ROSENBERGER, Robert; VERBEEK, Peter-Paul (Ed.).

Postphenomenological Investigations: Essays on HumanTechnology

Relations. London: Lexington Books, 2015.

1 - A Field Guide to Postphenomenology (Robert Rosenberger and Peter-Paul

Verbeek)

The various postphenomenological studies that have been undertaken so

far (e.g., Ihde, 1993; Selinger, 2006; Rosenberger, 2008; Verbeek, 2008b;
Rosenberger, 2012) have at least two things in common. First of all, they all
investigate technology in terms of the relations between human beings and
technological artifacts, focusing on the various ways in which technologies
help to shape relations between human beings and the world. They do not
approach technologies as merely functional and instrumental objects, but as
mediators of human experiences and practices. Second, they all combine
philosophical analysis with empirical investigation. Rather than applying
philosophical theories to technologies, the postphenomenological approach
takes actual technologies and technological developments as a starting
point for philosophical analysis. Its philosophy of technology is in a sense a
philosophy from technology (p.9-10).
Classical phenomenological analyses of technology, most notably in the
work of Martin Heidegger, approached technology in fairly abstract and also
romantic terms. They studied Technology as a
broad, social, and cultural phenomenon, with a special focus on the ways in
which technology alienates human beings from themselves and from the
world they live in. While this approach has brought many relevant insights in
the role of technology in human existence, its monolithic and romantic
character were increasingly experienced as problematic (Feenberg, 2000;
Ihde,
1993). The analyses were losing touch with the actual experiences people
have of the roles of technologies in human existence (p.10).
It is precisely this claim to regain access to an original world that is richer
in meaning than the world of science and technology, that
postphenomenology refutes. Rather than thinking in terms of alienation, it
thinks in terms of mediation. Science and technology help to shape our
relations to the world, rather than merely distancing us from it (p.11).
Subject and object cannot have a separate existence. The human subject is
always directed at objects: we cannot just see, hear, or think, but we
always see, hear, or think something (p.11).
Phenomenology replaced the split between subject and object with an
intentional relation
between them. Postphenomenology takes this relationist approach one step
further than phenomenology. Phenomenology itself was already a move
beyond modernism, because its concept of intentionality made it possible to
overcome the modernistic subject-object split. Against subjectivism and
objectivism, which founded knowledge on the internal workings of the
subject or on the objectivity of the world, its relationalism opened a novel
and fruitful perspective.
Postphenomenology, however, reconceptualizes this intentional relation in
two distinct ways. First, it investigates its fundamentally mediated character.
There is no direct relation between subject and object, but only an indirect
one, and technologies often function as mediators. The human-world
relation typically is a human-technology-world relation (Ihde, 1990). Second,
it does away with the idea that there is a pre-given subject in a pre-given
world of objects, with a mediating entity between them. Rather, the
mediation is the source of the specific shape that human subjectivity and
the
objectivity of the world can take in this specific situation. Subject and object
are constituted in their mediated relation (Verbeek, 2005). Intentionality is
not a bridge between subject and object but a fountain from with the two of
them emerge (p.11-12).
Postphenomenology makes it possible to make micro-scale analyses of the
mediating roles of technologies in human-world relationsand as such it
can be said that it truly takes us back to the things themselves: material
technological artifacts that deserve explicit philosophical attention (p.12).
Postphenomenology is the practical study of the relations between humans
and technologies, from which human subjectivities emerge, as well as
meaningful worlds. As a result of this practical and material orientation,
postphenomenology always takes the study of human-technology relations
as its starting point []. Technologies, to be short, are not opposed to
human existence; theyare its very medium (p.12-13).
Ihde writes, the wearer of eyeglasses embodies eyeglass technology: I
eyeglassesworld (1990, 73). As they are worn, the eyeglasses are a
transformative mediation of the bodily-perceptual relationship between the
user and the world. A related notion is what Ihde calls the transparency of
a particular human-technology relation. This refers to the degree to which a
device (or an aspect of that device) fades into the background of a users
awareness as it is used. As a user grows accustomed to the embodiment of
a device, as habits of bodily action and perception develop, and as the use
of the device takes on a familiar and everyday character, the device itself
takes on a degree of transparency (p.14).
The notions of embodiment and transparency can be illustrated in the
contrast between two wearable technologies with which Ihde himself is
personally familiar, hearing aids and eyeglasses (p.15).
It would be not be accidental if the reader were to detect in the notions of
embodiment and transparency an echo of Heideggers account of tool use
(as well as, of course, other examples from the phenomenological canon
that share these themes, such as Merleau-Pontys account of the blind
mans cane). Ihdes framework on this point is at once an appropriation and
critique
of Heideggers ideas. That is, on the one hand Ihdes conceptions of the
embodiment and transparency of technology can be understood as a
straightforward repackaging of Heideggers description of the withdraw of
the ready-to-hand tool, such as in his famous account of the hammer in
Being and Time (1996)[].On the other hand, Ihdes account of
embodiment relations is part of an explicit critique of Heideggers views
(p.15).
According to Ihde, human-technology relations generally, and embodiment
relations in particular, share a magnification/reduction structure. []
through the non-neutral transformations rendered to user experience
through the mediation of a technology, we not only receive the desired
change in our abilities, but always also receive other changes, some of them
taking on the quality of tradeoffs, a decrease of a sense, or area of focus,
or layer of context (p.16).
Rather than experience the world through the device as in an embodiment
relation, in a hermeneutic relation the user experiences a transformed
encounter with the world via the direct experience and interpretation of the
technology itself (p.17).
With the notion of alterity relations, Ihde refers to devices to which we
relate in a manner somewhat similar to how we interact with other human
beings. The idea is that some forms of interface are devised specifically to
mimic the shape of person-to-person interaction, and that sometimes we
encounter a device as itself a presence with which we must interrelate. The
term alterity is used in phenomenological discussions to refer to the
special experience of engaging with another human being, that significant
encounter with Otherness. Ihde claims that our interactions with
technologies can sometimes take on a quasi-other quality (p.18).
The postphenomenological focus on human-technology relations, as stated
in section 1, is closely connected to its relational ontology. Technologies,
postphenomenology holds, are to be understood in terms of the relations
human beings have with them, not as entities in themselves.[] In doing
so, technologies also help to shape the subjectivity of their users and the
objectivity of their world []. Subject and object are no pre-given entities,
but get constituted in the technologically mediated relations that exist
between them. This relational ontology of the postphenomenological
approach has a somewhat different character than the ontology of the
closely related approach of Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 1993). Actor-
Network Theory approaches the world as networks of relations between
actants, which can be human and nonhuman. Latour emphasizes that his
approach of these actants as symmetrical: he does not want to start from
an a priori distinction between human subjects and nonhuman objects, but
rather aims to make visible the continuity between humans and
nonhumans. Revealing this continuity, according to Latour, makes it possible
to understand how nonhuman entities do not only play a role in the material
world, but in the social world as well. From such a symmetrical approach,
not only humans but also things act. The postphenomenological approach,
however, explicitly does not give up the distinction between human and
nonhuman entities. Instead of symmetry it sees interaction and mutual
constitution between subjects and objects (p.19).
Actor-Network Theory studies complicated networks of relations from
outside, from a third-person perspective; postphenomenology studies
engaged human-world relations, and their technologically mediated
character, from a first-person perspective. It is not the distinction between
humans and technologies that it wants to depart from, but their radical
separation []. When postphenomenology claims that technologies play an
actively mediating role in human-world relations, it does not claim that
things can act just like humans do. Such a claim would actually reproduce
the modernistic subject-object split, by attributing the characteristic of
subjects to objects as well (p.20).
In the spectrum from embodiment via hermeneutic and alterity to
background relations, technologies move ever further away from the
human being as it were: from being an extension of the body via a
readable artifact and an object for interaction to the background of our
experience. More intimate than a relation of embodiment, though, there is a
relation of fusion, in which the physical boundaries between humans and
technologies are blurred, and technologies merge with our bodies. And more
radically environmental or ambient than the background relation, there
is a relation of immersion, in which a technological background interacts
actively with human beings. Moreover, augmented reality technologies,
which add an extra layer to our experience of the world, open up a relation
of augmentation. (p.20-21)
In the fusion relation, technologies merge with our physical body (p.21).
From this fusion relation, a hybrid intentionality emerges. Rather than
being a technologically mediated form of human intentionality, it is the
intentionality of a new, hybrid entity: a cyborg. Contrary to embodiment
relations, no clear distinction can be made here between the human and the
nonhuman elements in these relations: together, humans and technologies
form a new entity, which is directed towards the world in a hybrid way,
integrating human and nonhuman elements. In the immersion relation,
the configuration of humans and technology takes yet another shape. Here,
technologies do not merge with the body but with the environment. And the
relation between human beings and that hybrid environment is interactive:
smart environments perceive their users too, and act upon them
(p.21).
The intentionality involved in such augmentation relations can be
indicated as bifurcated: there is a split in peoples directedness at the
world, because two parallel fields of attention emerge (p.22).