If phenomenology is an
albatross, is
postphenomenology possible?
Don Ihde, Philosophy, SUNY Stony Brook
What is today more and more frequently called technoscience
studies has emerged from a fairly short history of what could
either be called ˜paradigm shifts™ [Kuhn] or changed ˜epistemes™,
[Foucault] depending on whether one is more or less in the
Anglophone or the Francophone world. [1 see IR] First there was
the sixties emergence of ˜anti-positivism™ in the philosophy of
science. And although there was not yet, at least in North
America, any very visible philosophy of technology, the historians
of technology were at work.. The seventies saw the beginnings of
what might be called a ˜post-Mertonian™ sociology of science, and
toward the end of the seventies glimmers of philosophy of
technology. The eighties were fairly explosive with the
sociologies of the ˜strong program™, youthful actor-network-
theory, and so-called ˜social constructionist™ approaches to
science, drawing fire from both scientists and philosophers. The
nineties were times of diversification and the beginnings of more
complex interdisciplinary programs which welded various social
sciences to earlier sixties HPS programs [History and Philosophy
of Science], now become SSK [Sociology of Scientific
Knowledge], STS [Science and Technology Studies], etc. The
nineties also saw the emergence of the ˜science wars™ which were
sparked by growing reactions to the newer philosophical, social
science, and cultural studies of the hybrid phenomenon,
technoscience. Even so short an overview shows how rapidly the
studies of science and technology have changed in the last third of
the 20th century.
If one then switches to an equally brief look at the major
practioners of today™s technoscience studies, one finds a similar
pattern of individual career changes. For example, Bruno Latour,
perhaps the most cited figure in the social studies of science
fields, and who occupies a forefront role presently similar to the
earlier HPS most cited Thomas Kuhn, has called himself an
anthropologist, a sociologist, and a philosopher [see our interview
in this volume]. Similarly, Donna Haraway, began as a biologist,
turned to the history of biology, to literary theory and some
philosophy, and today is identified as a feminist technoscience
studies figure. Andrew Pickering, began as a physicist, turned
sociologist of science, and has ambitions through his '˜theory of
everything™ towards metaphysics. In each case multidisciplinary
approaches prevail, both individually and for the field as a whole.
I fit this transformation of roles pattern as well, although my
changes have remained within philosophical parameters. I was
first a phenomenological philosopher, then a philosopher of
technology, and today am engaged in technoscience studies. I
rehearse this highly abbreviated history in order to locate my own
position in this set of shifting battlefields and war zones. I
completed my doctorate just two years (1964) after the
publication of Kuhn™s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
(1962). But at that point, my battlefield was a very different one
and I had not yet entered the fields of science or technology
studies. In the 60™s, the larger engagement within philosophy was
between a well ensconced Anglo-American establishment of
analytic philosophy challenged then by an, at first, very small
movement inspired by European philosophers, particularly
existential and phenomenological thinkers. And while I had been
trained”as all of us were”in the mainstream analytic
philosophies [guess what we were reading?: Wittgenstein, Quine™s
"Two Dogmas¦", Word and Object, Goodman, The Structure of
Appearance, etc.], the newly available insights of phenomenology
and hermeneutics were highly appealing. So, armed with a
dissertation on Paul Ricoeur, then mostly unknown in the
Anglophone world, I set out to ˜do phenomenology.™ Way back
then, it appeared to be the revolutionary thing to do.
Given the lack of any infrastructure for Euro-American
philosophy in the sixties and seventies, at first it did not seem
onerous to have to ˜introduce™ phenomenological (and
hermeneutic) styles of analysis to the larger scene. My program
began with some analytic-phenomenological comparative studies,
mostly on issues of language and perception, but soon these
became boring and so I decided to ˜do phenomenology.™ Listening
and Voice: A Phenomenology of Sound and Experimental
Phenomenology (1976 and 1977 respectively) were the results.
These studies synchronized with European oriented foci upon
perception and embodiment, themes which remained through
much later work. Note that to this point, explicit relations to
philosophy of science, philosophy of technology or the later
technoscience studies were very much in the background, but they
were not absent. This early career research emphazied a
phenomenologically oriented philosophy of perception. My
identification, then, was one who did ˜descriptive
phenomenology.™ And this identification, already this far back,
began to pose difficulties. The popular belief, if anything
exaggerated by analytic philosophers, held that (a)
phenomenology was ˜subjectivist™ in contrast to ˜objectivity™; (b)
˜introspective™ in contrast to analytical; (c) and, with respect to
evidence, took the ˜immediately or intuitively given™ as its base.
>From my perspective, all three of these widely held notions about
phenomenology were false. But in that early period, I naively
believed that this could be corrected by exemplifying careful
phenomenological work. (And, in case one is unfamiliar with my
answers to the beliefs: (a) phenomenology, in my understanding,
is neither subjectivist nor objectivist, but relational. Its core
ontology is an analysis of interrelations between humans and
environments [intentionality]. (b) It is not introspective, but
reflexive in that whatever one ˜experiences™ is derived from, not
introspection, but the ˜what™ and ˜how™ of the ˜external™ or
environmental context in relation to embodied experience. And
(c) all ˜givens™ are merely indices for the genuine work of
showing how any particular ˜given™ can become intuited or
experienced. Phenomenology investigates the conditions of what
makes things appear as such.. Thus I was glad to see that Jari
Jorgenssen clearly recognizes my "postsubjectivist" stance in this
volume.) This problem of repeated introduction, appeared in the
late 60™s and proceeded into the 70™s. As a ˜phenomenologist™ one
could never take anything for granted.
Already in the early 70™s, I began to be interested in technologies.
This interest was not absent even from the two books mentioned,
but was there backgrounded by the foreground interest in
perception. However, by 1979, I had published Technics and
Praxis which is often identified as the first North American work
on philosophy of technology. From then, through the entirety of
the 80™s I was re-identified as a ˜philosopher of technology.™
The transition to philosophy of technology was not abrupt, but
actually an extension of the earlier work on perception. The four
chapter sequence on the phenomenology of science
instrumentation (plus other technologies) showed how science is
necessarily ˜embodied™ in technologies or instruments, but
simultaneously it implicates human embodiment as that to which
the ˜data™ are reflected. It was out of this context that I began to
run afoul, not this time so much with analytic philosophy of
science but with European takes on phenomenology in a
lifeworld. In the early 80™s, not yet familiar with either ˜social
constructionism™ or ˜actor-network-theory™, I had stumbled upon a
way to take into account ˜non-humans.™ Part of the schematism of
˜human-technology relations™ was to regard the simplest possible
unity for dealing with technologies as a partial symbiosis of
human plus artifact. This meant that ˜my™ Galileo could not be a
Galileo without a telescope, whereas the ˜husserlean™ Galileo was
a mathematizer without a telescope. Even to this day, many
Europeans have trouble recognizing my incorporation of
technologies into phenomenological ontology as unorthodox. So,
now I had a double problem with being a ˜phenomenologist™.
Could there be a phenomenological philosophy of technology? I
tried to show that both Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger had partial
ways of doing this. But most Europeans retained phenomenology
under an earlier Ditheyan model. So while I thought one could
incorporate technologies into phenomenology, others thought this
to be oxymoronic.
The third move was then to technoscience studies. Here I thought
that part of the problem had been pre-solved. The term,
˜technoscience,™ implies in part that science and technology are
not totally, perhaps not even discernibly different domains. Had
technology been incarnate in science, or science emboded in
technology? Good, this would leave me some real breathing
space. Moreover, by the mid-80™s I had discovered most of the
strands which led to technoscience studies: the ˜social
constructionists,™ the feminist critics of both science and
technology, actor-network-theoreticians, and even the small
school of ˜instrumental realists™ {Hacking, Galison, Dreyfus,
Ackermann, and one kind of Latour} whom I dealt with in
Instrumental Realism (1991). And, indeed, one strand within
technoscience studies, that which dealt with non-humans [Latour],
mangles and machinic agency [Pickering], and cyborgs [Haraway]
seemed to hold the right possibilities. Moreover, this latest career
deflection opened the way to a new set of conversations and
conversants.
This third move, however, exacerbated the identification as
˜phenomenologist™ even more than the previous incarnations.
Andy Pickering accuses me of still being a "representationalist",
in spite of the thrust of work trying to develop a non-
representationalist epistemology; Bruno Latour accuses me of
doing "philosophy of consciousness" precisely because as a
phenomenologist that is what phenomenologists do. And while
Donna Haraway has not made any accusations other than that I
misunderstand her variety of semiotic method, I have found once
again that the label, "phenomenologist", has become burdensome.
The now famous "Cyborg Conference" in Aarhus, Denmark
(1999) found me saying it was my "Albatross." But no one knew
what that meant, so I had to explain that all of us in American
schools once had to read the "Ryme of the Ancient Mariner"
wherein the sailor who killed an albatross had to wear the dead
bird around his neck as punishment for bringing bad luck to the
ship. The metaphor is appropriate because phenomenology has
been pronounced ˜dead™ several times, first after structuralism,
then post-structuralism, then deconstruction and now in the
contexts of revivals of old forms of semiotics.
I thought the pronouncements of death were premature, and I was
willing to affirm my belonging to a philosophical tradition from
which I had learned. But its other side, heard almost with equal
frequency, is that what I do is "nothing like traditional
phenomenology." The relationality analysis, the central emphasis
upon variational theory and its resultant multiperspectival and
multistable effects, the emphasis upon extended embodiment,
while drawing upon classical phenomenological thinking, do not
strictly model upon older phenomenology. Then my self-
characterization as a non-foundational phenomenologist (Sweden,
1984) and later a ˜postphenomenologist™ (1993), I thought might
help. I even toyed with creating a neologistic escape: why not
"pragmatological phenomenology,"? or, "phenomenological
pragmatism"? or, borrow from Goteborg, Ference Marton™s
"phenomenography"? But all such attempts seemed too clumsy,
although I have found some signs that my European friends like
"postphenomenology" the best and have sometimes used this in
recent program announcements. The albatross still retains some of
its feathers and all of its bones and I can™t seem to remove it from
my neck. (It might seem that my meditation upon re-inventions
runs in a direction opposite of those claimed by Bruno Latour. He
dissociates himself from the labels which have been attached to
him. He vehemently claims he has never been a ˜social
constructionist™ [/]; that he has never used the term, ˜actor-
network-theory™ [/], etc., whereas I have been willing to accept the
label, ˜phenomenologist.™ But, in the end, these labels are just as
albatrossic whether self-stickered or stickered by others.)
In the self-explanations made by the others in this collection, one
finds both Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour reviving the work of
Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead™s "process" oriented
philosophy clearly resonates with all of the praxis versions of
technoscience studies which are contemporary. I, too, read and
liked Whitehead the many years ago that I read him”but his
special vocabulary of neologisms put me off. "Prehensions,"
"concresence," and the like did not seem to connect. Rather, lying
in my own background almost unavoidably was American
pragmatism. Everyone knows that William James was a major
influence upon Husserl (Husserl™s personal library shows which
books he read carefully be the underlining and comments in the
margins. William James, not often mentioned in Husserl™s written
texts, was well marked up and commented upon, whereas
Descartes, highly mentioned, remained untouched). I, too, read
James and his emphasis upon experience (and its ambiguities)
remains an important aspect of whatever it is that I do. But it is
probably more John Dewey who rises to more importance in this
hybridization of phenomenology and pragmatism which I like.
Dewey, very early on, and at least earlier than Heidegger,
developed a quiet, more Aristotelean than Platonic direction;
clearly opposed ˜foundationalism™; saw ˜instrumentalism™ “which
he later would have preferred calling ˜technology™”as the process
of philosophizing; was a fallibilist; and who emphasized concrete
studies and experiments; all strands of thinking which while not
˜phenomenological™ in either style or origin, reverberate well with
the way I understand what I shall now call more explicitly,
postphenomenology.
Why ˜post™? Because, while a pragmatically bonded
phenomenology retains the emphasis upon experience, there is
neither anything like a ˜transcendental ego™ nor a restriction to
˜consciousness.™ Because a pragmatically bonded phenomenology
evokes something like an ˜organism/environment™ notion of
interactionism, a notion I have repeatedly used as well. Because,
the relativity of pragmatist and phenomenological analyses (not
relativism) is a dynamic style of analysis which does not and
cannot claim ˜absolutes™, full ˜universality,™ and which remains
experimental and contingent. All this takes what was once (the
bones and feathers) phenomenology in a ˜postphenomenological™
direction. But, can the albatross become a phoenix? At least this
gives some sense of where and how I locate myself at the borders
of technoscience.
Enough already. The above shows that there is always labeling,
whether self afflicted or attached by others. The test, however,
should lie in outcomes”what produces the relatively better
analysis, interpretation, or critique? Here, however, another more
subtle and doubled problem arises. The first part of the problem is
the level of the field. One could compare analyses, interpretations
and critiques only if the problems are genuinely comparable.
Second, as the matrix project so clearly realizes, each principal
thinker chooses examples which implicitly best fit the style of
analysis being practiced. Cyborgs [Haraway] are collection
hybrids and bring together vast and complex entities, functions,
relations. Oncomouse is artificial, constructed, human assisted,
genetic, social, etc.etc.etc. But, Oncomouse is not-netural in that
Oncomouse-like phenomena select away from anything which
looks either ˜simple™ or ˜pure.™ The harawayan selection is a
trajectory away from the simple or pure (if such phenomena
exist?) and towards the complex and complicated phenomena of
her version of technoscience. Pikering™s mangle, dance of agency,
and machinic agencies are likewise selection devices. He wants
his analysis to be posthuman in the sense that only the processes,
emergences, and results occur when they are all ˜mangled™. This,
too, selects away from stabilities, real time persistences, and long
lasting firm consenses. If there is an ancient and latent
kuhnianism here, it is a kuhnianism which elevates revolutionary
over normal science. Latour™s strong program of symmetries also
serves as a selection device. The schematism of humans-
nonhumans, with each being declared actants ( a term he
repeatedly uses whether or not joined by A-N-T!) in an equivalent
sense, also selects 0away from anything isolated, invididualized,
or autonomous. Even the seemingly passive nonhumans such as
speed bumps (sleeping policemen), door stoppers, etc. are turned
into actors/actants within the symmetry. This taste for the
compound-complex and symmetrical is shared by these three
technoscience interpreters.
Of course, reading the others in this conversation this way means
that I must read my own examples as selection devices as well.
What does this show? I now realize,perhaps only because of this
retrospective and comparative situation, that what I thought I was
doing turns out to have some unexpected side-effects! I have
frequently deliberately chosen examples which, not unlike the
thought experiments I learned doing analytic philosophy, are
simple, direct and therefore enhance what I hoped would be
clarity. Using a telescope, listening to a telephone, using a dental
pick are all examples from Technics and Praxis. More of the same
accumulate through the years. All of these were selected to
demonstrate different kinds of embodiment relations, whereby the
instrument is experientially taken into one™s sense of body and
through the instrument something is (mediatedly) perceived "out
there." My aim was simplicity and thus clarity. What I did not
realize was that this device could be, and was taken, as a selection
device showing individual (rather than social), subjective (rather
than relational or reflexive), and sometimes as simple (rather than
complex or systems of technologies). So, it could look like I was
selecting out the social, political, cultural; selecting out the
quantitative and analytic; and selecting out the complex and
systems technologies. Caught by my own device.
Fortunately, I do not need to leave the unhappy situation just
where it is, seemingly caught by the critique of the semiotic
symmetrists of this conversation. As it turns out in at least one
case, the most symmetrical of all the symmetrists”Bruno
Latour”has twice used exactly the same examples I have used!
One revolves around handguns plus humans and the NRA slogan,
"guns don™t kill people, people kill people." (See Aaron Smith™s
amusing variant on this example.) The other is the use of a bodily
extension device, a stick, used to knock down a piece of fruit,
although in Latour™s case he uses a chimpanzee instead of a
human.. I have recently addressed the single strictly identical
example, the human-gun example:
[There is a] striking [convergence] from the uses Bruno Latour
and made of the same example”the denial of the NRA claim that
"Guns don™t kill people; people kill people." In Technology and
the Lifeworld (1990), I claimed that my account was a relativistic
one [in a physics metaphor]:
The¦.advantage of a relativistic account is to overcome the
framework which debates about the presumed neutrality of
technologies. Neutralist interpretations are invariably non-
relativistic. They hold, in effect, that technologies are things-in-
themselves, isolated objects. Such an interpretation stands at the
extreme opposite end of the reification position [of
technologies”see Latour below]. Technologies-in-themselves are
thought of as simpoly objects, like so many pieces of junk lying
about. The gun of the bumper sticker clearly, by itself, does
nothing; but in a relativistic account where the primitive unit is
the human-technology relation, it becomes immediately obvious
that the relations of human-gun (a human with a gun) to another
object or another human is very differenty from the human
without a gun. The human-gun relation trasnforms the situation
from any similar situation of a human without a gun. At the levels
of mega-technologies, it can be seen that the transformational
effects will be similarly magnified. {TL, }
Thus I could not help but be struck when a colleague gave me a
copy of Latour™s 1993 [later revised as chapter Six in Pandora™s
Hope, 1999] paper, "On Technological Mediation," in whch this
same example is more elaborately analyzed. Latour™s context is
precisely the same attack upon neutrality and reification noted
above. "The myth of the Neutral Tool under complete human
control and the myth of the Autonomous Destiny that no human
can master are symmetrical." {..} Then, by granting actant status
to both, Latour produces a complex analysis of how both ˜gun™
and ˜human™ are transformed:
¦A third possibility is more commonly realized; the creation of a
new goal that corresponds to neither the agent™s program of
action¦I called this uncertainty, drift, invention, mediation, the
creation of a link tht did not exist before and that to some degree
modifies the original two. Which of them, then, the gun or the
citizen, is the actor in this situation? Someone else (a citizen-gun,
a gun-citizen)¦ You are a different person with the gun in your
hand. {,,}
What Latour goes on to claim, beyond the obvious parallelism
with my relativity context above, is full symmetry: "This
translation is wholly symmetrical. You are different with a gun in
our hand; the gun is different with you holding it. You are another
subject because you hold the gun; the gun is another object
because it has entered into a relationship with you." {..} And
although from a framework of phenomenological interactivity, I
would agree to the same conclusions about how ˜subjects™ and
˜objects™ are both transformed in relativistic situations, the
disagreement would be secondary over whether or not ˜subjects™
and ˜objects™ are simply eliminated as meanings by virtue of
symmetries. {..}
While this example shows a clear convergence and agreement
over some of the major factors concerning the human-gun
translation [Latour] or transformation [Ihde], there are also
divergences which could be noted. I would admit that the
nonhuman actant in the complex or collective, transforms the
situation. Human plus gun have amplified destructive power and
much else. Were we to vary this example into one about scientific
instrumentation, I would likewise hold that the human-telescope
has the same selective and magnificational transformation or
translation effects, thus one can say more strongly than
metaphorically, that the telescope embodies and in use has a
certain interpretive direction as a technology. This is what Latour
means by it becoming a different "object" (in use rather than just
lying around). But, switching examples again, I would find it
rather hard to say”at least without claiming a highly
metaphorical attribution”that the speed bump (sleeping
policeman) is filled with designers, administrators and policemen!
I can™t quite bring myself to the level of "socializing" the artifacts.
They may be interactants, but are not quite actants.
In the simple examples just discussed, one could say the playing
field was quite level, and thus the critics, analysts and interpreters
could meet on that field. Is the same true if we turn to more
complex examples?
Donna Haraway and Andy Pickering have, most recently, selected
their ˜non-human™ examples from the animal kingdom. In her
piece in this volume, Donna discusses her movement from the
cyborg figure to the companion species [dogs] she now studies.
And whereas Donna has "gone to the dogs" with her studies, Andy
Pickering has "gone to the eels" with his mangling of Asian eels.
So, following this lead, my next example set will take a quick
look at animal non-humans.
The important questions of situatedness and symmetry can,
indeed, take different shape with this twist. If phenomenology has
the fatal flaw of necessarily being a "philosophy of consciousness"
as Latour holds, and if situatedness entails both embodiment and
some kind of socio-cultural situatedness as I am quite sure
Haraway and I would hold, and if animal experience can in some
sense be taken as "intentional", as I suspect Pickering would
affirm, then does the selection device posed by animals help us
converge? I now rephrase this in my own way: animals---all of
them I suspect, but especially the higher organisms such as dogs
and eels”are embodied beings which interrelate with
environments and thus are ˜situated.™ Nor do I have any trouble
with allowing some kind of ˜intentionality™ to animal being since,
for me, intentionality is the ontological structure of this
interrelationality between an experiencing being and an
environment. And, again with at least higher and complex animal
life, I don™t even have a problem with attributing these animals
with ˜cultures.™ Latour™s chimp with a stick can also be the chimp
who fashions a number of termite probes from vegetable matter,
apparently according to some patterned plan, and thus is ready to
continue the feast even after the first, then the second wears out.
The chimp is ˜aware™ of technological fallibility and the
phenomenon of breakdown and has introduced redundancy into
the situation! The point of all this is, in the case of animal non-
humans, one problem of symmetry is considerably eased. And it is
eased in precisely one direction taken by actant theory”we can
˜socialize™ the animals, I think, much more easily than we can the
speed bump or door stopper. And because that is so, I have
virtually no problem at all with either Haraway™s analysis which
claims, symmetrically, that dogs and humans have ˜mutually
invented™ each other. Her story, shared by others, is that wolves,
probably at about the same time the first modern humans evolved,
were only too glad to hang around the cave and accept easily
gained tid-bits and, cutting the story short, the wolves
domesticated the humans at the same time that the humans
domesticated the now wolf-dog. Eventually, particularly with
purebreds, even breeding itself could occur only with human help
or, better, with human-dog cooperation. Here we have a
symmetrical ˜collective™ which can be spoken of without much
hesitation or linguistic contortion.
Nor, although not in quite as a˜domesticated™ context, Pickering™s
Asian eels are also creatures we can recognize. The funny stories
about persons with two tanks of aquatic creatures, fish in one/eels
in the other, upon finding the fish gone one morning, and a fat,
grinning eel in its own tank, soon discovers the unexpected side-
effect that eels can crawl out of their tanks and then back in with
bellies full of fish, comfortably in their salt water environment
after having invaded a fresh water environment. My own
˜phenomenological™ addendum to this story is that one reason why
transplanted animals can either fail miserably or succeed
dramatically, is that they are transferred without their indiginous,
complex context into a different context. If, as in the case of
Asian eels now invading our southlands, they no longer have the
same parasites, predators, even food supply, they can nevertheless
opportunistically quickly adapt and even begin to displace
indiginous competitors. This is a version of figure/ground change
which constitutes one important and powerful phenomenological
tool for analysis, now applied to animal transfer. The same
observation applies to technology transfers as per my examples in
Technology and the Lifeworld which discuss the entirely new
cultural context for sardine cans (as centerpieces for elaborate
New Guinean headgear, i.e., a fashion object) which were in their
imported Australian context merely preservation devices for
keeping food (the ovaloid can becomes a ˜different™ artifact or
technological object by context change.)[..] And not to slight
Bruno Latour, this is consonant with the process he calls
˜translation™ whereby the object plus the human is changed as it is
processed along.
While each of these analyses clearly reverberate well to some
degree, there also remain degrees of differences. I would hold that
it is easier to see how both dogs and humans change through
interaction, particularly behaviorally but also in deeper ways, than
to see how the sardine cans change by being placed in their new
fashion context. This is not to say that the sardine can either
remains a ˜sardine can™ throughout, when it changes from food
container to fashion object (since, phenomenologically, any object
is what it is only in relation to its context or set of involvements,
one can say it ˜changes™ from container to fashion object) and it is
not to say that the human-artifact interrelation lacks significant
behavioral and cultural change, since technological artifacts are
parts of material culture and thus are implicated in such changes.
But it remains, I hold, harder to maintain that the artifact changes
with the same degree of symmetry as the human, or better, the
human within the technologically changed context. This is
something like the old joke: "How does a psychiatrist change a
lightbulb? Very slowly and through many sessions”and the
lightbulb really has to want to be changed."
Beneath all this, I am holding out for something like a sliding
scale of symmetry. This affirmation of a sliding scale can
recognize some ambiguities as my last example will show. What
if, in this case, our non-human is one of those "quasi-others"
which I have previously described which enters into an alterity
relation with the human of the equation? Here the human-
technology, or human-non-human relation is one in which the
non-human gives off a selected ˜appearance™ of being some kind
of virtual ˜other™”I call this a ˜quasi-other.™ That is, the relation
to the technology finds its focal fulfillment in the interaction with
an artifact, not through an artifact by embodiment or by the
hermeneutics of interpretive activity. I will pose this as a sort of
challenge: Could AIBO be a companion species?
AIBO is a ˜quasi-animal™ entertainment robot produced by SONY,
Inc. It™s first version looked like a plastic”silver or
black”artificial dog; its second version is more ambiguous,
comes in three colors, and is sort of an artificial dog/cat. For a
mass produced robot, it claims high sophistication; the ad claims
it responds, "ignore AIBO and it will become lethargic; AIBO has
four senses¦touch, hearing, sight and a sense of balance;¦.it
will show when it is happy or sad¦and can express six emotions:
happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and dislike;¦and has
instincts”it wants to play with people, look for its favorite toy,
move about [and in a gesture to its machinic nature] satisfy its
hunger (i.e., get recharged) [SONY ad, 2nd generation
entertainment robot.] Like the Gamiguchis before it, AIBO
becomes lethargic if ignored and demands attention. And, in
Japan, the AIBO rage has even led to AIBO soccer games, with
quasi-animals playing with each other; to magazines which
include diaries about human-AIBO interactions; and testimonials
concerned with the possible superiority of AIBO over living
animals (it does not die, excrete, or make a mess). Here are some
testimonials printed in a slick, multi-colored magazine, Aibo
Town Magazine: "Keeping dogs is not allowed in our apartment,
so actually a robot is much better." Then, in a feature piece, an
interview with a television actress, Tetsuko-Kuroyangi, she
describes her response to her own AIBO, "Gray."
When my cute one first arrived in my house, the first imporession
that I had was, ˜Its color is robotic™. That is where the name Gray
comes from. ˜Rat-like color (this is Japanese name for gray)™ does
not sound cute though. Gray [in English] sounds a bit cuter, I
guess. Since my cutie has done the classic ˜lift the leg and mark
the territory™ behaviour, I believe it is a boy¦..
Then, the interview continues, with, on the one side an
anthropomorphization of the robot; and on the other a recognition
of its machinic being:
˜Both the mother and the child do not follow the manual.™ For
example, when I give the command, ˜4-1™ with the performance
mode, Gray follows the command once. But on the second time,
Gray does whatever he wants. I think this is funny. ¦ Usually
Gray barks once then does a pee on the first try. On the second try,
Gray again does whatever he feels like. ¦ When I show him the
sound commander and say, ˜go to sleep,™ Gray was shaking his
head as if saying, ˜No, No™. Again it ws quite cute. Because Gray
hated it so much, I hid the sound commander under a cushion.
[italics mine.] ¦One of the good things about having AIBO. It
will not get sick and die. Especially, it will not die¦I really feel
this is great. ¦ It will never feel pain since he is a robot. Beside
that, he is similar with living creatures. ¦However, just as the
internet has been used in a different way from the one that the
developers wished, there will be people who will misuse robots. I
don™t want it to happen since a robot is such a cute creature. [Aibo
Town Magazine ]
This admixture of machine-like/animal-like responses is, in one
sense, appropriate. SONY did not attempt to make a ˜cartesian™
robot which could be confusing for an observer”no fur, no eyes,
no actual liquids, etc. No one would be deceived by a cartesian
evil genius here. AIBO is shiny, plastic, its ˜eyes™ are red lights,
it™s ˜voice™ a series of tones. One has to ˜read through™ to get it as
life-like. Could this AIBO be a companion species?
The above description was second hand, I now turn to my own
experience. Although for a base price of $1500, with
programming options more than doubling the base price, I was not
tempted to go out and buy one, I was curious enough to go to the
first demonstrations of the new AIBO in New York City. As with
many toy technologies, the hype proved stronger than the
performance. Yes, it could perform a karate chop on (repeated)
command; it (sometimes) returned a ball; it moved much more
slowly than any puppy; and was highly ˜confused™ by commands
from different people. It would have been hard for me to move
from the robot-recognition to the other side of Tetsuko™s cute
recognition, although its ˜cuteness™ is quasi-recognizable.
The question about this cyborgian robot as a companion species is
clearly a question which could be put to Donna Haraway. But, as
she put it to me when I asked over email, "Ms Cayenne Pepper
and Roland Dog [dogs in Haraway™s house] were not impressed.
Smelled wrong and was awfully literal." [email, 3/10/01] And,
maybe the dogs are in this case the best judges.
The philosophical point is a little harder to make: could I be
reverting to a modernist position in which I am taking AIBO aka
Gray as simply a machine? And then, seeing Tetsuko™s response
as a piece of romantic anthropomorphization of this machine? Or,
worse, am I making an metaphysical judgment about the intrinsic
nature of AIBO as simply a being of this sort? In the various
discussions the four of us have had, this sometimes is what comes
up. Tetsuko is making something of a hybrid description of her
Gray: cute, with feelings, decisions, etc., but equally non-feeling,
non-dying and robotic. The metaphysician simply wants to wipe
out half the hybrid. But the hybrid description is in a limited
sense, correct, if also misleading.
But that has never been my point. It can™t be, since I am opting for
a perspectival, situated knowledge which lacks the god's eye view
either from overhead or into the interior. Yet, I also do not want to
make the symmetrist™s equivalent error: simply of granting some
kind of equality of status to the human and the non-human. One
the one hand, we have seen this leads either to the temptation to
˜mechanize™ the totality; or to ˜socialize™ it. There is
simultaneously in the modernist and the symmetrist™s positions
the temptation to a kind of reduction in one or the other direction.
Rather, and this has been my point, an asymmetrical but
postphenomenological relativity, gets its ˜ontology™ from the
interrelationship of human and non-human. Here is where
Haraway™s dogs actually have it right: they can tell by smelling
and playing that AIBO™s responsiveness is literal and not-right.
The cannot interact with AIBO as dog, although I doubt they are
making a metaphysical judgment; rather they are finding that the
quasi of the quasi-˜dog™ is forefronted in the interrelation itself.
The tendency to anthropomorphize, of course, is ancient and not
restricted to
quasi-human or quasi-animal technologies. Even automobiles can
have attributed ˜personalities.™ And, the situation is further
complicated by the role of fantasy and desire. As I have claimed
elsewhere (TL), we sometimes have the desire to have the
magnified powers which technologies are fantasized to
possess”in the case of AIBO a lack of pain and an absence of
death”but without recognizing the technological materiality
entailed”AIBO will wear out and can break. This technofantasy
can be detected in the Tetsuko interview as well:
Oh, I forgot about Gray™s birthday. He arrived in summer and
since my birthday is August 9th”which is the memorial day of the
Atomic Bomb in Nagasaki”and I have some friends who passed
away in August and September, it might be a good idea to think
that Gray is a reincarnation. [Aibo Town Magazine]
This last quotation casts a deeper shadow on the AIBO
phenomenon. It is one thing to read AIBO through technofantasy,
both desiring the powers of technology, yet wanting these to be so
transparent that the technology disappears. Rather, in this case,
the technology must become something else. And, here too, is an
ancient echo: technology as Idol. To see in the artifact certain
powers which it should not seem to possess, is to push the human-
technology relation to its ultimate extreme. Rather than
companion species, this AIBO becomes a quasi-deity, a move
which I would tend to resist with an iconoclast™s skepticism.
I will end on this highly ambiguous note, recognizing that if our
social situatedness is ˜non-innocent™ as Haraway claims, and that
technologies are ˜non-neutral™ as I claim, then perhaps precisely
what AIBO does not have, pain and death, gets transformed into a
sort of machinic vision of the immortality which technofantasies
can stimulate.
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