HEIDEGGER WINS! (again)
Podcast:
In this week's podcast, I explore some of the overlap of Blythe, Longo, and Bay and Rickert. Specifically, I examine the way the first two take an agency-based, hegemonic approach, whereas the third text offers up a fresh, more sustainable method for incorporating technology in contemporary rhetorical theory.
HEIDEGGER WINS! (again) by Joshua H. Barnes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Music: "Elektra" by Lover303 (Album: Modern Fairytales)
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Comments
Hi Josh, I very much enjoyed
Hi Josh,
I very much enjoyed your post and am interesting in seeing how my own research in this area plays into your configuration.
My question centers on what we do with the brute-ness of the body appearing in a technologically saturated environment? We see, from Husserl's phenomenology at least, that the human body is distinctive, that it calls itself out to be perceived differently and apart from things that are not themselves transcendental egos. Yet, Bay and Rickert, arguing against a humanist perspective, criticize the "human body still [retaining] a primary and privileged role" (213).
How might one go about theorizing human/technology relations when the very body through/with which we argue, calls for itself to be viewed as separate? I suggest (as I've held onto this entire class) that the idea of the mundane, in fact, helps out here (regardless of Bay/Rickert's mentioning that the mundanization of technology implies a privileged human agency). As I argued in last week's podcast, viewing the body as a mundane technology itself, dwelling in ambient relation-hood with both its environs and other ambient bodies, allows for us to cultivate a less dominant/voluntarist view of technology and more so a view of technology as (ambient)bodily-ingrained. Such a view positions the human body, technology and the surround environment as an assemblage or a horizon.
But I'm left with questions: how might we move toward such a (re)conception? And without playing into a historiography of technology that privileges invention/innovation (what Edgerton calls "futurological history" (singular))? Where do we(and technology) go from here?
Great job. Production quality was of the highest. Thanks!
What's more persuasive than a dinosaur?
I think you're absolutely
I think you're absolutely right when you say that technology is something that we cannot overcome; we cannot become, as Descartes would say, the "masters and possessors of nature," nature here being understood as that sort of standing reserve from which the materials for our tools are drawn, and something also not unlike Kelley's conception of the technium. I think this is principally because, as Heidegger points out, our being (dasein) is essentially, radically, inextricably "being-IN-the-world," we cannot exist outside of it, and since the world is that from which all of our tools are made/drawn as well as being the sphere of their influence, every interaction with that world, even in its rawest state, is inherently technological. This is what Bay and Rickert are pointing to when the cite Heidegger in their article, saying: "everywhere, we remain unfree and chained to technology" (216).
When you say that we also cannot adapt to technology, is this because, in Heideggerian terms, we are already, on an intuitive...sort of...pre-conscious level, already naturally adapted to technology in the natural act of performing work?
On Adaptability...
Jonathan,
Thanks for the constructive criticism/questions. I like how your question ties in with the Kyle's above. I think I've read somewhere (it may have been in this week's readings or elsewhere), that technology --be it a computer, a pen, a cell phone, etc --is an extension of the body. In a way, then, I see adapting to technology as arbitrary because a) technology has already adapted to us, and b) on a deeply theoretical level technology is an extension of the human being. Furthermore, yes, my argument is that trying to adapt to technology doesn't quite get at what Bay and Rickert discuss via Heidegger: dwelling. Rather than "adapting to" technology, we ought to think of technology in existential terms. How can we be with technology? This move is one I think is unique to their piece, where adaptability seems to be a basic tenet of some of our other readings this week. Good question!
-Josh-
Great, Jon. Also, Cf. Kevin
Great, Jon. Also, Cf. Kevin Kelly's "technium." Right? I mean, taken in terms of a principle, its one that says we've ALWAYS been being-IN-the world. For there is no out (or in any case, in) there. These internal/external distinctions are made irrelevant.
Awesome stuff.
What's more persuasive than a dinosaur?