Miscellaneous

Technoscientific Angst

Quote ~ ~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 5 Comments

“The anguish of artists and poets is celebrated by societies that expect justice and happiness in the future regardless of their current conditions. Anguish is accepted and endorsed not so much as a judgment about the present but as a means to envision and usher in a different future. Oddly enough, those who are members of the technoscientific community are discouraged from playing the same social role as do artists and poets; their anguish is neither acknowledged nor displayed. On the rare occasions when they express professional anxiety, personal anguish, or cultural angst, they are invited to leave the technoscientific community. I find this situation unfortunate, disturbing, and socially harmful. It is reasonable to believe that if members of the technoscientific community were encouraged to display their concerns publicly and thereby enhance the critical involvement of society as a whole (as did, for example, Joseph Rotblat, the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize laureate), we might be spared in the future the horrors of the past, like those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima.”

From the Preface of Raphael Sassower’s Technoscientific Angst: Ethics And Responsibility (1997). Compare Don Ihde’s remarks discussed here.

Self-Defeating Technological Projects

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 3 Comments

In Technoculture and Critical Theory, Simon Cooper seeks a third way to understand technology that avoids the pitfalls of technological determinism on the one hand and instrumental accounts of technology on the other. According to Cooper, an instrumental approach to technology which treats technologies as neutral tools enabling human beings to do better (or worse) what they already do in any case fails to ask whether “the meanings of these human capacities are reconstituted through the operation of a technological framework.” Cooper thinks that is the crucial question.

“Understanding technology’s capacity to reconstitute human meanings and activities within different constitutive frameworks,” Cooper believes, “provides the condition for determining whether we might say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology.”

Cooper goes on to argue that “technology enables a more constitutively abstract mode of engagement with the world.” The levels of abstraction, which may be either intellectual or material, effect both “modes of social integration” and “ontological categories of existence.” The ontological categories of existence include space and time as well as subjectivity and embodiment. Following Paul James, Cooper suggests three levels of social integration: the face-to-face, the agency-extended, and the disembodied (Cooper is quick to point out that these do not exist in pure form).

These concepts are crucial to Cooper’s argument. In his view, desires and meanings that are constituted at the face-to-face level of social integration, are re-constituted when their fulfillment is pursued through technologies that shift the interactions to the higher levels of abstraction. This leads Cooper to ask,

“If technology allows for a more abstract mode of engagement with the world, if it reconstitutes social and cultural settings, in effect creating a new constitutive framework through which to operate, then how ought we to negotiate the relationship between this emergent level and prior levels of engagement and association?”

Ultimately, Cooper wants to recognize “the benefits of technological reconstitution while setting limits to the extent of its operations.” He offers two reasons why such limits are worth pursuing. “The first,” Cooper explains, “concerns the degree to which the abstract reconstitution of social and cultural meanings is easily harnessed to the commodity relation.”

The second revolves around what Cooper calls ontological contradiction, “the process whereby desires and practices contained within one constitutive layer contradict those carried within another.” Cooper explains further: “Insofar as human needs and desires are carried within specific historical and cultural frameworks, it is necessary to consider whether technology is able to consummate these needs, or whether the reconstituting process it enables works to undermine the ground which historically sustained them.” In other words, it’s worth considering if the pursuit of certain ends through certain technological means does not ultimately undermine the end being pursued.

Cooper goes on to give a handful of examples of such self-defeating operations from the theorists he has chosen as his conversation partners:

“Heidegger’s technologised subject, whose power to objectify the world through a process of abstraction only comes at the coast of objectifying the self, is a classical formulation. Paul Virilio’s claim that technological ‘speed’ ultimately leads to inertia has a similar tenor, in that both theorists describe a situation in which technological mediation extends previous capacities only to undermine the ground on which such extension would have any meaning. The Futurists desire for a more powerful and regenerated nation-state was attempted within a theory that worshipped technology for its transgressive and universalising character. Yet the nation-state was invoked at the very same time that emerging technologies allowed for the easy transcendence of any physical and cultural boundary and hence threatened to undermine the meaning of the nation.”

The Intellectual Virtues

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 12 Comments

I commend to you Alan Jacobs’ recent musings on thinking, or more precisely on “having ideas worth expressing.” Jacobs encourages us to seek out intellectual encounters with the best and most serious proponents of traditions of thought other than our own. Such encounters will have several salubrious, although potentially uncomfortable consequences. For instance:

“If you seek out what’s strange to you in its better expressions, several things will happen. First of all, you’ll court being changed by the encounter, having your views altered, perhaps in significant ways. You’ll learn that the people who disagree with you are almost certainly, taken as a whole, morally and intellectually the equal of the people you agree with.”

That last lesson is crucial. The failure of public discourse is ultimately a moral failure. It is not, so far as I can tell, primarily a failure of reason, intellect, or logic (although, certainly, such failures also abound). It is a failure of humility, patience, and imagination. A failure, in other words, to recognize our own ignorance, to persevere in the pursuit of understanding one another, and to imagine a different way of looking at the world.

Jacobs closed his post with a lovely line from the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch:  “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”

I’ll add to that this complimentary passage from Murdoch’s, The Sovereignty of the Good, which I stumbled upon some time ago:

“I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me…. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal. The honesty and humility required of the student — not to pretend to know what one does not know — is the preparation for the honesty and humility of the scholar who does not even feel tempted to suppress the fact which damns his theory.”

Murdoch is here reflecting on the task of learning a foreign language, but what she has to teach us in this passage applies just as well to learning from others more generally. Central to the passage is that same notion of love as that which leads us out of ourselves. Notice as well what is required of the student: honesty and humility. The life of the mind, especially when it concerns itself with our common experience — which is to say with our life together, with our political life — depends on virtue for its success.

But it is, as Jacobs points out, a risky business to humbly and honestly seek out such encounters with those who do not agree with us. We risk a discomforting and disorienting loss of certainty. We risk a challenge to beliefs and convictions that we’ve long held dear. And so it is not just a matter of humility and honesty, but also of courage.

Of course, there is an even greater risk involved. James Schall put it this way:

“Chesterton once said, in a memorable phrase of which I am inordinately fond, that there is no such thing as an uninteresting subject, only uninterested people. Nothing is so unimportant that it is not worth knowing. Everything reveals something. Our minds cannot fully exhaust the reality contained in even the smallest existing thing. The condition of our being human, then, is the risk of not knowing something worth knowing.”

Recent Readings

~ L. M. Sacasas ~ 4 Comments

This past Friday I took the first of my comprehensive exams. I think it went well, well enough anyway. If my committee agrees, I’ll have two more to go, which I’ll be taking within the next three months or so.

The first exam was over selections from my program’s core list of readings. The list features a number of authors that I’ve mentioned before including Walter Ong, Lev Manovich, Jerome McGann, N. Katherine Hayles, and Gregory Ulmer. There were also a number of “classic” theorists as well: Benjamin, Barthes, Foucault, Baudrillard.

Additionally, there were a few titles that were new to me or that I had never gotten around to reading. I thought it would be worthwhile to briefly note a few of these.

Daniel Headrick’s When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution tells the story of a number of information systems — for classifying, storing, transforming, and transmitting information — that preceded the advent of what we ordinarily think of as the digital information revolution.

I finally read one of Donald Norman’s books, Living with Complexity. Hands down the easiest read on the list. Engaging and enlightening on design of everyday objects and experiences.

From Papyrus to Hypertext: Toward the Universal Digital Library, a translated work by French scholar Christian Vandendorpe, is laid out as a series of short reflections on the history of texts and reading. It was originally published more than a decade ago, so it is a little dated. Nonetheless, I found it useful.

The most important title that I encountered was Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. It’s a shame that it has taken me so long to finally read something from Latour. I heartily recommend it. I’ll be giving it another read soon and may have something to say about it in the future, but for now I’ll simply note that I found it quite enlightening.

Historian Thomas Misa gives a fine account of the entanglement of technology and Western culture in Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present.

Then there was this 2010 blogpost by Ian Bogost, which was anthologized in Debates in the Digital Humanities: “The Turtlenecked Hairshirt: Fetid and Fragrant Futures for the Humanities.” It is, how shall I put it, bracing.

Finally, this wasn’t part of my readings for the exam, but I did stumble upon a 1971 review of Foucault’s The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences by George Steiner: “The Mandarin of the Hour-Michel Foucault.” The review is not quite so dismissive as the title might suggest.

There you have it, that’s what I have to show for the past couple of month’s reading. As the semester winds down and grades get turned in, who knows but some new blog posts may appear.