology.
Designers are responsible not only for considering the intended use of
their products, but also the complexity and diversity of interpretive
possibilities and stances adopted by the human agents engaging with
technologies in practical settings. In a sense, designers must also
possess a type of practical wisdom, a virtue which deals with
deliberation about /human/ action and its ends, and the things which
/pertain to/ those ends: "Technologies help to shape what counts as
'real'. This hermeneutic role of things has important ethical
consequences since it implies that technologies can actively
contribute to the moral decisions human beings make."[267]
The ethical task for designers does not consist in making their own
devices or systems more robust or closed off to unintended uses
through strengthening their technical knowledge. Rather their
responsibility stems from broader concerns based on an insight that
the interpretability of devices can become a positive factor in the
shaping of the moral lives of the users. The "moral" work of the
designer is then to bridge the gap between design context and possible
use contexts:
To cope with this complexity, designers should try to
establish a connection between the context of design and
the context of use. Designers could try to formulate
product specifications not only on the basis of the
desired functionality of the product but also on the basis
of an informed prediction of its future mediating role and
a moral assessment of this role.[268]
Crucial here is the importance of developing an /informed prediction/
of the device's future mediating role. Enriching the informed decision
requires not only a development of the technical knowledge needed in
the design context, but also a practical and imaginative understanding
of how designs are deployed in the field of human action. There is a
clear division between the technical task of striving for
functionality and the moral assessment of the device as it may exist
in various contexts, with the latter being emphasized by Verbeek.
Verbeek provides an example of this broader understanding of design in
the case of the Dutch industrial designers collective Eternally Yours.
This company aims to address issues of sustainability, not only by
considering the usual, calculative questions of "reducing pollution in
production, consumption and waste,"[269] but also by considering a
deeper problem of sustainability which is found in the relation
between humans and artefacts:
the actual problem, Eternally Yours holds, is that most of
our products are thrown away far before actually being
worn out...For this reason, Eternally Yours focuses on
developing ways to create product longevity. It does so by
investigating how the coming about of attachment between
products and their users could be stimulated and
enhanced.[270]
Most technologies are designed to need as little maintenance or
attention as possible, and strive towards the production of what David
Lewin calls "utopias of functionality" (Chapter 6).This is especially
clear in the design logic of interfaces, which Lewin discusses in
relation to /phronēsis:/
The whole point of the interface is to stabilize what
discloses itself. We might say that it fixes and closes,
and thereby opposes disclosure. By its attempt to conceal
complex (that is, fragile or insecure) interaction and
deliberation, the interface denigrates and excludes the
human faculty of practical reason, named by Aristotle as
/phronēsis/.[271]
For Verbeek, too, the aim of functionality in relation to
technological design is not always the most practical. We are indeed
"disburdened" through these efficient designs: "Technologies, after
all, are often designed to disburden people: a central heating system
liberates us from the necessity to gather wood, chop it, fill the
hearth, clean it, and so forth. We need only to switch a button and
our house gets warm."[272] But this disburdening also leads to
carelessness in our attitude towards our practical environments. To
counter this process, we do not necessarily need to minimize or even
eradicate the presence of technologies in our practical lives, but
rather we can re-imagine the role that technology can play,
supplementing our technical capability to produce highly "functional"
systems with a practical wisdom which better understands and
anticipates the more complex field of human action. For example, in
relation to the problem of heating, we need not necessarily return to
the valuable work of gathering wood, chopping it, and so on; instead
we can simply pay more attention to the way we interact with
technologies:
An interesting example in this direction is an engaging
electric/ceramic heater that was designed by Sven
Adolph...This artifact is not a purely functional heater
that withdraws into pure functionality like common
radiators, which are hidden under the windowsill and are
only turned on and off. It is an engaging product that
asks for attention and involvement in its functioning,
much like a campfire. You cannot hide it under the
windowsill but have to put it in the middle of the room.
You cannot escape it if you need warmth: you have to sit
around it. Its shells have to be arranged if you want it
to function. Simply turning the heater on and off is not
enough: you actually have to be involved in its
functioning if you want it to work.[273]
In this way, designers are able to free themselves from anxieties
about the limits of their technical knowledge, that is, uncertainty
with regard to the functioning of devices in practical settings whose
complexities cannot always be anticipated by a narrow "technical"
approach. By adopting the view that technologies help /mediate/ our
understanding of the world, designers learn better how to contribute
to our practical self-understanding and our moral relations with
others. Technical knowledge and practical wisdom combine in order to
anticipate this mediating process more completely.
Verbeek's overall understanding of technology demonstrates how
problems arising from the /limits/ of technical knowledge can be
bridged, precisely by extending the types of questions that /techne/
poses toward those which practical wisdom aims to address, namely, the
ambiguity of application and the formation of the moral self. This
approach intertwines agency and mediation in practical understanding.
Moral decisions cannot be made solely based on the insight of an
independent or distanced human mind. Instead, they must be
deliberative, due to the variable nature of singular practical
settings and the multistabilities of the devices that mediate our
action in these settings. I have argued that the type of morality
suggested by this description is similar to the virtue-based practical
wisdom described by Aristotle.
However, in the following section a caveat is added to this relatively
smooth or frictionless picture of technological mediation and its
associated practical moral philosophy. I argue that an understanding
of practical wisdom that sees it as a way of enriching or
complementing technical knowledge (understandings which aim to produce
a more holistic or "spiritual" description of practice[274]) neglects
an important factor. The missing factor is the /tragedy/ of action, an
aspect of practical life which is incorporated into the hermeneutic
philosophies of Ricoeur and Gadamer. It is notable that, in their most
extensive discussions of /phronēsis,/ both Ricoeur and Gadamer make
sure to include the important link between /phronēsis/ and /deinon/ in
their analysis.
4.1.2.2 Deinon Phronēsis
In the above account of technological mediation, the crucial aspect of
the /ambiguity/ of technologies was brought to the fore. On the one
hand, this aspect is celebrated as allowing the design process to
become a consideration of making the `best' and most moral
technologies possible within a given set of circumstances. The systems
produced need not be perfect nor totally determined in advance, and
allow for the preservation of the freedom of the users, on the
condition that this freedom is understood as a relative freedom which
is always mediated by social, political, and technological
circumstances. The other side of this ambiguity is a recognition of
the /fault/ of technologies. Technologies will always under-perform,
or perform in ways not immediately anticipated by designers. It seems,
therefore, that we transition from faulty technical knowledge to a
complementary wisdom which /completes/ the action mediated by
technologies and reorients them in a direction guided by moral
insight.
However, this transition can also be conceived of in another way.
Recognition of a fault or ambiguity does not always result in a
correction of the fault; it can also lead to an acceptance of
incompleteness and vulnerability. This latter approach to ambiguity is
central to one of the key paradoxes of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is,
on the one hand, concerned with bringing about understanding, but on
the other hand, it views understanding as something which constantly
escapes us and remains incomplete. Even if we accept Verbeek's
postphenomenological analysis of technologies, we do not need to see
the incompleteness of technical knowledge solely as a practical,
pragmatic problem, demanding a solution or judgement which would bring
a sense of unity or concreteness to technical knowledge. Instead, we
can view the fault of technologies as a symbol which gives rise to
reflection, but remains a problem that cannot be overcome:
/Phronēsis,/ often seen as the pragmatic virtue combining
sight and insight enabling a moral agent to judge and act
rightly in a given situation becomes, when touched by
tragedy in all its senses, a /deinon phronēsis. Deinon
phronēsis/ sees situations demanding choice against the
background of /fault/ -- a phenomenon capable of
symbolisation and narration but resistant to understanding
-- aware that some situations embody /aporiai;/ mutually
exclusive principles or norms. An /aporia/ is not resolved
by action; it is lived through.[275]
In Ricoeur's ethics, found in /Oneself as Another/[276], the strategic
role of his "interlude," a reading of /Antigone,/ is not to outline a
practical moral philosophy founded on /phronēsis,/ but rather to
demonstrate the necessity of /phronēsis/ in an approach that combines
an ethical wish to live well and in accordance with one's desire with
moral respect for others and their conflicting desires. /Phronēsis/
emerges against the background of tragic conflict as a mode of
interpreting conflict justly. The wisdom /Antigone/ provokes is a
wisdom that has been exposed to the horrors of ethical conflict,
conflict which emerges from the persistence of exceptions and singular
situations in political life. Thus understood, wisdom is not a way of
overcoming failures or faults of mediation, but of becoming aware of
and experiencing the persistence of these faults in a humane way:
The fiction forged by the poet is one of conflicts which
Steiner rightly considers intractable, nonnegotiable.
Taken as such, tragedy produces an ethicopractical
aporia...In this respect, one of the functions of tragedy
in relation to ethics is to create a gap between tragic
wisdom and practical wisdom. By refusing to contribute a
"solution" to the conflicts made insoluble by fiction,
tragedy, after having disoriented the gaze, condemns the
person of praxis to reorient action, at his or her own
risk, in the sense of a practical wisdom in situation that
best /responds/ to tragic wisdom.[277]
This view of practical wisdom suggests an alternate moral function to
a view which may see wisdom as a deeper or more insightful way of
perceiving a situation with the purpose of promoting flourishing and
happiness in practical settings. Practical wisdom still exists at the
"limits" of technical knowledge and in relation to the aspects of life
to which we remain technically ignorant, but when instructed by tragic
wisdom, practical wisdom becomes more of a form of resignation or
acceptance of fate than a "seeing-beyond" immediate technical problems
or questions towards better, more moral solutions.
Arguably, the strongest case for discerning an opposition between a
practical morality founded on /phronēsis/ and a form of morality which
places technological mediation and ascesis at its centre is in this
way of conceiving tragedy. There are many examples where, through the
use of technologies and problem-solving techniques, the persistence of
the tragedy of action is seen as something surmountable rather than as
a source of reflection and empathy. In professional settings there are
"checklists" and technocratic procedures which are intended to ensure
fairness but often end up distorting interpersonal relations.[278]
Insurance companies provide "remedies" for tragic situations through
institutional mediation, but the results of this process still remain
questionable.[279] As David Lewin points out, the "technical
interface" is becoming more and more pervasive, to the extent that our
complex interactions with others and with our technological devices
become reduced to a series of easily negotiable buttons and
icons.[280] Although all of these examples emerge as responses to
tragedy and uncertainty, these responses tend to see tragedy or
vulnerability as problems to be solved rather than as inescapable
experiences. As David H. Fisher writes, it is in a world populated by
interfaces, "all consuming images," and technocratic solutions that
"/deinon phronēsis/ can provide a way toward being grasped by the
question of ethics."[281]
Furthermore, doesn't technology itself, understood as a particular
form of mediating reality, pose its own tragic or "terrifying"
dimension? Is it not this dimension that informs Verbeek's call to
make the process of technological design more morally responsible? A
recognition of "technical ignorance", or the limits of /techne,/ is
arguably as terrifying as it is liberating. For example, Verbeek also
highlights that technologies such as ultrasound scans open up new
practical, ethical possibilities for living well, not because they
show us how reality /is,/ but because they de-stabilise and reorient
sedimented practices and therefore possess a huge potential for
helping shape human action in new ways. In this capacity to redirect
and refigure action, technological designs contain their own normative
stance and a type of conviction that allows for the possibility of
conflict. For example, via the ultrasound scan, the father is brought
into a new relation with the unborn child, a relation which may shape
the way decisions will be made and convictions will be formed over the
course of the pregnancy.[282]
At the practical level, technologies have an extraordinary power over
our relation with our circumstances. However, it is important to also
recognise the limits of this power in the case of tragic situations.
Although we can better understand ourselves and the other through
developing more responsible, more beautiful, and more functional
technologies, the solicitude that stems from the voice of the other
and the voice of conscience will ultimately always transcend mediation
and call for a different ethical response. This response may be
/phronetic,/ but not necessarily practical in the sense of being in
harmony with a given situation. The singularizing call from
conscience, which leads to conviction in a stance, may often direct
one towards a position of rejection or disharmony with one's own
surroundings. Just as conviction can lead to tragedy, so too can
wisdom, if that wisdom emerges in a setting, or /sittlichkeit/,
dominated by /techne./
Verbeek's response to this situation, which attempts to broaden our
understanding of what technologies can do in practical environments,
is a strong one, incorporating positive aspects of /phronēsis/ and
hermeneutic understanding. However, by placing technological mediation
at the heart of moral deliberation, we are also in danger of obscuring
crucial aspects of /phronēsis/ that cannot be factored into a
postphenomenological account of ethics, namely the human experiences
of suffering and the corresponding feelings of empathy and
forgiveness.
The intellectual virtues of /techne/ and /phronēsis/ are
philosophically linked in their relation to practice and variable
phenomena. Whereas a conventional understanding of how technologies
work could lead us to conclude that practical wisdom and technical
knowledge are in opposition to one another, the work of Verbeek
challenges this assumption. /Practical/ morality depends just as much
on the tools or artefacts we use to mediate reality as on the
reasoning capabilities of individuals. Gadamer's understanding of
/techne/ as presupposing /direct/ application and as unrelated to
knowledge of the self was called into question by Verbeek's
postphenomenological account of the ambiguity of technological
intentionality and technological ascesis. Technologies help to shape
and define the contexts subjects find themselves in, and similarly, no
technological design is "complete" until it has in a sense been
"successfully" deployed in a setting. A technological design may be
highly robust and functional, but may not find an appropriate horizon
against which it can become a meaningful factor in human action. It is
relevant to distinguish between these two types of "skills" in
practical application because our understanding both of technologies
/and/ practical wisdom can be revised. Both "skills" - designing well
(knowing /how/) and moral intuition and judgement in a situation
(knowing /when/) - exist against a shared background of the
/uncertainty/ of application. Through Verbeek's work this uncertainty
is refigured as something productive and liberating.
In contrast to Borgmann's strong distinction between /things/ and
/devices,/ which emphasizes how we /belong/ to the thing while we are
/alienated/ through the device, Verbeek's conception of technological
mediation helps recognize the /distanciated/ features of practical
understanding better. His approach helps us to see the ways that
technological designs can be seen as participating in Ricoeur's
distanciation-belonging dialectic -- technological designs are modes
of effecting practical understanding at a distance (through
mediation). Designs potentially open up new worlds and practices (for
example, the ultra-sound scan) in the same way that distanced
explanations or representations project new possibilities for action.
However, I have also suggested that if we over-emphasise the
centrality of technological mediation, and in particular its power to
refigure practical life, there is a danger of losing sight of the
features of application which arguably are linked more strongly or
asymmetrically to practical wisdom, namely the persistence of the
tragic and the corresponding human capabilities for empathy,
forgiveness, and the recognition of suffering. Although increased
attention to the role of technologies in human action can guard
against "misfortune" and tragedy, we also need to think about ways a
reflection on technology can lead to a reflection on the inevitability
of conflict in ethical life. Verbeek's approach, which takes the fact
of technological mediation as a /given,/ is in danger of reconciling
the tragedies of practice too quickly by focusing on the framework of
"technological mediation" and "informed prediction." Practical wisdom,
which I have argued a postphenomenological view presupposes, has
itself a more open function in terms of application, and for this
reason there will always be an incommensurability between technologies
and wisdom. By developing a broader picture of the process of
application, we can begin to design more meaningful technologies,
while at the same time gaining a deeper understanding of the fragility
of all human practice.
4.2 The Interface
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
/Alterity cannot, by definition, be anticipated and
factored into the design of the interface./[283]
/The computer instantiates a practice not a presence, an
effect not an object./[284]
The previous chapter argued, by utilizing the resources of
postphenomenological thought, that a practice-based distinction
between a `device' and a `thing' can be challenged. Devices are not
`univocal', though paradigmatically they may strive toward univocity
and functionality. Rather, they are `multistable'. As with a /thing,/
new connections and relations can emerge through the activities of the
device, as long as designers and users resist the temptation to treat
the device as `invisible' or `passive'. However, just as devices
should not be pushed into the background, neither should they be seen
as fully /present;/ technological ascesis cannot replace the moral
authority of the self possessed with /tragic wisdom/.
If Chapter 5 aimed to highlight the openness of technological devices
to practical modes of appropriation, the following chapter aims to
explore the hermeneutic character of the interaction between devices
and practical understanding. As with the device, the interface
initially appears, via hermeneutic critique, as guided by a logic of
/univocity./ David Lewin suggests that it moves towards the
construction of a /utopia of functionality,/ due to its tendency to
reduce complex operations to easily negotiable and understandable
icons, buttons, menus, etc. In other words, just as with Borgmann's
critique of the device, the experience of engaging with an interface
is always mediated by the goal of the interface's design, which is to
conceal uncertainty and alterity, features which would disrupt the
flow of the user experience. We are dissuaded from considering the
broader, contextual factors of the experience, such as the complexity
of the machine or system that the interface is representing, or the
actual `other' whom we are communicating with via the interface, and
so on.
The second part of the chapter draws on the work of Alexander Galloway
to argue that the `distance' created by the interface is more akin to
a /practical/ distance demanding negotiation rather than a theoretical
or logical circumscription. As Galloway puts it, the interface is less
of an Isis-figure (a veil, masking the true /nature/ of the machine),
and more of a Hermes-figure (an active attempt at mediation). That is,
it should be understood less in terms of what it /is,/ and more by way
of what it /does,/ or more appropriately what it necessarily /fails/
to do. As with Lewin, Galloway does accept that the interface is a
functional medium, it aims to represent, in a more coherent or
readable way, the workings of the technical operations that are being
performed. However, the gap between what is being represented and the
aesthetic demands of the interface, a gap the Lewin also highlights,
renders the mediation of the interface perpetually incomplete. Whereas
Lewin reads the logic of the interface as technological (a mode of
enframing), Galloway instead examines it from an aesthetic perspective
that emphasizes the /presentational/ features over the
/representational./ At this level, the interface performs its own
contradictions, and in doing so invites a /practical/ response.
For Galloway, the interface is defined not by its `essence' or logic
but by its /effects./ He focuses on political implications of coherent
and incoherent aesthetics of the interface, and argues for the
importance of paying closer attention to the impact of the incoherent,
/unworkable,/ interface. The `unworkable' interface discloses its own
`truth'; that as a form of mediation, it can never be total or fully
transparent. Instead, "the digital interface in fact produces an
autonomous zone of interaction, orthogonal to the human sensorium,
concerned as much with unworkability and obfuscation as with
connectivity and transparency."[285]
If Lewin helps us understand the `utopia' dimension of the interface,
and Galloway the unworkability of it, the final section of the chapter
will attempt a resolution, by returning to hermeneutic accounts of
representation. In her book /Computers as Theatre,/ Brenda Laurel
draws on, among other sources, Aristotle's /Poetics,/ to think-through
the problems of human-computer interaction.[286] Crucially, what is
aimed for in interface design is the establishment of a /common
ground,/ between the person interacting with the computer and the
computation processes. The nature of this ground is representational
and performative. In other words, in order to engage with a computer,
it is necessary to have some sense of self-understanding, and this is
presupposed in the design of the interface. Just as a theatre
production will contain features of design which take into account in
advance the existence of an /audience,/ interfaces presuppose a space
of creative application.
Along with Galloway, she conceives the interface not as a medium, but
as a mediation process, and therefore as durational and dynamic. She
compares the experience of engaging with a computer to the experience
of going to the theatre where actions are performed, and meaningful
experiences are constructed across a limited time-frame, with finite
possibilities. In other words, the choices made by both designers and
those engaging with the interface possess as much weight and
significance as the choices made by theatre producers or audience
goers. The interface does not present us with a `utopia' of comfort,
nor with an endless range of playful, meaningless decisions (what
Galloway calls a `ludic economy'), rather, it provides a framework or
context in which meaningful action is possible.
4.2.1 The Utopia of Functionality -- Interface and Representation
-----------------------------------------------------------------
As this thesis is concerned with hermeneutic questions of application,
it is useful to move beyond the question of artefacts and design,
towards the question of the `threshold' across which many
technological applications take place: the interface. Technologies,
which in one way or another, are directed towards producing effects in
the world, can only be `guided' or instructed to do so via an
interface, that is, /at a distance./ Not `distance' in the sense of
being separated from, but distance in Ricoeur's sense of
distanciation; interfaces introduce an intermediary position between
us and a technological process that enables us to participate in this
process whilst remaining distinct from it. The difference between a
plumber fixing a pipe, or a computer engineer writing code, and a
person washing their hands in a sink or opening a window on their
computer screen, represents two different ways of participating in the
same process. The plumber or engineer has a specific set of concerns.
Although they stand `outside' a system, in a position of control, the
concerns that guide their action and choices are `internal' to the
system they are working with - their concerns are 'cybernetic' and
direct. In contrast, the person washing their hands or running
applications on their operating system is also engaging with the
system, but is bringing along their own set of concerns to the
process, concerns which may be `external' to the functioning of the
technical system. If the relation between the engineer and the system
is cybernetic, the relation between the `user' and the system is
indirect and /recursive/ -- shifts in interface design affect user
experience, and user expectations affect the design and application of
technologies.[287] This logic was explored in Chapter 2.
To think of an interface as a `threshold', then, is perhaps
misleading. It does not stand as a `window' between two worlds, one
technological and the other human. Rather, from the perspective of
`world' and 'action', it is a necessary mediation. The potential
worlds contained in technological arrangements only come into effect
via the interface.
Hermeneutic appropriation or application, as we have seen, involves
two stages; understanding a text, language, discourse, etc. in-itself,
in its context, and so on, and understanding oneself in light of the
text. Application is the concrete fusion of these two horizons, a
self-understanding reflected through a particular, historically-rooted
expression. This self-understanding does not just `happen', it is
'enacted', through the reading process. As Ricoeur and Gadamer
highlight, since the text, or language, always has its own `nature' or
'being' (autonomy), and therefore is always to some extent `foreign'
to us, application/appropriation as a fusion of horizons is also the
act of establishing a common ground across a distance. The initial
distance (due to history, inscription, culture, etc.) is a necessary
condition for the appearance of this common ground. To have something
at a distance is also to allow an in-between, indeterminate space to
emerge between oneself and the thing-at-hand, a space that can
potentially be filled or `negotiated' in the process of engagement
(e.g., reading). If, as Heidegger points out, technology, although
appearing proximate, is always at a `distance' from us,[288] then the
interface can potentially be seen as the medium across which a "common
ground" may emerge.
The question when it comes to the interface is whether the space of
'negotiation', mediated by it, is fully /controlled./ Are `users' of
interfaces merely passive operators of technological processes? Or,
rather, is the space mediated by the interface a properly /liminal/
space, a space of communication "in and through distance", with the
'agency' of both sides playing significant but distinct roles? For
David Lewin, the logic of the interface aims to render us passive
users, even if it never totally achieves this goal.
Lewin's essay on the interface argues for the relevance of Ricoeur's
hermeneutics in relation to questions of technology. He dismisses the
idea that Ricoeur's work has nothing to say about technology simply
because it does not discuss it thematically. Rather, drawing on
Heidegger and central tenants of hermeneutic thinking, Lewin suggests
questions of technology cannot be avoided since in modern times it
conditions our interpretative structures. It has become a feature of
our historically effected consciousness, and as such its structures
resist thematization, "Like Heidegger's famous example of the hammer,
a hermeneutic is most presence in its absence."[289] Because of this,
the way to approach technology, following Heidegger, is directly; not
by way of devices and artefacts, but through inquiry into its essence
(/das Wesen der Technik/). Or, rather, we should approach devices and
artefacts themselves indirectly, by inquiring into the essence that
underpins their design. This allows one to fully grasp technology's
nature as a condition of disclosure, rather than as a set of
identifiable processes or objects, "If we can expand our understanding
in this direction, then technology is only secondarily defined by
artefacts, but is to primarily be understood as the way in which the
world shows itself."[290]
For Lewin, what is specific to /this/ historical epoch or condition of
the human is the question of /freedom,/ "modern technology is the
context in which the question of human freedom arises."[291] This is
the point at which Ricoeur's work becomes meaningful, since his is a
philosophy that charts a path between Cartesian understandings of the
subject and Nietzschean testimonies of the fragmented, rhetorical
self. That is, freedom is not synonymous with autonomy, in opposition
to heteronomy, instead, it involves aspects of both.[292] Lewin sees
this polarity repeated in discussion of modern technology;
Agency is too often seen in polarized terms as either the
possession of the sovereign subject - in which case
technologies are simply neutral devices that we take or
leave -- or a feature of autonomous technology that has
gotten out of hand. Within the context of hermeneutical
philosophy, agency is not a concept that can simply be
applied to a subject (or an object, namely, technology),
but is meaningful only within a particular interpretive
context.[293]
Furthermore, as discussed in the first chapter, the reason technology
is a particular concern for hermeneutics is because of the modes of
rationality it entails, "[technological rationality] seeks to displace
a hermeneutic relation to being."[294] Lewin sees these two poles of
concern, the displacement of a hermeneutic relation to being by
technological rationality, and the historical disclosure of questions
of human agency and freedom, manifested in the technical interface.
Lewin's description of the logic of the interface conceives it as
being aimed at the erasure of practical wisdom; it seeks to destroy
the hermeneutic relation to the world. He writes; "Behind all
technologies is a basic desire to foreground functionality and conceal
complex operations; to foreground ends, and conceal the means to those
ends."[295] As was mentioned in the previous chapter, Aristotle
understands /phronēsis/ as the capability to deliberate about ends in
relation to the means of achieving those ends. Following this, the
threat of the interface lies in its concealing of complexity through
the presentation of functionality, it conceals its own /means/ and
therefore practical concerns. Devoid of practical concerns we cease to
become persons and instead are reduced to `users'. Complex operations
are presented to us as simple `buttons' and `icons'. Ends are
presented as being easily within reach, there is no longer a need for
deliberation. As devices themselves become more complex, their
interface design becomes simpler and more sophisticated, they become
easier to use. In this way, the `being' of the device (complexity) is
/circumscribed/ by the technological rationality embodied in the
interface,
This tendency towards circumscribed functionality gives us
the impression that device does not exist with an
interpretive context, but within a decontextualized utopia
of functionality. As attractive as this utopia seems to be
-- it is, after all, exactly what the user wants the
device to achieve -- it negates the hermeneutic dimension
of existence by its presentation of unmediated
function.[296]
It is still something that `mediates', but it conceals this fact by
closing down possibilities of (or the need for) interpretation through
its utopia of functionality. `Alterity' is not admitted into the
design of the interface since it disrupts functionality. In this way,
it seeks to erase the sacred or symbolic aspects of existence. The
symbolic, as we saw, is the realm of double-meaning and uncertainty,
of the possibility of the self being other than itself. Whereas the
symbol "gives rise to thought", "the device only ever does what we ask
of it. In so doing it cannot give rise to genuine thought."[297] If
technology works to conceal its own interpretive /context,/ then,
according to Ricoeur's view of autonomy indicated above, it works to
negate human /freedom,/ which always appears against an interpretive
background.
Nevertheless, Lewin's criticism of the interface follows the same
course as a Ricoeurian hermeneutics of suspicion. That is, he seeks to
/unmask/ the `technological hermeneutic'. The interface, in its mode
of circumscription --- in seeking to eliminate the need for
interpretation --- gives rise to the thing it aims to conceal, "From a
philosophical point of view, the technological hermeneutic discloses
its own negation of alterity and thereby its effort to conceal
hermeneutics only serves to demonstrate a deeper hermeneutic taking
place."[298] This `deeper' hermeneutic is a more general hermeneutic
concerning our (human) relation to things, which technology
participates in. Since, for Ricoeur, we are never wholly `free' nor
wholly `determined', the rationality of the interface can never
totally conceal this relation to the thing. While admitting that
questions of agency and freedom should not be too quickly solidified,
for example by being attributed to "only certain kinds of humans, or
certain `higher' species", Lewin does not want to "simply wish away
this primary distinction [between persons and things] that informs
Ricoeur's work at the deepest level."[299]
For Lewin, the technological hermeneutic is unmasked by appealing to
this ontological distinction between persons and things; the being
that gave rise to technology (Dasein) can never be wholly eclipsed by
it, since it always remains something other than a mere object. As we
become 'users', our fundamental capability to instantiate a relation
to the world, even a technological one, is reflected in the interface,
even as it aims to conceal this capacity.
However, just as with the device in the previous chapter, the
interface itself can potentially be seen to have a /thing/-like
character, in that its modes of presentation include moments of
reflexivity and what Galloway calls /unworkability./ This feature of
the interface is revealed by focusing, instead, on the /practical/
language of the interface, as opposed to the logic that underpins this
language. Or, to use Gadamer's terms, the "nature of a thing" as
determined by theoretical or technical knowledge, is something
different than the "language of a thing", which is more reflective of
the participation of both subject and thing in the process of coming
to know.[300] To move from one to the other is to move from the
ontological to the practical field. With this in mind, I will now turn
to Galloway's reading of the interface. Galloway reads it through the
lens of aesthetics and politics, and it is these features which bring
us closer to the practical `language' of the interface, which remains
distinct from its ontological `logic'.
4.2.2 The Utopia of Dysfunctionality -- Interface and Presentation 1
--------------------------------------------------------------------
In the above-mentioned distinction between the `nature of things' and
the `language of things', gestured toward by Gadamer, one of his aims
is to undermine our presumption to /know/ a thing fully by determining
its nature. Whereas both of the everyday expressions, "/Es liegt in
der Natur der Sache"/ and "/Die Dinge sprechen für sich selber",/ seem
to express the common Enlightenment attitude of asserting a necessary
distinction between (biased) subjects and objects in the pursuit of
knowledge, when examined closer a crucial difference emerges. The type
of knowledge associated with the nature of the thing is gained through
methods and procedures, aimed at either identifying or controlling
materials, and is associated broadly with the modern, scientific
worldview. The /language/ of a thing reveals something different about
its nature. What a thing `says' includes its relation to an observer
or participant. At the theoretical level, the difference between the
nature and the language of a thing is knowledge that is determined by
establishing a system of correspondences, on the one hand, and
knowledge being revealed within particular paradigms or horizons, on
the other. At the practical level, we have the difference between
/techne/ and practical understanding repeated. A /techne/ or technique
is aimed at working with, and often controlling, the nature of the
thing, whereas practical understanding works by allowing the thing to
speak for itself. 'Thing' here is taken in Gadamer's sense to refer
not only to material things, but also the subject /matter/. Whereas,
practically speaking, we must call upon a variety of techniques and
methods when analysing a discourse, we are also called on to
acknowledge the /effects/ of the subject matter, how it impacts me and
alters my identity. Viewing the thing in terms of its `nature' keeps
me at a distance, while the language of the thing implicates me.
The appeal to the "language of things" has a polemical accent, "It
expresses the fact that, in general, we are not at all ready to hear
things in their own being, that they are subjected to man's calculus
and to his domination of nature through the rationality of
science."[301] Whereas a distanced examination of the nature of the
thing ensures progress and advancements of human knowledge, Gadamer
asserts a more fundamental indeterminacy in the person-thing relation,
expressed through the medium of language. Before truth is a
`correspondence' between the nature of the thing and our abstract
knowledge of it, it is a `linguistic agreement' that occurs between
person and thing, with neither possessing absolute agency, "The
agreement about things that takes place in language means neither a
priority of things nor a priority of the human mind that avails itself
of the instrument of linguistic understanding. Rather, the
correspondence that finds its concretion in the linguistic experience
of the world is as such what is absolutely prior."[302]
The spirit of this distinction is at work, as I read it, in Alexander
Galloway's book, /The Interface Effect./ His project aims to move away
from ontological accounts found in many influential media theorists,
towards a consideration of the /practical effects/ of contemporary
technologies, i.e., he moves from a consideration of the nature of the
interface towards the language of the interface. The tradition he
appeals to is similar to the tradition discussed in the previous
chapter in relation to the alternate understanding of /techne/ as
being related to questions of the /self./ In contrast to theorizing
media /qua/ media, he wishes to return to questions of /mediation,/
i.e., to move away from a focus on objects and media artefacts,
towards the activities they instantiate. Whereas he reads Kittler and
McLuhan as "conservative" in their focus on media objects, where
/techne/ "is substrate and only substrate", he gestures towards "an
alternate philosophical tradition that views /techne/ as technique,
art, habitus, ethos, or lived practice."[303] In this tradition,
mediation is not reducible to an easily resolved `middle' position, a
point (in this case, an artefact) outside the mediating activity
itself. Just as in the case of hermeneutics, where a `mediated'
dialogue does not mean an externally 'resolved' dialogue, but rather a
dialogue which is /carried/ along by the indeterminate force of
language itself, mediation, as opposed to 'media' cannot be reduced to
an objective state;
When Kittler elevates substrates and apparatuses over
modes of mediation, he forfeits an interest in techniques
in favour of an interest in objects. A middle -- a
compromise, a translation, a corruption, a revelation, a
certainty, an infuriation, a touch, a flux, is not a
medium, by virtue of it not being a technical media
device.[304]
Approaching interfaces from the perspective of `mediation', as opposed
to `media', means putting them in the difficult position of being
/in-between./ This entails a double-bind: the in-between is at once
responsible for distinguishing between two points, whilst at the same
time being in no clear place itself. Whereas boundaries such as
'windows', door-frames, and so on, clearly delimit two places, the
interface, conceived of as /activity,/ is by nature non-fixed and
indeterminate. The more `coherent' or fixed an interface becomes, the
more it withdraws from view and the less it resembles an interface. On
the other hand, the more `incoherent' it becomes, the more it draws
attention to itself and the less it actually `mediates' anything. For
Galloway, this aspect of mediation means that the relation is not
"chronological, spatial, or even semiotic,"[305] rather, it is a
systemic one. On this point he quotes Michel Serres:
Systems work because they don't work. Non-functionality
remains essential for functionality. This can be
formalized: pretend there are two stations exchanging
messages through a channel. If the exchange succeeds -- if
it is perfect, optimal, immediate -- then the relation
erases itself. But if the relation remains there, if it
exists, it is because the exchange has failed. It is
nothing but mediation. The relation is a
non-relation.[306]
Here, we have the tension repeated that we have been exploring so far.
For Lewin, the danger was that the logic of the interface (the
reduction of complexity to easily negotiable operations) would
/succeed/ in its aim, therefore `erasing' or concealing that a
mediation process is occurring (that the interface mediating and
re-presenting the complexities of the technology). However, Lewin
admits that this process can never succeed completely, and that a
recognition of this point reveals a `deeper' hermeneutic at work (the
hermeneutic relation between modern technology and human freedom,
between totality and finitude, and so on). In this way the interface
is both anti-hermeneutic (in its aims) and hermeneutic (in its failure
to succeed), it is both `technological' (in the negative, critical
sense), and `hermeneutic' (disclosive). Galloway carries this point
further and categorizes the interface as /unworkable/. The idea of the
unworkable interface is intended to eschew the false polarity between
`Iris' and `Hermes'; "Representation is either clear or complicated,
either inherent or extrinsic, either beautiful or deceptive, either
already known or endlessly interpretable. In short, either Iris or
Hermes."[307] Instead, both aspects are contained within the
interface, both `coherence' and `incoherence', and it is the
perpetuation of both these forces that render it a mediation process.
In this sense, the idea of the unworkable interface is similar to
Ricoeur's own formula for narrative representation --- `concordant
discordance'.
The terms `coherence' and `incoherence' refer to the aesthetic
qualities of the interface. Galloway illustrates the difference with
reference to a painting by Norman Rockwell, /Triple Self-Portrait/,
and a parody of this image that appeared in /Mad/ magazine. The first
is emblematic of the coherence of the interface -- the portrait
self-consciously gestures towards its own artifice, but only to render
this artifice more solid and centred. It draws the viewer towards an
appreciation of the face, whilst aiming to conceal the interface or
mediation process that brought their eye to rest at this point. It is
a celebration and centring of craft and representation as such, "There
is a circulation of coherence within the image that gestures toward
the outside, while ultimately remaining afraid of it."[308] In this
reading, the painting self-consciously gestures toward an anticipated
audience member (one familiar with questions of representation, craft,
etc.) in order to pre-empt and fulfil their desire to interpret or
understand the image. In short, it shrewdly eschews the problematic
space of hermeneutic application -- it `mediates' on the viewers
behalf whilst also concealing that the mediation has taken place. Yet,
to read it solely in this semiotic way, that is, in the way it aims to
gesture towards paratextual elements in order to reify its own
expression, is to miss out on the crucial gesturing /process/ itself.
Galloway iterates here that the interface is always an effect: "The
stress here is that one must always think about the image as a
process, rather than as a set of discreet, immutable terms. The
paratextual (or alternatively, the nondiegetic) is in this sense
merely the process of outering, of exteriority."[309]
The image from /Mad/ magazine replicates the image, but highlights and
intensifies the elements responsible for the `outering' process in the
original, rendering the disavowal of the Rockwell image more visible.
The illustrator of the /Mad/ image, Richard A. Williams, is not
concerned as much with questions of technique or art, as he is with
provoking a response in the viewer. In this way, he embraces the
'unworkability' of the interface more so than Rockwell, viewing the
space of application as a territory to be conquered rather than as an
uncertainly to be avoided,
Every ounce of energy within the image is aimed at its own
externalization. Looking back at the history of
art-making, one remembers that addressing the viewer is a
very special mode of representation that is often saved or
segregated or cast off and reserved for special occasions.
It appears in debased forms like pornography, or folk
forms like home video, or marginalized political forms
like Brechtian theatre, or forms of ideological
interpellation like the nightly news.[310]
Galloway's point in tracing the workings of these opposing forces is
to subsequently map the corresponding "regimes of signification" they
imply. The Rockwell painting, and its aesthetic of coherence, presents
the interface without actually `enacting' it, whilst the /Mad/
magazine parody `enacts' the effects of the interface without
believing in its content. These two approaches correspond to two types
of political activity; `coherent' politics, which is centralised,
organised, etc., and `incoherent' politics, which is politics that
seeks ruptures with past configurations. These four categories are
then permutated to produce four `regimes of signification':
1. Ideological: an aesthetics of coherence, a politics of coherence;
2. Ethical: an aesthetics of incoherence, a politics of coherence;
3. Poetic: an aesthetics of coherence, a politics of incoherence;
4. Truth: and aesthetics of incoherence, a politics of
incoherence.[311]
For Galloway, the interface effect, as seen at work in videogames like
/World of Warcraft/ where a representational depiction of a world or
scene is overlaid by multiple dialogue-boxes and menus, signals a
shift in current political regimes from the "ideological" to the
"ethical".[312] The term ethical here refers simply to the /practical/
dimension of the interface effect. The coherent modes of politics it
produces can range from Brechtian Marxism to what Galloway calls the
"ludic economies" of contemporary times -- in which we are both
encouraged to `play freely' and `express' ourselves as much as
possible, whilst being encircled by cybernetic loops of reference (so
that it is always a `controlled' play).[313] In the case of /World of
Warcraft/,
The game displays an aesthetics of incoherence in that it
foregrounds the apparatus (statistical data, machinic
functions, respawn loops, object interfaces,
multithreading, and so on), while all the time promoting a
particularly coherent politics (protocological
organisation, networked integration, alienation from the
traditional social order, new informatic labor practices,
computer-mediated group interaction, neoliberal markets,
game theory, and so forth).[314]
We could also add the examples from the design collective /Eternally
Yours,/ discussed earlier (Chapter 5) -- works which seek to
foreground the `unworkable' interface of the device to provoke an
ethics of product sustainability.
The third regime, the `poetic', is probably the regime where one would
tend to place many forms of hermeneutic thinking, since hermeneutics
often emphasizes the inherent value of a /work,/ and indeed Galloway
does associate Heidegger with this regime. The category `poetic'
resonates with /poiesis/,
It is labelled "poetic" simply because it aligns itself
with /poiesis,/ or meaning-making in a general sense. The
stakes are not those of metaphysics, in which any image is
measured against its original, but rather the
semiautonomous "physics" of art, that is, the tricks and
techniques that contribute to success or failure within
mimetic representation as such.[315]
The /practicality/ of the interface is linked to its aesthetic
incoherence, which distinguishes it from a Heideggerian "work of art"
-- a coherent /work/ that draws together, with the aid of techniques
and practical experience, a finished or `complete' thing. The aim of a
work of art in this sense, is not to conform to a "metaphysical"
ideal, but to present in a unified, intelligible form, its own
conditions of making. The interface is indeed more `technological' in
this sense, its incoherence foregrounds its own technique and
tool-like character. It can either become a tool for performatively
reinforcing a certain ideological politics, or it can become a
destabilising tool for performing a `truth'.
Yet, in contrast to Heidegger, the work of Ricoeur and Gadamer is
marked by its turn to the centrality of practical engagement with
/others/ when thinking about the work of understanding. If, for
Heidegger, the work of art `gathers' together its conditions by
presenting them, Ricoeur and Gadamer's rehabilitation of appropriation
and application means that any gathering or consistency of a work is
vulnerable to being overturned by interpreting communities. In
particular, for Ricoeur, an /explanation/ of the work, a decoding and
critique of its techniques and structures, is crucial to the process
of understanding it. In this sense, a technique is never celebrated
in-itself, but only in relation to the historical or communal
background against which it becomes visible and effective. This places
Ricoeur's account of a /work/ somewhere in between the idea of a
coherent, unified work, and an incoherent interface-mediated
experience. In line with the thrust of this thesis, which places
emphasis on the co-determining movements of appropriation and
construction, hermeneutics would be placed somewhere in between the
regimes of `ethics' and `poetics' - a work is marked both by the
sincere intention to `say something about something', whilst also
being 'plagued' by rhetorical strategies, failures of technique, etc.,
aspects which call out for further reflection and engagement.
Similarly, the political side of the work is determined by the mixed
nature of the work; communities are defined both by the traditions
that condition them and the innovations they bring about in trying to
break with tradition. In this way, there could be a fifth regime:
1. Hermeneutic: aesthetics of concordant discordance, politics of
tradition-innovation
With regard to the earlier discussion of technology and time, drawing
on the work of Simpson, it was argued that technology shifts our focus
from participating in the /meaning/ of a practice to `valuing' the
frame of a practice. For Simpson, there was a cost in this shift of
attention; meaning is /conditioned/ or presented `within' a frame of
reference, so that the valuation of a frame itself results in a
translation of meaning from something conditioned to something
determinable in advance. Galloway has a similar conception of the
technical interface, its perpetual `framing' results in an
`unworkable' erasure of content. However, for Galloway the outcome of
such a framing is not fixed in advance. He focuses on the
`unworkability' of the interface as an effect-producing phenomenon,
and therefore as /practical./ It is practical because its negativity
(negation of content, of direct presentation) provokes a response from
a self. As a symptom of the failure of technique, it is also the
beginning of practice.
Galloway's claim that the computer instantiates a `practice', not a
'presence', quoted at the outset of this chapter, stems from this
notion of the unworkable interface. As I have argued, practical
understanding is constituted not only through relations of belonging
(in this case a 'politics') but also through distanciation (in this
case an `aesthetic regime'). The interface participates in practical
understanding by standing a distance from it. In particular, practical
considerations arise due to the negativity or /unworkability/ of the
interface. By highlighting the unworkability of the interface,
Galloway enables us to perceive the failure, or incompleteness, as the
heart of a functioning interface, but also to perceive the crucial
role the /receiver/ of the message plays in constituting the effects
of the interface. Its mixture of both coherent and incoherent
representations, of its need to draw attention to both itself and to a
space beyond itself, means that a subject engaging with the interface
is tasked with negotiating these tensions. Or, rather, with
/appropriating/ them, since the term 'negotiating' may suggest that
the `user' somehow `completes' the work of mediation. It would be more
appropriate to say that the user temporally resolves tensions through
developing a practical stance in relation to the interface and its
technical lacunas. In hermeneutic thought, the experience of failure
gives rise to the need for reflection, not for intellectual reasons,
but due to the need for practical closure. When we experience failure,
our pre-understandings of the world, and therefore our patterns of
understanding that make up our identity, are put into question.
Reflecting on failure is more than a technical or intellectual
endeavour, it involves a reflection on our conditions of belonging to
a world, and for these reasons failure /effects/ reflection, or `gives
rise to/provokes' it in Ricoeur's terms. Galloway comes to a similar
conclusion about the interface, its unworkability means the interface
should be understood through its 'effects', and therefore through the
role it takes up in its space of application. As a counterpart to the
unworkability of the interface, we find a myriad of practical
solutions, `workarounds' and hacks. Galloway highlights the political
and ideological questions arising in that space, but his overall aim
is to /historicize/ the interface against tendencies to reify a
`ludic' mode of existence suggested by it.
4.2.3 Constructing a Common Ground -- Interface and Presentation 2
------------------------------------------------------------------
Galloway's definition of the interface as an effect, and therefore as
practical, resonates with earlier investigations into the
practice-technique dialectic. The potential problem of the interface,
for Galloway, was the rise of the regime of what Deleuze calls
`control societies'; interfaces both embrace the `freedom' of a
playful, interacting subject, whilst simultaneously controlling them.
Whereas for Lewin the interface threatens to annihilate human freedom,
for Galloway it `economises' freedom.
The work of Brenda Laurel can be illustrative here. Her book,
/Computers as Theatre,/ written from the perspective of a practitioner
theoretically reflecting on her field, implicitly employs key
hermeneutic concepts to articulate the structure of human-computer
relations. Her approach is, in many ways, phenomenological. She
explores the question by focusing on the /experiential/ dimension of
human-computer activity, and does so by inquiring into the structures
and forms that shape this experience, structures which she argues are
remarkably similar to those outlined by Aristotle in his
/Poetics./[316] Aristotle's /Poetics/ is also a key source for
Ricoeur's theory of narrative and, therefore, the two approaches
overlap at various points. The implicit hermeneutic grounds for her
inquiry appear in these Aristotelian understandings of performance and
representation, but even more so in her overall framing of the
computer-human situation as one in which a /common ground/ is being
sought for through the activity of participating subjects within
pre-established structures/constraints. Just as narrative
representations for Ricoeur are understood as /mimetic,/ the
interface, in seeking a common ground, /repeats/ the practices it is
aiming to enable (for example, composing a spreadsheet) in a
technological mode. This mimetic function, as with narrative,
introduces a difference which enables the emergence of innovations and
new procedures from within the context of the representation itself,
for example, new techniques or ways of doing something that arise due
to the processing power of computers.
The idea of a common ground is a difficult one, as it may seem at
first sight to be built around the exclusion of the other (of the
alterity of the machine, for example). If this were the case then it
would bring the computer-human interaction in line with what Lewin was
arguing about the logic of the interface. Computers and interfaces
would be seen as objects that lead us to think in a technocratic way;
the shared ground of computer-human interaction would be an
impoverished one, devoid of meaning and alterity. However, this is not
the sense in which Laurel uses the term common ground. For
hermeneutics, a `commonality' of sense, does not exist prior to
engagement, as something fixed that a conversation works towards.
Rather, commonality emerges in and through the understanding process.
Aiming to understand the other does not necessarily mean aiming to
find what we have in common. The idea of the 'other' is already
built-in to the concept of a common ground - it is meaningless to come
to an agreement with oneself. Agreement is not something that can be
`programmed' in advance. In fact, it is the inverse of something that
can be anticipated, it emerges only through the transformation of
oneself through revision of one's expectations or anticipations in the
face of the other. There is a `formation' process occurring, but it is
not led by either side of a dialogue, but by the process of
interaction itself,
We say that we "conduct" a conversation, but the more
genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies
within the will of either partner. Thus a genuine
conversation is never the one that we wanted to
conduct...No one knows in advance what will "come out" of
a conversation. Understanding or its failure is like an
event that happens to us...All this shows is that a
conversation has a spirit of its own, and that the
language in which it is conducted bears its own truth
within it -- i.e., that it allows something to "emerge"
which henceforth exists."[317]
So, the fusion of horizons is not brought about by will or wilful
action, but by /interaction./ Furthermore, understanding, or the
production of a commonality across a distance, is an "emergent"
phenomenon. A common ground is something that happens to be /produced/
through interactive engagement. This conception of understanding and
commonality is mirrored by Laurel. For example, she traces the
different, historical senses of `conversation' between computers and
humans - in earlier cases computers were controlled using knobs and
dials, later by punch cards, followed by early forms of visual display
("glass teletypes") and command line interfaces, etc. All situations
in which humans and computers were imagined to be `conversing' in a
"tit-for-tat" manner, "a person does something and the computer
responds."[318] However, "as advanced linguistics demonstrated, there
is more to conversation that tit for tat. Dialogue is not just
linearized turn taking in which I say something, you go think about
it, then you say something, I go think about it, and so on."[319] An
alternative approach to conversation emphasizes the importance of a
common ground, therefore transforming the `role' the interface plays.
The interface is not just a `messenger', carrying instructions between
users and the system, instead, "it forms a shared context for action
in which both [person and computer] are agents."[320] For example, she
cites the work of Susan Brennan, writing,
Brennan's work was aimed at designing human-computer
interfaces so that they offer means for establishing
common ground ("grounding") that are similar to those that
people use in human-to-human conversation, such as
interruptions, questions, and utterances and gestures that
indicate whether something is being understood.[321]
Laurel's own work stresses the performative and representational
character of this common ground, comparing the work of an interface
designer with that of a set designer for a theatre production, "both
create representations of objects and environments that provide a
context for action."[322] As with a theatre production, series of
actions achieved in human-computer interaction develop temporally, and
this temporal sequence is also itself a product of interaction and is
represented by the interface, as in cases when the interface conserves
prior actions and re-presents them to users. An application contains a
potential range of actions and outcomes, but the sequence that becomes
actual is left open to be determined by concrete the human-computer
interaction itself.[323] This temporal aspect of the interface is a
trace of the incompleteness of the technological hermeneutic which
Lewin discussed. The interface does not only present a range of
functions, it also presents itself: "What is represented in the
interface is not only the task's environment and tools, but also the
process of interaction -- the contributions made by both parties and
the evidence of the task's evolution."[324]
This `feedback' from the interface is important in understanding the
productive nature of human-computer interaction. Certainly, many forms
of interface feedback are designed to invisibly `nudge' us towards
specific actions, which makes the feedback process more a means of
coercion than collaboration. However, as we saw from Galloway's
description of the interface, it is often `unworkable', it presents us
with its own uncertainty and failure, forcing a practical resolution.
Whether coercive or unworkable, the point for Laurel is that it is
firstly temporal. In relation to the earlier discussion of technology
and time, Laurel's work challenges assumptions that technology is
aimed primarily towards the reduction of temporality (and therefore
uncertainty). All the /dramatic/ potential of temporal experience,
thwarted expectations, catharsis, fulfilment, and so on, are to be
found in the design of computers and interfaces. As she writes:
Assume for a moment that you have gone to the theatre not
knowing what is playing. You sit in your seat. Anything is
possible until the curtain goes up. When you face a
computer screen, anything is possible until you turn on
the device and see what sorts of applications and
affordances are present.[325]
That is, the computer-human experience takes place over a dramatic,
flux-like timeframe. It even has a beginning-middle-end structure,
starting with switching something on, not knowing fully in advance
what is to be expected, or what will cause an end-point to arrive. The
fact that machines and software applications are, to a large extent,
'pre-programmed', containing a `limited' or prescribed range of
possibilities, does not concern Laurel. Taking her cue from theatre
and Aristotle, she asserts instead that all meaningful experience
involves constraint. Her `structuralist' approach to software design
is not to be confused with an overly-technical desire to `control' or
map experience in advance. She writes: "As a structuralist, I have
been assailed by both theatre and computer people for taking what they
perceive as a rather bloodless approach. Structure is not always well
understood, and even when it is, its uses are seen to be analytical
rather than productive."[326] Instead, paying attention to
/structure,/ at the level of software-design, is akin to the
/configurational/ task of narrative emplotment explored in Chapter 4.
As with Ricoeur's account of time, human temporality cannot be grasped
independently of its structuration and emplotment in narrative from.
By drawing attention to these features of computer and interface
design, Laurel is highlighting its reflective relation to human
understandings of meaning and temporality.
Whereas it is easy to identify the ways in which various structures
mediate our experience of playing a video game, or participating in an
interactive simulation, Laurel emphasizes that mediating structures
provide dynamic contexts across all levels of computer-human
interactions. For example, the appeal of many spreadsheet software
applications is not simply their functionality, it is also the
representative mode of the interface. This representative dimension
provides a more `pleasing' structuring of an action. To illustrate
this, Laurel uses the example of deciding whether you can afford to
buy a new house. She outlines the steps of the task that would involve
preliminary evaluations, entering data and formulas, making
trade-offs, creating an artefact, etc. She charts these steps using
the format of a Freytag curve. At each level, the software provides
formal parameters for an action, but requires guiding and input from
the person using the application. There is direct feedback from
calculations; you can witness how changing one factor of a decision
may alter other factors, and determine better which variables to give
more weight to. You can format and create an `artefact' of the
process, and "print the whole thing out to show my husband so that he,
too, will be convinced".[327] In contrast, you could execute the same
task using a pencil and paper, but "the action would lack organic
wholeness; rather than the elegant Freytag-like curve, the action
would more likely consist of long, flat-line segments of calculation
punctuated by periods of analysis and planning with a completely
different representational context and 'feel'."[328]As an alternative,
spreadsheets like Excel are,
successful largely because they do an extremely good job
of supporting whole actions with a satisfying degree of
complexity, magnitude, and completeness. One could perform
the same whole action as that in the previous example with
a calculator, an abacus, or even a pencil and paper, but
its magnitude (in the sense of duration) would be
excruciatingly excessive.[329]
Again, in contrast to Simpson's view of technology and time, Laurel is
arguing that the design of software and interfaces includes
considerations of what counts as a `meaningful', or at the very least,
pleasurable, use of one's time.
Although, Laurel does not use this language, Ricoeur's notion of the
"world of the text" is helpful here. As we saw in the cases of
narrative and structuralism, there is a difference, for Ricoeur,
between the `raw material' of language, and even of various structures
(myths, genres, tropes), and the world that is formed from the
combination of these materials. The world of the text is always in
excess of the component parts that make it up, thus rendering a
structuralist or analytic account incomplete. Laurel has a similar
perspective when it comes to the interface. Just as in the case of
theatre, when the actual material components of a production (set
backdrops, actors, scripts) combine to produce an effect which is
something other than the pure material relations of the parts making
up the effect, the interface effect is something other than a direct
expression of the material parts of the machine. For example, in
relation to the above example of the spreadsheet software, she writes:
Here we must separate the activity from its artefacts. The
/representation/ of a manuscript or spreadsheet as we
manipulate in on screen is in fact pretend, as compared to
physical artifacts like data files (in memory or on a
storage medium) and hard copy. The artifacts are real (as
are actors, lighting instruments, and scenery in a play),
but the rules involved in working with the
/representations/ of dramatic actions or interactions are
distinct from the artifacts.[330]
Why is this the case? Why the need for a supplementary rule-set in
dealing with a technological device such as a computer? There are two
main reasons, which I believe are related. The first reason is the
expected one; someone engaging with a machine simply needs a different
frame of reference for the engagement to take place, one that they are
more familiar with. In Laurel's case, she draws parallels with
traditions of representation, of our human capacities to `suspend
disbelief', to `play', and so on. A software engineer will engage with
the machine on a different level, just as the author will approach the
construction of a text differently than the reader who takes it up in
a new context. As we saw earlier in the case of narrative, a narrative
is not simply an isolated system of signs and their relations, it is
also an /intelligible,/ organic whole, and the same is true in the
design of computers, they are meant to be engaged with at the level of
intelligibility and practical reason, not only at a rational level. In
the case of commercial computers, especially, a designer's
consideration of user experience outweighs considerations of
maximizing the /functionality/ of the machine. The machine
functionality is not foregrounded, but instead is relegated to the
level of an invisible 'constraint', a formal condition for the actual
engagement that takes place between the person and computer,
Engagement is only possible when one can rely on the
system to maintain the representational context. A person
should not be forced to interact with the system /qua/
system; indeed, any awareness of the system as a distinct,
"real" entity would explode mimetic illusion, just as a
clear view of the stage manager calling cues would disrupt
the "willing suspension of disbelief" for the audience of
a traditional play.[331]
Laurel argues that instead of being concerned with representing what
that machine is doing, designers need to pay more attention to
representing what the /interactor/ with the machine is doing. In
contrast to Lewin's analysis of the logic of the interface, these
alternative design concerns actually disrupt the pursuit of
functionality. The logic of the interface is not a transcendent
essence that transforms complex technological phenomena into utopias
of functionality, rather, for Laurel, the program and the interface
(and by implication, person using the interface), develop alongside
one another,
How should an interface come to be? In effective
interaction design, the interface does not simply come
last; it develops throughout with the entire design
process. It is deeply entwined with functionality. It
shows sensitivity to the interactor and sometimes even
constrains functionality that cannot or need not be
touched effectively by the interactor. If we think of an
application as an organic whole, the process by which it
is created should be organic as well.[332]
This question of how the interface `comes to be' leads us to the
second reason for the supplementary rule-set. If the first reason is
'practical' (interfaces need to employ familiar rules of
representation to encourage engagement), then the second is
`ontological'. Like Galloway, Laurel conceives the computer primarily
as a medium, as opposed to an artefact. She enumerates this point as
her first "design heuristic": "Think of the computer not as a tool,
but as a medium."[333] Furthermore, it is a medium with a history,
which Laurel herself has participated in forming, and an open future.
It is the uncertainty of what exactly computers can do, combined with
the participatory medium of the interface that makes it an ontological
question.
Throughout Laurel's book, one of the key ideas she draws on from
Aristotle is the difference between potentiality and actuality. Just
as the integrative force of a narrative or theatre production gains
its meaning effect from the way it closes-down the multiple potential
outcomes or modes or representation, the software applications and
interface designs of computers also constrain the `potentialities' of
the machine. When we engage with spreadsheet software we may forget
the extent of the power of the machine that is running the software,
but this is necessary for a meaningful engagement to take place.
Laurel's primary aim is to encourage designers of interfaces and
software to see their practice in a new way, through the lens of
Aristotelian views on poetics. The practical skills required to
orchestrate a theatre production resemble those which are called upon
to produce a flourishing `user-experience'. Of course, a large amount
of the pleasure derived from using computers or technological devices
comes from increases in efficiency, power and so on, but the role of
the designer is to constrain and redirect this potentiality in a way
that will be meaningful for someone engaging with the device. Overall,
this prioritising of the very `human' side of human-computer
interactions shifts focus from thinking about what a device is, to
what it can do, and even, how it can `perform' (with the term
`performance' taking on a different significance than it might usually
have when placed alongside a description of a computer).
At the background of all these reflections, though, are questions
about what technology /is/. Designers are also constrained by
limitations of the device, as well as assumptions about what a
computer is, "The characteristics of the interface for any given
representation are influenced by the pragmatics of usage and
principles of human factors and ergonomics, as well as by an
overarching definition of what computers are."[334] Aside from
defining a computer as something that mediates human experience, the
question of what they are, or what they will become is left relatively
open. The openness of this question, though, is part of the nature of
computers. It seems that what Laurel is describing is a classic
hermeneutic circle of understanding, applications inform the
construction of underlying structures, which in turn bring forth new
possibilities for application and design.
It could be argued that technology serves a fundamentally different
/social/ function than, for example, theatre or poetry. We might be
able to say that other representational mediums contain a broader
socially agreed upon purpose, to represent to society the tragic or
comic nature of life in the case of theatre, to express `eternal
truths' in the case of poetry, and so on. Yet what is being mediated
or brought into view by computers? Is it, as Lewin argued, a `utopia
of functionality', devoid of alterity and uncertainty? Or, as Galloway
argued, an indoctrination into the network-culture of control
societies? These are, of course, the wrong questions to ask. Any
`broader' social or cultural purpose or framework is precisely what
Heidegger criticised as a technological attitude. The point is,
rather, that the hermeneutic circle between computers and their
representations, that persists across all modes of representation,
creates an indeterminacy that can only be resolved through practice
and action. This is the point that Galloway helped us arrive at, and
Laurel, too, sees this crucial practical aspect of computers, leading
her to end her reflections on a note of hope, "Our lives are torn up
by what we see looming in the future of Gaia. We succumb to the
temptation to be always busy, to collaborate with our existing culture
personally and professionally. Alternatives are difficult to imagine.
And yet, we all know that we must not only imagine but /make/
them...Hope is an active verb."[335]
Whether the interface is a mode of concealment, an unworkable
mediation, or a common ground, its mediation is never total. This
means that it acts as an opening for a consideration of the
hermeneutic link between human agency and technology. The phenomena of
the interface implies that there is always an in-between point of
negotiation or interpretation that underlies our practical engagements
with technologies. However, Galloway's point that this indeterminacy
can give rise to a /ludic economy,/ a controlled mode of play that
would never extend /beyond/ the interface (either towards a deeper
understanding of ourselves or of the technologies themselves), is
important. The next chapter considers how a hermeneutic account of
/play,/ which Ricoeur argues is a key moment of appropriation, can
potentially resolve this tension. The task will be to investigate
whether what I have called the hermeneutic circle between technologies
and their individual, practical modes of presentation is a vicious or
virtuous circle. As we have seen, for Ricoeur, the work of
understanding involves mediating between two perspectives -- an
objectifying, explanatory approach, and a participatory, engaged
approach. So far in this section, I have considered the ways that
technologies potentially shape human understanding, whether it be in a
negative or positive sense. In the next chapter I will suggest that
Ricoeur's account of play and appropriation provides a way of thinking
about how human understanding can shape technology.
4.3 Appropriating Technics
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The perspectives explored so far in this section can be seen to
represent two sides of a conflict of interpretations. Borgmann and
Lewin, along with Simpson in Chapter 4, are all highly /suspicious/ of
modern technology. Whereas, prior to the industrial era, techniques,
skills, habits, and so on were /hermeneutic,/ in the sense they were
localised, interpretive and related to meaningful practices, modern
technological phenomena express a unified, underlying logic which is
detached from the world of human action and meaning. This logic is
understood as the attempt to annihilate indeterminate temporal
progressions through planning, controlling, etc. (Simpson); as
following the `promise' of technology, which is to make a function
more available, transparent, and comfortable (Borgmann); or, as the
attempt to reduce complexity to easy negotiable interfaces and
operations (Lewin). These critiques, along with many of Ricoeur's own
comments on technology, all share a similar point -- technologies are
/impractical,/ they displace us from our practical, hermeneutic
relation to the world.
The other side of a conflict of interpretations is a phenomenology of
hope, a restorative project which corresponds dialectically to a
hermeneutics of suspicion. The works of Verbeek, Galloway and Laurel
aim to embrace the potential for individual devices and technologies
to productively shape and support meaningful action in the lifeworld.
Ricoeur is also, to an extent, a representative of this approach,
since he accepts that all action and understanding is mediated. Action
involves a combination of a power to act on the part of the human
agent, and the institutions and structures that enable this power to
be expressed and communicated. I suggested in Section 3 that Ricoeur
engages with the technique-aspect of practical understanding, since
our understanding of the world is not only determined by relations of
/meaning,/ but the distanced structures that organise and condition
this meaning. Provided that techniques are understood as modes of
/distanciation/ as opposed to a distanced mode of manipulation or
control, it is possible to imagine forms of practical appropriation
that correspond to the use of techniques (for example, the concrete
activity of reading).
There are hermeneutic limitations to the constructive features of this
approach, however. Although we can develop better-informed practices
of design and technological mediation, which can improve our actions
and disclose new features of the lifeworld, the project, like any
ethical project, is limited through the human experience of tragedy.
The limit that enables technological appropriation also marks the
fallibility or uncertainty of particular technological designs and
solutions to living problems and traumas. Also, Galloway highlights
the fact that the /practical/ thrust of the interface (its
inconsistencies) can potentially lead to a liberating "politics of
incoherence"; but, more often than not, the unworkability of the
interface seems to reinforce coherent political regimes and lead to
what Deleuze calls "control societies". The practical, engaging and
indeterminate features of the interface can produce /ludic economies
-/ endless options for a play that appears as `free' but which is
actually circumscribed by a consistent, ideological politics.
The question arises then, as to the possibility of finding a middle
position between these two approaches, one that could recognise both
the /practical,/ localized features of technologies and the more
general features that hermeneutic approaches are critical of.
Ricoeur's concepts of distanciation and appropriation can help us
achieve this. The task, I argue, is a hermeneutic one. It involves
first recognising the hermeneutic circle that persists between
technologies and practical understandings, and then, following
Heidegger's famous claim, "what is decisive is not to get out of the
circle but to come into it in the right way."[336]
In this spirit, the first part of this chapter will examine Gilbert
Simondon's claim that to grasp the distinctiveness of /technics/, our
everyday prejudices against it must be challenged. This approach
demands that a hermeneutic /suspicion/ of technology needs, instead,
to be turned toward the way we interact with technologies, rather than
towards the transcendental structures of technology itself. Following
Simondon, I suggest that, like a text, technologies are /distanced/
from the world of practice (as a hermeneutic of suspicion suggests)
yet, as with the activity of reading, it is possible to appropriate
this distance at the regional, practical level. Ricoeur's
understanding of appropriation entails a double movement - the naïve
understanding of an ego is replaced with an enlarged
self-understanding, and the meaning of the text is also augmented and
developed further through being repeated anew in different contexts.
The distanciation-appropriation model of interpretative interaction
outlined by Ricoeur's philosophy allows us to read the relationship
between human understanding and technologies as co-determining,
provided that we recognise the /incomplete/ and unstable nature of
technological design. A step towards seeing the incomplete, fragile
nature of technology can be achieved once we recognise its mirror in
hermeneutic consciousness. If, according to Ricoeur, hermeneutic
consciousness proceeds as a `spiral', with our understandings of
ourselves and others perpetually open to augmentation and revision
through self-alienation, then we must accept, firstly, that our
understandings of technology are subject to similar revisions in the
case of new encounters, and, more importantly, that technologies, as
the product of acting, thinking beings is /reflective/ of the same
questions that shape and condition this uncertain, incomplete
consciousness. For Simondon, technics depends, in its becoming, on
human `operators' to engage with its structures and draw out new
possible configurations through innovations and inventions. Whereas
Simondon helps us to understand how /technics/ depends on this process
in its actualizations, Ricoeur's hermeneutics helps us see how an
acting self can be also be conceived of as an integral part of the
operation, since Ricoeur's understanding of the situated, vulnerable
self avoids the forms of 'humanism' that Simondon views as a threat to
technology.
The second part of the chapter expands on this image of a productive
interaction between technics and the self by highlighting further the
hermeneutic character of the interaction. Ricoeur's understanding of
'play', adopted from Gadamer, helps us to conceive the interactive
relation between practical reason and technological configurations as
one in which prior identities (ego identities on the part of the
human, and `intentionality' or univocal function on the part of a
technology) are bracketed. This bracketing allows for the emergence of
the implicit horizons of both the technologies and the human to be
brought to the fore and transformed through one another. Play allows
for the possibility of a recognition of the /symbolic/ aspect of
technology, i.e., its ambiguous or multistable features that are
celebrated in postphenomenological thought. A hermeneutic approach,
however, must go further than this due to its inherent suspicion of
technological rationality. As Verbeek has shown, a recognition of the
multistability of the device can lead to better informed, more `moral'
design practices. However, a key part of the hermeneutic task,
revealed through the experience of interpretation and appropriation,
is in attesting to the fragility and finitude of understanding. I
suggest that recognising the symbolic features of technologies can
lead to such an attestation. If hermeneutics always entails a double
movement of suspicion and trust, then the counterpart of a hermeneutic
critique of technology can be found in recognising the symbolic
aspects of technology through play.
4.3.1 The World of the Text and the /Associated Milieu/ of Technology
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Simondon's work is useful for characterizing the /world/ of technics
and its difference and integrity in relation to the world of human,
practical concerns.[337] Like the world of the text in the case of
Ricoeur, the `world' of the technical object is an /autonomous/ one.
Similar to Iser's retrieval of the /parasitic/ nature of fiction in
relation to ordinary language, the technical object has a parasitic
relation to practice -- it does not directly `respond' to practical
dilemmas (these, in fact, are /constraints/ on technical evolution),
rather, it has its own internal commitments or logics. As with
Ricoeur's account of psychoanalytic techniques, the technical object
is formed through relations of /force/ as opposed to /meaning/ (for
example, the laws of physics, thermodynamics, etc.). Nevertheless,
features of the technical object are still /intelligible/ and
meaningful in relation to human practical understanding, since the
technical object has a transformative effect on the lifeworld through
the emergence of new sets of relations and variables that correspond
to concrete technical ensembles (the "associated milieus" of concrete
technologies). Like the work of fiction, this /distanciation/ of
technologies from practices enables the creative production of
/imaginative variations/ on established understandings.
One of the crucial, and most lasting, aspects of Simondon's analysis
of the technical object is the /emancipatory/ character of his
reading. His explanations of technics are a critical attempt to
transform our everyday attitudes towards modern technologies,
Culture behaves toward the technical object much in the
same way as a man caught up in primitive xenophobia
behaves towards a stranger...The alienation in question is
not caused by the machine but by a failure to come to an
understanding of the nature and essence of the machine, by
the absence of the machine from the world of meanings, and
by its omission from the table of values and concepts that
are an integral part of culture.[338]
Against an elevated `humanism' that treats machines and technologies
as inert tools that carry out the human or social projects more
efficiently, on the one hand, and an unjustified fear of the
'automated', world-threatening nature of the machine, on the other,
Simondon asserts that these ideological positions blind us from
properly understanding the nature of technics. To emancipate the human
from these self-defeating perspectives, it is important to think about
technologies in terms of their /becoming/, which is at once
independent from, and co-emergent with human life. Rather than seeing
ourselves as either masters or slaves of technology, we should see
ourselves as collaborators with technological processes. This
emancipatory perspective is paralleled in Ricoeur's understanding of
the text. The work of understanding, before considering the will or
agency of the reader/participant (or author), embraces the long detour
of reading and analysis. As with questions of the technical object,
the `freedom' of the reader is always relative to the work being
considered. Like the text, technics encourages the development of an
enlarged self, against a self that either asserts its dominance (by
reducing technology to a tool), or disappears completely from the
world (as would be the case in processes of enframing).
The convergence with the way Ricoeur and Iser discuss the activity of
reading and the way Simondon discusses the becoming of technology is
also found in their understandings of /concretization/. In the case of
the act of reading, we saw that concretization was a productive
process in which the horizons of the reader and horizons of the text
were fused. The text has its own reality, independent of the concerns
of the reader, meaning that the act of reading is not a simple
assimilation of ideas or transmission of information. Instead, it is
an active struggle, guided by cues from the text, the répertoire of
the subjects engaging with the text, differing reading and composing
strategies, and so on. All these mediating factors work to engender
the fusion of horizons. The temporal nature of a text means that its
objective character cannot be reduced to the subject-object
distinction, but is an object that is constituted by the "wandering
viewpoint". A text cannot be abstracted from this wandering viewpoint
and condensed into easily transmissible units of knowledge or
information. All these factors render the reading process a process of
concretization. The text, as a communicative medium, only /takes
effect in existence,/ through this process of (re)configuration by the
reader. Prior to the reading process, the worlds of the text are only
`proposed worlds' or potential worlds.
In the preface to /On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,/
John Hart writes that Simondon's term /concrétude/ is difficult to
render in English, with the closest possible terms being
concretization or concrescence. However, he does offer a useful image,
taken from M. C. Richards, to explain the idea of machine
`concrétude'.[339] The crafts (in this case, pottery), offer a
suitable mode of practice for thinking about the relation between
function and meaning in relation to making. When crafting an object,
strong coordination is required between an understanding of the
meaning of the object and the corporeal gestures and activities
required to bring about that intended form. A necessary symmetry needs
to be established between the two -- it is not enough to simply have
the intended form `in mind' without the habitual knowledge of how to
achieve it, and similarly it is not enough to know how to perform
certain actions without understanding their purpose. These factors are
drawn on by Richards in her book on centring, "It is the assertion by
Richards of the inconvertible strength and symmetry of the combination
which makes her combination of pottery and writing so important. Her
concept of centering and fusion in the potter's craft has the best
chance of providing a language for machine `concretude' in
Simondon."[340]
Technological becoming or concretization follows a similar process of
centring: internal technical laws and the demands of natural milieus
or particular technical ensembles are in conflict with one another,
but the negotiation of this conflict is central to the concretization
process. Similar to the part-whole relation in hermeneutics, the
`technical object' (the whole) is realized through concrete instances
which differentiate it, just as individual machines are made up
different parts working together. Unlike, Borgmann who suggests that
the parts of machines or devices can all be reduced to the overall
functionality or purpose of the device (and therefore can be
swapped-out, altered, improved, etc., without changing the overall
purpose), Simondon's approach suggests that individual parts of a
concrete technical object all have their own heterogeneous functions
that are coordinated as a working whole. Altering a single part
introduces a new set of functions to be integrated, and this process
is not straight-forward. The new functions introduced by individual
parts can reveal new possibilities for the whole, provoking radical
transformations of the functioning of the machine. Therefore, in
Simondon's case there is a perpetual tension between the parts of the
machine and the overall function or purpose of the machine, which
makes concretization a dynamic, recursive process.
So, concretization is understood in terms of a /fusion/ -- the
coordinated integration of different systems or horizons into a new
configuration. This is why, for Simondon, it is incorrect to think
about technology in terms of /production./ It is not a `tool' or
process designed to produce a particular outcome or artefact. If
something is produced, it is the tangential result of a concretization
process. The fusion of various converging series of technical
processes /gives rise to/ utilizable outcomes (or may not). The point
is that it is firstly the internal dynamics of the technical object
that generate the concretization, rather than, for example, the
`needs' of a society, "It is not the production-line which produces
standardization; rather it is intrinsic standardization which makes
the production line possible."[341] It seems here that Simondon is
arguing for a /poietic/ account of technics, as a way of resisting the
temptation to view it as simply `productive', in the economic sense.
For a user of a technology, understanding its meaning can be
difficult, since its genesis is more the result of a series of
technical innovations, immanent to the technical object, rather than
being related directly to its use in the lifeworld. For example, a
technological configuration, such as the petrol engine, can be applied
in a variety of different contexts (lawnmowers, boats, cars, etc.),
and therefore its meaning is not exhausted by any one of these
particular applications. For this reason, an examination of the
/utility/ of a technology does not yield a better understanding of its
function or purpose,
We can get the same result from very different
functionings and structures: steam-engines,
petrol-engines, turbines, and engines powered by springs
and weights are all engines; yet, for all that, there is a
more apt analogy between a spring-engine and a bow or
cross-bow than between the former and a steam-engine; a
clock with weights has an engine analogous to a windlass,
while an electric clock is analogous to a house-bell or
buzzer. Usage brings together heterogeneous structures and
functions in genres and species which get their meaning
from the relationship between their particular functions
and another function, that of the human being in action.
[342]
For Simondon, the /individuality/ of a concrete technology can only be
explained by recourse to a specific form of analysis. The meaning of
particular technologies cannot be discerned through events of usage,
but through a reflective or explanatory account of the inner workings
of the technology itself. In the above quote, the (social/practical)
category "engine" does not account for the different configurations
that make up various species of engine, and that lend them their
individual quality. In other words, if we wish to understand the
essence of a technical object, practice or practical usage is the
wrong point with which to begin. Rather than analysing how a
technology is utilized in determining its meaning, Simon suggests
instead a more genealogical approach -- technologies move from
abstract models to concrete unities. `Artisanal' techniques, for
example, are seen to be more abstract. They depend on the coordinated
influence of a number of external factors. They are more likely to be
individuated by `chance' elements; perhaps an artefact is
made-to-order, supply of certain materials is low so others are
substituted, and so on. In short, abstract technologies depend on
/practical compromises/ in their functioning. A technology becomes
concrete through an internal process of integration, which, in a
sense, negates the need for environmental compromises. In Aristotle's
terms, /techne/ loves /tyche --/ the genesis of the technical object
involves a struggle with chance or non-controllable elements in the
process of developing its own self-sufficient form. For example, in
relation to the technical configuration of an engine:
It could be said that the modern engine is a concrete
engine and that the old engine was abstract. In the old
engine each element comes into play at a certain moment in
the cycle and, then, it is supposed to have no effect on
the other elements; the different parts of the engine are
like individuals who could be thought of as working each
is his turn without their ever knowing each other...the
integration of the particular unit into the ensemble
involves a series of problems to be resolved, problems
that are called technical but which, in fact, are problems
concerning the compatibility of already given
ensembles.[343]
The more fragmented a technological ensemble is, the more abstract and
vulnerable it is. A concrete technology is one with a high level of
coordination and integration. The `technical' problem involving the
convergence of different structures into an integrated whole, is
distinguished from the `practical' problem of finding compromises and
partial solutions for incomplete technologies,
Therefore, the technical problem has to do with the
convergence of structures in to a structural unity rather
than with the seeking of compromises between conflicting
requirements...It is such a convergence that gives the
technical object its specific identity because, at any
given time, an indefinite plurality of functional systems
is not possible. Technical species are a great deal more
restricted in number than the destined uses of technical
objects. Human needs diversity to infinity, but directions
of convergence for technical species are finite in number.
[344]
In hermeneutic terms, the "specific identity" of individual
technologies is related to their /horizon --/ their internal, concrete
configurations already have a historical meaning. Their past
innovations and constructions, which they have negotiated and
integrated on the way to becoming more concrete, now shape and
determine their future possible innovations. Concrete technologies are
also /finite./ In Gadamer's terms, they are subject to their own
/history of effects./ Like a text they have an /autonomous/ nature,
the /internal/ /meaning/ of technology is the source of its genesis
and resulting concreteness, as opposed to its /significance/ (human
significance). For example, the automobile is a revolutionary
technological innovation from a social perspective, yet its emergence
was the product of a practical /compromise/ between the "technical
species" and the nature of the human operator,
The more a car must meet the critical needs of its user
the more its essential functions are encumbered by an
external bondage. The body-work becomes loaded with
accessories and the shape no longer approximates a
stream-lined structure. The made-to-measure feature is not
only inessential, it works against the essence of the
technical being, like a dead weight imposed from without.
The car's centre of gravity is raised, and bulk
increased.[345]
Simondon's work parallels that of Simpson and Borgmann to an extent.
Technologies and practices are seen to be in conflict with one
another. However, as an inversion of the earlier perspective offered
by Simpson and Borgmann, Simondon sees social/practical compromises as
threatening to the evolution of technologies, rather than /vice
versa/. Instead of seeing technologies being nihilistic modes of
representing (enframing) practices, practices are seen to anticipate
and represent technological innovations in ways which stifle the
individuation process of a technological species, human needs and
desires tend to render /inessential/ features of technologies more
significant. From Simondon's perspective, there seems to be an
irresolvable conflict between practical understanding, taken in a
humanist sense, and technological becoming. Concrete technologies are
akin to biological entities, they possess their own individualities
and structures. The office plant and the computer could be said to be
analogous in this sense; both are individuated phenomena that have
been abstracted in order to enhance a practical working environment.
However, Simondon does offer a solution to this conflict. We must
abandon our `humanist' pretensions and embrace a new mode of the human
that is a collaborator with technologies. Whereas the `essence' of a
technical species has its own internal tendency, and therefore has an
integrity resembling that of natural phenomena, its becoming is also a
process laden with affective consequences, and these consequences can
indeed be felt at the practical level. Concrete technologies produce
/associated milieus./ When Ricoeur asserts the integrity and
autonomous nature of the text, he does so in order to accentuate its
/worldly/ character -- a world which is at once distanced and
inviting. The same can be said of Simondon's reading of technologies.
For hermeneutics, the notion of an enlarged self entails the crucial
factor of /transformation --/ the act of reading is a concretization
because its effects /alter/ self-understanding in a way that is
irreversible. We do not simply approach a text or narrative with the
intention of fulfilling our own needs or desires, instead, we expect
to feel our desires and outlooks challenged by the world of the text.
The expectations of the reader, and the challenges presented by the
world of the text, are transformed into a new, inseparable,
configuration embodied in the enlarged self. Whereas technologies are
in conflict with practices, their associated milieus offer points of
engagement and transformation. A technology that `fits in' well with
an already on-going practice, for example a technique employed by an
artisan, has less of an effect on established practices than a
fully-formed concrete technology that demands to be taken on its own
terms.
The reason technologies produce associated milieus is because, in the
process of becoming more concrete, technologies must /adapt/ to the
surrounding environment. Much of this adaptation process is impacted
by human operators, "The technical object is delimited to a certain
extent by human choice which tries to establish the best compromise
possible between two worlds."[346] However, adaptation must be taken
in a particular sense. It does not mean that there is already a
fully-formed environment in which the technology must carve out its
own niche. Rather, adaptation is a type of recursive activity, where
the environment is also /produced,/ retroactively, by the adaptation
process, "The adaptation-concretization process is one which causes
the birth of an environment rather than being the result of an already
established environment."[347] In other words, technologies both find
a place within an ongoing milieu, whilst at the same time inaugurating
new connections and values which also affect the shape of this milieu.
The individuation of a technical object is effected by this adaptation
process, "such individuation is possible because of the recurrence of
causality in the environment which the technical being creates around
itself, and environment which it influences and by which it is
influenced. This environment, which is at the same time natural and
technical, can be called the associated milieu."[348]
The associated milieu, which is a mixture of the environmental and the
technical, must be distinguished from the practical environment of the
human agent. Simondon asserts the circularity (recursivity) of the
adaptation process because he wants to highlight that the associated
milieu of the technical object is not a /fabricated/ milieu. The
relationship between a world and the technical object is one of mutual
dependence. The technical object has, in Canguilhem's terms, a /vital
value./[349] Again, it must be acknowledged that there is a difference
between an abstract and a concrete technical object, but a concrete
technology is one which is integrated into a milieu, and this
integration entails a selection process. Certain features of the
environment which are favourable to the development of the technology
are highlighted, or in hermeneutic terms, disclosed, by its concrete
existence.
Can these selections become meaningful for human practices? Perhaps
they do not give themselves up easily to interpretation. More may be
'disclosed' to the existing human being by dwelling by a river bank
among the large pillar-like trees, than explicating the fluid
mechanics of the hydroelectric dam which lies further down the river.
In other words, there remains something `other' in technical
evolution, it has its own logic and development process, which is not
concerned with the vital values of the `human' (beyond the
human-as-operator). However, if, taking Simpson's view of meaning
discussed earlier, meaning is a /condition/ of practice, rather than a
value to be extracted from the practice, then it may be possible to
view the associated milieus of technologies as important for
considering how practical conditions shift alongside the evolution of
technologies. Taking Simondon's view of technical evolution seriously,
means accepting that the formation of associated milieus is an
/in/-human operation. The worlds conditioned by technological
adaptations are worlds we arrive in as others, and which must be
approached through an attitude of engagement and discovery.
Technological associated milieus are not comforting, familiar worlds,
fabricated for our own benefit, instead, they are disruptive and
foreign. In this way, approaching concrete technologies is akin to
approaching a text, it involves the demand to alienate oneself from
one's own assumptions about technology.
4.3.2 Emancipation through Appropriation
----------------------------------------
The concrete nature of technologies suggests that they can potentially
be thought of as hermeneutic objects. Simondon's work highlights that
individual technologies possess their own horizons and internal
meanings that can be disclosed by combining an analysis of their
technical features with a genealogy of their past iterations. At the
practical level, the associated milieus of technologies help shape
what counts as valuable in the lifeworld. I have suggested that
Simondon's account of the technical object shares some features of
Ricoeur's understanding of distanciated structures; both have an
autonomous existence; their /meaning/ is something contained within
the configuration or /work/ itself rather than in the `minds' of the
users engaging with or producing these structures. However, whereas
texts, narratives, linguistic structures, and so on, are hermeneutic
because they repeat personal, historical or cultural concerns, the
technical object seems to offer no place for the human self.
Therefore, if hermeneutics centres on ideas of /Bildung,/ including
Ricoeur's directing of his hermeneutics towards the task of
understanding /better,/ what do we /learn/ about ourselves from
engagements with technologies? Simondon's answer to this question
involves the overcoming of social prejudices about technology and
liberating ourselves from a humanist conception of our existence and
nature. I suggest that Ricoeur's work, too, allows the possibility for
thinking about the productive effect of technology on
self-understanding, provided that a difference is retained between
techniques and practical understanding.
What we learn through appropriating these complex, foreign, and
/incomplete/ configurations is a lesson about human freedom. As David
Lewin argued, this is the guiding question of a technological epoch.
However, whereas Lewin suggested that technology reveals the question
of freedom and self-determination in a negative way by displacing the
question, below I will re-read this displacement as a potential
opening or opportunity to put our assumptions /in play/. Through
technological engagement, the apparent freedom of an ego is replaced
by the playful (free) interactions of structures and
self-understanding. A /literal/ engagement with technology must be
overcome for this approach to become operative. A literal engagement
is one that disavows the /symbolic/ features of technology.
Within the context of our everyday interactions with technologies,
devices and systems appear initially through their /utility./ In this
sense, technologies do not address us or invite a free participation
in the same way as an artwork or text. The utility of technology is
linked to what Borgmann calls the "tightly-patterned network" of
technologies -- devices exist within a network or configuration which
progressively aims towards fulfilling a certain /promise/ (making
resources more available with increased efficiency, producing higher
levels of comfort, reducing risk, etc.), and in this sense individual
devices are /substitutable./ In this way, no particular device exists
only within a concrete context. As we saw, for Ricoeur linguistic
understanding is predicated on an inseparable relation between
language-systems and the symbol, i.e., the point at which a language
system can be traced back to its origins in the lifeworld, as a
feature of a particular historical tradition or an existential insight
about sacred being-in-the-world. The inseparability of context and
mediating structure seems to be absent in technologies according to
the hermeneutic critique.
From this perspective, technology does not address us as vulnerable,
capable agents, in the same way that the symbol `calls out' to us and
implicates us. Whereas entering into a dialogical interaction with an
artwork or text can be seen as a voluntary act (even if it is a
voluntary submission to the message of the work), the utility and
substitutability of technological artefacts means that we can neither
enter into dialogue with them, nor simply walk away (as we could in
the case of a painting). For example, in the run-up to a recent U.S.
Supreme Court case regarding the question of whether or not the
tracking data for your mobile phone should be considered as `private'
and therefore as protected under the Fourth Amendment, the magazine
/Wired/ featured an article with the title "Supreme Court Must
Understand: Cell Phones Aren't Optional".[350] In the article the
authors write:
The problem is that cell phones are no longer meaningfully
voluntary in modern society. They have become central to
society's basic functions, such as employment, public
safety, and government services. The cell phone is a
revolutionary technology, but its real value comes not
from its technical capabilities, but from its
near-universal adoption.[351]
This description of mobile phone technology mirrors Lewin's analysis
of the logic of the interface -- the technology `behind' it is
"revolutionary", but these "technical capabilities" are circumscribed
by the /utility/ of the device. Furthermore, as with Lewin's analysis
of the interface, the /utility/ of the mobile phone actively denies
the deliberative freedom of its users - we do not even have a choice
as to whether to use one or not.
The authors of the /Wired/ article identify the /value/ of technology
with its social effects. A hermeneutic account, on the other hand,
should not stop at this `literal' level. If we want to read
technologies as symbolic, the literal, or `sign' value of the mobile
phone needs to be read in relation to what the authors identify as the
broader /capability/ of the device. As we saw, Ricoeur's understanding
of the symbol, the point at which hermeneutics begins, asserts that
sign-structures operate in relation to a concealed symbolic
(ambiguous) substratum. Interpretation is a work that aims to
reactivate and renew these symbolic features by putting them into play
in new ways (appropriation). In this case, the technological
capability of the mobile phone, which exceeds its use within a
utility-driven configuration, is the symbolic dimension of the phone.
This symbolic meaning cannot be separated from its effects within a
particular economy of use, but it nevertheless exceeds these effects
and remains open to different interpretations and uses.
Ricoeur himself articulates this tension, between hegemonic
utilizations of technology and a recognition of the alternative
possibilities concealed by this utility, "[T]he modern praxis most
caught up in technology presupposes a prior agreement about the
possibilities and norms of what is taken to be a meaningful
being-in-the-world. Tradition is both the bond and the setting for
this understanding."[352] The hermeneutic task lies in revealing this
dependency on tradition and history, so that new possibilities and
futures can emerge.
The hermeneutic suspicion of technology succeeds in acknowledging a
dimension of technology neglected by Simondon -- its tendency to mask
or conceal itself. The unmasking of technology can occur by appealing
to its symbolic rootedness in praxis. Both a critique or suspicion of
the broader network or paradigm of technological effects, and an
attestation of the indeterminate, inventive, world of /technics/
concealed by these effects overlap in articulating a /limit/ of
technology -- from the critical hermeneutic perspective the limit is
representative of technology's impracticality, while for Simondon the
limit is an enabling limit which constitutes technics as a /world./
The key here is that the limit, on both accounts, opens up a space for
practical wisdom to operate. Either practical wisdom is left to take
over where technologies fail, or, it acts as an `operator' -- it
negotiates compromises between the demands of the technical object and
the societal or cultural demands.
Utilizing aspects of Ricoeur's work explored so far, I suggest that
this limit should be conceived as a /horizon,/ across which
appropriation occurs. The horizon of technology is found in its
practical applications. In keeping with a hermeneutic account of a
horizon, it is not a fixed, graspable point. Instead, it is a
projection of a field of possibilities which are variable and
uncertain, and which imply the perspective of a subject or individual.
Throughout Section 4 I have discussed various way that this horizon is
visible, in terms of the multistability of the device, the
presentational features of the interface, and the associated milieus
of technical objects. The thinkers who articulate these perspectives
also emphasize the role that /practical understanding/ plays in the
negotiation of these horizons.
Engaging with technologies at the level of presentation is different
than a direct examination or critique of the technical object or
tendency itself. Participating in technological presentation, both in
a critical and appropriating way, permits a fusion of horizons to
emerge between a technical tendency and practical understanding.
Crucially, this mode of enragement leaves /both/ sides open and
vulnerable. Practical participation in technological milieus does not
answer the question of what technology /is/ or may become, but is
aimed, inversely, at keeping this question open.
4.3.2.1 Play: Transformations of Technology
The hermeneutic account of the way that this fusion occurs is through
/play./ Play transforms literal, everyday interactions into
indeterminate, symbolic structures of representation. It actualises
the surplus of meaning present within every configuration or work. For
Brenda Laurel, this is what the interface does in relation to the
computer. Whereas, from a certain perspective, the processes of a
computer can be reduced to their logical, programmatic operations, the
supplement of the interface translates these operations into a new
mode of presentation. According to hermeneutic theory, this activity
of representing has broader implications beyond the purely pragmatic
questions of user experience. If we conceive the activity of the
interface as a dynamic, effect-producing practical form of
presentation, as Laurel and Galloway do, then interactions with
interfaces can be thought in terms of play. Using the resources of
hermeneutics, we can read this activity as one that /transforms/ our
understanding of technology. Furthermore, Gadamer's account of play,
integral to Ricoeur's understanding of appropriation, suggests that
the activity of play not only transforms self-understanding, but
transforms the object that we are engaging with by disclosing new
futures and possibilities of application.
When discussing representation, Gadamer makes a distinction between a
sign, a symbol, and the picture (/Bild/). The sign (pure indication,
/Verweisung/) is defined through its functionality, it serves as an
/indication/ (of what is absent). For example, a road-sign indicating
an upcoming curve, or a bookmark, serving to indicate a particular
page.[353] The symbol (pure substitution, /Vertreten/) stands at the
other end of the scale, it represents something, but does so to such
an extent that the `original' becomes unnecessary.[354] For example, a
crucifix. In the object or image of a crucifix, the thing being
represented is already fully present in the object or image itself.
This aspect of symbols is also what allows them to become
"institutional". The picture stands between these two representational
modes, it both points (indicates) beyond itself, toward some absent
thing, but also /belongs/ to the absent thing; its existence augments
the thing it represents, "The difference between a picture and a sign
has an ontological basis. The picture does not disappear in pointing
to something else but, in its own being, shares in what it
represents."[355] Gadamer's example here is of landscape painting. It
is by virtue of the existence of the landscape painting we begin to
see a landscape as `picturesque', "It is only through the picture
(Bild) that the original (Urbild) becomes original (Ur-bild: also,
ur-picture) -- e.g., it is only be being pictured that a landscape
becomes picturesque."[356] Therefore, with pictures there is an
ontological connection between a representation and the thing that is
absent in the representation. Ricoeur's concept of /représentance/ is
similar to this notion of the picture.[357] As a stand-in for
something absent, a picture or /représentance/ highlights the
mediating and active character of representations. For Ricoeur, these
kinds of representations, for example a historical trace, also call
out for an appropriation that would attest to the impossible recovery
of the `original' thing or event that is being mediated.
Gadamer's outline of the "picture" leads to the idea that `aesthetic
differentiation' is always secondary (an abstraction), that is, the
idea of `art-in-itself' is misleading, because a real work of art
always belongs to a world. For Gadamer, the best example of this is
architecture. A well-designed building is not only aesthetically
pleasing in its own right, but it demands to be appreciated within a
particular context. It cannot `stick out' on the landscape, etc.
Therefore, architecture combines aesthetic considerations with
practical wisdom, there is always a problem-set beyond the aesthetic
(coming from the world itself) which contributes to the formation of a
building. The final product, the building, both mirrors its
surroundings (in that they provided the framework or constraints on
design), whilst also augmenting or enhancing its surroundings by
introducing something new into its appearance, "We call a successful
building a `happy solution,' and mean by this both that it perfectly
fulfils its purpose and that its construction has added something new
to the spatial dimensions of a town or landscape. Through this dual
ordering the building presents a true increase of being: it is a work
of art."[358]
Where would we situate the interface on this scale? For Lewin, it
certainly would be viewed as a network of signs/indications. It
represents in a mode where there is no connection between what is
absent (a series of computational operations, for example) and what is
present (the icon we click on to perform these operations). The
"unworkability" of the interface, on the other hand, may bring it
closer to symbolic modes of representation; the interface becomes
caught in endlessly recurring loops of representation without ever
participating meaningfully in the content being mediated. Laurel's
perspective seems to bring it closest to the idea of
interface-as-picture - designers are seen as playing a crucial role in
bridging practical and aesthetic concerns. Like an architect who must
consider many practical factors, software and interface designers must
be aware of the capacities of the machine and the aesthetic concerns
of the person operating the machine and, in this way, there is a
concordance between the performative and the practical.
The aim of both hermeneutic concepts, of a picture (/Bild/) and
/représentance,/ is to respond to the tradition of philosophical
understandings of representation in a productive way. What is retained
is a phenomenological understanding of /intentionality --/ a
representative medium does stand-for or intend towards some actual
object or theme. However, the caveat is that this intentionality
remains /unfulfilled./ Therefore, a representation is bound by the
content against which it stands, whilst at the same time remaining
different. Through this difference it is capable of producing
imaginative variations on the thing it is representing, which in turn
feed back into our understanding of the thing, allowing us to both see
a resemblance between a representation and the subject of that
representation, as well as a variation which enables us to see the
original in a new way. This logic was discussed earlier in Chapter 4,
where the distance of a narrative representation is refigured by
Ricoeur as a /productive/ distance. For example, in relation to
history, narrative understandings allow us to both attest to the
historical existence of an event, whilst also integrating this event
into our own horizon of understanding, "Although the event cannot be a
mere `referent,' it can be an `ultimate' one and although it is not
the `object' of a narrative account, it can be the `counterpart' of
/Gegenüber/ of such a narrative."[359]
For Gadamer, the difference of representation is pushed further. A
representation does not only belong to its referent by way of
comparison or similarity, rather, its existence /transforms/ the
original. Whereas Ricoeur speaks of an enlarged self-understanding
brought about by an encounter with a text, for Gadamer
self-understanding is radically transformed. For Gadamer, the play of
presentation is closer to the unworkability of the interface; it is a
mode of engagement in which the subject matter being engaged with is
produced through the rules or terms of participation rather than
through reference to an already existing subject matter. In "play",
the subject (reader, author, etc.) ceases to retain their "identity",
and instead acts as a participant within a larger whole, "play itself
is a transformation of such a kind that the identity of the player
does not continue to exist for anybody. Everybody asks instead what is
supposed to be represented, what is "meant." The players (or
playwright) no longer exist, only what they are playing."[360]
Participation in play does not result in an "altered"
self-understanding, but a transformed one,
In terms of the categories, all alteration (alloiosis)
belongs in the sphere of quality -- i.e., of an accident
in substance. But transformation means that something is
suddenly and as a whole something else...Transformation
into structure is not simply transposition into another
world. Certainly the play takes place in another, closed
world. But inasmuch as it is a structure, it is, so to
speak, its own measure and measure itself by nothing
outside it.[361]
The endless variations on the structures of play belong to this
"closed" world itself, rather than to the subjectivities of the
performers enacting the play. Gadamer stresses that the "world" of
play is not an imaginary or "suspended" world, rather, it is even more
/truthful/ than "everyday" reality ("modern" reality that is
regimented, and devoid of play), since truth is an emergent phenomenon
that occurs through the play of structures, "The concept of
transformation characterizes the independence and superior mode of
being of what we called structure. From this viewpoint `reality' is
defined as what is untransformed, and art as the raising up
(Aufhebung) of this reality into its truth."[362]
Following the examples in the previous chapter, the technical reality
of the computer is put into play, or `presented', via the interface
and the various forms of application. As Lewin pointed out, there is a
difference or concealment that takes place in the translation between
the logic of the machine and its presentation in representational
forms (interfaces). As I have been arguing, this concealment can be
read in a positive sense, since this new form of presentation /invites
participation./ It introduces a `user' or `player' into the
technological process. As Simondon noted, the technical object has its
own integrity or tendency, but the evolution of the interface, as a
distinct but related technological phenomenon, suggests that practical
manifestations of this tendency are crucial in the evolution of
technologies. The reality of technology, in absence of its
presentation (concretization) remains abstract and untransformed. For
Gadamer, too, the reality of the world of the work requires playful
participation in order to be brought into existence,
Without being imitated in the work, the world does not
exist as it exists in the work. It is not there as it is
there in the work, and without being reproduced, the work
is not there. Hence, in presentation, the presence of what
is presented reaches its consummation...Every such
presentation is an ontological event and occupies the same
ontological level as what is represented. By being
presented it experiences, as it were, an /increase in
being./ The content of the picture itself is ontologically
defined as an emanation of the original.[363]
Our everyday interactions with technologies, guided by the logic of
signs (the utopia of functionality), is an ordered, non-playful mode
in interacting with technology. It does nothing to further our
understanding of what technology /is./ Instead, it conceals this
question. Not only are our practical understandings of the world
threatened, as the hermeneutic critique suggests, but our practical
understandings of /technologies/ themselves is threatened. In relation
to the above quote, an everyday, non-playful interaction suggests to
us that the "world [of technics] does not exist", since it is only
through playful presentation, which itself mirrors the dynamic nature
of the technical object, that technics can be expressed and engaged
with.
In terms of the practice-technique relationship, when a practitioner
engages with a new technology, their prior identity is threatened. To
return to the example utilized by both Simpson and Borgmann, with the
introduction of the microwave, the family becomes alienated from the
practice of the "family dinner". Whereas the structure of the family
dinner was potentially a flexible one that allowed for play and
variation, the design of the microwave encourages participants to
engage with it in a non-playful manner, nothing is transformed or
revealed through this interaction. However, in the case of Verbeek's
example, the ultrasound scan, it is easier to trace the practical
transformations that occur by the introduction of a new mode of
presentation. Unanticipated questions emerge for the actors involved
in the pregnancy, and the presence of the new technology dissolves old
modes of practice and inaugurates new relations. The process involves
a mutual agreement; in order for the technology to take effect,
participants have to willingly engage in the rules of play, and in
order for a self to become enlarged, it must submit itself to the new
rules of engagement.
As the above quote by Gadamer highlights, modes of presentation that
take effect in existence are, ontologically speaking, an /extension/
or expansion of the thing that is being mediated (an "increase" in its
being). It is through /engagement/ with technological modes of
presentation that the question concerning technology is expanded and
left open. If we engage with technological artefacts in a non-playful,
regimented way, the essence of technology appears as threatening and
fixed. However, as technological designs and interfaces begin to
embrace the uncertain space of application as a playful and meaningful
space, the essence of technology is put into question. Individual
technologies, whose modes of presentation are constantly being
differentiated and reconfigured, can be seen to extend the question of
the meaning of technology. The practical accounts of technology
presented throughout this section attest to the variable, playful
nature of technological devices and interfaces.
4.3.2.2 Play: Transformations of the Self
On the one hand, recognising the productive horizons of individual
technologies and technological solutions leads to a disclosing of the
symbolic or ambiguous features of technologies, allowing us to develop
unanticipated practices around them. One the other hand, a recognition
of this limit also brings into view the question of the kind of /self/
who engages with technology in this way. Ricoeur's embracing of
explanatory and critical methods is predicated on the assumption that
an intimate connection persists between a distanciated perspective and
our fundamental belonging to a world. In absence of a consideration of
the self, technological /play/ becomes an eternal recurrence of the
same 'ludic economy'; we may succeed in generating new applications
and designs but would end up becoming simply another part of the
machine. When viewed from the perspective of practical
self-understanding, on the other hand, an engagement with the
indeterminate horizons of technology can become a productive moment in
a recursive self-engagement. As discussed earlier, Ricoeur's notion of
a `spiral' of understanding, captured in Iser's account of the
recursivity that persists between interpretations and /registers/ of
interpretation, claims that distanciation and belonging perpetually
inform one another. Read according to this model, technologies and
practices inform and challenge one another through constant
development and revision. Generating more forms of technologies,
encouraging the exploration of /ingenious/ or novel technical
solutions, is reflective of a deeper human concern to transform
understanding through the activity of reflective distanciation.
Technologies, as distanciated inventions, provide a means of both
reflecting on the practical self, while at the same time creating new
avenues for the self to explore. In short, it leads to an
/enlargement/ of the self.
Ricoeur's notion of the enlarged self is linked to appropriation. Just
as Simondon replaces the figure of the human engineer or designer with
the figure of the human /operator,/ Ricoeur replaces the figure of the
knowing, acting /subject,/ with the figure of the shattered cogito --
a mediated /self/ who is at once vulnerable and capable. Although the
discourse is different, both approaches eschew an `elevated' humanism
in favour of a participatory, mediated version of the human.
Importantly, Ricoeur even suggests moving beyond the /intersubjective/
framework, toward a framework which anticipates a lifeworld
constituted not only by subjects but by /works/ and language systems.
The self before a work is no longer a reader in dialogue with the
author, but a reader engaging with a work that possesses its own
integrated meaning and functions,
The theory of appropriation which will now be sketched
follows from the displacement undergone by the whole
problematic of interpretation: it will be less an
intersubjective relation of mutual understanding than a
relation of apprehension applied to the world conveyed by
the work. A new theory of subjectivity follows from this
relation. In general we may say that appropriation is no
longer to be understood in the tradition of philosophies
of the subject, as a constitution of which the subject
would possess the key. To understand is not to project
oneself into the text; it is to receive an enlarged self
from the apprehension of proposed worlds which are the
genuine object of interpretation.[364]
If, along with Ricoeur, we conceive the subject as both constituting
and constituted by works and interpretations, then characterizing
individual technologies as exhibiting a /work/-like character allows
us to see that ways that the self is implicated in the development of
technology.
Ricoeur's understanding of the enlarged self, received through
appropriation, aims to retain the /dual/ nature of the self. For
Ricoeur, the self can never be articulated as a totality, due to the
/semantic dualism/ that persists through discourses which deal with
the 'objective' character of the self (its /idem/ identity) and those
which deal with the experiential or subjective character of the self
(its /ipseity/).[365] As with Ricoeur's account of the
explanation-understanding dialectic, the /self/ for Ricoeur is
distinguished from the subject because it encompasses both reflective
and participatory features of its identity. The hermeneutic circle of
appropriation "encompasses in its spiral both the apprehension of
projected worlds and the advance of self-understanding in the presence
of these new worlds."[366] A "fusion of horizons" between the
technical object and human understanding, then, is not a convergence
where one term disappears into the other, but a relation where the
difference between both is retained. In order to maintain the
difference, the /mode of being/ of each side of the relation needs to
be recognised according to its own terms.
The mode of being of the practicing self is related to its /ipseity,/
or its "non-identical repetitions" in time. The mode of being of
/technics,/ according to Simondon, is related to the phenomena of
concretization and the logic of the technical object. Both modes can
be seen to presuppose and enrich each other in certain ways. The
technical tendency runs parallel to the becoming of the self, both
processes are understood as /tasks./ Ricoeur's understanding of
/ipseity/ presents a view of selfhood that captures both the
differentiation of a self by language, works, communities, etc., and
the integrative nature of this differentiation process. Similar to the
technical object, the self tends towards enlargement, the assimilation
of heterogeneous worlds and experiences into an integrated
understanding, reflected in the capacity to attest. As Simondon notes,
when it comes to the formation of concrete technical ensembles,
differentiation and integration are two related processes,
It seems contradictory, surely, to affirm that the
evolution of a technical object depends upon a process of
differentiation (take for example, the command grid in the
triode dividing into three grids in the pentode) and, at
the same time, a process of concretization, with each
structural element filling several functions instead of
one. Differentiation is possible because this very
differentiation makes it possible to integrate into the
working of the whole.[367]
Technological appropriation (concretization), and practical,
hermeneutic appropriation, share a similar relation to the world.
Although both remain distinct processes with their own individual sets
of concerns or logics, technologies cannot exist wholly independently
of human activity. Against cybernetic theories, Simondon asserts the
/artificiality/ of the technical object. Although much of Simondon's
analysis involves drawing parallels between biological systems and
technical systems, the crucial difference is that "The most that can
be said about technical objects is that they tend towards
concretization, whereas natural objects, as living beings, are
concrete right from the beginning."[368] Similarly, human
self-understanding becomes impoverished when devoid of external works
and techniques, against which a partial self-understanding is
perpetually built. Or, in Heidegger's terms, /Dasein/ is a type of
being that is in question, whose concreteness is determined as much by
potentiality (what I may become) as by its being. /Dasein/ also
differs from "natural objects" in that, due to its historical nature,
it is not concrete from the beginning. So, although distinct,
practical self-understanding and technical objects, depend on one
another in the process of becoming more concrete (which involves both
integration and enlargement).
This, alternative, understanding of technics requires us to re-think
key hermeneutic concepts. As was argued in Chapter 5, /phronēsis/ and
/techne/ presuppose one another because of their mutual limitation;
/techne/ is limited in application, and practical understanding is
limited due to the concealed possibilities for action that can only be
revealed through /making./ This approach contrasts with that of
Heidegger, for whom the temporality of action grounds human
understanding in ways that theoretical knowledge (including, for
Heidegger, /techne/) fails to do,
To see why /phronēsis/ is the highest [for Heidegger], it
is necessary to compare it to the other ways of
uncovering... /Technē/ loses out because although it deals
with things that can be otherwise, it does not concern
Dasein itself; the producer does not consider himself
while producing an object, but rather is absorbed in the
production. Even if he steps back and regards himself
technically as a worker, he has taken up one possibility
of being without making explicit all of the possibilities
he can be.[369]
However, if, with Ricoeur, we recognise the inseparability of action
and text, or of action and the structures that mediate and project
possibilities for action, then the type of production associated with
technics (distanciated production) can be read as a way of closing
down possibilities in order to open new ones. The "producer" who is
"absorbed in the production" is indeed displaced from an immediate
understanding of herself, yet this displacement is necessary for the
"enlargement" of the self, through the re-appropriation of product
into practical life. The producer is still /indirectly/ concerned with
themselves. This approach is driven by the centrality of /praxis,/ as
opposed to the centrality of /dwelling./ It favours active
construction and creation over quietude. The self who is conditioned
by both belonging and distanciation is revealed not by turning away
from technics bu t by embracing it in a new, dependant way.
Technologies, due to their artificiality, are never fully /in/ the
world, they remain at a distance from it, like the text. In their
applications, they depend on a practical attitude that recognizes and
corresponds to their demands. Practices also depend on, or tend
towards, reflective articulations of the pre-understandings that make
up practice. These can take the form of writings, narratives,
techniques, and so on. Technologies, when considered in their
practical dimension (as forms of mediation) also serve as reflective
representations of practices. For Verbeek, they enable practical
transformations and re-orientations, a fact that can be harnessed to
develop more /moral/ technologies. For Galloway and Laurel, the
aesthetics of the interface implicate human agents and can potentially
instantiate corresponding practices. For Simondon, technics demands
the transformation of an entire mode of social being -- from passive
consumers or users of technologies to active operators and
collaborators in the co-becoming of technical and human reality.
Given that human understanding depends on the works that mediate and
condition new possibilities for the growth of the self, and that
technologies, in their artificiality, depend on a relation to the
human in the process of integration, the self and
technologies-as-works are mutually dependant on one another. In this
way, appropriating technologies, in the productive sense, can also be
a point of emancipation, as Simondon, suggests. An appropriation of
technology, which comes following a reflective detour through an
analysis of the technical object, can be a mode of transitioning from
the naivety of the social attitude towards technology that Simondon
critiques, toward the 'second naivety' of a playful engagement with
concrete technologies.
Whereas a /literal/ engagement with technology can result in the
production of a /utopia of functionality,/ an interpretive /play/ is
aimed at moving beyond these familiar senses of technologies, towards
a deeper understanding of the technical object and of the type of
/self/ implied by a confrontation with that object. For Ricoeur, this
is the goal of appropriation. It aims to move beyond an apprehension
of the immanent patterns of the work, toward an understanding of its
features that transcend this immanence and address another:
So if we apply explanation to `sense', as the immanent
pattern of the work, then we can reserve interpretation
for the sort of inquiry concerned with the /power of a
work/ to project a world of its own and to set in motion
the hermeneutical circle, which encompasses in its spiral
both the apprehension of projected worlds and the advance
of self-understanding in the presence of these new
worlds.[370]
Simondon's alternative understanding of technics allows us to retain
aspects of the hermeneutic critique, whilst enacting a revision.
Technological worlds remain distinct from human, practical
understanding and the practices that correspond to those
understandings. However, the dynamic nature of technical structures in
application means that, contrary to what is suggested by the
hermeneutic critique, they remain open to appropriation at the
practical level. In place of a critical investigation of the
transcendental features of technology, a playful appropriation allows
for the possibility of the critical attitude to become revised. Play,
in Gadamer's sense, and adopted by Ricoeur, is aimed at counteracting
features of technology that hermeneutics is critical of, features
which deny that variable, differential features of the practical self,
"play shatters the seriousness of a utilitarian preoccupation where
the self-presence of the subject is too secure. In play, subjectivity
forgets itself; in seriousness, subjectivity is regained."[371] If,
according to the perspectives explored throughout Section 4,
individual technologies can be seen to be /open/ to playful
negotiation and interpretation at the practical level, then these
features of technology need to be incorporated into a hermeneutic
account. The hermeneutic critique of technology, which characterizes
technology as univocal and ordered, and therefore as /impractical,/
also contains the resources for thinking about what counts as a
/practical/ technology -- a multivocal, engaging, transformative
technology.
Concluding Comments
===================
\addcontentsline{toc}{section}{Concluding Comments}
Having begun with the observation that Ricoeur said relatively little
about the subject of technology, I hope to have shown that his
discussions were nevertheless running parallel to a broader discourse
about the practical and hermeneutical qualities of technologies.
Hermeneutic understandings of practical wisdom and appropriation,
classically limited to the problem of textual and linguistic
interpretation, take on a renewed significance when placed alongside a
consideration of technology. I have aimed to highlight both the
constructive and difficult features of this interaction.
I have argued that modern technologies, when considered from the point
of view of hermeneutic accounts of practice, can be considered as
/reflective/ of concerns that arise from practical understanding. That
is not to say that they should be taken as straight-forward
representations. As a critical hermeneutic account of technology
highlights, there is also something unfamiliar and difficult about
distanciated representations. Within the context of Ricoeur's work,
the notion of reflection implies the dual movements of /distanciation/
and /appropriation./ That is, technologies produce distanciated images
of practice, which then must be re-assembled through future
engagements. Through their distance technologies are /problematic,/
they tend to reduce meaningful, variable relations to a technical
structure or logic. However, these technical structures are not fixed,
they possess their own indeterminacy and variability, revealed through
their encounters with practical wisdom. By being /open/ to engagement,
as in the accounts of the device and the interface, their problematic,
distanced worlds can potentially be rendered /significant/ at the
practical level. Their significance is found in their ability to
create new possibilities for action and practice. The back and forth
relation between technologies and practical wisdom is productive and
transformational. This point only emerges when neither side is reduced
to the other. In this way, the hermeneutic /critique/ of technology is
a useful starting point for thinking about technology, since it allows
for a consideration of the irreducibility of practical wisdom to
technical knowledge, and vice versa. However, this perspective calls
out for a corresponding /restorative/ hermeneutics of technology.
Given that the critical account of technology has already been
admirably and exhaustively treated, this thesis has attempted to
sketch an outline of what such a restorative account may look like.
Section 1 asked whether the hermeneutic critique of modern technology
was entirely justified. I focused on the key hermeneutic concept of
practical /application/ and argued that the hermeneutic suspicion of
technology can be seen to operate strongly at this level, in the view
that scientific method remains /indifferent/ to questions of
application and that technology, seen as an extension of the
scientific worldview, is a concrete expression of this indifference to
application. Technologies are /anti/-practical in this sense, and the
hermeneutic question of application is forgotten in a technological
age.
It was asked, however, whether this picture of technology needed an
update. The work of David Kaplan highlighted the necessity of taking
Ricoeur's work, which places heavy emphasis on mediation and
contextual understanding, beyond a critique of technology based on its
transcendental features, towards a properly /hermeneutic/ engagement
with the living features of individual, pluralistic technological
configurations. Furthermore, whether confronting a text, artwork, or
technological artefact, questions of /technique/ are unavoidable; in
the creation of any of these works, techniques were developed and
deployed to mediate the emergence of meaning and significance. An
engagement with the technique aspect of a work involves a /detour/
through the structures of the work. As Ricoeur states, such a detour
involves self-alienation, but it also increases our understanding and
our enjoyment of a work.
Section 2 explored Ricoeur's understanding of the dialectic between
application and distanciation. It was demonstrated that Ricoeur's
distinctive approach to hermeneutic understanding involved the
necessity of detour. /Meaning/, for Ricoeur, is not attributable to a
mental construction, but is something that occurs /in and through/ the
world, i.e., /at a distance/ from the subject. This means that
language, on the one hand, can be reduced to its observable structural
and systematic features. On the other hand, meaning is also a feature
of /living interpretation/, it is not only 'in' the world in a purely
objective sense; it also calls out and implicates us. This /living/,
changing aspect of language-systems means that no structural or
phenomenological reduction can result in a unified understanding of
language. The /symbolic/ aspect of language means that it is always
also a /practical/ phenomenon, occurring within the world and among
participating subjects.
The double nature of meaning, as being both systematic and
significant, implied two key points. Firstly, the `truth' that both
Heidegger and Gadamer associate with the experience of /belonging,/
and which stands opposed to the representations of /method,/ cannot be
grasped independently of the autonomous, distanced structures that
condition and enable this belonging. A distanced perspective, given
through reflection, is potentially as disclosive as the experience of
belonging. Secondly, though, the /way/ that a distanciated perspective
becomes disclosive is through its /projective/ character. Along with
Gadamer and Heidegger, Ricoeur agrees that distanciation is indeed a
mode of alienation, yet he conceives this alienation as holding the
potential for the projection of /other/ ways of being. The projective
character of a distanciated perspective cannot be grasped from within
the perspective itself, however. It can only be grasped through
appropriation. Therefore, belonging and distanciation both participate
in a broader dialectic. As an example of this dialectic at work, the
relation between 'computation' and `intuition' in design processes,
was also mentioned. Here, the work of designing is enabled through a
spiral of understanding; an intuitive, playful relation with the world
is enriched and deepened by the complementary task of translating
these experiences into a reflective mode of expression. This act of
distanciation produces new possibilities which then have to be
re-integrated into the design experience, with the whole process
repeating endlessly.
In Section 3, this dialectic of distance and belonging was carried
towards the question of /technique./ I argued that Ricoeur's
hermeneutics includes the possibility of considering /technique/ as
form of distanciation on the condition that we view it as indirectly
related to /practical understanding./ Ricoeur's distinctive account of
technique aims to retain two important views. Firstly, /technique/ is
non-technological, in that it is dissociated from `observation',
attitudes of `control', and so on. In the case of narrative
emplotment, it also resists a technological approach to time, since
narrative works combine the technological or cosmological /time of the
world/ with the phenomenological, lived /time of the soul/. However,
it is also dissociated from classical hermeneutic accounts of meaning
and explication. Techniques are not /directly/ aimed at explicating or
constructing a meaning. Instead, they are directed towards
quasi-scientific notions of force, order, explanation, and so on. In
this way, techniques, taken in the positive sense, are associated with
the phenomena of distanciation, they stand at a distance from
relations of belonging, but this distance is not the radical distance
associated with observational methods.
Ricoeur's account of psychoanalytic technique highlighted the fact
that, in the context of analytic experience, the technique itself
/mediated by/ /language,/ i.e., by the insights, slips of tongue,
narratives, etc., which appear /within/ the intersubjective,
dialogical situation. Therefore, although concerned with the
/economics of desire,/ its concern is limited to what has already by
admitted, by interacting, historical subjects, into a concrete
setting. Separated from this dependency on practice, techniques risk
becoming modes of enframing. Within, the context of practice, on the
other hand, they are understood as being a productive form of
disclosure. They allow for the clearing away of resistances and the
uncovering of hidden features of practical understanding that are
present but unacknowledged.
However, the fundamental difference between an attempt to explain the
workings of the unconscious, via technique, and the historical,
living, and therefore /incomplete,/ nature of the subject matter of
the technique (the life history of the analysand), means that the
dialectic between technique and appropriation is potentially
interminable. Since the /difference/ between the technique and the
practice (between distanciation and belonging) is also the condition
for the emergence of new self-understandings, the generative nature of
technique is also what gives rise to its incompleteness. While
psychoanalytic techniques are /productive,/ they do not /produce,/ in
the sense of giving access to a cure, a `completed'
self-understanding, and so on. Instead, it is only /practical wisdom/
that can determine when a course of therapy is /complete./ Just as in
the case of a painter, well-versed in their own particular style or
technique, must make a /judgment/ as to when a painting is complete
(otherwise, they would endlessly, recursively add to the painting),
self-understanding is asymmetrically related to practical wisdom.
In the case of narrative works, it was shown that narratives also
become meaningful through the combining of two different regions of
understanding. The temporality associated with emplotment, the /time
of the world,/ recalls both Ricoeur's analysis of technique (as
dealing with quasi-scientific questions of force, organization, etc.)
and Simpson's characterization of the time of modern technology, which
stands opposed to the time of practice. However, in the case of
narratives, this time is productively combined with the time of
/action,/ meaning that narratives draw from both the explainable,
objectified time of the world, and the living, indeterminate time of
practical repetitions and imitations. In this way, narratives provide
a useful framework for thinking through the relationship between a
distanced representation of a practice (for example a technological
solution to a practical problem), and the role that readers or users
of this representation play in the act of re-figuring it.
The act of reading is a meaningful, transformative activity, because
the /world of the narrative/ stands against our own world and demands
to be taken on its own terms. Indeed, much of the pleasure of reading
arises from the encounter with the unfamiliar and alienation from
oneself. The narrative world is at once foreign and inhabitable, since
it inscribes within the time of the plot the lived time of experience.
Every narrative world projects an /implied reader./ The perspective of
the implied reader, inscribed within the narrative structure, opens
the cosmological time of /emplotment/ to the de-totalizing /time of
initiative./ Just as the narrative object (/mimesis_{2}/), whilst
possessing an identifiable structural integrity, cannot be separated
from its "upstream" (/mimesis_{1}/) and "downstream" (/mimesis_{3}/)
relations, technological configurations ought not to be abstracted
from their dependant relation to their applications and their history
of development. Like narratives, technological designs /integrate/
practical concerns and questions, render these concerns /intelligible/
(to a user), and /produce/ new situations and connections within the
lifeworld.
The question of the time of initiative, of the central role of the
reader in the construction (and deconstruction) of the significance of
the work, lead into Section 4, where the aim was to explore the space
between technologies and their applications. Chapters 5 and 6 charted
a tension between two different approaches to this question. On the
one hand, the hermeneutically informed readings by Borgmann and Lewin
suggested that devices and interfaces work to /conceal/ the initiative
of the implied /user/ of technology. On the other hand, the
postphenomenological and aesthetic accounts of the device and the
interface suggested that these technological phenomena cannot be
reduced to their ontological status, but rather must be grasped at the
/practical/ level through their mediating /activities./ In this way,
devices and interfaces were granted the same dynamism and openness as
narrative structures. Although technological designs may carry with
them certain /intentionalities,/ within the context of the lifeworld
these intended uses are overturned and de-stabilized by the activities
of the social agents engaging with them. In this way, technologies do
not inhibit or conceal possibilities for action, they instead
/support/ and guide meaningful action. The implications of this
approach lead to an /ethics/ of technological design, where the
transformative features of technologies can shape and guide the
formation of the self.
One the one hand, this practice-oriented account of technological
mediation resonates with Ricoeur's understanding of the productive,
mediating effects of /distanciation./ However, on the other, as we saw
in the analysis of Ricoeur's understanding of technique, there is an
irreducible /difference/ between the distanciation of a technique and
the practical understanding of subjects who /appropriate/ the
technique. In this way, it is difficult to imagine how a framework of
better-designed technologies could totally solve the problems of
practical experience and understanding. At best, we could /aim/
towards producing better designs, which would then require
appropriation, giving rise to the need for improved design, and so on.
The interminable dialectic between practice and technique means that
technologies, as I have characterized them (through the concept of
distanciation), cannot be reduced to their /practical/ meaning. In
this sense, the approach of developing a technological mode of
ascesis, while attractive, fails to account for the features of the
hermeneutic self that cannot be reduced to its conditions of
formation, such as the wisdom it possesses through exposure to
negativity and tragedy (i.e., points at which mediations break down).
The final chapter aimed to develop a practical account of technology
that would stand at equal distance from both a hermeneutic suspicion
of technology and an account that reduces the practical features of
technologies to their impact on the human moral self. A
/presentational/ account of the dynamics of the interface, in Chapter
6, opened up a space for the consideration of the role of /play/ in
the practical engagements with technologies. Simondon's explanatory
account of the technical object suggested that the /meaning/ of
technics is, in fact, concealed by the social and ideological
prejudices against technologies. Attitudes of either distrust or naïve
acceptance mask the essential, living features of technics. These can
only be disclosed through a /detour/ or investigation into the
technical object itself. Such a detour allows us to productively
transform our understandings of technologies.
I suggested that Simondon's conception of a productive human-technics
relation mirrored Ricoeur's account of the self before the world of
the text. In engaging with technologies, we are called on to develop
an /enlarged self-understanding/ in light of the world of technics.
This means recognising both the /distance/ of the technical object and
the generative role that appropriation plays in mediating this
distance. In other words, a discourse on technics can be productively
supplemented with a discourse on the hermeneutic /self./ A possible
framework for thinking about the relation between the self and
technology is the hermeneutic notion of /play,/ which is a mode of
appropriation that secures self-identity through alienation from
oneself (through the world of technics, for example). To notion of
play is aimed at transforming our literal readings of technologies, by
paying more attention to the symbolic and indeterminate features of
technological application.
The multistability of devices and the presentational features of
interfaces means that technologies, in practice, arrive with their own
sets of problems, questions, and projections demanding a response from
the user. Users can unknowingly, unreflectively conform to the utopia
of functionality and comfort offered by these phenomena, at the cost
of losing out on a meaningful relationship with their environment.
Such a relationship can only be built-up through the non-identical
repetitions of a practicing, learning self. Alternatively, as Verbeek
suggests, users and designers can harness the variability and dynamics
of devices and interfaces in order to draw on the interpretive
potential of human agents interacting with them. In this way,
technologies become co-shapers of a broader social /ethos,/ aimed
toward the productive, morally-guided /transformation/ of the self.
Ricoeur's work, I have argued, implicitly draws on both perspectives;
technologies produce alienating effects, but also mediate
understanding by uncovering untried possibilities for praxis.
Accepting the variable features of technical designs and applications
means that the hermeneutic task becomes one of interpretation and
engagement. Technologies, through their practical limitations and
unworkability, depend on inventive, creative practical responses. The
unplanned /future/ of technology is secured, not through greater
levels of optimization or technical functionality, but through
creative appropriations. These appropriations succeed because they
attest to the /inventive,/ singular nature of individual technologies.
The true /iterability/ of a technology is found in these unforeseen,
practical uses and applications. That is, technologies themselves need
to be situated within the paradigm of non-identical repetitions. In an
almost counterintuitive way, the futures of technologies lie in their
fallibility, since it is their practical incompleteness that renders
them open to renewed attempts at completion. Without these
explorations of hidden variables and uses, technologies would not be
able to survive the living, dynamic temporalities associated with
practices, contexts, cultures and history.
Exposure to and engagement with the world of technics also transforms
practical self-understanding. We are reminded of the naivety and
unquestioned status of many features of traditions or practices that
we had come to depend on. If technologies help to draw out and
translate these un-noticed features of the lifeworld, then we have a
responsibility to explore and engage with the consequences of these
representations. The generation of new forms of practical
technologies, then, would count as a creative engagement with oneself.
Since technologies don't reveal /directly/ our concerns or values,
this self-engagement, mediated by technology, must take place at the
interpretative level, through difficult negotiation and exploration.
Deepening and widening the hermeneutic spiral of reflection and
belonging involves the active attempt to risk the security of the ego
by exposing it to new practical possibilities for action and
interaction, brought about by technologies and their mediating
effects. Overcoming the alienating effects of technologies involves
the multiplication and diversification of technological forms, and the
corresponding generation of different types of selves implied in these
projected worlds and milieus.
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Footnotes
_________
[1] Jürgen Habermas, /The Theory of Communicative Action Vol 1,/
trans. Tomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984); Jürgen Habermas,
/The Theory of Communicative Action Vol 2,/ trans. Tomas McCarthy
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1987).
[2] Verbeek on Ihde's concept of `multistability': "The insight that
technologies cannot be separated from their use contexts implies that
they have no "essence"; they are what they are only in their use. A
technology can receive an identity only within a concrete context of
use, and this identity is determined not only by the technology in
question but also by the way in which it becomes interpreted",
Peter-Paul Verbeek, /What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on
Technology, Agency, and Design/ (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2005), 117.
[3] Don Ihde identifies 1979 as a "watershed year" for this `turn' in
thinking in English-language philosophy of technology, due to the
simultaneous publication of two books - his own /Technics and Praxis:
A Philosophy of Technology,/ and the book /Laboratory Life: The
Construction of Scientific Facts,/ by Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar.
See. Don Ihde, "Preface: Positioning Postphenomenology", in Robert
Rosenberg and Peter-Paul Verbeek eds., /Postphenomenological
Investigations: Essays on Human-Technology Relations/ (Lexington
Books, 2015), vii-xvi.
[4] Paul Ricoeur, "The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered
as a Text," in /From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II,/
trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (London and New York:
Continuum, 2008), 142.
[5] "It could be said, then, from Aristotle's work, that different
types of practice involve different forms of knowledge with varied
aims and objects, which also involve differential ways of distributing
human energies and reflecting on conduct. These can be regarded as
technologies in the very general sense because moral training has an
end product, even if moral action in itself does not: the end product
of moral training is a human being with the habitual dispositions and
capacities to act morally. /Technology, then, could be said to be the
practical rationality that accompanies and guides productive
activities, and, thus, is enmeshed in those social relations in which
people are educated and trained...Habitus/, then, denotes an acquired
ability or faculty rather than an acquired habit to act in a routine
way. The term ability suggests the possibility of doing something, of
acting in ways that are creative and not wholly predetermined." Ian
Burkitt, "Technologies of the Self: Habitus and Capacities," /Journal
for the Theory of Social Behaviour/ 32:2 (2002), 223-225.
[6] Albert Borgmann, /Technology and the Character of Contemporary
Life,/ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 7-12.
[7] Paul Ricoeur, /The Symbolism of Evil,/ trans. Emerson Buchanan
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 349.
[8] Catherine Pickstock, /Repetition and Identity: The Literary
Agenda/ (Oxford: OUP, 2013).
[9] Morton Feldman, "Some Elementary Questions", in /Give My Regards
to Eight Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman,/ ed. B.H.
Friedman (Cambridge: Exact Change, 2000), 63.
[10] Hans-Georg Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ trans. Joel Weinsheimer
and Donald G. Marshall (London and New York: Continuum, 1975), 307.
[11] Paul Ricoeur, "Appropriation", in /Hermeneutics and the Human
Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation,/ ed. &
trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981),
190.
[12] Ricoeur, "Appropriation," 185.
[13] Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ 308.
[14] Jürgen Habermas, /Knowledge and Human Interests,/ trans. Jeremy
J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 214-245.
[15] Richard J Bernstein, /Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science,
Hermeneutics, and Praxis/ (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1983), 264.
[16] Jürgen Habermas, Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 255.
[17] Hans-Georg Gadamer, "Welt Ohne Geschichte", in /Truth and
Historicity/ (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 8. Translation of
this quote appears in Joel Weisenheimer, /Gadamer's Hermeneutics: a
reading of truth and method/ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985)
188-189, fn. 52.
[18] Sam Levin, "Squeezed out: widely mocked startup Juicero is
shutting down," /The Guardian,/ September 1, 2017,
<https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/01/juicero-silicon-valley-shutting-down>.
[19] Jean Grondin, /Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics,/
trans. Joel Weinsheimer (Yale: Yale University Press, 1994), 115-116.
Emphasis added.
[20] Albert Borgmann, "Focal Things and Practices", in Robert C.
Scharff and Val Duesk (eds.) /Philosophy of Technology: The
Technological Condition: An Anthology/ (Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 331.
[21] Todd Mei, "Heidegger in the Machine: The Difference between
/Techne/ and /Mechane/," /Continental Philosophy Review/ (2015)
267-292.
[22] Feldman, "Some Elementary Questions", 63-66
[23] Habermas, /Knowledge and Human Interests,/ 214-245.
[24] Paul Ricoeur, "Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology", in
/From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II/, trans. Kathleen
Blamey and John B. Thompson (London and New York: Continuum, 2008),
264.
[25] Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation", 72.
[26] Paul Ricoeur, /Oneself as Another,/ trans. Kathleen Blamey
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 11-16.
[27] Paul Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation", 85.
[28] Paul Ricoeur, "Ethics and Politics", in /From Text to Action:
Essays in Hermeneutics, II,/ trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B.
Thompson (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), 320.
[29] See Todd S. Mei, /Heidegger, Work and Being/ (New York and
London: Continuum, 2009); Todd S. Mei, "An Economic Turn: A
Hermeneutical Reinterpretation of Political Economy with Respect to
the Question of Land," /Research in Phenomenology/ 41.3 (2011),
297-326.
[30] Paulo Cesar Duque-Estrada, /Gadamer's Rehabilitation of Practical
Philosophy: An Overview/ (Ph.D., Boston College, 1993), 2.
[31] See, for instance, David Kaplan, "Paul Ricoeur and the Philosophy
of Technology", /Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy/ 16.1/2
(2006): 42-56; David Kaplan, /Ricoeur's Critical Theory/ (SUNY Press,
2003), 164-173; David Kaplan, "Thing Hermeneutics", in Francis J.
Mootz and George H. Taylor (eds) /Gadamer and Ricoeur: Critical
Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutics/ (Continuum, New York & London,
2011), 226-241.
[32] Kaplan, "Paul Ricoeur and the Philosophy of Technology", 42.
[33] Kaplan, "Paul Ricoeur and the Philosophy of Technology", 49.
[34] Bruno Latour, "An Attempt at a `Compositionist Manifesto'", /New
Literary History/ 41.3 (2010), 471-490.
[35] The areas of Ricoeur's work that Kaplan mentions are: (1)
Ricoeur's "model of the text as a paradigm for the linguistic
mediation of experience", (2)his "model of the hermeneutic arc"
[between technology and society], (3) Ricoeur's narrative theory, (4)
Ricoeur's account of the philosophical identity of the self, and (5)
Ricoeur's moral philosophy. Kaplan, "Ricoeur and the Philosophy of
Technology", 49-52.
[36] Kaplan, "Paul Ricoeur and the Philosophy of Technology", 49.
[37] Kaplan, "Paul Ricoeur and the Philosophy of Technology", 54.
[38] Kaplan, "Paul Ricoeur and the Philosophy of Technology", 54.
[39] Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, /What Makes Us Think? A
neuroscientist and a philosopher argue about ethics, human nature, and
the brain/ (Princeton University Press, 2002), 14-15.
[40] Paul Ricoeur, "Existence and Hermeneutics", trans. Kathleen
McLaughlin, in /The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in
Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde/ (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern
University Press, 1974), 15.
[41] The terms `difficult' and `impossible' are used by Ricoeur to
distinguish his own approach to forgiveness from Derrida. Paul
Ricoeur, /Memory, History, Forgetting,/ trans. Kathleen Blamey and
David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
2004), 457-506.
[42] Immanuel Kant, /Critique of Pure Reason,/ trans. Marcus Weigelt
(Penguin Classics, 2007), B 172/A 133.
[43] Paul Ricoeur, /Du texte a l'action: essais d'herméneutique II/
(Paris: Éditions Du Seuil, 1986), 78-81.
[44] Paul Ricoeur "The Task of Hermeneutics", /From Text to Action:
Essays in Hermeneutics, II,/ trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B.
Thompson (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), 55.
[45] Friedrich Schleiermacher, /Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other
Writings,/ trans. and ed. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge University Press,
1998), xxi.
[46] Schleiermacher, /Hermeneutics and Criticism,/ xxii.
[47] Schleiermacher, /Hermeneutics and Criticism,/ 11.
[48] Michel Foucault, /Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel
Foucault, eds./ Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton
(Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 16-49.
[49] Although he suggests that the /hope/ for some kind of unified or
general perspective remains an important, non-philosophical, resource
for the work of philosophy.
[50] Ricoeur, "The Task of Hermeneutics," 60.
[51] Ricoeur, "The Task of Hermeneutics," 61.
[52] Ricoeur, "The Hermeneutical Function of Distanciation", in /From
Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II,/ trans. Kathleen Blamey
and John B. Thompson (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), 72-73
[53] Paul Ricoeur, "Debate with Hans-Georg Gadamer", in /A Ricoeur
Reader: Reflection & Imagination,/ ed. Mario J. Valdés (Toronto and
Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 237.
[54] Paul Ricoeur, "The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action
Considered as a Text," in /From Text to Action: Essays in
Hermeneutics, II,/ trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (London
and New York: Continuum, 2008), 142.
[55] Paul Ricoeur, "Existence and Hermeneutics", trans. Kathleen
McLaughlin, in /The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in
Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde/ (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern
University Press, 1974), 13.
[56] Ricoeur, "Existence and Hermeneutics", 6.
[57] Paul Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative: Volume 1/, trans. Kathleen
McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1984), 72.
[58] Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, /Nudge: Improving
Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness/ (Penguin, 2008), 12-14.
[59] Paul Ricoeur, "Phenomenology and Hermeneutics", in /From Text to
Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II,/ trans. Kathleen Blamey and John
B. Thompson (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), 23-51.
[60] Ricoeur, "Existence and Hermeneutics", 20-21.
[61] Gert-Jan van der Heiden, /The Truth (and Untruth) of Language:
Heidegger, Ricoeur, and Derrida on Disclosure and Displacement/
(Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 2010), 94-95.
[62] Catherine Pickstock, /Repetition and Identity: The Literary
Agenda/ (Oxford: OUP, 2013).
[63] Edmund Husserl, /The Shorter Logical Investigations,/ trans. J.
N. Findlay (London: Routledge, 2001), 105.
[64] Husserl, /Logical Investigations,/ 105.
[65] James K. A. Smith, "A Principle of Incarnation in Derrida's
(/Theologische?/) /Jugendschriften:/ Towards a Confessional Theology",
in /Modern Theology 18:2/ (April 2002), 222.
[66] Husserl, /Logical Investigations,/ 103. Emphasis in original.
[67] Jacques Derrida, /Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on
Husserl's Theory of Signs,/ trans. David B. Allison (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1973), 22.
[68] James K. A. Smith, /Jacques Derrida: Live Theory/ (London:
Continuum, 2005), 30.
[69] Smith, /Live Theory,/ 29.
[70] Derrida, /Speech and Phenomena/, 42.
[71] Smith, /Live Theory/, 33.
[72] Van der Heiden, /The Truth (and Untruth) of Language,/ 96.
[73] Ricoeur, "Phenomenology and Hermeneutics", 23.
[74] Derrida, /Speech and Phenomena,/ 8.
[75] Ricoeur, "Existence and Hermeneutics", 15.
[76] Paul Ricoeur, /Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation,/
trans. Denis Savage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1970), 31.
[77] More specifically, this division is made to distinguish between
Kearney's anathesim and Derrida's atheism: "Beckett confessed that the
"key word of my work is Perhaps;" and if anatheism reads this to mean
"perhaps Godot will come," deconstructive atheism is more likely to
respond, "perhaps Godot won't come." Kearney, Richard, "Derrida and
Messianic Atheism", in Edward Baring and Peter E. Gordon (eds), /The
Trace of God: Derrida and Religion/ (Fordham University Press, New
York, 2015), 207.
[78] Paul Ricoeur, "Structure and Hermeneutics", trans. Kathleen
McLaughlin, in /The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in
Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde/ (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern
University Press, 1974), 31.
[79] Ricoeur, "Structure and Hermeneutics", 33.
[80] Paul Ricoeur, /Hermeneutik und Strukturalismus. Der Konflikt der
Interpretationen I,/ trans. Johannes Rütsche (Munich: Kösel, 1973),
194. Quoted/translated by Iser in: Wolfgang Iser, /The Act of
Reading/: /A Theory of Aesthetic Response/ (Baltimore and London: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 151. Alternative translation by
Peter McCormick -- "Two thresholds of understanding then must be
distinguished, the threshold of `meaning,'...and that of
`signification,' which is the moment when the reader grasps the
meaning, the moment when the meaning is actualised in existence." Paul
Ricoeur, "Preface to Bultmann", in /The Conflict of Interpretations:
Essays in Hermeneutics/ (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University
Press, 1974), 397.
[81] Iser, /The Act of Reading/, 151.
[82] Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, /What Makes Us Think? A
neuroscientist and a philosopher argue about ethics, human nature, and
the brain/ (Princeton University Press, 2002), 122.
[83] Davidson, Scott, "Intersectional Hermeneutics", in /Hermeneutics
and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur,/ eds. S. Davidson and M. A. Vallée
(Springer International Publishing, 2016), 159-173.
[84] Ricoeur, "Structuralism and Hermeneutics", 57.
[85] Ricoeur, "Structuralism and Hermeneutics", 56.
[86] Ricoeur, "Structuralism and Hermeneutics", 58.
[87] Edmond Ortigues, /La Discours et la Symbole/ (Paris: Aubier,
1962), 194, Quoted in Ricoeur, "Structuralism and Hermeneutics", 59.
[88] Ricoeur, "Structuralism and Hermeneutics", 60.
[89] Ricoeur, "Structure, Word, Event", trans. Robert Sweeney, in /The
Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde/
(Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 79-99.
[90] Ricoeur, "Structure, Word, Event", 84.
[91] Ricoeur, "Structure, Word, Event", 91.
[92] Ricoeur, "Structure, Word, Event", 92.
[93] Ricoeur, "Structure, Word, Event", 92.
[94] Paul Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative: Volume 1/, trans. Kathleen
McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1984), x.
[95] Hans-Georg Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ Trans., Joel Weinsheimer
and Donald G. Marshall (London and New York: Continuum, 1975), 296.
[96] Wolfgang Iser, /The Range of Interpretation/ (Columbia University
Press: New York, 2000).
[97] Francisco J. Varela, /Principles of Biological Autonomy/ (New
York: Elsevior, 1979), 107.
[98] Iser, /The Range of Interpretation,/ 100.
[99] Iser, /The Range of Interpretation,/ 101.
[100] Iser, /The Range of Interpretation,/ 108-109.
[101] Iser, /The Range of Interpretation,/ 109.
[102] Enthem Gürer, Mine Özkar, and Gülen Çağdaş, "A Hermeneutical
Sketch of Design Computation", /METU Journal of The Faculty of
Architecture/ (32:1), 165-183.
[103] Gürer, Özkar, and Çağdaş "A Hermeneutical Sketch", 169.
[104] Gürer, Özkar, and Çağdaş "A Hermeneutical Sketch", 168.
[105] Gürer, Özkar, and Çağdaş "A Hermeneutical Sketch", 179
[106] Gürer, Özkar, and Çağdaş "A Hermeneutical Sketch", 179.
[107] Lorenzo C. Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of
Modernity/ (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).
[108] Material from this chapter initially appeared in: Eoin Carney,
"Technique and Understanding: Paul Ricoeur on Freud and the Analytic
Experience", /Études Ricoeuriennes/Ricoeur Studies/ 7, no. 1 (2016):
87-102.
[109] Paul Ricoeur, /Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on
Interpretation,/ trans., Denis Savage (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1970), 32-36.
[110] Paul Ricoeur, "The Question of Proof in Freud's Psychoanalytic
Writings", in /On Psychoanalysis,/ trans., David Pellauer (Cambridge:
Polity, 2012), 23.
[111] Wolfgang Iser, /The Range of Interpretation/ (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2000).
[112] Sigmund Freud, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable", in /The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud/, /Vol. XXIII (1937-1939)/ (The Hogarth Press: London, 1964),
216-253.
[113] Jean Laplanche, "Psychoanalysis as anti-hermeneutics", /Radical
Philosophy/ 79 (1996). Although Laplanche opposes his view to
Ricoeur's on the basis that Ricoeur "takes no account of the methods
of Freud himself," this may be due to the fact that he focuses on
/Freud and Philosophy,/ rather than on many of Ricoeur's subsequent
writings on psychoanalysis which deal directly with the analytic
experience and methods of treatment. In agreement with Laplanche,
Ricoeur is critical of psychoanalytic theories which are often
misunderstood as arising "organically" from the analytic experience:
"It is the misunderstanding of the circular connection between the
procedure of investigation, method of treatment, and theoretical
system that has led to overestimation of the theoretical system and,
at the same time, to not noting possible discordances between what
psychoanalysis /does/ and what it /says/ it does." Paul Ricoeur,
"Image and Language in Psychoanalysis", in /On Psychoanalysis,/
trans., David Pellauer (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 95.
[114] Laplanche, "Psychoanalysis as anti-hermeneutics", 11.
[115] For example, in the case of dreams: "Two separate functions may
be distinguished in mental activity during the construction of a
dream: the production of dream thoughts, and their transformation into
the content of the dream." This activity "is completely different
(from waking thought) qualitatively and for that reason not
immediately comparable to it. /It does not think, calculate or judge
in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form/",
Sigmund Freud, /The standard edition of the complete psychological
works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 5,/ 506-507; quoted in Ricoeur, "The
Question of Proof", fn. 24; Emphasis added.
[116] Jürgen Habermas, /Knowledge and Human Interests,/ trans. Jeremy
J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 214-245.
[117] Ricoeur, "The Question of Proof", 30-33.
[118] Paul Ricoeur, "Technique and Nontechnique in Interpretation,"
trans. Willis Domingo, in /The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in
Hermeneutics,/ ed. Don Ihde (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern
University Press, 1974), 184-185.
[119] Sigmund Freud, "On Beginning the Treatment", in /The standard
edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vol.
12,/ trans. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 1958), 126-127.
[120] Ricoeur, "Technique and Nontechnique", 183.
[121] Freud, "On Beginning the Treatment", 140
[122] Freud, "On Beginning the Treatment", 141
[123] Freud, "On Beginning the Treatment", 142
[124] Freud, "On Beginning the Treatment", 139
[125] Sigmund Freud, "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through" in
/The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund
Freud, Vol. 12,/ trans., James Strachey (London: Vintage, 1958), 147.
[126] Ricoeur, "Technique and Nontechnique", 185. (Section 4 --
Technological Applications)
[127] Explored in more detail in /Section 4 -- Technological
Applications./
[128] Ricoeur, "Technique and Nontechnique", 187.
[129] Ricoeur, "Technique and Nontechnique", 187.
[130] Ricoeur, "Technique and Nontechnique", 188.
[131] Ricoeur, "Technique and Nontechnique", 188.
[132] Ricoeur, "Technique and Nontechnique", 188.
[133] Ricoeur, "The Question of Proof", 19-20.
[134] Ricoeur, "Technique and Nontechnique", 192-194.
[135] Paul Ricoeur, "The Question of the Subject: The Challenge of
Semiology", trans., Kathleen McLaughlin, in /The Conflict of
Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde/ (Evanston,
Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 243.
[136] Ricoeur, "Technique and Nontechnique", 191-192.
[137] Sigmund Freud, "The Dynamics of Transference", in /The standard
edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud, Vol.
12,/ trans., James Strachey (London: Vintage, 1958), 108.
[138] Hans-Georg Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ Trans., Joel Weinsheimer
and Donald G. Marshall (London and New York: Continuum, 1975), 307.
[139] Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ 307.
[140] Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ 307.
[141] Richard Kearney, /On Stories/ (London and New York: Routledge,
2002), 35-40.
[142] Freud, "The Dynamics of Transference", 104
[143] Freud, "The Dynamics of Transference", 99-100.
[144] Freud, "The Dynamics of Transference", 100.
[145] Ricoeur, "The Question of Proof", 16.
[146] Paul Ricoeur, "Appropriation", in /Hermeneutics and the Human
Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation,/ trans. John
B. Thompson (Cambridge University Press, 1981). 182-197.
[147] Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ 102-125.
[148] Paul Ricoeur, "Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology", in
/From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II,/ trans. Kathleen
Blamey and John B. Thompson (London and New York: Continuum, 2008),
292.
[149] Freud, "On beginning the treatment", 143
[150] Iser, /The Range of Interpretation,/ 80.
[151] Iser, /The Range of Interpretation,/ 151.
[152] Vinicio Busacchi, "Postface: Desire, Identity, the Other --
Psychoanalysis for Paul Ricoeur after /Freud and Philosophy/"/,/ in
/On Psychoanalysis,/ trans., David Pellauer (Cambridge: Polity, 2012),
224.
[153] Paul Ricoeur, "Narrative: Its Place in Psychoanalysis", in /On
Psychoanalysis,/ trans., David Pellauer (Cambridge: Polity, 2012),
208.
[154] Paul Ricoeur, /Memory, History, Forgetting,/ trans. Kathleen
Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2004), 88.
[155] Freud, Sigmund, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable", 216-253.
[156] "Thus we can see that there /is/ a resistance against the
uncovering of resistances...They are resistances not only to the
making conscious of the contents of the id, but also to the analysis
as a whole, and thus recovery." Freud, "Analysis Terminable and
Interminable", Freud, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable", 239.
[157] Freud, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable", 238.
[158] Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ 301.
[159] Freud, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable", 228
[160] Freud, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable", 229
[161] Freud, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable", 247.
[162] Freud, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable", 247.
[163] Freud, "Analysis Terminable and Interminable", 249-250.
[164] Paul Ricoeur, "The Difference between the Normal and the
Pathological as a Source of Respect," in /Reflections on the Just,/
trans. David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2007), 196.
[165] Paul Ricoeur, /Oneself as Another,/ trans. Kathleen Blamey
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
[166] Ricoeur cites Kermode on this point: Frank Kermode, /The Genesis
of Secrecy/ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 75-77. See
Paul Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative: Volume 1,/ 37.
[167] Ricoeur, /Oneself as Another/, 152.
[168] "the mark of thingness seems to be consistency and continuity
despite variation", Catherine Pickstock, /Repetition and Identity: The
Literary Agenda/ (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 11.
[169] Lorenzo C. Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of
Modernity/ (New York and London: Routledge 1995).63.
[170] Pickstock, /Repetition and Identity,/ 30.
[171] Pickstock, /Repetition and Identity,/ 31.
[172] Michel Foucault, /The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at
the College de France, 1981-82/, Gros, Frédéric (ed.), translated from
French by Graham Burchell, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
[173] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
43.
[174] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
50.
[175] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
51.
[176] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
57.
[177] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
52.
[178] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
52-53.
[179] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
53.
[180] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
53-54. Emphasis in original. As a side note, an example of planning
for /contingent/ novelty might be the scheduling of a `festival' in
Gadamer's sense. The festival sits within the calendar but is also
outside, since the temporality associated with it is different than
the daily routine of work, etc. Festivals `work' by the way they
embrace the `flux' of time in their organization.
[181] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
58.
[182] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
54-55.
[183] Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ 350.
[184] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
47.
[185] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
47.
[186] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
46.
[187] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
47.
[188] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
48.
[189] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
45.
[190] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
45.
[191] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
48.
[192] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
48.
[193] Simpson, /Technology, Time, and the Conversations of Modernity,/
44. Emphasis added.
[194] Martin Heidegger, /Being and Time,/ trans. John Macquarrie &
Edward Robinson (Blackwell Publishing, 1962), Martin Heidegger, /The
Basic Problems of Phenomenology,/ trans. Albert Hofstadter
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982).
[195] William C. Dowling, /Ricoeur on Time and Narrative/ (Notre Dame,
Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 33.
[196] Peter Osborne, /The Politics of Time/ (London: Verso, 1995), 53.
[197] Paul Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative: Volume 1,/ translated by
Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (The University of Chicago
Press: Chicago and London, 1984), 52. Emphasis in original.
[198] Paul Ricoeur, "Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator", in /On
Psychoanalysis,/ eds. Jean-Louis Schlegel and Catherine Goldenstein,
trans. David Pellauer (Polity, 2012), 188.
[199] Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative 1,/ 77.
[200] Paul Ricoeur, /Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the
Involuntary,/ trans. Erazim V. Kohák (Northwestern University Press:
Evanston, Illinois, 1966).
[201] Ricoeur /Freedom and Nature/, 450-456.
[202] Van der Heiden, /The Truth (and Untruth) of Language,/ 203.
Emphasis in original.
[203] Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative 1/, 33.
[204] Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative 1/, 33.
[205] Paul Ricoeur, "The Paradigm of Translation," in /Reflections on
the Just/, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2007), 115.
[206] Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative 1/, 35
[207] Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative 1/, 35
[208] Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative 1/, 238, fn. 10.
[209] Arnold Schoenberg, /Structural Functions of Harmony,/ ed.
Leonard Stein (Faber and Faber, 1954), 1-2.
[210] Paul Ricoeur, "Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator", 187.
[211] Paul Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative: Volume 2,/ trans. Kathleen
McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1985), 46-47.
[212] Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative 2,/ 47.
[213] Dowling, /Ricoeur on Time and Narrative,/ 48.
[214] Ricoeur, "Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator", 191.
[215] Ricoeur, "Mimesis and Representation", in /A Ricoeur Reader:
Reflection and Imagination,/ ed. Mario J. Valdés (University of
Toronto Press, 1991), 139-140
[216] Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative 2,/ 44.
[217] Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative 1/, 72.
[218] Wolfgang Iser, /The Act of Reading/: /A Theory of Aesthetic
Response/ (The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London,
1978, 57.
[219] J. L. Austin, /How to do Things with Words,/ (Oxford University
Press, 1975), 22.
[220] Iser, /The Act of Reading,/ 58-59.
[221] Iser, /The Act of Reading,/ 169.
[222] However, it is important to note that a structuralist approach
may read these elements otherwise: "The fact remains, however, that a
narrative is made up solely of functions: everything, in one way or
another, is significant. /It is not so much a matter of art (on the
part of the narrator) as it is a matter of structure./ Even though a
detail may appear unequivocally trivial, impervious to any function,
in would nonetheless end up pointing to its own absurdity or
uselessness: everything has a meaning, or nothing has. To put it in a
different way. Art does not acknowledge the existence of noise (in the
informational sense of the word). It is a pure system: there are no
wasted units, and there can never be any, however long, loose, or
tenuous threads which link them to one of the levels of the story."
Roland Barthes, "An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of
Narrative", /New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2, On Narrative and
Narratives/ (Winter, 1975), 244-245, emphasis added.
[223] Iser, /The Act of Reading,/ 109.
[224] Paul Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative: Volume 3/, trans. Kathleen
McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1988), 167.
[225] Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative 1,/ 72.
[226] Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative 1,/ 72.
[227] Ricoeur, /Time and Narrative 1,/ 74-75. The other example,
alongside psychoanalysis, is of a judge "unravelling the tangle of
plots the subject is caught up in".
[228] Mark Coeckelbergh and Wessel Reijers, "Narrative Technologies: A
Philosophical Investigation of the Narrative Capacities of
Technologies by Using Ricoeur's Narrative Theory", /Human Studies/ 39,
no. 3 (2016); Mark Coeckelbergh and Wessel Reijers, "The Blockchain as
a Narrative Technology: Investigating the Social Ontology and
Normative Configurations of Cryptocurrencies", /Philosophy &
Technology (2016), 1-28/; Bruno Gransche, "The Art of Staging
Simulations: Mise-en-scène, Social Impact, and Simulation Literacy",
in /The Science and Art of Simulation 1/ (Springer, 2017), 33-51.
[229] Coeckelbergh, "Narrative Technologies", 336-337.
[230] Paul Ricoeur, "Appropriation", in /Hermeneutics and the Human
Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation/ (Cambridge
University Press, 1981).
[231] "Albert Borgmann on Taming Technology: An Interview", Religion
Online, accessed January 7 2017,
<http://www.religion-online.org/article/albert-borgmann-on-taming-technology-an-interview/>.
[232] Hans Georg Gadamer, /Philosophical Hermeneutics,/ trans. and ed.
David E. Linge (Berkeley, California: University of California Press,
1977), 201.
[233] Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the Self," in /Technologies of
the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault/, eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck
Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: The University of
Massachusetts Press, 1988); Michel Foucault, /The Hermeneutics of the
Subject: Lectures at the College de France, 1981-82/, ed. Frédéric
Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
[234] "And if we had never drawn near to the country of the unsayable,
would we ever understand the meaning of the secret, of the
untranslatable secret? And do not our best exchanges, in love and
friendship, preserve this quality of discretion -- of secrecy and
discretion -- that preserves distance in proximity?" Paul Ricoeur,
"The Paradigm of Translation," in /Reflections on the Just/,trans.
David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
2007), 120.
[235] Albert Borgmann, "Focal Things and Practices", in Robert C.
Scharff and Val Duesk (eds.) /Philosophy of Technology: The
Technological Condition: An Anthology/ (Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 331.
[236] Martin Heidegger. "The Thing", in /Poetry, Language, Thought,/
trans. Albert Hofstadter (Harper & Row, Publishers, 1971), 161-185.
[237] Borgmann, "Focal Things and Practices", 332.
[238] Albert Borgmann, /Technology and the Character of Contemporary
Life: A Philosophical Inquiry/ (University of Chicago Press, 2009).41.
[239] Borgmann, /Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life,/
41.
[240] The criteria Borgmann associates with availability.
[241] Borgmann, /Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life,/
41.
[242] Borgmann, /Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life,/
41-42.
[243] Borgmann, "Focal Things and Practices", 330.
[244] Borgmann, "Focal Things and Practices", 329.
[245] Borgmann, /Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life,/
35-40.
[246] Borgmann, /Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life,/
42.
[247] Catherine Pickstock, /Repetition and Identity: The Literary
Agenda/ (Oxford: OUP, 2013), 151.
[248] Pickstock, /Repetition and Identity,/ 152.
[249] Borgmann, "Focal Things and Practices", 331.
[250] Borgmann, "Focal Things and Practices", 337.
[251] Borgmann, "Focal Things and Practices", 336.
[252] Borgmann, "Focal Things and Practices", 336.
[253] David Kaplan, "Thing Hermeneutics", in /Gadamer and Ricoeur:
Critical Horizons for Contemporary Hermeneutics,/ eds. Francis J.
Mootz III and George H. Taylor (New York and London: Continuum, 2011),
232.
[254] Peter-Paul Verbeek, /What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections
on Technology, Agency, and Design/ (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2005), 178.
[255] Material from this subsection initially appeared in: Eoin
Carney, "Knowing Ignorance: The Fragility of Technological
Application", In /Technisches Nichtwissen/, eds. Alexander Friedrich,
Petra Gehring, Christoph Hubig, Andreas Kaminski, and Alfred Nordmann
(Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, 2016) 41-54.
[256] Hans Georg Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ trans. Joel Weinsheimer
and Donal G. Marshall (London and New York: Continuum, 2004), 314.
[257] Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ 315.
[258] Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ 319.
[259] Bent Flyvbjerg, /Making Social Science Matter: Why social
inquiry fails and how it can succeed again,/ trans. Steven Sampson
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Bent Flyvberg, Todd
Landman, and Sanford Schram, eds., /Real Social Science: Applied
Phronesis/ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
[260] Elizabeth Anne Kinsella and Allan Pitman, eds., /Phronesis as
Professional Knowledge: Practical Wisdom in the Professions/
(Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishers, 2012).
[261] Foucault, /The Hermeneutics of the Subject;/ Foucault,
/Technologies of the Self./
[262] Foucault, /The Hermeneutics of the Subject,/ 4.
[263] Peter-Paul Verbeek, "Obstetric Ultrasound and the Technological
Mediation of Morality: A Postphenomenological Analysis," /Human
Studies/ 31:1 (2008), 23.
[264] Flyvbjerg, /Making Social Science Matter,/ 112.
[265] Peter-Paul Verbeek, "Materializing Morality: Design Ethics and
Technological Mediation," /Science, Technology, & Human Values/ 31:3
(2006), 365.
[266] Verbeek, "Materializing Morality," 365.
[267] Verbeek, "Materializing Morality," 366.
[268] Verbeek, "Materializing Morality," 372.
[269] Verbeek, "Materializing Morality," 373.
[270] Verbeek, "Materializing Morality," 373.
[271] David Lewin, "Ricoeur and the Capability of Modern Technology,"
in /From Ricoeur to Action: The Socio-Political Significance of
Ricoeur's Thinking,/ eds. Todd S. Mei and David Lewin (Bloomsbury:
London and New York, 2012), 65.
[272] Verbeek, "Materializing Morality," 374.
[273] Verbeek, "Materializing Morality," 374.
[274] "We will call `spirituality' then the set of these researches,
practices, and experiences, which may be purifications, ascetic
exercises, renunciations, conversions of looking, modifications of
existence, etc., which are, not for knowledge but for the subject, for
the subjects very being, for the price to be paid for access to the
truth." Foucault, /Hermeneutics of the Subject,/ 15.
[275] David Fisher, "Ricoeur's /Atemwende/: A Reading of `Interlude:
Tragic Action' in Oneself as Another," in /From Ricoeur to Action: The
Socio-Political Significance of Ricoeur's Thinking,/ ed. Todd S. Mei
and David Lewin (London and New York, Bloomsbury, 2012), 195.
[276] Paul Ricoeur, /Oneself as Another,/ trans. Kathleen Blamey
(Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 169-296.
[277] Ricoeur, /Oneself as Another,/ 247.
[278] "[A]s the mechanisms of professionalization have been put in
place, so too have the levels of prescription increased, thereby
circumscribing the capacity of members to act autonomously in
situations that demand the exercise of judgement...This underlines the
essential need to consider calls for phronesis in light of what Kemmis
has called the extra-individual features of practice, including the
social, cultural, material-economic, discursive, political, and policy
dimensions." Kinsella and Pitman, /Phronesis as Professional
Knowledge,/ p. 8.
[279] "Actuarial science employs a form of statistical modelling
enabling insurance companies to consider their exposure to risks in
order to calculate premiums providing coverage for such risks. For
example, assessment of liability in auto insurance will consider,
among other things, the age, gender, and credit rating of a driver. So
while an insurance company provides a qualified guarantee to
compensate individuals who have suffered a loss, the subsequent effect
occurs as a sort of transvaluation via the social
imagination---namely, risk and loss themselves have financial value."
Todd Mei, "The Relevance of an Existential Conception of Nature,"
/Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy/
10:2 (2014), 156.
[280] Lewin, "Ricoeur and the Capability of Modern Technology," 64-67.
[281] David H. Fisher, "Is /Phronesis Deinon/? Ricoeur on Tragedy and
Phronesis," in /Gadamer and Ricoeur: Critical Horizons for
Contemporary Hermeneutics,/ ed. Francis J. Mootz III and George H.
Taylor (London and New York: Continuum, 2001), 157.
[282] Verbeek, "Obstetric Ultrasound," 14-18.
[283] Lewin, "Ricoeur and the Capability of Modern Technology", 66.
[284] Alexander R Galloway, /The Interface Effect/ (Polity, 2012), 22.
[285] Galloway, /The Interface Effect,/ 121.
[286] Brenda Laurel, /Computers as Theatre: Second Edition/
(Addison-Wesley, 2014).
[287] For the difference between a "cybernetic" and
"recursive/autopoietic" approaches to systems, see Iser, /The Range of
Interpretation,/ 83-113.
[288] Martin Heidegger, "The Thing", in /Poetry, Language, Thought,/
trans. Albert Hofstadter (Harper and Row, 1975). 165-166.
[289] Lewin, "Ricoeur and the Capability of Modern Technology", 63.
[290] Lewin, "Ricoeur and the Capability of Modern Technology", 57.
[291] Lewin, "Ricoeur and the Capability of Modern Technology", 58.
[292] Ricoeur, /Oneself as Another,/ 273-283.
[293] Lewin, "Ricoeur and the Capability of Modern Technology", 55.
[294] Lewin, "Ricoeur and the Capability of Modern Technology", 54.
[295] Lewin, "Ricoeur and the Capability of Modern Technology", 64.
[296] Lewin, "Ricoeur and the Capability of Modern Technology", 65.
[297] Lewin, "Ricoeur and the Capability of Modern Technology", 66.
[298] Lewin, "Ricoeur and the Capability of Modern Technology", 70.
[299] Lewin, "Ricoeur and the Capability of Modern Technology", 69.
[300] Hans-Georg Gadamer, "The Nature of Things and the Language of
Things", in /Philosophical Hermeneutics/ trans. and ed. David E. Linge
(University of California Press, 1977), 69-82.
[301] Gadamer, "The Nature of Things and the Language of Things", 71.
[302] Gadamer, "The Nature of Things and the Language of Things", 78.
[303] Galloway, /The Interface Effect,/ 16.
[304] Galloway, /The Interface Effect,/ 18.
[305] Galloway, /The Interface Effect,/ 25.
[306] Michel Serres, /Le Parasite/ (Paris: Éditions Grasset et
Fasquelle, 1980), 107.
[307] Galloway, /The Interface Effect,/ 26.
[308] Galloway, /The Interface Effect,/ 34.
[309] Galloway, /The Interface Effect,/ 36-37.
[310] Galloway, /The Interface Effect,/ 38.
[311] Galloway, /The Interface Effect,/ 51.
[312] Galloway, /The Interface Effect,/ 51.
[313] Elsewhere, Galloway cites Deleuze to illustrate this point, "A
control is not a discipline. In making freeways, for example, you
don't enclose people but instead multiply the means of control. I am
not saying that this is the freeway's exclusive purpose, but that
people can drive infinitely and `freely' without being at all confined
yet while still being perfectly controlled. This is our future."
Gilles Deleuze, "Having an Idea in Cinema", in /Deleuze and Guattari:
New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture,/ eds. Eleanor
Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller (University of Minnesota Press:
Minneapolis, 1998) 18. Quoted in Alexander R. Galloway, "Computers and
the Superfold", /Deleuze Studies/ 6.4 (2012), 522.
[314] Galloway, /The Interface Effect,/ 49.
[315] Galloway, /The Interface Effect,/ 49.
[316] The term `experiential' here is being used in a different sense
than Laurel herself uses it. She does not situate her work within this
suggested phenomenological framework. She does employ the term
`experiential' in order to distinguish between `productive' and
`experiential' activities, for example, a productive activity might be
editing an Excel spreadsheet, whereas an experiential activity might
involve playing a video game. Of course, she herself collapses any
distinctions between the two (such as `productivity' being a `serious'
activity vs. the `playfulness' of video games), Laurel, /Computers as
Theatre,/ 32.
[317] Gadamer, /Truth and Method/, 385.
[318] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 3.
[319] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 3-4.
[320] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 5.
[321] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 5. Susan E. Brennan,
"Conversation as Direct Manipulation: An Iconoclastic View." In /The
Art of Human-Computer Interface Design/, edited by Brenda Laurel.
(Addison-Wesley: Reading, MA, 1990).
[322] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 14.
[323] The terms `actual' and `potential' and Laurel's terms, being
employed in their Aristotelian sense. Later, she also uses the notion
of the `flying wedge' to discuss the parallels between the way a
theatre production and software application `begin' and `end'; they
start out with a wide range of questions and possible outcomes, which
are gradually narrowed over the course of action. Laurel, /Computers
as Theatre,/ 82-95.
[324] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 11.
[325] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 82.
[326] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 109.
[327] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 105.
[328] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 105.
[329] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 105.
[330] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 139-140. Emphasis in original.
[331] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 140.
[332] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 16.
[333] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 151
[334] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 150.
[335] Laurel, /Computers as Theatre,/ 219. emphasis in original
[336] Martin Heidegger, /Being and Time,/ trans. John Macquarrie &
Edward Robinson (Blackwell Publishing, 1962), 195.
[337] Simondon's term /technics/ (/les techniques/) should be
distinguished from the term /technology,/ "which remains programmatic
in Simondon's text". The term is translated into English as /technics/
to reflect the specialized nature of the subject matter. As the
translators of /On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects/ write,
technics means "the theory or study of industry and of the mechanical
arts; while this term, as a collective plural used in the singular
along the same lines as "physics," is usually a near synonym to
"technology" and is differentiated in English from "technique" insofar
as the latter refers to the almost ineffably practical and particular
application of technics to a given concrete task, in French the
singular "la technique" and the plural "les techniques" cover together
the meanings covered both by "technique" or "techniques" in English
and by "technics" , and so the word "technics" as it appears in this
text accordingly covers both." , Gilbert Simondon, /On the Mode of
Existence of Technical Objects,/ trans. Cecile Malaspina and John
Rogove (Univocal, 2016), 9, fn. 1.
[338] Gilbert Simondon, /On the Mode of Existence of Technical
Objects,/ translated by Ninian Mellamphy (University of West Ontario,
1980), 1-2.
[339] M. C. Richards, /Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person/
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1962).
[340] John Hart, "Preface", in Simondon, /On the Mode of Existence of
Technical Objects,/ xvi.
[341] Simondon, /On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,/ 17.
[342] Simondon, /On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,/
11-12.
[343] Simondon, /On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,/ 14.
[344] Simondon, /On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,/
15-16.
[345] Simondon, /On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,/ 18.
[346] Simondon, /On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,/ 54.
[347] Simondon, /On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,/ 58.
[348] Simondon, /On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,/
60-61.
[349] Georges Canguilhem, /La connaissance de la vie/ (Vrin: Paris,
1992).
[350] Andrew D. Selbst and Julia Ticona, "Supreme Court Must
Understand: Cell Phones Aren't Optional", /Wired 11.29.17./ Accessed
January 7 2018.
<https://www.wired.com/story/supreme-court-must-understand-cell-phones-arent-optional/>.
[351] Selbst and Ticona, "Cell Phones Aren't Optional"
[352] Paul Ricoeur, "Hermeneutical logic?" in /Hermeneutics: Writings
and Lectures/, trans. D. Pellauer (Polity: 2013), 85.
[353] Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ 146.
[354] This use of the term "symbol" is different than Ricoeur's use
that discussed in earlier chapters.
[355] Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ 146.
[356] Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ 136.
[357] Paul Ricoeur, /Memory, History, Forgetting,/ trans. Kathleen
Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 2004), 565, fn. 81
[358] Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ 149.
[359] Pol Vandevelde, "The Enigma of the Past: Ricoeur's Theory of
Narrative as a Response to Heidegger", in S. Davidson and M. A. Vallée
(eds.) /Hermeneutics and Phenomenology in Paul Ricoeur/ (Springer
International Publishing, 2016), 128.
[360] Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ 111.
[361] Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ 111.
[362] Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ 112.
[363] Gadamer, /Truth and Method,/ 133-135.
[364] Paul Ricoeur, "Appropriation", in /Hermeneutics and the Human
Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation/ (Cambridge
University Press, 1981), 182.
[365] Jean-Pierre Changeux, and Paul Ricoeur, /What Makes Us Think? A
Neuroscientist and a Philosopher Argue about Ethics, Human Nature, and
the Brain,/ 13-14.
[366] Paul Ricoeur, "Metaphor and the Problem of Hermeneutics", in /A
Ricoeur Reader: Reflection & Imagination,/ ed. Mario J. Valdés
(Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 178.
[367] Simondon, /On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,/ 27.
[368] Simondon, /On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects,/ 50.
[369] Christopher Ricky, /Revolutionary Saints: Heidegger, National
Socialism, and Antinomian Politics/ (University Park, Pennsylvania:
Pennsylvania University Press, 2002), 48.
[370] Ricoeur. "Metaphor and the Problem of Hermeneutics", 171.
[371] Ricoeur, "Appropriation", 186.