I’d not ever heard of Michael Heim until I stumbled upon his 1987 book, Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing, at a used book store a few days ago; but, after reading the Introduction, I’m already impressed by the concerns and methodology that inform his analysis.

Yesterday, I passed along his defense of philosophizing about a technology at the time of its appearance. It is at this juncture, he explains, before the technology has been rendered an ordinary feature of our everyday experience, that it is uniquely available to our thinking. And it is with our ability to think about technology that Heim is chiefly concerned in his Introduction. Without too much additional comment on my part, I want to pass along a handful of excerpts that I found especially valuable.

Here is Heim’s discussion of reclaiming phenomena for philosophy. By this I take it that he means learning to think about cultural phenomena, in this case technology, without leaning on the conventional framings of the problem. It is a matter of learning to see the phenomena for what it is by first unseeing the a variety of habitual perspectives.

“By taking over pregiven problems, an illusion is created that cultural phenomena are understood philosophically, while in fact certain narrow conventional assumptions are made about what the problem is and what alternate solutions to it might be. Philosophy is then confused with policy, and the illumination of phenomena is exchanged for argumentation and debate [….] Reclaiming the phenomena for philosophy today means not assuming that a phenomenon has been perceived philosophically unless it has first been transformed thoroughly by reflection; we cannot presume to perceive a phenomenon philosophically if it is merely taken up ready-made as the subject of public debate. We must first transform it thoroughly by a reflection that is remote from partisan political debate and from the controlled rhetoric of electronic media. Nor can we assume we have grasped a phenomenon by merely locating its relationship to our everyday scientific mastery of the world. The impact of cultural phenomena must be taken up and reshaped by speculative theory.”

At one point, Heim offered some rather prescient anticipations of the future of writing and computer technology:

“Writing will increasingly be freed from the constraints of paper-print technology; texts will be stored electronically, and vast amounts of information, including further texts, will be accessible immediately below the electronic surface of a piece of writing. The electronically expanding text will no longer be constrained by paper as the telephone and the microcomputer become more intimately conjoined and even begin to merge. The optical character reader will scan and digitize hard-copy printed texts; the entire tradition of books will be converted into information on disk files that can be accessed instantly by computers. By connecting a small computer to a phone, a professional will be able to read ‘books’ whose footnotes can be expanded into further ‘books’ which in turn open out onto a vast sea of data bases systemizing all of human cognition. The networking of written language will erode the line between private and public writings.”

And a little later on, Heim discusses the manner in which we ordinarily (fail to) apprehend the technologies we rely on to make our way in the world:

“We denizens of the late twentieth century are seldom aware of our being embedded in systematic mechanisms of survival. The instruments providing us with technological power seldom appear directly as we carry out the personal tasks of daily life. Quotidian survival brings us not so much to fear autonomous technological systems as to feel a need to acquire and use them. During most of our lives our tools are not problematic–save that we might at a particular point feel need for or lack of a particular technical solution to solve a specific human problem. Having become part of our daily needs, technological systems seem transparent, opening up a world where we can do more, see more, and achieve more.

Yet on occasion we do transcend this immersion in the technical systems of daily life. When a technological system threatens our physical life or threatens the conditions of planetary life, we then turn to regard the potential agents of harm or hazard. We begin to sense that the mechanisms which previously provided, innocently as it were, the conditions of survival are in fact quasi-autonomous mechanisms possessing their own agency, an agency that can drift from its provenance in human meanings and intentions.”

In these last two excerpts, Heim describes two polarities that tend to frame our thinking about technology.

“In a position above the present, we glimpse hopefully into the future and glance longingly at the past. We see how the world has been transformed by our creative inventions, sensing–more suspecting than certain–that it is we who are changed by the things we make. The ambivalence is resolved when we revert to one or another of two simplistic attitudes: enthusiastic depiction of technological progress or wholesale distress about the effects of a mythical technology.”

And,

“Our relationship to technological innovations tends to be so close that we either identify totally with the new extensions of ourselves–and then remain without the concepts and terms for noticing what we risk in our adaption to a technology–or we react so suspiciously toward the technology that we are later engulfed by the changes without having developed critical countermeasures by which to compensate for the subsequent losses in the life of the psyche.”

Heim practices what he preaches. His book is divided into three major sections: Approaching the Phenomenon, Describing the Phenomenon, and Evaluating the Phenomenon. The three chapters of the first section are “designed to gain some distance,” to shake loose the ready-made assumptions so as to clearly perceive the technological phenomenon in question. And this he does by framing word processing within longstanding trajectories of historical and philosophical of inquiry. Only then can the work of description and analysis begin. Finally, this analysis grounds our evaluations. That, it seems, to me is a useful model for our thinking about technology.

(P.S. Frankenstein blogging should resume tomorrow.)