Abstract
This article builds on the hypothesis that theoretical approaches to philosophy of technology are currently stuck in a false alternative: either embrace the “empirical turn” or jump back into the determinism, pessimism, and general ignorance towards specific technologies that characterized the “humanities philosophy of technology.” A third path is however possible, which consists of articulating an empirical point of view with an interest in the symbolic dimension in which technologies and technological mediations are always already embedded. Bourdieu’s sociology of the symbolic forms represents an important and mostly unexplored resource in this respect. In this article, we introduce the notion of technological capital and its tree states—objectified, institutionalized, and embodied. In the first section, we briefly account of the empirical turn in philosophy of technology. Specific attention is then devoted to postphenomenology. We depict three perspectives in postphenomenology: (1) standard postphenomenology, in which one single human-technology-world relation at a time is considered; (2) the attempt of some technological mediation theorists to articulate postphenomenology and actor-network theory (ANT); (3) the original effort in Ihde, which is currently practiced by a minority of postphenomenologists, to combine an interest for the empirical dimension of technological mediations with an attention to the social and cultural conditions of possibility in which these mediations are embedded. In the second section, we consider some recent critiques of the limits of the empirical turn in philosophy of technology, especially related to postphenomenology. Furthermore, we argue that Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology may benefit the philosophy of technology. One might say that according to a Bourdieusian perspective, technologies are, in their invention, implementation, and use, embedded in symbolically organized interactions among social actors or groups. The notion of technological capital is introduced. A specific attention is given to its embodied state, which is related to the habitus. Such concept suggests that, to rephrase the famous sentence by Heidegger, “the essence of technology is not totally technological.” In the conclusion, we consider three risks related to a Bourdieusian approach to technology: (1) transparency, (2) determinism, and (3) absolutism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For Smith, other two problems with postempirical turn philosophies of technology are that (1) the empirical turn tends towards problematic common-sense presuppositions on what constitutes a “Technology,” to the detriment of the potential for a focus on “exceptional technologies,” and (2) the empirical turn has set a problematic precedent where a key picture of method in philosophy of technology is one of “turning.” We discuss these aspects in the conclusion as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland. Accessed on September 21, 2019.
In this context, we are using “postphenomenology” and “mediation theory” as synonyms. Mediation theory presents itself as an evolution of postphenomenology. While the latter is mainly concerned with perception, the former also focuses on signification and, in particular, on the ethical implications of technological mediations. There is no room in this context for fully deploying such a criticism, but we contend that mediation theory does not represent any substantial step forward compared to postphenomenology. Firstly, because in the seminal work of Ihde, there is already much concern for signification, and secondly, and more importantly, because the kind of ethics developed within mediation theory is, so to say, as flat as the postphenomenological perspective. For instance, in the ethics by design developed in Verbeek (2011), both ethical problems and solutions are entirely materialized in technologies. A Bourdieusian perspective such as the one sketched out in this paper instead paves the way for a series of political initiatives concerning the normative and symbolic conditions of possibility of technologies.
Robert Rosenberger (2014, p. 377, no. 7) has opportunely noticed that strictly speaking SCOT’s “interpretative flexibility” and postphenomenological multistability do not refer to the same phenomenon. The former deals with history of the social conflict leading to the establishment of a specific design, while the latter focuses on the potential for any technology to fit into different contexts.
The example, borrowed from Ihde, is that of the confrontation between Western navigation and South Sea islanders’ navigational techniques. It can be argued that despite the differences in culture and technology, these two activities accomplish the same objective, namely navigation.
For a similar approach, see the work of the anthropologist Cathrine Hasse—for instance (Hasse 2015).
Critical theory would say that the empirical turn in philosophy of technology is indeed ideological. According to Habermas (2005, pp. 73–74), “[i]t is a single achievement of this ideology to detach society’s self-understanding from the frame of reference of communicative action and from the concept of symbolic interaction and replace it with a scientific model.” The German philosopher is referring to technocracy, so it might be argued that philosophy of technology after the empirical turn is the ultimate result of the penetration of technocracy into philosophy. The limits of Habermas’ approach to technology lie not only in his “essentialist picture of technology” but also in the “abstract universalism” in what concerns both technology and communicative action. In the words of Bourdieu (2000, p. 65), “the representation of political life that Habermas proposes […] obscures and represses the question of the economic and social conditions that would have to be fulfilled in order to allow the public deliberation capable of leading to a rational consensus. […] How indeed can be ignored […] that the force of arguments counts for little against the arguments of force […], and that domination is never absent from social relations of communication?” The same holds true for technology, which, for Habermas, will always be a non-socially determined relation to nature—on the point, see the partial rehabilitation of Marcuse over Habermas proposed in Feenberg (1996).
Without entering the details of the discussion, a movement similar to the one proposed here can be observed in the shift in Wittgenstein’s philosophy from the concept of “language game” to the notion of “Weltbild.” While in the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, the word finds its meaning in the sentence, and while in the Philosophical Investigations, the sentence has its meaning in the context of a language game; in On Certainty, language games derive their meaning from a specific culture or form of life.
It is important to stress that Bourdieu is using here an economic terminology (“economic,” “market,” “producer,” “consumer,” “profit,” and of course “capital”) metaphorically.
The emergence of new macro-fields and capitals has been observed. For instance, Fourcade and Healy (2016, p. 8) have introduced the concept of “übercapital,” i.e., “a form of capital arising from one’s position and trajectory according to various scoring, grading, and ranking methods”—many of them of course related to the ubiquitous presence of connected digital devices. Floridi (2018, p. 483) has discussed the notion of “semantic capital,” defined as “any content that can enhance someone’s power to give meaning to and make sense of (semanticise) something.” However, Floridi’s semantic capital has not much to do with the Bourdieusian capital, viz. with capital as such, insofar as capital implies a problem of scarcity and unequal distribution of the resources that Floridi’s semantic capital has not. In order to develop an authentic theory of the semantic capital, it should be studied how the capability of giving meaning to facts or data is not equally distributed among the symbolically dominant and the dominated. Moreover, there is a theoretical mistake in Floridi’s understanding of Bourdieu’s notion of capital, when he says that “it presupposes economic capital as a foundational concept” (Floridi 2018, p. 483). Indeed, in Bourdieu’s perspective, the least common denominator among the different forms of capital is not “$$$,” but, as it will be argued in this paper as well, symbolic exchanges. Bourdieu (1998a, p. 93) makes this point clear, writing that “[w]hat certain adepts of fast-reading (including many professors, unfortunately) saw as an expression of economism [he is referring to his “principle of symbolic goods”], marked, to the contrary, a desire to wrest from economism (Marxist or neomarginalist) precapitalist economies and entire sectors of so-called capitalist economies […].”
This might sound in contradiction with the very definition of symbolic capital as “any property (any form of capital whether physical, economic, cultural or social) when it is perceived by social agents endowed with categories of perception which cause them to know it and recognize it, to give it value” (Bourdieu 1998a, p. 47. Italics are ours). Technologies capital is indeed mostly unrecognized, because technologies are still taken into a sort of illusion of transparency and neutrality. But this is the case of other forms of capital as well, such as the informational capital Bourdieu (1998a, p. 45) talks about, and which is concentrated for him into the State. Incidentally, it would be interesting to account for the struggle for both technological and informational capital undergoing today between public institutions and big private tech companies such as Google, Facebook, and Apple.
https://vimeo.com/92709274. Accessed on April 9, 2019.
Conversely, one could argue that this paper, along with other researches that make the effort of giving a positive definition of the transcendental of technologies, counterbalances the risk of relativism or emptiness of the meta-transcendental approach proposed by Smith.
References
Achterhuis, H. (Ed.). (2001). American philosophy of technology: the empirical turn. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Blond, L., & Schiølin, K. (2018). Lost in translation?: getting the grips with multistable technology in an apparently sable world. In J. Aagaard, J. K. B. O. Friis, J. Sorenson, O. Tafdrup, & C. Hasse (Eds.), Postphenomenological methodologies: new ways in mediating techno-human relationships (pp. 151–168). Lanham: Lexington Books.
Bourdieu, P. (2000). Pascalian meditations. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1998a). Practical reason. On the theory of action. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1998b). The masculine domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of cultural production. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J. E. Richardson (Ed.), Handbook of theory of research for the sociology of education (pp. 241–258). Westport: Greenword.
Bourdieu, P. (1979). Les trois états du capital culturel. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 30, 3–6.
Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1970). Zur Soziologie der symbolischen Formen. Surkhamp: Frankfurt a.M.
Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. J. D. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. Cambridge: Polity.
Brey, P. (2010). Philosophy of technology after the empirical turn. Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 14(1), 36–48.
Coeckelbergh, M. (2017). Using words and things: language and philosophy of technology. London and New York: Routledge.
Feenberg, A. (1996). Marcuse or Habermas: two critiques of technology. Inquiry. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 39(1), 45–70.
Floridi, L. (2018). Semantic capital: its nature, value, and Curation. Philosophy & Technology, 31(4), 481–497.
Fourcade, M., & Healy, K. (2016). Seeing like a market. Socio-Economic Review, 15(1), 9–29.
Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Habermas, J. (2005). Technology and science as “ideology”. In N. Stehr & R. Grundmann (Eds.), Knowledge. Critical concepts (pp. 56–87). London and New York: Routledge.
Hasse, C. (2015). Multistable roboethics. In J. K. B. O. Friis & R. P. Crease (Eds.), Technoscience and postphenomenology: the Manhattan papers (pp. 169–188). Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Hess, D. J. (2011). Bourdieu and science studies: toward a reflexive sociology. Minerva. A Review of Science, Learning and Policy, 49(3), 333–348.
Ignatow, G., & Robinson, L. (2017). Pierre Bourdieu: theorizing the digital. Information, Communication & Society, 20(7), 950–966.
Ihde, D. (2012 [1977]). Experimental phenomenology: multistabilities. New York: SUNY.
Ihde, D. (1990). Technology and the lifeworld: from garden to earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Jasanoff, S. (2015). Future imperfect: science, technology, and the imaginations of modernity. In S. Jasanoff & S.-H. Kim (Eds.), Dreamscapes of modernity: sociotechnical imaginaries and the fabrication of power (pp. 1–33). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Kroes, P., & Meijers, A. (Eds.). (2001). The empirical turn in the philosophy of technology. Bingley: Emerald.
Latour, B. (2013). An inquiry into the modes of existence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Latour, B. (1994). On technological mediation. Common Knowledge, 3(2), 29–64.
Liberati, N. (2016). Augmented reality and ubiquitous computing: the hidden potentialities of augmented reality. AI & Society, 31(1), 17–28.
Mauss, M., & Durkheim, E. (1963). Primitive classification. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Mitcham, C. (1994). Thinking through technology: the path between engineering and philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: philosophy and ecology after the end of the world. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Pinch, T., & Bijker, W. E. (2012 [1982]). The social construction of facts and artifacts: or how the sociology of science and the sociology of technology might benefit each other. In W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, & T. Pinch (Eds.), The social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology (pp. 11–44). Cambridge: MIT.
Rodighiero, D., & Romele, A. (2020). The hermeneutic circle of data visualization: the case study of the affinity map. Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 24(2).
Romele, A. (2019). Digital hermeneutics: philosophical investigations in new media and technologies. New York and London: Routledge.
Rosenberger, R. (2017). Callous objects: designs against the homeless. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, Manifold https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/callous-objects.
Rosenberger, R. (2014). Multistability and the agency of Mundane artifacts: from speed bumps to subway benches. Human Studies, 37, 369–392.
Rosenberger, R., & Verbeek, P.-P. (2015). A field guide to postphenomenology. In R. Rosenberger & P.-P. Verbeek (Eds.), Postphenomenological investigations: Eesays on human-technology relations (pp. 9–42). Lanham: Lexington Books.
Schmauss, W. (2007). Rethinking Durkheim and his tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, A. (2003). Do you believe in ethics? Latour and Ihde in the trenches of the science war. In D. Ihde & E. Selinger (Eds.), Chasing technoscience (pp. 182–194). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Smith, D. (2018). Exceptional technologies: a continental philosophy of technology. London: Blommsbury Kindle edition.
Sterne, J. (2003). Bourdieu, technique and technology. Cultural Studies, 17(3/4), 367–389.
Verbeek, P.-P. (2011). Moralizing technology: understanding and designing the morality of things. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Verbeek, P.-P. (2005). What things do: philosophical reflections on technology, agency, and design. University Park: Penn State University Press.
Wiltse, H. (2014). Unpacking digital material mediations. Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, 18(3), 154–182.
Zwier, J., Blok, V., & Lemmens, P. (2016). Phenomenology and the empirical turn: a phenomenological analysis of postphenomenology. Philosophy & Technology, 29(4), 313–333.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
The concern to return to the ‘things themselves’ and to get a firmer grip on reality, a concern that often inspires the projects of postphenomenology, can lead one purely and simply to miss a ‘reality’ that does not yield to immediate intuition because it lies in structures transcending the technological mediations which they form.
(Bourdieu 1991, p. 68. Two words modified)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Romele, A. Technological Capital: Bourdieu, Postphenomenology, and the Philosophy of Technology Beyond the Empirical Turn. Philos. Technol. 34, 483–505 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00398-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-020-00398-4