Abstract
The emerging school of thought called “postphenomenology” offers a distinct understanding of the ways that people experience technology usage. This perspective combines insights from the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with commitments to the anti-essentialism and nonfoundationalism of American pragmatism. One of postphenomenology’s central positions is that technologies always remain “multistable,” i.e., subject to different uses and meanings. But I suggest that as this perspective matures, philosophical problems are emerging around the notion of multistability, what I call “the problem of invariance” and “the problem of grounding.” These problems point out things that remain unclear within the postphenomenological framework, such as how it handles structural claims regarding a technology’s various stabilities, and how it grounds its claims. How can postphenomenology make structural claims about technology and yet remain anti-essentializing? And on what epistemological basis does it ground its claims about human-technology relations? The paper concludes with a series of prescriptions that, if followed, enable postphenomenology to make edifying claims about technology, all while avoiding the problems of invariance and grounding, and maintaining its commitments to anti-essentialism and nonfoundationalism.
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Notes
Postphenomenology is of course not alone as a contemporary account of technology committed to nonfoundationalism and anti-essentialism. Fellow travelers here include Donna Haraway’s cyborg analyses, actor-network and social construction accounts in STS, Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory of technology, the pragmatist accounts of technology of figures like Larry Hickman, Paul Durbin, and Joe Pitt, as well as feminist standpoint perspectives on technology such as Sandra Harding’s, to name only a few (Haraway 1997; Feenberg 1999; Haraway 1997; Latour 1999; Oudshoorn and Pinch 2005; Durbin 2007; Hickman 2007; Harding 2008; Pitt 2011).
Thus, postphenomenology is not a move opposed to many of the central tenants of classical phenomenology. That is, it is not “post” in the way that, say, poststructuralism opposes much of structuralism. In fact, it is akin to “existential phenomenology” which, like postphenomenology, rejects the essentialism of classical phenomenology. But where existential phenomenology integrates commitments and themes of existentialism, postphenomenology integrates commitments of pragmatist philosophy and it focuses on themes regarding human-technology relations.
For analyses of postphenomenology’s pragmatism, see (Mitcham 2006; Hickman 2008). For more on postphenomenology see the online bibliography at www.postphenomenology.org, and the book series with Lexington Books/Rowman Littlefield Press entitled “Postphenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology.”
Ihde develops his account of these relations throughout his corpus. Here I refer to the version that appears in chapter 5 of Technology in the Lifeworld (Ihde 1990).
Postphenomenologists continue to theorize about human-technology relations and expand on Ihde’s list, exploring for example what kind of relations might be involved with “implanted” technologies taken into a user’s body itself, such as in the cases of pacemakers or cochlear implants (see Verbeek 2011; De Preester 2011, 2012; Besmer 2012; Rosenberger and Verbeek 2015a; Rosenberger 2015).
Ihde’s account of embodiment and transparency is also of course equally indebted to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied perception (e.g. Merleau-Ponty 1962).
For example, in the recent interview book Philosophy of Technology: 5 Questions, it is Heidegger’s name that garners the most index citations (Friis and Selinger 2007). Graham Harman, Ian Bogost, and others follow out the implications of Heidegger’s radical critique of metaphysics in a perspective they call Object-Oriented Ontology (e.g., Harman 2011; Bryant et al. 2011; Bogost 2012). Heidegger’s account can be seen to deeply inform Hubert Dreyfus’s critique of hard AI, Lucy Suchman’s phenomenology of interface and agency, and Albert Borgmann’s ethical analysis of the technological background of our everyday world, to name just three examples of work central to the field of philosophy of technology (Dreyfus 1972; Borgmann 1984; Suchman 2007).
Verbeek’s co-shaping account of technological mediation has become a central insight of the postphenomenological perspective, and its further development and analysis is a cutting edge of postphenomenological theory. But I will not rely too heavily on this vocabulary here. This is because the slight shift in emphasis maintained by Verbeek’s view may be dragging postphenomenology into deep and fraught questions regarding the tension between subjectivist and postsubjectivist perspectives. On the one hand, of course both classical phenomenology and postphenomenology claim to avoid such issues, eschewing modernist assumptions about subjects and objects. But on the other hand, so does much work in the Continental tradition. And the question of how best to navigate tension between the very different attempts at postsubjectivity continues to dog many discussions. [A first-level instance can be found in the debate between Susan Bordo and Judith Butler (Bordo 1999; Butler 1993)]. Within the phenomenological tradition in particular, it is commonplace to understand there to be a disjunction between Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodied experience and Michel Foucault’s account of the political construction of the subject. Thus there seems to be a tension building within postphenomenology between those accounts that rely more heavily on Merleau-Ponty’s insights into embodied experience (e.g., Ihde 1990; Rosenberger 2012), and those like Verbeek’s that more centrally incorporate insights into the shaping of subjectivity from Foucault (e.g., Verbeek 2011; Dorrestijn and Verbeek 2013). Postphenomenology, in my view, is due for a reckoning on these terms. But that is beyond the scope of this paper.
On the search for an ultimate grounding of knowledge, Husserl famously writes, “we start out from that which antedates all standpoints: from the totality of the self-given which is prior to any theorizing reflexion, from all that one can and immediately see and lay hold of, provided one does not allow oneself to be blinded by prejudice, and so led to ignore whole classes of genuine data. If by ‘Postivism’ we are to mean the absolute unbiased grounding of all science on what is ‘positive,’ i.e. on what can be primordially apprehended, then it is we who are the genuine positivists” (1931/2012, 38).
One of the criticisms in Cerbone’s highly dismissive review of several of Ihde’s recent books is on exactly the coherence of the idea that the notion of multistability similarly applies to both visual illusions and to technology usage (Cerbone 2009).
I intend the replies in this paper to Scharff and Thomson’s critiques of postphenomenology to be made in a constructive—and not in any way dismissive—spirit. Scharff’s decade-long line of criticism of postphenomenological work is careful, productive, insightful, and in my opinion stands as one of the most important and technical contributions to this school of thought on offer. His critique of the assumptions behind the greater “empirical turn” in the philosophy of technology should challenge not only postphenomenologists, but all perspectives that fit under this trend. And, as a part of this line of thinking, his takedown of the entry on the “philosophy of technology” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Technology should become an instant classic (Scharff 2015). My intention in this paper is not to respond to all aspects of the critique he has put forth, but to begin the constructive process of addressing his concerns through the articulation of “the problem of grounding” in this section, and the development of prescriptions for postphenomenology at the end.
As an aside, we can note that I have made comments on Verbeek’s analysis of Borgmann (Verbeek’s critique is reviewed in the next section) that are in tune with Scharff’s concerns here (Rosenberger 2008).
In a particularly stinging critique, Scharff reviews Ihde’s distinctions between microperception and macroperception, and between what he has called Body 1 and Body 2. With these ideas Ihde functionally separates his analyses of bodily relations with technology (microperception/Body 1) from the larger cultural aspects of those relations (macroperception/Body 2), while always maintaining the two are actually inseparable. On this Scharff writes, “I want to ask, ‘from what sort of perspective does he make the distinction between perceptual ‘embodiment’ and cultural ‘context,’ put their discussions in separate chapters, and often discuss one without reference to the other?’ (2006, 137). I do think this is a strong criticism since such separations could unfortunately contribute to further relegating issues of gender, culture, class, and race to a separate conversation from those conventionally taken to be of central philosophical standing. One potential response Ihde might give is to point to the practical case studies that make significant use of these ideas, such as Cathrine Hasse and Anette Forss’s empirical work (e.g., Hasse 2008, 2015; Forss 2012).
In addition to postphenomenology, Scharff calls out Andrew Feenberg’s critical theory and Larry Hickman’s pragmatism specifically, and the accounts of the “empirical turn” more generally, i.e., that interpretation of the field of philosophy of technology developed by Hans Achterhuis and others that sees an increase in focus on concrete issues and a decrease on generalized and foundational accounts, most notably in the work of Borgmann, Haraway, Feenberg, Dreyfus, Winner, and Ihde (Feenberg 1999; Hickman 2007; Achterhuis 2001).
In a sister paper to this one, I develop the method of “variational cross-examination” in which a postphenomenological investigation, after first brainstorming stabilities through variational analysis, should then critically contrast those stabilities with one another (Rosenberger 2014). This method of variational cross-examination thus rings in tune with Prescription 1. In that paper I flesh this out through an example of the positive use of multistability, exploring the case of subway and park benches, which in addition to the dominant bench stability, are also used by the homeless as makeshift beds.
In a related discussion, Ihde explores the example of rotated cubes (1986, 103).
To continue our reply to Thomson’s suggestion that “technology” is a category that must be defined ahead of time if we are to do a phenomenology of technology, we can appeal to the Haraway quote here. The category of “technology” could be added to Haraway’s list of local abstractions that should never be mistaken for preexisting essences, nor ever mistaken for providing a preexisting foundation. Verbeek’s postphenomenological conviction that subjects and the world are things that are co-shaped though technological mediation is resonant with Haraway’s insights on this point.
For example, reflecting on a Heidegger-style passage in Hubert Dreyfus’s work, Scharff writes, “I think Dreyfus wants it to be heard with a Heideggerian ear, as describing how technoscience for the most part already tends to ‘occur,’ to ‘give’ reality to us—that is, to essentialize” (2010, 111).
Diane Michelfelder makes exactly this argument in an interestingly counterintuitive way, claiming that while social media websites fit Borgmann’s device paradigm, massive multiplayer internet games challenge the paradigm and can offer meaningful experiences that challenge the device paradigm (2012).
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Rosenberger, R. Notes on a Nonfoundational Phenomenology of Technology. Found Sci 22, 471–494 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-015-9480-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-015-9480-5