Abstract
The goal of this article is to examine the nature of technology in view of Georges Bataille’s notion of intimacy. After providing a summary of Bataille’s critique of technology, I offer my response and show that a technological device can reach such a degree of familiarity that it becomes indistinguishable from our psychophysical personality. In this sense, we experience technology not as instrumentation, but in intimacy. The old theory of technology as organ-projection is, therefore, reinterpreted to produce a theory of technology that includes the technological process in its entirety, from the moment of invention and innovation, involving a movement of transcendence and objectification, to the moment of intimacy.
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Notes
There are others, of course, who offered analyses of technological adoption and integration that seem to point to the possibility of a relation of intimacy between technology and humanity. I will mention, at least, the works of Everett Rogers, who, in his Diffusion of Innovations, provides a clear model for the diffusion of technology and the attributes necessary for their adoption; Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions in The Age of Spiritual Machines about the future of technology point to a future merging with humanity; Bruno Latour and Andrew Feenberg. Of these two last philosophers more will be said in the body of the article.
Animals of different species have been observed to use tools and to develop them to make them better fit to perform a certain task. A crow has recently been observed to form a hook, for example. These examples suggest we should abandon the idea of a divide between animals and humans, and claim blurriness as a sign of continuity, even though humans have reached such a level of technological complexity that no other species conceivably could achieve in the foreseeable future. Technology does not solve the problem of the origin of human specificity.
Basalla's evolutionary approach to technology gives us a diachronic explanation of the illusion of a technological unit, while I provide a synchronic one. Basalla (1988) quotes Gilfillan as blaming “language, custom and social conventions for breaking down the continuum into a series of discrete, identifiable inventions” (p. 22).
There is a difference between our objectifiable body and the unobjectifiable body that is ours. The term mine-body is not the objectified body, but the body that is engaged while it is engaged. We can make the hand that is playing one of Bach’s piano concertos the object of our consciousness, but we cannot expect it to play the concerto any longer. The mine-hand is the hand that is playing the piano concerto. Also, the mine-body includes all references to the psyche, as well. We could talk of the mine-mind. However, the emphasis should be placed on the “mine,” not on any philosophical conception of what constitutes the human personality. In the perception of what is mine, we experience the absence of separation and distance, which corresponds to the negative definition of intimacy.
The body of the Other, therefore, constitutes a solution to the problem of the mine-body, which we want to return to intimacy.
Andrew Feenberg recognized the role of these non-instrumental qualities, but placed them so-to-speak in the background of the primary function of technology, which is to be useful. In the process he calls “secondary instrumentalization,” characterized by four stages of increasing positive integration of technology “with the natural, technical, and social environments that support its functioning” (1999, p. 205), the ethical and aesthetical are thought of as “secondary qualities,” though necessary for a successful integration.
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Tomasi, A. Technology and Intimacy in the Philosophy of Georges Bataille. Hum Stud 30, 411–428 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9072-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-007-9072-7