In order to examine the nature of existence
within the framework of the multiple subjectivities produced by technology,
Heidegger sought to essentialize the relationship between human subject and
technology by means of an examination, in reductive terms, of that which is
“not technological”. In the question concerning technology, Heidegger provided
a framework for the understanding of technology as a means by which the
production of meaning involves the ordering of reality into resources ordered
and viewed as always-already on stand-by for their exploitation. While
technology does indeed have the capacity for disclosure, ultimately Heidegger
rejects technology as lacking the capacity for achieving the “good life” in
which freedom of choice defines the subject.
Borgmann responded to Heidegger’s negative
critique of technology by means of trying to understand the capacity of
technological processes to redefine the human subject. Fundamentally, he
implicitly rejects Heidegger’s conception of a unified subject, which, will
historically-determined, speaks with one pretechnological voice. To this end,
he defines the subject in relation to that which objectivizes. Objects and
practices can be seen as particular means of focus. “A focal practice is the resolute and regular
dedication to a focal thing. ... [They] are at ease with the natural sciences.”
focal things “are concrete, tangible, and deep, admitting of no functional
equivalents; they have a tradition, structure, and rhythm of their own. They
are unprocurable and finally beyond our control.” (307) focus is itself identified by means of
an etymological investigation into the word as both hearth and "optical or
geometric" instrument. "a focus gathers the relations of its context
and radiates into its surroundings and informs them" (293-4). "to
focus on something or to bring it into focus is to make it central, clear, and
articulate> It is in the context of these historical and living senses of
"focus" that I want to speak of focal things and practices."
(294)
It is here that
Borgmann breaks with Heidegger, for he questions whether art is in fact the
sole means (or focus) by which authentic disclosures can be realised. that humans look to their environment is
entirely natural: "The wildernes is beyond the procurement of technology,
and our response to it takes us past consumption. But it also teaches us to
accept and appropriate technology" (296). Borgmann then looks at two such practices:
competitive running, and the "culture of the table", in order to
elaborate the notion that focal events can be mistakenly construed as
"experiences in the subjective sense, events that have their real meaning
in transporting a person into a certain mental or emotional state".
Technology will then endeavour to more efficiently deliver and replace the
state with itself, unless "we guard focal things in their depth and
integrity". "To elaborate the context of focal events is to grant
them their proper eloquence." (297)
Technology comes to be
realised as a process of subjective alienation due to the fact that by means of the storing of labour through time,
the subject it divided against itself: satisfaction of desire and the realisation
of satisfaction are rendered discontinuous. "I am a divided person; my
achievement lies in the past, my enjoyment in the present." (297) Borgmann
then describes the alienating experience of industrial food, which replaces the
culture of the table. "eating in a focal setting differs sharply from the
social and cultural anonymity of a fast-food outlet." (299). and yet, these small, seemingly mundane
practices attain a degree of Benjaminian aura precisely due to their recontextualization
within the technological apparatus of the modern era. “On the spur of the
moment, we normally act out what has been nurtured in our daily practices as
they have been shaped by the norms of our time.” (300).
While ritual was the
social means by which practices became tradition in ancient societies, for
modern humans engaged in the technological process, what comes to be known as
the device paradigm (in the next section) is defined: devices realize
increasing efficiencies which realize states of satisfied desire. Heidegger’s
critique here stands, for the creation and satisfaction of desires will itself
become an autonomous and self-perpetuating process under the rule of
technology. Borgmann: “If we are to challenge the rule of technology,
we can only do so through the practice of engagement. ... without a
practice an engaging action or event can momentarily light up our life, but it
cannot order and orient it focally. Through a practice we are able to
accomplish what remains unattainable through a series of individual decisions
and acts.” (300)
Borgmann posits that
making “the technological universe hospitable to focal
things turns out to be the heart of the reform of technology …. [for] only things that we experience as greater and
other than ourselves can move us to judge and change technology in the first
place” (302). And so we come to the redemptive potential inherent to technology
in Borgmann’s thought. Fundamentally, what we can describe as the “good life”
requires the application of our capacity for engaging with a self-defined
subjective experience. engagement encompasses “the acquisition of
skills, the fidelity to a daily discipline, the broadening of sensibility, the
profound interaction of human beings, and the preservation and development of
tradition” (304), and in the process “harmonize the variety among people but
also within the life of one person”.
However, focal things can also subsume a
person and take over the definition of the good life, which involves the
mastery of the capacity to master a practice and thus a means of ordering and
understanding. While not in itself either absolute or an absolution, “it is not
finally decisive whether and how we succeed in securing an ordered and
excellent life for worldlessly conceived subjects” (307), there remains the
possibility that “a technological device or, more generally, a technological
invention may someday address us as such a thing, one that, whatever its
genesis, has taken on a character of its own, that challenges and fulfills us,
that centres and illuminates our world?” At this point, Borgmann, surmises,
technology would itself be able to “birth ... a focal thing or event”
“the reform of technology .... must be one of
and not merely one within the device paradigm. ... A reform of the paradigm is
... the recognition and the restraint of the paradigm. To restrain the paradigm
is to restrict it to its proper sphere. Its proper sphere is the background or
periphery of focal things and practices. ... Reform must make room for focal
things and practices.” (308) thus, the good inherent to a focal thing or
pratice will result in ends which resonate with the means of their procural,
hence the story of the environmentally-conscious runner on page 309. “To have a
focal thing radiate transformatively into its environment is not to exact some
kind of service from it but to grant it its proper eloquence.”
Borgmann therefore suggests that people should
balance the political consequences of tehcnological enthrallment with the fact
that “in one or another area of one’s life one should gratefully accept the
disburdenment from daily and time-consuming chores and allow celebration and
world citizenship to prosper in the time that has been gained.” (310). The good
life involves a degree of social recognition for having mastered an area of
focal practice, for being able to share the celebratory moments of life and
success with loved ones, and “where we encounter our fellow human beings in the
fullness of their capacities, and where we know ourselves to be equal to that
world in depth and strength.” (310). mastery of knowledge is simply mastery “of the
means rather than the ends of life. What is needed if we are to make the world
truly and finally ours again is the recovery of a centre and a standpoint from
which one can tell what matters in the world and what merely clutters it up. A
focal concern is that centre of orientation.” (311)
The other two articles
serve to position Heidegger and Borgmann in relation to each other, and in
doing so they alternatively come to agree with one thinker or the other. Thus,
we can witness Dreyfus and Spinosa’s article argues in support of Heidegger’s
critique of technology being “a more cogherent and credible answer than
Borgmann’s” (315). They state that for Heidegger, technology is a process in which
ordering increasingly supplants objects themselves, which are themselves merely
a means for further ordering. Borgmann is in agreement, to the extent that “the
object disappears precisely to the extent that the subject gains total control”.
And yet, in gaining control “the post-modern subject is reduced to a ‘point of
arbitrary desires’” (316-7). Thus, despite the displacement of objects,
(hyper)reality remains determined by the satisfaction of desire: “Heidegger’s intuition is that treating
everything as standing reserve or, as we might say, resources, makes possible
endless disaggregation, redistridution, and reaggregation for its own sake.”
Along with the object, Dreyfus argues that Heidegger eliminates subjectivity.
Technology is thus “a new stage in the understanding of being.” (317) “Thanks
to Nietzsche, Heidegger could sense that, when everything becomes standing
reserve or resources, people and things will no longer be understood as having
essences or identities or, for people, the goal of satisfying arbitrary
desires”. the new subject gains meaning not through
fixity, but rather through the process of connection. “Even desireing subjects
have been sucked up as standing reserve.” (319)
For Heidegger, “when a focal event such as a
family meal is working to the point where it has its particular integrity, one
feels extraordinarily in tune with all that is happening, a special graceful
ease takes over, and events seem to unfold of their own momentum” (320). When a
“thing is thinging”, says Heidegger, the divinities must be present; focal
practices channel the divine by means of mortality. “So long as a people who
regularly encounter a thing are socialized to respond to it appropriately,
their practices are organized around the thing, and its solicitations are taken
into account even when no one notices” (320). Dreyfus agrees with Borgman’s rejection of
Heidegger’s pretechnological focal things to be “misleading and dispiriting”
(321).
Dreyfus argues that groups of people use
technologies adaptively and in social congruence (given congruent
sociability)., and furthermore that given a phenomenological concern, the fact
that humans can choose to exercise from a variety of possibilities, and thus
express their mortality, determines that people are “never wholly a resource”
(322). “Neither equipment nor roles could be gathered, but the skills for
treating ourselves as disaggregated skills and the world as a series of open
possibilities are what are drawn together so that vaious dispersed skillful
performances become possible. But if we focus on the skills for dispersing
alone, then the dangerous seduction of technology is enhanced.”
“Resistance to technological practices by
cultivating focal practices is the primary solution Borgmann gives to saving
ourselves from technological devastation. ... Heidegger’s view of technology
allows him to find a positive relation to it, but only so long as we maintain
skills for disclosing other kinds of worlds. Freeing us from having a total
fixed identity so that we may experience ourselves as multiple identities
disclosing multiple worlds is what Heidegger calls technology’s saving power.”
(323). Thus Dreyfus and Spinosa can come to terms with the two authors: “as mortal disclosers of worlds in the plural,
the only integrity we can hope to achieve is our openness to dwelling in many
worlds and the capacity to move among them. Only such a capacity allows us to
accept Heidegger’s and Borgmann’s criticism of technology and still have
Heidegger’s genuinely positive relationship to technological things.” (324)
Feenberg opens his article with the
condemnation of Hedegger as an institutional force. . Such, however, is not a
rejection of Heidegger, but rather a circumscription of meaning as plurality
which is otherwise obscured by Heideggerian thought as having been furnished
with an institutional status. And yet he can agree with Heidegger that “ Technology is a cultural form through which
everything in the modern world becomes available for control. Technology thus
violates both humanity and nature at a far deeper level than war and
environmental destruction. To this culture of control corresponds an inflation
of the subjectivity of the controller” (328)
Feenberg states that “Heidegger’s critique of
autonomous technology is not without merit” (329), and wonders whether “our
specifically technological engagement with the world ... is merely an attitude
or it it embedded in the actual design of modern technological devices?”. The
former is contingent with the historical process itself, which contextualizes
the production of meaning, while the latter Feenberg argues to be rather
optimistic in its causal effectiveness. “Heidegger holds that the restructuring of
social reality by technical action is inimical to a life rich in meaning.”
(329). Feenberg states that for Borgmann, the logic of devices is to become
increasingly efficient, which is defined by a replacement of expertise,
resource gathering and exploitation, and social ritural by machine
functionality. However, “the generalization of the device paradigm, its
universal substitution for simpler ways, has a deadening effect. Where means
and ends, contexts and commodities are strictly separated, life is drained of
meaning. Individual involvement with nature and other human beings is reduced
to a bare minimum, and possession and control become the highest values.” (330)
[potential reading of Apple computers]
Feenberg argues that Borgman “offers a more
understandable response to invasive technology than anything in Heidegger”, as
the former “[bounds] the technical sphere to restore the centrality of meaning”
(330). for Borgmann, the modern human subject mediated
by the computer becomes “disposable experiences that can be turned on and off
like water from a faucet. The person as a focal thing has become a commodity
delivered by a device”(331). Feenberg rejects Borgmann’s conception of
computer-mediated communication for being naive and incomplete, for it rejects
the possibilities for the development of human subjectivities enabled by
communication otherwise impossible. “Borgmann’s critique of technology pursues
the larger conenctions and social implications masked by the device paradigm.
To this extent it is genuinely dereifying. But insofar as it fails to
incorporate these hidden social dimensions into the concept of technology
itself, it remains still partially caught in the very way of thinking it
criticizes.” (332)
Feenberg argues that Heidegger “is demanding
that we recognize fully our own unsurpassable belonging to a world in which
meaning guides the rituals that crystallize around things.” (333). “The
fourfold refers to no particular system of practices and things, but reminds us
of what all such systems have in common insofar as all human lives are rooted
in enacted meaning of some sort” (333). “Is the gathering thing a node in a network?
... The notion o the thing as a gathering that discloses a world can be seen as
a correective to the overemphasis on the role of Dasein in disclosure in [Being
and Time]. There, world was defined not as “all that is”, nor as an object of
knowledge, but as the realm of everyday practice.” (334) Feenberg thus posits
Heidegger’s thought as circumscribed by its objectivist (managerial) nature.
(discussion of
Schindler’s list as an unethical film)
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