While some people think that our new technologies which texture our lifeworld disembody human experience, and while others think that eventually we will be able to 'upload' our very embodiment into these technologies, this collection of chapters takes a close postphenomenological account of a myriad of these technologies as we interface with them. He argues that the new technologies both extend and transform our experience of embodiment. And the multistable trajectories of these new technics present possibilities often not yet explored.
In this book, Meenakshi Gigi Durham outlines and advances a progressive feminist framework for digital ethics in the technosexual landscape, exploring the complex and evolving interrelationships between sex and tech. Today we live in a “sexscape,” a globalized assemblage of media, transnational capital, sexual practices, and identities. Sexuality suffuses the contemporary media-saturated environment; we engage with sex via cellphone apps and airport TVs, billboards and Jumbotron screens. Our techniques of sexual representation and body transformation — from sexting to plastic surgeries — occur in relation to our deep and complex engagements with mediated images of desire. These technosexual interactions hold the promise of sexual liberation and boldly imaginative pleasures. But in the machinic suturing of technologies with bodies, the politics of race, class, gender, and nation continue to matter. Paying acute attention to media’s relationship to the politics of location, social hierarchies, and regulatory schemas, the author mounts a lucid and passionate argument for an ethics of technosex invested in the analysis of power.
A personal account of the aging body and advanced technologies by a preeminent philosopher of technology Medical Technics is a rigorous examination of how medical progress has modified our worlds and contributed to a virtual revolution in longevity. Don Ihde offers a unique autobiographical tour of medical events experienced in a decade, beginning in his 70s. Ihde offers experiential and postphenomenological analyses of technologies such as sonography and microsurgery, and ultimately asks what it means to increasingly become a cyborg. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead
This volume includes eleven original essays that explore and expand on the work of Don Ihde, bookended by two chapters by Ihde himself. Ihde, the recipient of the first Society for Philosophy and Technology's Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, is best known for his development of postphenomenology, a blend of pragmatism and phenomenology that incorporates insights into the ways technology mediates human perception and action. The book contains contributions from academics from Europe, North America, and Asia, which demonstrates the global impact of Ihde’s work. Essays in the book explore the relationship between Ihde's work and its origins in phenomenology (especially Husserl and Heidegger) and American pragmatism; integrate his philosophical work within the embodied experience of radical architecture and imagine the possibility of a future philosophy of technology after postphenomenology; develop central ideas of postphenomenology and expand the resources present in postphenomenology to ethics and politics; and extend the influence of Ihde's ideas to mobile media and engineering, and comprehensively assess the influence of his work in China. The book includes a reprint of the Introduction of Sense and Significance, one of Ihde's first books; "Hawk: Predatory Vision," a new chapter that blends his biographical experience with feminism, technoscience, and environmental observation; and an appendix that lists all of Ihde's books as well as secondary sources annotated by Ihde himself. Starting with an Editors' Introduction that offers an overview of the central ideas in Ihde's corpus and concluding with an index that facilitates research across the various chapters, this book is of interest to a diverse academic community that includes philosophers, STS scholars, anthropologists, historians, and sociologists.
Tactics of the Human returns to American fiction published during the 1990s, formative years for digital cultures, to reconsider these narratives’ comparative literary print methods of critically engaging with digital technologies and their now ubiquitous computation-based modes of circulation, scenes of writing, and social spaces. It finds that fiction by John Barth, Shelley Jackson, Leslie Marmon Silko, Ruth L. Ozeki, and Jeffrey Eugenides, by creatively transposing digital writing, material formats, and spatiotemporal orientations into print, registers shifting relations to technologies at multiple sites and scales. Grappling with the digital practices catalyzed by post–World War II biological, information, and systems theory, these literary narratives tactically enlist, and enable speculative diagnoses of, emerging relations to digital technologies. Their experimental technics comparatively retrace emerging relations to the digital as these impact American nationalisms and their transnational economic networks; processes of gendering and racialization that remain crucial to differential discourses of the human; and as they enter, unnoticed, into micropractices of everyday life and lived space. In the midst of expanding technoscientific processes of digital de- and re-materialization that render multiple, charged boundaries of the human increasingly plastic, Tactics of the Human illustrates why it is ever more crucial to query and assess the divergent (re)understandings of the human now categorized, quite loosely, as posthumanisms with particular attention to women’s, subalterns’, and other knowledges already considered liminal to the human. It identifies here and pursues strains of systems thinking, informed by feminist, new materialist, queer, and subaltern understandings of material practices, revealing why these are so pivotal to ongoing efforts to assess current limits to digital technics and expand upon their biological, cultural, social, and poetic potentialities.
Paul Ricœur has been one of the most influential and intellectually challenging philosophers of the last century, and his work has contributed to a vast array of fields: studies of language, of history, of ethics and politics. However, he has up until recently only had a minor impact on the philosophy of technology. Interpreting Technology aims to put Ricœur’s work at the centre of contemporary philosophical thinking concerning technology. It investigates his project of critical hermeneutics for rethinking established theories of technology, the growing ethical and political impacts of technologies on the modern lifeworld, and ways of analysing global sociotechnical systems such as the Internet. Ricœur’s philosophy allows us to approach questions such as: how could narrative theory enhance our understanding of technological mediation? How can our technical practices be informed by the ethical aim of living the good life, with and for others, in just institutions? And how does the emerging global media landscape shape our sense of self, and our understanding of history? These questions are more timely than ever, considering the enormous impact technologies have on daily life in the 21st century: on how we shape ourselves with health apps, how we engage with one-another through social media, and how we act politically through digital platforms.
Acoustic Technics opens with the 19th century discovery of radiation which exceeds our human bodily perceptual experience, light beyond light, sound beyond sound and on into what today we call the electromagnetic spectrum. Claiming a second scientific revolution through imaging technologies and drawing from both instrumental sensory mediation and animal studies, Acoustic Technics follows listening in its new forms into music, echo-location, infra and ultra-sounds, medical diagnosis, surveillance, and subsurface and interplanetary domains. Synthesized sounds, sonification, in both esoteric and popular technologies such as earbuds, cellphones, television are analyzed from a postphenomenological perspective.
This publication includes a selection of peer reviewed academic papers. The FULL PAPER / Proceedings publication for the DRH2014 conference showcase up to-date discussions, dynamic debates and innovative keynotes and aims to open a discussion on defining digital communication futures, as a theme that connects interdisciplinary practices, focusing particularly on issues of communication and its impact on creative industries .
Husserl’s Missing Technologies looks at the early-twentieth-century “classical” phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, both in the light of the philosophy of science of his time, and retrospectively at his philosophy from a contemporary “postphenomenology.” Of central interest are his infrequent comments upon technologies and especially scientific instruments such as the telescope and microscope. Together with his analysis of Husserl, Don Ihde ventures through the recent history of technologies of science, reading and writing, and science praxis, calling for modifications to phenomenology by converging it with pragmatism. This fruitful hybridization emphasizes human–technology interrelationships, the role of embodiment and bodily skills, and the inherent multistability of technologies. In a radical argument, Ihde contends that philosophies, in the same way that various technologies contain an ever-shortening obsolescence, ought to have contingent use-lives.
