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Rewriting the Constitution: A Critique of ‘Postphenomenology’

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Abstract

This paper builds a three-part argument in favour of a more transcendentally focused form of ‘postphenomenology’ than is currently practised in philosophy of technology. It does so by problematising two key terms, ‘constitution’ and ‘postphenomenology’, then by arguing in favour of a ‘transcendental empiricist’ approach that draws on the work of Foucault, Derrida, and, in particular, Deleuze. Part one examines ‘constitution’, as it moves from the context of Husserl’s phenomenology to Ihde and Verbeek’s ‘postphenomenology’. I argue that the term tends towards different senses in these contexts, and that this renders its sense more problematic than the work of Ihde and Verbeek makes it appear. Part two examines ‘postphenomenology’. I argue that putatively ‘poststructuralist’ thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault, and Deleuze may be better characterised as ‘postphenomenologists’, and that approaching them in this way may allow better access to their work from a philosophy of technology perspective. Part three argues for a ‘transcendental empiricist’ approach to philosophy of technology. In doing so, it argues for a rewriting of contemporary philosophy of technology’s political constitution: since an ‘empirical turn’ in the 1990s, I argue, philosophy of technology has been too narrowly focused on ‘empirical’ issues of fact, and not focused enough on ‘transcendental’ issues concerning conditions for these facts.

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Notes

  1. The full entry reads:

    1. 1.

      The action of constituting, making, establishing.

    2. 2.

      The action of decreeing or ordaining.

    3. 3.

      A decree, ordinance, law, regulation.

    4. 4.

      a. The way in which anything is constituted or made up. b. Composition in reference to elements. c. Consistency (Obs)).

    5. 5.

      a. Physical nature or character of the body in regard to healthiness, strength, vitality, etc.

      b. Nature, character, or condition of mind; mind, disposition, temperament, temper.

    6. 6.

      The mode in which a state is constituted or organized; especially, as to the location of the sovereign power, as a monarchical, oligarchical, or democratic constitution.

    7. 7.

      The system or body of fundamental principles according to which a nation, state, or body politic is constituted and governed (OEDb 2014, original emphasis).

  2. More technically, Moore defines idealism as follows:

    Let s be a kind of sense-making. Then idealism with respect to s may … be defined as the view that certain essential features of whatever can be made sense of in accord with s depend of features of s itself (2012: 142).

  3. Reflecting back on 1891’s Philosophy of Arithmetic in 1929’s Formal and Transcendental Logic, for example, Husserl writes:

    It was …, in my later terminology, a phenomenological-constitutional investigation; and at the same time it was the first investigation that sought to make ‘categorial objectivities’ of the first level and of higher levels (sets and cardinal numbers of a higher ordinal level) understandable on the basis of the ‘constituting’ intentional activities, as whose productions they make their appearance originaliter, accordingly with full originality of their sense (1969: 87).

    Such hindsight by an author can, however, be misleading. It is therefore noteworthy to find passages such as the following in 1900–1901’s Logical Investigations:

    A painting only is a likeness for a likeness-constituting consciousness, whose imaginative apperception, basing itself on a percept, first gives to its primary, perceptually apparent object the status and meaning of an image (2001: 239).

    As a complement to this early picture of consciousness as ‘constituting’, Husserl also writes of objects of consciousness as ‘constituted’ in Logical Investigations:

    … the objects of which we are ‘conscious’, are not simply in consciousness as in a box, so that they can merely be found in it;… they are first constituted as being what they are for us, and as what they count as for us, in varying forms of objective intention (2001: 156, original emphasis; see also Husserl 1981: 11, 15, 23, 34).

  4. Authors including Ihde and Janicaud consistently stress that Husserl intended phenomenology to be a rigorously ‘presuppositionless’ method, eschewing all metaphysical claims, including those of idealism (Ihde 1999: 29; Janicaud 2009: 81). What this underplays, however, are the explicitly idealist leanings of Husserl’s later work (Bell 1990: 153–154; Ricoeur 1999: 176). A much more controversial issue is the type of idealism towards which Husserl tends. Moore, for example, detects a form of ‘subjective’ or ‘empirical idealism’ in Husserl (Moore 2012: 451). He is supported in this by occasional notorious statements from Husserl (see, for example, 2002: 94–95). Other authors, such as Moran (2000) and Sokolowski (1964), read Husserl more straightforwardly in terms of a form of ‘transcendental idealism’.

  5. A view of constitution as embodied and enactive is present in Husserl’s late work (see, in particular, the essay ‘Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature’ (1981: 222–233)). However, it is more strongly associated with the work of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger.

  6. There are much more rhapsodic strands of contemporary philosophical engagement with technology and media where these tendencies become more pronounced. See, for example, Flusser 2002 and Stiegler 1998.

  7. Further on, Verbeek is more circumspect: ‘Technologies help to constitute freedom by providing the material environment in which human existence takes place and takes its form’ (2011: 60).

  8. Ihde devotes considerable attention to ‘linguistic turn’ issues elsewhere in his work (see, for example, Ihde 1986, 1993, 1999). My focus on his ‘phenomenology + pragmatism’ equation here is therefore somewhat rhetorical, but nevertheless defensible as an index of how Ihde situates his own work in relation to these issues. For a development of this, see part three of this paper below.

  9. Note, for example, the emphasis on things speaking ‘for themselves’ in this extract from Merleau-Ponty:

    If the philosopher… feigns ignorance of the world and the vision of the world which are operative and take form continually within him, he does so precisely in order to make them speak, because he believes in them and expects from them all his future science (1968: 4).

  10. Consider, further, this elaboration from Foucault:

    I have no wish at the outset to exclude any effort to uncover and free… ‘prediscursive’ experiences from the tyranny of the text. But what we are concerned with here is not to neutralise discourse, to make it the sign of something else…. What, in short, we wish to do is to dispense with ‘things’… To substitute for the enigmatic treasure of things anterior to discourse, the regular formation of objects that emerge only in discourse (2002: 52–53).

  11. Here are some typically ‘phenomenological’ examples: Husserl’s pieces of paper (Husserl 2002: 116; Husserl 1970a), Heidegger’s hammer (Heidegger 1962: 98), Sartre’s ‘glass of beer’ or ‘chestnut tree’ (Sartre 1972), and Merleau-Ponty’s ashtray (Merleau-Ponty 1976). Here, in contrast, are some typically ‘poststructuralist’ examples: Foucault’s Raymond Roussel (Foucault 1992), Deleuze’s Francis Bacon (Deleuze 2005), Derrida’s Antonin Artaud (Derrida 2002: 292–317).

  12. This is not to understate the importance of contemporary philosophy of technology approaches to Foucault, in particular (see, for example, Dorrestijn 2012; Verbeek 2011: 66–89). Instead, it is to suggest that there may be less obviously ‘technology’-focused features of the work of thinkers like Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze that may be of relevance for contemporary philosophy of technology. In what follows, I argue that the most important of such features is a shared turn towards a critical and nuanced transcendental approach.

  13. Ihde writes:

    By beginning with the ‘silence’ of perceptual experience and by viewing language as expression, as the coming-into-being of significance, Merleau-Ponty in effect begins a phenomenology of speech. The subject struggling with language, to say the new, to express himself, is the focus of the perceptualist’s immediacy. But by beginning with what has been said and by showing how we are used by our language and our interpretations, Heidegger begins with a phenomenology of language (1999: 38).

  14. Indeed, Ihde is often explicitly hostile to what he sees as the ‘romanticism’ generated by Heidegger’s ‘phenomenology of language’ when it turns to reflect on philosophy of technology issues (see, for example, Ihde 1999: 103–115).

  15. Ihde and Verbeek are at the forefront of contemporary philosophy of technology hostility towards what they, following Achterhuis (2001), variously characterise as ‘classical’, ‘transcendental’ or ‘dystopian’ philosophy of technology (see, for example Ihde 2000: 66, 2008: 2; Verbeek 2005: 7–8). See below for more on this.

  16. It is possible, on the basis of an understanding of the ‘transcendental’ as denoting a form of argument, to argue for a revised sense of the specifically Kantian project of ‘investigating and philosophically contextualising the most basic [a priori] constitutive principles defining the fundamental spatio-temporal framework of empirical natural science’ (Friedman 2002: 188). This, for example, is what Friedman does in an attempt to arbitrate between the legacies of Quinean naturalism and Carnap’s philosophy of ‘linguistic frameworks’ for contemporary philosophy of science. Following Reichenbach, Friedman distinguishes between two senses of the a priori in Kant: the strong and, he argues, illegitimate sense of ‘necessary and unrevisable, fixed for all time’, and the weaker and legitimate sense of ‘constitutive of the concept of the object of [scientific] knowledge’ (2002: 174). From here, he argues for a ‘reconceived version of Kant’s original philosophical project’ that adopts a ‘relativized and dynamical conception of a priori mathematical–physical principles’. Such principles, Friedman argues:

    …change and develop along with the development of the mathematical and physical sciences themselves, but … nevertheless retain the characteristically Kantian constitutive function of making the empirical natural knowledge thereby structured and framed by such principles possible (2002: 175).

    Friedman’s rationale for adopting this approach is to be better equipped than Quinean naturalism to account for conceptual discontinuities and continuities in ‘revolutions within the sciences’ (2002: 188). For the purposes of this paper, it is worth noting that Friedman’s approach is entirely compatible with what Deleuze calls ‘transcendental empiricism’.

  17. To what extent, we might wonder, is contemporary philosophy of technology disproportionately invested in Zeitgeist-seizing technologies such as drones, biotechnologies or ICTs?

  18. A perpetual motion machine, the philosopher’s stone, and Maxwell’s demon are impossible technologies, and Vannevar Bush’s ‘memex’ is a merely imagined technology (Nyce and Kahn 1991); all alike, however, have exerted powerful inspiration on real-world technological developments.

  19. Consider, for example, the faculty of reading in the context of this remark from Deleuze:

    Each faculty must be borne to the extreme point of its dissolution, at which it falls prey to a triple violence: the violence of that which forces it to be exercised, of that which it is forced to grasp and which it alone is able to grasp, yet also that of the ungraspable (from the point of view of its empirical exercise) (2004a: 180).

    As authors as different and Wittgenstein (2001) and Hayles (2012) have observed, the faculty of reading changes in nuanced ways in relation to the context conditioning it. What transcendental empiricism offers is a series of provocations to take investigation of this further. In the context of reading, for example, ‘that which forces it to be exercised’, might be a pamphlet, a novel, a contract, or an ICT, each of which forces different norms of perception upon the reader; ‘that which [reading] is forced to grasp’, in contrast, might be a political message, a new style of literature, or the terms and conditions of a prospective employment, each of which, again, forces a different reading; that which is ‘ungraspable’, in contrast, might be all of printed literature or the entire content of the Internet, to which the act of reading in question is related, but only ‘virtually’, as an ‘ungraspable’ background condition.

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Smith, D. Rewriting the Constitution: A Critique of ‘Postphenomenology’. Philos. Technol. 28, 533–551 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-014-0175-6

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