https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0567-4587
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ABSTRACT
Technology has been at the centre of existentialist (e.g. Heidegger) and sociological (e.g. Marcuse) critique for a long time. The latest versions of criticism rely on the results of “science and technology studies”: they argue that essentialist conceptualisations of technology should be replaced while aiming at “democratizing technology” (e.g. Feenberg). However, even these approaches are characterised by a shortcoming when it comes to providing a normative basis: as contemporary technology intermeshes with the elementary levels of existence (such as perception or cognition), it remains in the blind spot of those users, who could “democratize” it through their critique. Accordingly, the formal normative bases (e.g. the one provided by Feenberg, who relies on Habermas’ democracy principle), need to be complemented with substantive claims. For this purpose, a phenomenological-existentialist framework is elaborated with the help of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. It is argued that due to the ongoing expansion of social systems relying on various forms of technology (Luhmann), the “mediated flesh” becomes rigid. By losing the plasticity of the chiasm, subjects are exposed to existential crises unmanageable by mere technology (e.g. mental disorders). Such experience of technologically induced social suffering could serve as a normative basis for criticising the over-expansion of technology.
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Notes
1 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology.
2 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man.
3 Delanty and Harris, “Critical Theory and the Question of Technology.”
4 Feenberg, Technosystem: The Social Life of Reason.
5 Feenberg, Questioning Technology, 147.
6 Not even the final phenomenological basis of critique, the experience of “social suffering” (see Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 17-18), can orient them, as its causes and solutions are equally inseparable from technological mediation.
7 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible.
8 Levinas, Totality and Infinity.
9 Luhmann, Introduction to Systems Theory.
10 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology.
11 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness.
12 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action.
13 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, 134.
14 Ibid., 264.
15 Ibid., 149.
16 Mazzocchi, “Fleshing Out the Political.”
17 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 114.
18 Ibid., 158.
19 While responsibility constitutes its important aspect, inter-affectivity cannot be reduced to an absolute ethical sentiment characterising private relationships. As the example of organisations shows, chiasmatic action coordination characterises public interactions in various ways (see Küpers, “Embodied Inter-Affection”).
20 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 197.
21 Ibid., 123.
22 Ibid., 212.
23 Ibid., 57.
24 Derrida, Aporias, 76.
25 Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 292.
26 Such crisis can manifest as various illness (see Svenaeus, “The phenomenology of chronic pain”) or mental disorders (Aho, Contexts of Suffering).
27 Schütz and Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World.
28 Luhmann, Introduction to Systems Theory, 47.
29 Ibid., 120.
30 Ibid., 83.
31 Ibid., 94.
32 Ibid., 161.
33 Ibid., 216.
34 Ibid., 198.
35 Ibid., 164.
36 Ibid., 230.
37 Luhmann, Social Systems.
38 Luhmann, “Technology, Environment and Social Risk.”
39 Beck, Risk society.
40 Luhmann, “Technology, Environment and Social Risk.”
41 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology.
42 Schalow, Toward a Phenomenology of Addiction.
43 Lovitt, Introduction.
44 In some cases, such releasement requires specific strategies: for example, as mediated art becomes banal, a return to improvisation has the potential of enabling a non-mediated artistic experience (see McAuliffe, “The Significance of Improvisation in the Age of Technology”).
45 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness.
46 Fuchs, History and Class Consciousness 2.0.
47 Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man.
48 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action.
49 Feenberg, Questioning Technology.
50 Latour, Reassembling the Social.
51 That is why other analyses refer to the emergence of “techno-flesh”, that is a contemporary intertwining of existence and technology. While this tendency is inseparable from the broader transformations of modernisation, it has intensified by extraordinary events deconstructing the subject-nature boundaries, such as the Covid-pandemic (see de Boer and Verbeek, “Living in the Flesh”); or by those infrastructures which aim at technologically transforming the most intimate relation to the self (Bergen and Verbeek, “To-Do Is to Be”).
52 The various phenomenological analyses of mental disorders indicate the consequences of such existential rigidity: the depression emerging from “frozen” intertemporality and “irresponsive” interaffectivity (Fuchs, “Depression, Intercorporeality and Interaffectivity”) or the addiction emerging from the “obsessive” technical control of enjoyment (Schalow, Toward a Phenomenology of Addiction) are just two of the most relevant examples.
53 Just a few examples: technology cannot be tamed limitlessly due to its inherent rigidity; actors ready to give up part of their autonomy for comfort are hard to be motivated to self-limit the usage of technology (see Borgman, “Feenberg and the Reform of Technology”); the transformation of technology requires the transformation of the whole political systems, which is an overwhelming task (Woodhouse, “Technological Malleability”).
54 Feenberg, Questioning Technology, 95.
55 Doppelt, “Democracy and Technology”.