Abstract
Why does a cell phone have a screen? From televisions and cell phones to refrigerators, many contemporary technologies come with a screen. The article aims at answering this question by employing Emmanuel Levinas’ notions of the Other and the face. This article also engages with Don Ihde’s conceptualization of alterity relations, in which the technological acts as quasi-other with which we maintain relations. If technology is a quasi-other, then, I claim, the screen is the quasi-face. By exploring Levinas’ ontology, specifically what can be identified as his tool analysis, as well as his notion of the face, a new understanding of contemporary technologies can be extracted. Some of these technologies hardly fit into the Heideggerian notion of the hand as the main interface to artifacts. Instead they require the face. Levinas’ notion of the face is analyzed from an ontological perspective and developed in conjunction with the screen. As the screen serves as a quasi-face, it enables the construction of quasi-other technological artifacts.
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Notes
Thus, intellectual property such as novels, movies, or software code is excluded from their analysis of things. Like Heidegger, Levinas does not deal with Husserlian temporal objects, like music or written works, which require us to think in term of “consciousness of…” (Ihde 2010).
As reflected in Heidegger’s present-at-hand notion as well as in Deleuze and Guattari's (1983) notion of abstract machine. But while Deleuze and Guattari in later writing do refer to modern technologies such as television (1987), Levinas ignores television and even cinema, and remains bounded by the Heideggerian hammer and pen, or other traditional technologies such as clothing and dwelling. For Deleuze and Guattari machines like television and their users are entangled in such a way that the users are no longer users, but rather parts of larger machines. Their machine allows us to imagine a future where the “users” will break the “larger machine” they compose with the television. For Levinas, there is no need to break from the machine, because technologies help us live good lives.
Considered nowadays, it makes sense of the contemporary practice of setting a colorful wall-paper for the cell phone’s display, without thinking what it is good for.
There is a vibrant discussion whether Heidegger in The Question Concerning Technology is opening new horizon or looking back. For the former see Ihde (1979); Harman (2002); Lash (2002); Ihde (2010); Riis (2011) for the latter see Feenberg (1999); Scharff and Dusek (2003: 247); Wendling (2011). But my focus here is Levinas’ analysis of 1961 which takes the latter position rather than the former.
Similar list of things necessary for living can be found in Marx and Engel’s German Ideology, in the first paragraph of the chapter “History: Fundamental Conditions” in Part I on Feuerbach (1970): “life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things”.
Levinas’ elements may remind the reader Heidegger’s classification of nature in the context of presence-at-hand: “nature must not to be understood here as what is merely objectively present [present-at-hand, GW] nor as the power of nature. The forest is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock, the river is water power, the wind is wind ‘in the sails’” (1996: 66). Nature, for Heidegger, is a ready-to-hand that is in-order-to. In later writing (Heidegger 1977), he develops the Gestell relation to these elements, an enframing, where they are no more than standing reserve. By contrast, for Levinas the elements can be interacted from within the home.
My corrections. In the original: “Il serait impossible à un être sans demeure” (p. 170 in the French text). The translation to English is: “It would be impossible in a being that had no dwelling”.
Heidegger refers to additional technologies such as the invisible and untouchable hydroelectric dam. These technologies do not require the hand, let alone the body of the user (here one should distinguish between an operator and a user). They are in the background, see Ihde (1990).
For the role of the hand in the interface with a computer see Irwin (2006).
Thus Deleuze and Guattari’s Body without Organs is the next step in this direction of investigation and a further reduction to no organs at all (1987).
The words composing the discourse are a manifestation the interaction with the other. Words are part of a language. Levinas places importance on the role of language. He writes, “[l]anguage is not enacted within a consciousness; it comes to me from the other and reverberates in consciousness by putting it in question” (1995: 204). Levinas adds, “language does not exteriorize a representation preexisting in me: it puts in common a world hitherto mine. Language effectuates the entry of things into a new ether in which they receive a name and become concepts. It is the first action over and above labor” (1995: 174). Language, according to Levinas, is not a tool because it is abstract and because it is prior to labor. It conditions labor and is not part of labor. Language does not make the interiority representable in an external spoken world, rather language is the discourse spoken that affects the self in being spoken. While Heidegger presupposes a language that already exists and into which one is born and with which one becomes human, Levinas maintains that language operates within us in a way more complex.
The visual representation, although unlike any other representation, is “[t]he manifestation of the face [which] is already discourse” (Lenivas 1995: 66).
Quasi-other should be carefully constructed in order to avoid anthropomorphism, through “a phenomenologically relativistic analysis” (Ihde 1990: 99).
http://outfit7.com/character/talking-tom/ (accessed March 20, 2013).
As the headline of Totality and Infinity’s chapter III.B.4. states. See also Lenivas 1995: 73.
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Wellner, G. The Quasi-Face of the Cell Phone: Rethinking Alterity and Screens. Hum Stud 37, 299–316 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-013-9304-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-013-9304-y