Technologies in Practice
Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Technique

An aspect of Gadamer’s hermeneutics that has been the subject of criticism and close examination is his rehabilitation of the concept of application (Anwendung), an approach shared and extended by Ricoeur in his use of the term appropriation (Aneignung) and in related concepts such as mimesis₃. In Truth and Method Gadamer identifies application as the “central problem” of hermeneutics, which is “to be found in all understanding”.¹⁰ It is an idea that, for a time, was `forgotten’ due to the “aesthetic-historical positivism” branch of the hermeneutic tradition that drew an equivalence between understanding and interpretation (explication). What Gadamer calls aesthetic differentiation, allows for a bracketing of the question of application. For example, when I consider an artwork from a historicist or aesthetic perspective, I interpret it according to the theories and knowledge I have of art history and aesthetics. The `truth’ of the work follows the logic of correspondences, certain features of the work match with other works of that period or with expected explorations of thematic forms, and so on. The goal of hermeneutic methods, understood in this way, was to overcome historical distance and understand the author better than they understood themselves. In Ricoeur’s terms, questions of the work itself were bypassed in favour of the “Romantic pretension of recovering, by congenial coincidence, the genius of the author: from genius to genius!”¹¹

However, against this approach to understanding, which ends at the level of explication, Gadamer emphasizes that the more fundamental truth of the work is found in its contemporaneity. The work is not only a set of relations that correspond to a certain period or genre, it is also something which addresses the spectator, i.e., the aesthetic experience is also an event that incorporates both the work and the spectator. Hermeneutic application is still a response to the problem of historical or cultural distance, yet, in place of the idea of overcoming distance, distance is seen as a conditional, mediating factor for understanding. The figure of the author is no longer that of another `mind’ to be understood, but that of an other who addresses me at a distance. Application or appropriation, in this sense, “takes the place of the answer in the dialogical situation, in the same way that `revelation’ or `disclosure’ takes the place of ostensive reference in the dialogical situation.”¹²

Traditional hermeneutic theories distinguished three elements of interpretation; subtilitas intelligendi (understanding), subtilitas explicanda (interpretation), and subtilitas applicandi (application). Gadamer argues that these three moments are related and inseparable – to understand is to already have explicated, and to explicate involves questions of application (whether consciously acknowledged or not). For Gadamer, “we consider application to be just as integral a part of the hermeneutic process as are understanding and interpretation.”¹³ What this revision is explicitly aimed at correcting is a view that sees an interpretation as something that is first arrived at, and then later applied in various contexts. This view is represented most strongly by techne and scientific forms of reasoning, where application appears as a separate moment, distinct from a theory, skill-set, technological design, and so on.

The reason why this aspect of Gadamer’s hermeneutics has been debated and challenged (for example by Habermas, Emilio Betti and Hirsch) is because linking application to interpretation and understanding implies that all interpretation is related to the context of the interpreter, i.e., it becomes very difficult to externally validate the claims of an interpretation or appropriation since they are bound to the experience of the event/engagement itself. Habermas, for example, challenged this view on the grounds that it does not take into account power-dynamics in social settings, which are alien and violent in relation to particular interpreting subjects, and which require a distanced, rigorous critique (explication). If all interpretation involves appropriation, how is it possible to develop an emancipatory critique? Habermas, instead, developed a “depth hermeneutics” which combined hermeneutic interpretation with a critique of the underlying deep structures of the text (for example, the ideological functions).¹⁴

The two approaches, critique and application, are not entirely incompatible, a fact that is attested to by Ricoeur’s attempt to incorporate both. What Gadamer’s concept of application succeeds in articulating is the productive (and arguably critical) role of phronēsis in the task of understanding. The concept of phronēsis includes within it the difficult but crucial feature of human solidarity. For example, in a letter to Richard J. Bernstein, Gadamer writes,

I am concerned with the fact that the displacement of human reality never goes so far that no forms of solidarity exist any longer. Plato saw this very well: there is no city so corrupted that it does not realize something of the true city; that is what, in my opinion, is the basis for the possibility of practical philosophy.¹⁵

In place of the figure of the `ideal’ city, Gadamer suggests that concrete reality of the corrupted city is the locus of true understanding. Viewed from the perspective of critical theory, hermeneutic application is read as a submission to the status-quo, which leaves the vulnerable, interpreting subject in a position of dependence. Yet, as Gadamer highlights, this emphasis on the centrality of practical application in understanding is also necessary to affirm the solidarity that is crucial in any work of understanding. Furthermore, in the context of an age dominated by technological forms of rationality, the emphasis on phronēsis serves as a critical corrective to an attitude that is forgetful of the power of application in the determination of meaning.

Solidarity with a work or with others is something that can only be cultivated through a practical engagement with the world, since through the repetitions of practice relations of concern and belonging are established. These features of practice and hermeneutic application are threatened by what Habermas and Gadamer discuss as the dominance of a scientific attitude to understanding, an attitude which is linked to the rise of modern technology. Modern technology is seen as an expression of the interests of scientific method, which centre on the desire to evaluate and control a set of practical relations by reducing them to a theoretical perspective. Whereas practice, in the hermeneutic sense, is aimed towards developing a mastery of a situation, through subjecting oneself to a set of conditions or constraints, technology aims towards control. For example, mastering the skill of surfing does not imply control of the sea.

A practical application is seen by hermeneutics as a way of unfolding or deepening an already-present historical thread through the act of repeating something in a new way, for example, the way a law appears in light of an unanticipated case or the way a biblical verse can gain new significance and power in light of contemporary political situation. In contrast, technology works by presenting history as controllable and even as something we can overcome. Since both technologies and practical reason operate at the practical level, albeit guided by different concerns, discerning the difference and appropriateness of either perspective becomes tricky in cases where technology takes over from practical reason. Habermas summarises this perspective as follows:

The real difficulty in the relation of theory and practice does not arise from this new function of science as a technological force, but rather from the fact that we are no longer able to distinguish between practical and technical power. Yet even a civilization that has been rendered scientific is not granted dispensation from practical questions. Therefore a peculiar danger arises when the process of scientification transgresses the limit of technical questions, without, however, departing from the level of rationality confined to the technological horizon. For then no attempt is made to attain a rational consensus on the part of citizens concerning the practical control of their destiny. Its place is taken by the attempt to attain technical control over history by perfecting the administration of society, an attempt that is as impractical as it is unhistorical.¹⁶

For both Habermas and Gadamer, technology, whilst being related to the practical field, is entirely impractical and unhistorical in its execution. Gadamer presents the same contrast through the different senses of `application’ found in the arts and the sciences,

The problem of the application of science already presupposes that science as such possesses its self-certain and autonomous existence prior to all application and free from all reference to possible application; but thanks to just this freedom from purpose, its knowledge is available for any application whatsoever, precisely because science has no competence to preside over its application.¹⁷

For Habermas, the execution of a technological project of controlling society fails due to its impracticality, and for Gadamer, the forms of knowledge associated with scientific theory fail according to hermeneutic standards due to the lack of “competence” required in determining the practical application of theoretical models. The result is that knowledge gained through theoretical projects and applied through technological means of control either fails completely at the practical level, or else works too well, in that its functionality conceals the fragile practical relations at work in the application. So, technology is both impractical in that it is prone to failure, and anti-practical in that the functionality it offers draws subjects away from a deliberative, living relation with their environment.

A simple example of the skewed relation between technological rationality and practical application is found in a recent product by the company Juicero. The product was a juice machine that cost $400. You inserted pouches of juiced vegetables into the machine that would then squeeze them for you. The product failed, and the company went out of business, when people quickly realised that simply squeezing the pouches by hand proved far more effective than using the machine. Even the wifi-connectivity of the machine, which allowed the machine to notify you when the pouch is out of date, was rendered pointless by the expiration date printed on the pouches themselves. As with the classic myth/joke about the Americans spending one million dollars to develop a space-pen while the Russian used a pencil, the Juicero juicer failed because it strayed too far from the instruction of practical wisdom and common sense, “Juicero has since become something of a symbol of the absurd Silicon Valley start-up industry that raises huge sums of money for solutions to non-problems.”¹⁸ Application, in the hermeneutic sense, refers to the primacy of the concrete question or problem that guides the work of interpretation. Technological “solutions to non-problems” are symptomatic of the forgetfulness of this point in modern forms of reasoning. For Gadamer, “understanding…involves something like applying a meaning to our situation, to the questions we want answered…Motivated by the particular questions of the moment, understanding is not just reproductive but, because it involves application, always also a productive activity.”¹⁹

However, technological forms of rationality are especially problematic not because they are vulnerable to failure, but because they cause us to become forgetful of the practical questions and problems that guide interpretation. As the quote at the beginning of the chapter by Morton Feldman suggests, a “network” of ideas and technologies, or, as Borgmann writes, “the tightly-patterned character”²⁰ of modern technology, can end up serving as a distraction - a set of meaningless processes that nevertheless work. As Todd Mei has pointed out, the work done by the machine or device comes at the cost of becoming forgetful of our dependency on being.²¹ For example, although the presence of satellite-navigation systems in our cars save us from the work and hassle of consulting maps or locals, our prior awareness of a dependency on environmental `symbols’ and cues, such as landmarks, terrains, local knowledge, and so on, is lost. A hard-won practical skill – the ability to read and decipher maps – is traded for the relative ease and comfort of the GPS device, which requires relatively little skill to operate. The ontological cost is in terms of our living relation to our environment, which can only be disclosed by working through it, by being personally invested in it. When we allow a device, for example a microwave, to do the work on our behalf, our own relation to the world is destabilized (we no longer need to engage in the difficult and transformative practice of learning to cook, for example). In Morton Feldman’s case, he is asking whether musical `ideas’ or systems (he is writing in the shadow of Schoenberg, Boulez, Stockhausen, etc., as well as the `historicist’ account of musical development in general), which promise perfection and intellectual mastery, actually end up keeping the composer outside the work they are aiming to produce. His alternative, which is similar to Gadamer’s, is to instead return to an engagement with the practical dimension of composition, in order to build a rapport with the work. He considers the type of chair he sits in to write, the type of pen he uses and so on, features which from a purely `musical’, theoretical perspective seem irrelevant, but from the perspective of the actual, living composer are essential.²²

Although both Habermas and Gadamer have similar criticisms of the cultural dominance of a scientific/rationalistic view of the human world, their responses to the issue, as we have seen, differ. This is especially true with regard to the question of hermeneutic application. Habermas’ “depth hermeneutics”²³ or critical hermeneutics is, as Ricoeur argues, guided by the attitude of suspicion. It entails a direct confrontation with the structures and traditions that mediate and distort our understanding of ourselves. Therefore, it embraces the alienating function of critique; we must distance ourselves from the practices and traditions we perpetuate unknowingly, in order to perceive them with a more critical eye. A hermeneutic approach, on the other hand, advocates a positive recovery of already-present resources in the lifeworld, and especially those found within tradition. The two approaches first appear as “alternatives”, one negative and the other positive, “In contrast to the positive assessment by hermeneutics, the theory of ideology adopts a suspicious approach, seeing tradition as merely the systematically distorted expression of communication under unacknowledged conditions of violence.”²⁴

Ricoeur’s own approach wishes to retain both modes of interpretation. Gadamer’s concept of application outlines a hermeneutic project for the productive recovery of meaning. However, for Ricoeur, a project of recovery must also be the act of a capable agent, that is, an agent who is able to evaluate, reflect and discern appropriate meanings. Every act of hermeneutic recovery, in this sense, includes the moment of reflective distanciation. According to Ricoeur, Gadamer presents a false alternative, either a fully committed participation in the event or occasion of truth, or the isolation and alienation of method, an antinomy that,

seems to me to be the mainspring of Gadamer’s work, namely, the opposition between alienating distanciation and belonging. This opposition is an antinomy because it establishes an untenable alternative: on the one hand, alienating distanciation is the attitude that renders possible the objectification that reigns in the human sciences; but on the other hand, this distanciation, which is the condition of the scientific status of the sciences, is at the same time the fall that destroys the fundamental and primordial relation whereby we belong to and participate in the historical reality that we claim to construct as an object. Whence the alternative underlying the very title of Gadamer’s work Truth and Method: either we adopt the methodological attitude and lose the ontological density of the reality we study, or we adopt the attitude of truth and must then renounce the objectivity of the human sciences.²⁵

Ricoeur’s hermeneutics instead attempts to incorporate the act of alienation or distanciation from oneself as an integral moment on the path to appropriation. Distance becomes a necessary condition for understanding, due to the nature of what Ricoeur calls the “shattered cogito”.²⁶ Since who I am is already dispersed or diffracted among conflicting institutions, works and cultures, appropriation is not only an alienation from oneself, but an encounter with oneself in other forms. Ricoeur, a close follower of the “masters of suspicion”, affirms that the greatest threat to self-understanding is the narcissism of the ego. For this reason, Ricoeur reads appropriation as an act of enlarging the self. Both Ricoeur and Gadamer understand appropriation in terms of concreteness (i.e., whereas explication alone is abstract, appropriation is concrete and living), but Ricoeur’s metaphor of enlargement suggests that a process of concretization is as much a dissolution of identity as a convergence - “alienation” and “appropriation” remain dialectically bound, “understanding is as much disappropriation and appropriation.”²⁷

However, whereas Ricoeur embraces the distanciation produced by an objectifying approach, he is consistent with Gadamer in rejecting the mode of rationality associated with modern technology. Ricoeur seems to differentiate between knowledge gained through distanciation (for example, insights which emerge from the methods of the social sciences) that can be productively related back to a practical understanding of the world, and a technological rationality that operates according to a logic that no longer has any relation to human understanding. The distanciation caused by technological rationality results in an endless detour with no return, since it is a type of knowledge which remains forgetful of its relation to the hermeneutic question of being-in-the-world.

Both Ricoeur and Gadamer develop the idea of practical appropriation/application in direct response to forms of rationality that they see embodied in technology, i.e., rationality that is independent of appropriation. For example, when Ricoeur is discussing globalised, economic forms of rationality, and the negative effect that these have on our understanding of work, he links this phenomenon to the rise of modern technology,

In a word, labor, on the level of economic society as such, appears at once as technically rational and humanly unreasonable. Moreover, the individual is dissatisfied and even torn in the labor force of modern society because he finds no meaning in the simple struggle against nature nor in the apology of calculating efficiency. This is so true that in advanced industrial societies, at least, meaning is sought more and more outside work, and work becomes merely a means to gain leisure time, which, in turn, is organised along the lines of the technical model of work. In brief, work, in advanced societies, has ceased to be the great educator in the ways of rationality that Hegel and Marx saw it as.²⁸

Practical reason and the task of interpretation involve difficult and arduous work, yet it is a form of work that stands radically opposed to the types of work associated with modern economic society. The conflict here, between the “technically rational” and human reason, is similar to the conflict outlined by Gadamer and Habermas. The implication is that in an age dominated by a technical/economic enframing of “labour”, we have forgotten the hermeneutic notion of work, which involves building a relation with the land so that truthful dwelling and thanking can occur.²⁹

Furthermore, whereas practical wisdom is bound to self-understanding and the development of a self (Bildung), the skill of techne is something that I can learn, apply, and then discard or forget. This contrast between repetition of the same (technological production) and repetition of the different, makes the subject matter of this thesis difficult. The hermeneutic concept of practice, elaborated by Ricoeur and Gadamer, is developed in order to suggest an alternative mode of engaging with the world than the one we are currently presented with through the modern dominance of science and technology. As Paulo Cesar Duque-Estrada writes, this conflict between two forms of rationality is an old one and provides the foundation for Gadamer’s understanding of practical philosophy,

One can say, in this way, that the fundamental topic which correlates hermeneutics and practical philosophy is the problem of the preservation of one type of rationality against the totalitarian tendency of another type of rationality. In the context of practical philosophy, we find Aristotle’s critique of the formal universalism of Plato’s ideas, and the useless character of the idea of the good (idea tou agathou) regarding the concrete demands of the “here” and “now” proper to the practical realm.³⁰

If Ricoeur and Gadamer’s view of practical wisdom is developed against the types of rationality they see embodied in technologies, how can these two types of reason be brought into dialogue? While wishing to maintain this timely critique of technological rationality, I suggest here that practical philosophy cannot escape the question of technique. Just as living, participating subjects are appropriators of tradition and future meanings, techniques, and by extension technologies, can be seen as modes of appropriating practices through offering new solutions and unanticipated possibilities for action. This means that they themselves require further appropriation and development. The resources for thinking through this relation are already present in Ricoeur’s understanding of the circle of alienation and belonging. Ricoeur himself seen texts and linguistic structures as operating through economic, technical relations of exchange and codification. A detour through such structures is necessary for any genuine appropriation to occur. If, like the text, we read technologies as reflective of living, embodied practical concerns, then they too can be seen as appropriative of life. That is, the act of designing or constructing technological solutions to practical problems is not simply a negation of the human capacity for practical reason, as the hermeneutic thinkers suggest, but also an affirmation of questions and perspectives that remain unanticipated by the `naïve’ perspective of a practicing, unchallenged subject.

As I have suggested above, this thesis moves in the direction of taking the alienation that hermeneutics associates with technology in a positive sense. However, two features of the hermeneutic critique outlined prevent us from doing so, since alienation is only conceived as productive for Ricoeur when it is linked to the practice of interpretation. When linked to systematic forms of oppression and de-humanization, alienation is seen as negative. The two features of the hermeneutic critique that cause us to read technology as a negative mode of alienation are, firstly (1) is the link proposed between the interests guiding technological production and those of scientific rationality. Linking technology to science in this way leads to the view that the concerns underpinning technology cannot be reconciled with the concerns originating in the lifeworld. The technological concerns adhere to the demands of objectification associated with scientific method, while the concerns in the lifeworld are grounded in forms of intersubjectivity and interpretation. The second (2) is the presupposition that the modes of application associated with technology differ from those of an artwork or text, for example. Technological applications aim towards generalizable, decontextualized outcomes, while hermeneutic applications found in aesthetic encounters are singular and bound to the context of the engagement. In order to begin to consider technologies as hermeneutic objects, it is necessary to overcome both these hermeneutic presuppositions about technologies. The first objection is overcome, as David Kaplan argues, by acknowledging the pluralistic, material nature of technological mediation. Furthermore, I suggest that technologies should be read as emerging from practical experience, rather than from abstract forms of reasoning.

In view of Kaplan’s concerns about Ricoeur’s disposition toward technology, the second subsection will highlight what exactly makes Ricoeur’s hermeneutics meaningful for understanding technology. The relation between technological solutions and practical experience forms one part of a hermeneutic arc, with the other being practical re-appropriation. This leads us to overcoming the second objection mentioned above. The work of Friedrich Schleiermacher, which provides a background for Ricoeur’s project, will be examined due to its acknowledgement of the role of technique in application. However, his preference for a general model of hermeneutic seems to sublate the question of technique. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics (along with Gadamer and Foucault), in insisting on the centrality of practical appropriation, brings the question of technique back into view.

Ricoeur’s early turn to hermeneutics is marked by its investigation of the symbol. Symbols, in Ricoeur’s specific use of the term, are formally defined by their semantic ambiguity. That is, they possess a double, or composite, meaning – a primary, literal meaning, and a secondary, figurative meaning. The hermeneutic approach to language, which accounts for this symbolic dimension, arises at the limits of the phenomenological method, which Ricoeur claims is concerned primarily with signs -- univocal expressions of meaning. Husserl’s phenomenological method, which through its reduction tends towards abstraction, cannot account for the phenomena of symbols, which remain concrete for Ricoeur, i.e., bound to a specific tradition, culture, practice, place, individual, etc., by way of their figurative meaning. Any abstracted account of the symbol denies its living, revelatory nature.

Outside of the formal definition of the symbol as semantically ambiguous, it may be useful to provide a more concrete example of the symbolic. For example, a drop of wine spilt on a white tablecloth can be read in two ways. Taken literally, it is simply a sign of what has occurred, a material process governed by the laws of physics, chemistry, and so on, or perhaps it serves to differentiate the colours `red’ and ’white’ that now appear on the surface of the table. However, as an image (symbol) it also carries further connotations. It can also signify, for example, a stain, along with the historical, religious, psychoanalytic, etc., connotations that the image of a stain may bring forth. There is a difference between the literal meaning and the symbolic for Ricoeur, although both are inseparable. Whereas the literal meaning can be explained (up to a point), to understand or apprehend the symbolic meaning one has to have already been conditioned to see it (historically, culturally, experientially). Importantly, this does not mean that the symbolic meaning is secondary or a mere cultural derivative of the literal meaning, instead, Ricoeur sees it as at once being both highly contingent and fundamental, “There is no symbolism before man speaks, even if the power of the symbol is grounded much deeper.”⁵⁵

Language, for Ricoeur, is made up of a mixture of signs and symbols, i.e., of systematic or structural relations (signs) and their residues (symbols). In order to understand language a hermeneutic phenomenology is required – a mixed approach which recognizes both the structural (unbound, autonomous) and concrete (bound) aspects of language.

Since it is Ricoeur’s approach to the role of explanatory methods (phenomenological reduction, structuralism) that distinguishes him from his hermeneutic contemporaries, these aspects of his thought will be explored in the following subsections. Ricoeur agrees with Heidegger that philosophical `explanations’ (for example, metaphysical theories) can remove us from the direct encounter with being that is found along the “short-route of understanding”.⁵⁶ Nevertheless, he deems these ’detours’ necessary. There are multiple reasons for this approach, which continue to inform Ricoeur’s philosophy throughout his career, and are therefore difficult to enumerate. Within the context of this thesis, I will focus on the reasons for Ricoeur’s “long route of understanding” that relate to the question of practice and practical understanding.

Heidegger’s above-mentioned problem with philosophical explanation/clarification (as Ricoeur sees it), regarding the “distance” it introduces, is both lamented and embraced by Ricoeur. It is lamented because the direct confrontation with the truth of being (aletheia) encountered along the `short-route of understanding’, which provides an existential grounding (or un-grounding) for thought, remains perpetually out of our grasp. However, the attempt to explain the structures mediating our experience itself animates the quest for understanding. Ricoeur conceives the distance introduced by the detour through the mediating structures of experience and action as a reflective distance. New questions and insights that were previously concealed now emerge and feed-back into our understanding. Practical understanding involves both the way that an individual apprehends or participates in the world, and the knowledge that the individual possesses of the structures that mediate the interaction. Ricoeur views both these types of awareness as distinct and irreconcilable. As in a football match, the perspective of the spectator differs from that of the player. The spectator can speculate about the game from a distance, perceiving broader strategic patterns, and so on. The player, through their direct participation in the game, possesses their own unique perspective, which allows them to engage with the practice of football in a more direct, unmediated way. We typically expect the types of skills and practical wisdom possessed by the players to differ radically from the distanced speculations of the fans – it would be difficult to imagine a knowledgeable fan stepping down off the stands to join a professional match and doing well. However, Ricoeur’s approach, which acknowledges the difference between participation and distanciation, yet stresses the interrelationship across the difference, would view both spectators and players as belonging to the wider practice of the game of football. The players belong in a more immediate and participatory sense, but the spectators belong through their distanciation. Just as writing is the “destination of discourse”, commentary is the destination of the game – through commentary the game is realized not only as an event but as an enduring event, it is repeatable in a different, but related, form.

The fundamental difference between distanciation and participation means that practical self-understanding is conceived of as an interminable project for Ricoeur. The “I” of the self is both a subject and an object. It is composed of two incommensurable forms of understanding – embodied, practical wisdom and reflective, distanced knowledge-of. Both forms remain distinct but are reciprocal (we explain more to understand better). Due to this dualistic understanding of selfhood that sees the self as both something we are and something we have, the category of self-understanding or self-identity for Ricoeur is mixed – the self in not as a substance or entity but is a work or task, and therefore as inherently practical.

Again, this approach, which embraces both embodied, practical knowledge (belonging) and reflective, theoretical knowledge (distanciation) as constitutive of the practical self, means that Ricoeur’s notion of practice is distinctive. Using Ricoeur’s work as a foundation, I suggest that practices should not be understood in the sense of embodied, repeatable procedures, for example, a well-practiced figure skater whose movements are only achievable through embodied, habitual knowledge. Instead, practical understanding includes both this sense of practice, and the reflective, theoretical dimension outlined in Ricoeur’s account of explanation or distanciation. Therefore, although repetition is crucial in the formation of practical understanding, Ricoeur’s account includes the added dimension of the pattern of repetition (or spiral of understanding⁵⁷) that takes place through the back-and-forth movement of explanation and understanding (participation and distanciation). This form of repetition is one which strengthens understanding by differentiating it; the distance gained through reflection is both an alienating distance and a productive distance.

This is one of the ways that Ricoeur advocates the “long route of understanding”. It is important to mention these points here as they will become important later when considering the way that technologies produce distanciating effects in relation to on-going practices or traditions. It is also important since the following subsections consider Ricoeur’s account of the “sign”. As I mentioned at the outset, Ricoeur claims that hermeneutics is defined in relation to the symbol (ambiguity). For Ricoeur, this approach alone is limited, since symbols do not appear in a `direct’ unmediated manner. They always appear within an economy or system of relations. Therefore, he advocates a hermeneutic phenomenology. This distinguishes him as a hermeneutic thinker, since he is not only concerned with the problems of `saying’ (poietic showing) or of `Truth’, which would be the realm of the symbol, but also with the question of the how these moments of saying are constructed through the structures and paradigms that mediate this saying process. As I have outlined above, the reasons for this relate to his conception of practical self-understanding. Below I will examine further the reasons for this approach by considering further the distinction between signs and symbols, and structures and their applications, and why it is important to take both these separate but related aspects of language into account when considering the question of interpretation (taken in the broad sense to include application).

As we have seen, whereas Ricoeur and Derrida are both critical of Husserl’s aims, Derrida takes a more radical approach to the problem of signs and their meaning. Both agree that meaning can never be fully disentangled from the materiality of its expression, since the ’interiority’ of meaning proposed by Husserl denies its inherent communicative function. Meaning must exist in and through the world if it is to be meaningful in the world, i.e., have an effect. However, for Derrida, the logic of indication (Anzeichen) underpins, and surpasses, what Ricoeur calls the referential function of language. This difference hinges on the status of the `other’ in hermeneutics and deconstruction. For Derrida, the other (never) appears by way of the material trace, whereas for Ricoeur the referential function of language acts as an opening for the possibility of reconciliation and understanding. Ricoeur takes the epistemological route; we can never know for certain whether the world to which language refers is a common, shared one, yet the idea of a referential function acts as a productive regulative idea in the task of understanding. Both thinkers accept the unsurpassable fact of distance in any communication process, but whereas for Derrida this distance guarantees that a communication will never arrive at its intended destination, for Ricoeur distance is conceived as distanciation; the condition for a belonging which is struggled for and worked-through. As Richard Kearney notes, the difference here is between a “perhaps” (hermeneutics) and “perhaps not” (deconstruction) in relation to whether Godot will arrive.⁷⁷

Whereas both Ricoeur and Derrida are in strong agreement when it comes to the difficult nature of language, arising due to the materiality of its expression, they diverge when it comes to the role of the work of interpretation. To over-simplify their approaches: whereas Derrida stresses the disfigurative work of language (indication) on itself, Ricoeur stresses its configurative aspects. It is by cohering into the semblance of a `whole’ that language realises/actualises its capacity for productive understanding.

However, the configurative power of language, which remains threatened but never fully eclipsed by disfiguration, is not attributed to the author. It remains a property of language itself, understood as work. In a sense, it remains the promise of the technique that underpins the construction (configuration) of language, since techniques involve assemblies and configurations. Ricoeur’s first step in developing this thesis was, as we saw above, putting forward a critique of a purely phenomenological account of the `sign’, through resituating it within a network of indications. In this way, `meaning’ is no longer synonymous with the intention of a speaker. Yet, neither is it endlessly deferred. The “network of indications” is, Ricoeur posits, still decipherable, using the resources of structuralism, “Separated from speaking subjects, a language presents itself as a system of signs.”⁷⁸

Within the context of this thesis, the role structuralism plays in relation to language will be taken as analogous to the role that a technique plays in relation to practice. The structuralist approach, whose conclusions are in many ways redundant (this will be discussed further below), nevertheless represents a certain way of posing questions to language. It embraces methods of the natural sciences, and develops “a kind of intellectualism which is fundamentally antireflective, anti-idealist, and antiphenomenological.”⁷⁹ However, Ricoeur’s re-reading of structures as processes of structuration means that it is possible to account for both the practical and the configurational aspects of meaning. That is, it will become possible later to re-situate technologies and techniques, understood as modes of structuration and configuration, alongside practical understandings of the world. In the final part of this chapter I also discuss the ways that this relation is a productive one, through reference to the work of Wolfgang Iser, and a study conducted on architectural students to examine the relevance of Ricoeur’s theory for understanding the productivity computational moments in the design-process.

Freudian psychoanalysis is a mixed discourse that aims to take into account human consciousness/mental activity, largely concerned with questions of meaning, and the human unconscious, which behaves as a thing.¹¹⁵ As Habermas points out, this distinguishes psychoanalysis from “traditional” hermeneutics and explains its emancipatory character.¹¹⁶ It differs from traditional hermeneutic or philological questions of interpretation as they are seen as remaining at the level of the “mental” life of a subject, whereas psychoanalysis, through incorporating questions of force and the unconscious into its theory becomes a depth hermeneutics; it aims to interpret not only the mental and public utterances of a speaker or author but also the private, censored, unconscious life of a subject, because these private, “split-off” symbols have an affective or distorting role in relation to public forms of discourse. It counts as an emancipatory project due to the therapeutic clearing away of “split-off” symbols, removing distortions from communication and allowing subjects to engage with one another at a more transparent level.

While largely in agreement with Habermas and Alfred Lorenzer,¹¹⁷ Ricoeur’s approach to psychoanalysis differs in a key way. He reflects on psychoanalysis from within the Freudian framework, where the forces or drives associated with the unconscious and desire are not something which can ever be fully “normalised” or translated into cultural or rational expression, but rather must accompany the “working-through” of the patient indefinitely. If there is an emancipatory character to the Freudian dictum “Where the id was, there ego shall be,” it is not, as in Habermas’ case, the cultural or communicative project of overcoming instinct, but rather in overcoming the prejudice that views the rational and irrational elements of discourse as separable. This approach is similar to Simondon’s (Chapter 7) and, indeed, Ricoeur does reference Simondon in characterizing the `technical’ features of the human (found in the unconscious). As with Simondon’s approach to technology, the task is not to either disavow or fear the thing-like character of the unconscious, but to become more aware of its effect and to learn to work with it.

If the person is alienated from their own hidden motives, the psychoanalytic task is not necessarily one of enlightenment, whereby the hidden causes of action would become explicated through interpretation, but rather is one of appropriation. Characterizing the work as appropriation as opposed to explication, implies that what is being revealed or appropriated, with the aid of techniques, is something which is already present or intelligible, albeit in a repressed form. In this way, the technique of psychoanalysis is not something external to the practice, but deals with already-present but concealed features of the practice itself. The technique and practical elements are complementary in this sense, techniques aid in the process of drawing out what has already been implicitly understood, and therefore work to advance practical understanding.

Appropriation is brought about by way of a struggle to remove the bar between the conscious and the unconscious, and in a sense, challenge the misunderstanding that there is a radical separation between (rational, motivated) “person” and (irrational, casual) “thing”. The person must first recognise their own technicity in order to begin the work of “handling” it well. The notion of `technicity’ should be taken in a metaphorical sense, as a way of disclosing the thing-like character of the unconscious, i.e., the unconscious, according to Freudian thought, behaves in a way similar to Simondon’s “technical object” – it follows an internal or systematic logic as opposed the types of logic/motivations we would generally associate with classical concepts of agency. Ricoeur draws directly on the work of Simondon to highlight this point:

We can now complete our description of psychoanalysis as technique. Its technical object (to use Simondon’s term as a designation of the respondent or opponent of the psychoanalytic manoeuvre) is man insofar as he himself is a process of deformation, trans-position and dis-tortion applied to all the presentations (whether affective or ideational) of his oldest wishes, those which The Interpretation of Dreams calls “indestructible” or “atemporal” and which the article on “The Unconscious” declares to be zeitlos or timeless. Psychoanalysis is constituted as technique because, in the process of Entstellung, man himself behaves as a mechanism, submits to an external law, and “condenses” or “displaces” his thoughts…In this way the psyche is itself a technique practiced on itself, a technique of disguise and misunderstanding.¹¹⁸

Freud’s own papers on technique trace a developmental movement, guided by concrete experiences with patients, from an understanding of technique as interpretation and explication, towards an understanding of technique as a type of system or register. Technique, understood in this way, aims only indirectly at questions of meaning and interpretation. These papers on technique are notable for their departure from speculations regarding theoretical hypotheses in favour of a turn to practical questions regarding issues such as structures of appointments, “I adhere strictly to the principle of leasing a definite hour. Each patient is allotted a particular hour of my available working day; it belongs to him and he is liable for it, even if he does not make use of it…No other way is practicable.”¹¹⁹ The concern here is with how psychoanalytic therapy can become more effective, not with general questions of human psychology. For Ricoeur, the “genre” of these papers is an important aspect of their practical relevance, “I consider these texts to be of an exemplary clarity. They suffice to open an abyss between everything that reflection can draw out of itself and that which only a craft can teach.”¹²⁰

In one of these “exemplary” essays, “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through”, Freud charts three “phases” of psychoanalytic technique, whose progression goes from a model close to that of behavioural/observational psychology, towards the dialogical model of exchange that Ricoeur associates with a hermeneutic understanding of technique. The first phase is that of Breuer’s cathartic method, which uses hypnosis to encourage the remembering of past, repressed events. This method of remembering is rejected by Freud on the basis that its focus on the isolated event of trauma does not take into account the crucial aspect of “repeating” associated with the formation of symptoms. Furthermore, the method of hypnosis displaces the work aspect of analysis onto the hypnotic technique itself. This `external’ foray into the patients unconscious is closer to a technological (taken in Ricoeur’s negative sense of the term) mode of manipulation, than a genuine psychoanalytic encounter.

The second phase involved a “deciphering” of the patient’s free associations on the part of the analyst, who would then communicate the interpretations to the analysand. Once again, this method did not utilise the working-through aspect which the analysand themselves must go through in order to become conscious. Instead, the analyst performed the bulk of the work of interpretation. More importantly, if an “interpretation” or even a “guess” regarding the patient’s symptom is presented to them before the transference process has begun, it will be as if an external observer has communicated to them their inner-workings and fantasies, and will seem like a violation which provokes aggression and resistance, “[Premature diagnosis] will completely discredit oneself and the treatment in the patient’s eyes and will arouse the most violent opposition in him, whether one’s guess has been true or not; indeed, the truer the guess the more violent will be the resistance.”¹²¹ Whereas “in the earliest days of analytic technique we took an intellectualist view of the situation,”¹²² increased knowledge of the “mechanisms” of the unconscious and of the topographical differentiation of mental processes lead to the psychoanalytic insight that a “conscious” recognition did not necessary imply an unconscious transformation, especially if that area of the mind had been strongly encrypted: “The strange behaviour of patients, in being able to combine a conscious knowing with not knowing, remains inexplicable by what is called normal psychology.”¹²³ In other words, Freud arrives at a hermeneutic insight regarding the limitations of theory, taken in isolation. In response to this aporia, a technique must be developed which takes into account the dynamic and productive nature of practical working-through. This practical working-through abandons theoretical goals in favour of cultivating a relationship between both the patient and analyst (transference) and between the patient and his or her unconscious. Any external `interpretations’ or suggestions on the part of the analyst must become secondary to their own task of recognising the occurrence of transference, “When are we to begin making our communications to the patient?…Not until an effective transference has been established in the patient, a proper rapport with him.”¹²⁴

The idea of `technique’, then, had multiple senses throughout the early history of psychoanalysis. It was firstly associated with mechanisms or operations that could be performed to manipulate the analysand (hypnosis). Following this it was seen as the clinical manifestation of psychoanalytic or psychological theories, as a `key’ or `cipher’ that could be applied to unlock the secrets of the analysand’s discourse. Finally, it was dissociated from both `method’ (in the sense of a repeatable procedure) and theory, and was seen as an accompaniment to the dialogical setting of the analytical experience. This, final, concept of technique is founded on the idea that the unconscious works in and through language. More precisely, in and through intersubjective language (language mediated by desire). Since what is being `worked-through’ is already present in the discourse of the analysand, albeit in a concealed form, the `technique’ does not need to supply or supplement the analytic experience with anything, it simply has to work on making what is already implicit, explicit. Freud defines this sense of technique as a struggle against resistances. This final phase of technique, which Freud himself advocates, redistributes the types of labour associated with psychoanalytic practice and recognises the role of repetition in both the formation and overcoming of symptoms. The work becomes a shared work, and energies which would have been previously directed at processes of free-association or recounting, are now directed also at the processes of repeating and working-through. The analyst no longer does the work of remembering on behalf of the patient (either through inducing/guiding hypnosis, or by suggesting interpretations to the analysand), but instead aims to clear away the patient’s resistances so that they can perform the work of remembering themselves,

Finally, there was evolved the consistent technique used today, in which the analyst gives up the attempt to bring a particular moment or problem into focus. He contents himself with studying whatever is present for the time being on the surface of the patient’s mind, and employs the art of interpretation mainly for the purpose of recognising the resistances which appear there, and making them conscious to the patient. From this there results a new sort of division of labour: the doctor uncovers the resistances which are unknown to the patient; when these have been got the better of, the patient often relates the forgotten situations and connections without any difficulty.¹²⁵

In hermeneutic terms, the analyst is no longer concerned with “reconstructing” a past event using interpretive methods, but rather focuses on the contemporaneity of the patients discourse as it presents itself in this new, analytical experience. They, in a sense, cease to be directly interested in the patient themselves, that is in terms of their “psychological” life, and rather become interested in the ways that this psychological life is presented through language in a dialogical situation.

Although psychoanalytic methods of treatment are different than those associated with hermeneutic “explication”, they cannot be separated from the procedure of investigation itself. The procedures of psychoanalysis remain hermeneutic for Ricoeur, since the psychoanalytic situation is intersubjective. The dialectic between the quasi-mechanistic technique and its practical application in a dialogical situation leads to another important distinction for Ricoeur. Psychoanalytic technique is not an instrument for `adapting’ the analysand or for producing a `normalised’ self. It operates on linguistic structures, retaining both its hermeneutic and technical character. This relation with practical, hermeneutic questions of truth and meaning renders it “non-technological”: “In this sense, psychoanalysis is more an anti-technique…When I say that psychoanalysis is not a technique of domination, I wish to emphasize its important feature of being a technique of veracity.”¹²⁶ In other words, Ricoeur distinguishes the two senses of technique according to the classic Heideggerian distinction between truth as correspondence and truth as unconcealment – psychoanalytic technique, in being related to the uncovering of already-present practical meanings, more closely follows a process of unconcealment. Ricoeur’s use of the term “non-technique” is instructive in this sense. Psychoanalytic technique both is and is not related to the question of modern technology. It is also important to note that what Ricoeur is calling “non-technique” – a technique grounded in practice instead of being circumscribed by theory – I am calling “hermeneutic technique”. This will become the focal point for claiming that the practice-based features of hermeneutic technique are shared by aspects of modern technology.¹²⁷

Freud’s own reflections on technique are also expressions of a ’non-technique’, in that the analyst moves from being a figure who administers a cure (through hypnosis, for example), to the figure of the ’expert’ (who explicates and explains your symptoms on your behalf), to the figure of a dialogue partner who simply listens, points out resistances, and encourages the patient to work-through the past according to their own terms. With the receding of the centrality of a technique or method, the corresponding emergence of practical understanding is seen. The singularity of the patient can only appear in the absence of a more dominating technique. Although Ricoeur provocatively labels this approach a `non-technique’, it still retains many technical features (discussed above), but these features are placed in a dialectical relation with practical understanding, rendering them more `truthful’.

The art of interpretation is indeed replaced with the task of “handling” the patient. However, if, with Ricoeur, we aim to recognise the phenomenon of distanciation in any realisation of language as discourse, then a productive understanding of technique can be adopted without it having to constitute a violation of the patient’s singularity. For example, a patient’s dreams, which are always intimate and personal, are admitted into the analytic situation via the process of recounting. That is, what is subjected to the technique of the analyst is the dream content as it is told by the analysand, or in other words the dream-content realised as discourse. The analyst is not interested in naturalistic questions concerning the actual dream itself, but rather with the way in which the patient recounts it to her. This conversational setting for examining an intimate aspect of the patient’s life could be contrasted with an analysis of a dream in a neurological study. Again, through replacing the `art’ of interpretation with the work of handling resistances, Freud is ascribing psychoanalytic technique the role not of understanding the patient better (as a singular individual), but of understanding their particular form of discourse better. To draw on Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the text, the analyst as technician is no longer directly concerned with the psychic life “behind” the patient’s words, but rather becomes concerned with the types of worlds and meanings opened up in front of the patient’s text.

Psychoanalytic technique does depend on, and gain its specificity from, a series of “technological” metaphors, which perhaps at first sight lead it to be confused with a method of controlling or mastering natural drives: “It is a technique, by its character as work and its commerce with energies and mechanisms which are attached to the economy of desire.”¹²⁸ But it nevertheless is more concerned with the “derivatives” of instinctual representatives, “The analyst never handles forces directly but always indirectly in the play of meaning, double meaning, and substituted, displaced, or transposed meanings. An economy of desire, yes – but across a semantics of desire. A dynamics, yes – but across a hermeneutics.”¹²⁹ In this way, psychoanalytic technique is related to the act of distanciation. By acting on linguistic manifestations of desire (as opposed to addressing the desire directly), it is reflective of the distance already produced between a person’s understandings (unconscious or `pre-understandings’) and their representations of these understandings to themselves or another.

It becomes a “technique of veracity” through this interrelationship between a hermeneutics of discourse and a technique of “handling” resistances. The goal of the handling is “access to true discourse,”¹³⁰ and not necessarily finding a “cure” for the analysand. Although psychoanalytic treatment does aim to move progressively from the pleasure principle towards the reality principle, the “reality” in question here has to be distinguished from “homologous concepts such as stimuli or environment.”¹³¹ Instead, “this reality is fundamentally the truth of a personal history in a concrete situation; it is not, as in psychology, the order of stimuli as they are known by the experimenter but rather the true meaning which the patient must arrive at through the obscure labyrinth of the fantasy.”¹³²

This aspect of Freudian psychoanalysis is attested to most strongly through the way in which it conceives of the work of mourning. This work does not consist in a complete “destruction” or annulling of the fantasy object which gives rise to melancholia, but rather in demonstrating the complicity of a fantasy object with the real-life resistances that it gives rise to. Once these resistances have been removed, the fantasy is not dispelled but unmasked. It can then be resituated at the appropriate level, that of the imaginary, and can accompany the patient in their working through without giving rise to further resistance,

Far from restricting itself to vanquishing the fantasy to the benefit of reality, the cure also recovers it as a fantasy to situate it, without confusing it with what is real, on the level of the imaginary…I will venture to say, in summation, that what is psychoanalytically relevant is what a subject makes of his fantasies.¹³³

Furthermore, Ricoeur situates the Freudian approach within a philosophical tradition concerned not with mastering or dispelling desire, but with redirecting and working with human desire in the project of becoming a subject. For Ricoeur, the analytic experience aims to recover two aspects of human existence, the ability to speak and the ability to love,¹³⁴ aspects of the self that have become detached and dispersed among various idols, pasts, or dogmatic forms of discourse. This “exteriorisation” of desire is what has to be worked-through, via detours, so that the subject can find themselves again: “The thesis of the anteriority, the archaism, of desire is fundamental to a reformulation of the cogito: like Aristotle, like Spinoza and Leibniz, like Hegel, Freud places desire at the centre of the act of existing.”¹³⁵ The project is not one of `freeing’ the will, which would be associated with a technological project of mastering nature, but rather, following Spinoza, “psychoanalysis proceeds…by suspending consciousness and thus rendering the subject equal to its real slavery. It is precisely by beginning with the level of this slavery, by delivering oneself without restraint to the imperious flux of deep motivations, that the true situation of consciousness is discovered.”¹³⁶ If we associate technological rationality with the will to power, as Heidegger does, then the psychoanalytic method must be understood as a “nontechnique”, as resisting this approach to human nature.

It should be clear at this point that Ricoeur’s understanding of technique is complex. Along with Freud he sees it as being something distinct from an “interpretive” method of explication, and indeed as arising due to the need to resist a too-quick interpretation of symptoms, but also as being separate from “technology”, taken in the sense of being a controlling attitude indifferent to human or culturally specific questions of meaning. In order to explore the function of technique more fully it is necessary to shift focus away from psychoanalytic discourse and towards the hermeneutic sphere of practice, where technique becomes meaningful in relation to human action and understanding. Psychoanalytic technique is not an `instrument’, but rather as a type of register which guides the recursive unfolding of experience throughout the course of analysis. The recursivity takes place between concrete subjects, with corresponding (partly concealed) life histories, and the framework represented by the technique, whose purpose is to gradually clear away built up resistances so that new meanings and practical orientations can emerge.

One of the guiding motives here will be that, following Ricoeur, critical theory and hermeneutics must be taken as inseparable. A technique of unmasking, led by a critical attitude of suspicion, can never become meaningful or effective until it is situated in a relation which is fundamentally one of belonging, “for when all is said and done, it is impossible to destroy anyone in absentia or in effigie.”¹³⁷ Practical understanding cannot occur independently of application, and a situation in which an interpretation is applied is always one to which a subject always already belongs. Of course, analytic experience presupposes the persistence of (historical) distance due to the nature of repression. It is an archaeology of desire as much of its work involves forays into past, distant events, such as those of childhood. But this archaeology is always accompanied by a corresponding teleology which aims to resituate these past experiences in the present contexts to which the subject belongs and participates in. The patient’s life history is the context for the application; they have not understood an interpretation of their symptom fully if it has not begun to affect their life. This is why the analytic experience has as one of its central forms of “work” the task of forming an appropriate narrative.

Application here must be taken in the traditional, but `forgotten’, sense that Gadamer outlines in Truth and Method. Rather than being a separate, secondary moment, whereby knowledge or an interpretation is first gained and subsequently applied or “tested”, it should be seen as an integral moment in a process of understanding. The same is true of Ricoeur’s concept of appropriation; a text will remain misunderstood until the horizons of the world of the text and the horizons of the world of the reader have been brought into dialogue. This aspect of understanding is also what renders interpretation perpetually incomplete. There will always be the possibility that a text will be understood in a new way through future processes of application or appropriation. As already discussed in Chapter 1, Gadamer points out that application was, for a time, a central concern for hermeneutics “it was considered obvious that the task of hermeneutics was to adapt the text’s meaning to the concrete situation to which the text is speaking.”¹³⁸ This was clear both in cases of legal and biblical hermeneutics: “A law does not exist in order to be understood historically, but to be concretized in its legal validity by being interpreted. Similarly, the gospel does not exist in order to be understood as a merely historical document, but to be taken in such a way that it exercises its saving effect.”¹³⁹

In relation to psychoanalysis, we could say the same about the `genre’ of the life or case history of a patient. It is an unsettled text, a narrative that has beneath it the force of traumatic or repressed past events which have a ripple effect on the surface, literal narrative. Through the lens of psychoanalytic technique this narrative, at first appearing as nonsensical and disconnected, becomes re-read as being subjected to these forces, with the result that seemingly disparate moments become signs of a repetition of the same event. Through the work of reflection, they cease to become `literal’ and instead become ’symbolic’. However, this re-telling process can only take place at the level of analytic experience itself, and therefore takes on a fundamentally applied character. It is not an instantaneous moment of revelation, but rather a constant and enduring working-through of resistances. The patient’s text is not something which has to be `mined’ for meaning, it is not a series of symptoms which merely have to be reconnected to an original event in order to be overcome, rather the analysis takes place in an intersubjective or dialogical setting and it is this context which sets the scene for the working-through. In this way, Freud’s metaphor of translation should be compared with Gadamer’s understanding of the translators task, “the interpreter’s task is not simply to repeat what one of the partners says in the discussion he is translating, but to express what is said in a way that seems most appropriate to him.”¹⁴⁰ The analyst struggles to translate the analysand’s utterances into the appropriate register of the technique, but the analysand must also struggle to find a way to render the technique meaningful in relation to their own life, a life which contains a much larger set of involvements and experiences than can be incorporated into the psychoanalytic situation and its techniques. Divorced from its dependency on practical application, technique can become a dangerous tool for moulding the patient as an “object”, for example in the case of Dora (Ida Bauer),

As several of Freud’s successors noted, the “talking cure” did not actually work for Dora for the probable reason that Freud construed her story according to his own unconscious identifications – in particular with the virile Herr K., whom Freud believed Dora wished to marry…The problem with Dora’s case may well be that it was treated by Freud less as a life in search of a history than as a (case) history in search of a life.¹⁴¹

This radical distancing on the part of the therapist, the refusal to recognise the claims of the patient as another, and not just as a “case” to submit to a technique, can be as therapeutically negligent as a situation in which a technique aiming at a cure is abandoned altogether.

Freud’s outline of transference serves as a unique and productive contribution to a critical-practical understanding. Characterising psychoanalytic technique as a struggle against resistances means putting transference at the heart of psychoanalysis, since, “finally every conflict has to be fought out in the sphere of transference.”¹⁴² Transference is significant for the wider consideration of the relation between technique and practice because it productively combines aspects of technique (struggle against resistances, “handling” of the patient) and practical understanding. In terms of practical understanding, it plays on key aspects of dialogue, understood in a hermeneutic sense. As was mentioned above, Freud’s own term for the type of relationship established through transference is one of rapport between two partners. Furthermore, it draws implicitly on hermeneutic conceptions of play and history. The theoretical claim underpinning transference is that a subject, shaped by childhood experiences, carries with them a type of template, which contributes (often negatively) to the formation of relations with others. The mixture of innate characteristics and early formative experiences “produces what might be described as a stereotype plate (or several such), which is constantly repeated – constantly reprinted afresh – in the course of the person’s life.”¹⁴³ The analyst becomes inserted into this series via transference,

Thus it is a perfectly normal and intelligible thing that the libidinal cathexis of someone who is partly unsatisfied, a cathexis which is held ready in anticipation, should be directed as well to the figure of the doctor…the cathexis will introduce the doctor into one of the psychical “series” which the patient has already formed.¹⁴⁴

The technique of transference, which is developed around this insight, consists not in a critical “removal” of stereotypical models, but rather in a bringing into play of these models in the context of a situation that is guided by a technique of unmasking.

This bringing into play of the fore-structures of the patient, so that they can be transformed through application, is what renders analytic experience a hermeneutics of suspicion, i.e., the investigation into the psychic life of the patient is not carried out by a distant observer but by a distanciated participant. The analytic experience involves a “staging” of a repetitive series, a “transposing [of] the drama that generated the neurotic situation onto a sort of miniature artificial stage,”¹⁴⁵ This characterization of transference draws on similar features of play and appropriation that Ricoeur adopts from Gadamer.¹⁴⁶ By putting a subject matter in play, you are at once distancing yourself from your everyday self/concerns, whilst allowing a deeper or concealed truth to be brought into focus. For Gadamer, it is only in play that these concealed truths can appear, since, in contrast to regimented, ordered, everyday existence, ontological truths are dynamic and `playful’.¹⁴⁷ This means that transference is not just projection; it is also an exposure to the other within oneself. In a similar way to engaging with a text, putting one’s own assumptions or life history in play is what is required for transformation to occur, “To understand is not to project oneself into the text but to expose oneself to it; it is to receive a self enlarged by the appropriation of the proposed worlds that interpretation unfolds…The metamorphosis of the world in play is also the playful metamorphosis of the ego.”¹⁴⁸ This hermeneutic approach, of exposing oneself to the text as opposed to examining it from a distance, captures the dialectic of distanciation and belonging, since even at a reflective distance one is exposed to the consequences of the reading. The same dialectic is at work in psychoanalysis, where past patterns are brought into play in a distanciated or reflective mode (the analytic situation), but in such a way as to re-appropriate these patterns by transforming them through novel insights. The play or staging of transference is a feature of psychoanalytic technique at work in practice, i.e., technique, regarded as a method of reflective distanciation as opposed to domination is seen as something that enables a productive self-distancing in the project of revealing significant truths. Technique and practical understanding are complementary in this sense.

However, if the technique complements practical understanding in certain regards (as a mode of productive distanciaiton), there remains a fundamental difference between practical understaning (of meanings, interpretations, etc.) and the discourse of the technqiue (which is concerned with “economies of desire”). This difference itself is also key to how the technique-practice dialectic is rendered productive. Psychoanalytic technqiues, in this sense, can be characterised as a type of register, whose technological metaphors aim at bringing to light aspects of the analysand’s motivations and desires that remain hidden to them. Every case of psychoanalysis begins with or is founded on a recognition of suffering and a corresponding motivation to alleviate or better understand this suffering. Taken on their own, these motivations or resources found in the suffering person are not sufficient to overcome the psychic conflict. The right paths to follow on the way to the `cure’ are opaque. The technique of psychoanalysis aims to gradually bring to light which paths will work through the clearing away of resistances, and a corresponding “handling” or redirecting of libidinal energies toward these paths (or a “storing up” of libidinal energy for this purpose through various techniques, e.g., abstinence), “Two things are lacking in the [motive force to annul suffering]: it does not know what paths to follow to reach this end and it does not possess the necessary quota of energy with which to oppose the resistances. The analytic treatment helps to remedy both of these deficiencies.”¹⁴⁹

Arguably, the type of work involved in this clearing away of resistances is one that is fundamentally recursive. The analytic experience takes place over a long period of time, and involves many alterations to the techniques being employed as the subject matter of the analysand shifts and more layers of their history and condition unfold. For Wolfgang Iser, Ricoeur’s reading of Freud succeeds in drawing out the specificity of psychoanalytic theory as being fundamentally concerned with hidden or obscured subject matters and which has therefore developed a corresponding mode of interpretation which is that of a transactional loop,

The looping operation is designed to regain what is lost; by making the repressed return, it clears blockages, thus recovering what the subject had been striving for when losing itself to the otherness of life. What is glimpsed of the hidden archê is to be fed forward into a surmised telos, from which a feedback will be received.¹⁵⁰

This necessary “feedback” process, characteristic of a recursive procedure, is caused by the nesting of the method of treatment (technique) into the investigatory procedure of analysis. The investigatory procedure, the field of meaning and discourse, and the methods of treatment, which are concerned with questions of force and the struggle against resistances, are two fundamentally incommensurable modes of practical understanding. This is what gives rise to “feedback” and the characterisation of the experience as recursive. Arguably, Ricoeur’s readings of Freud work to thematise this incommensurability by demonstrating the ways that a hermeneutics of suspicion presupposes a phenomenological understanding of meaning and consciousness. Ricoeur’s grafting of both the Hegelian and Husserlian understandings of intersubjectivity and the process of becoming conscious onto Freud’s archaeology of desire aims to destabilise “dogmatic” interpretations of Freud and show instead the fundamentally regional aspects of Freudian methods of interpretation. The psychoanalytic experience itself depends on the incommensurability between techniques and practical investigation since the working-through aspect of understanding proposed by Freud is something that explicitly resists `instant’ or immediate events of comprehension in favour of the gradual, and potentially interminable, process of clarification. The tension between the technique and practice opens what Iser refers to as a “liminal” space in which conflicts are constantly negotiated and renegotiated. The technique conditions the quality or nature of this liminal space, whilst also providing a means of access or “pathway” to hidden motivations

The register brought to bear in such an [interpretive] act is marked by a basic duality: (a) it is meant to provide a means of access to what is interpreted, but (b) it is also the framework into which the subject matter is translated. These two functions of the register are interdependent, and this holds true – at least up to a point – even if the register is more or less superimposed on the subject matter. In this case, the framework nevertheless functions as a means of access.¹⁵¹

This point also marks the limits of psychoanalytic technique. The regional, practical “subject matter” to which the technique is employed is one that extends beyond the analytic experience. It incorporates the life histories of both the analyst and analysand. As Vinicio Busacchi notes, the particular framework of the method of treatment proposed by Freud was seen, to an extent, as being surpassable by Ricoeur, through an alternative framework derived from narrative understanding:¹⁵²

It is no longer possible to preserve the economic, I would even say quasi-energetic model of Freudianism. It is necessary to reincorporate the linguistic element, the dialogical element, the element having to do with the relation between appearance and truth in the imaginary (an element one can call Platonic), and the narrative element, and to coordinate these four elements to make up the basis of a theory appropriate to the analytic experience, a hermeneutics.¹⁵³

Nevertheless, there is a crucial concept of work captured by the technological, energetic metaphors of technique. The hermeneutic reading of the psychoanalytic experience aims to draw out the value of this work in-itself, as opposed to seeing it simply as a means of production:

For its part, the work of mourning, since it requires time, projects the artisan of the work ahead of himself: he will have to continue, one by one, to cut the ties that hold him in the grip of the lost objects of his love and his hate; as for reconciliation with the loss itself, this will forever remain an unfinished task.¹⁵⁴

Recognising the work character of mourning means recognizing the figure of, what Ricoeur calls here, the “artisan”, i.e., of a figure who is to some extent equipped not only with self-knowledge but with knowledge of how things (in this case, the unconscious) work. In other words, when it comes to practical knowledge of oneself, immediate self-knowledge does not suffice. Due to the intersubjective nature of desire, some degree of distanciation is required in the task of understanding oneself. Psychoanalytic technique, understood as a register or framework to aid in the clearing away of resistances, is still invaluable when considering the above “artisanal” task of “cutting the ties” between oneself and the fantasy objects which have been “unsuccessfully” mourned. However, beyond the figure of the “artisan” or the therapist, it is only immediate self-understanding (reflected in the experiences of vulnerability and capability) that can accompany the patient beyond the therapy room and which anticipates the fundamental negativity of experience and the impossibility of total reconciliation.

One final, key feature of the technique-practice relation in the analytic experience must be pointed out. This is the feature that is suggested by the difference between or incommensurability of the practice and the technique. Within Freud’s own writings, he puts into question the therapeutic status of psychoanalysis by investigating whether it is “terminable” or not.¹⁵⁵ In the context of the current investigation, this question relates to whether the practice-technique dialectic can be seen as commensurable or incommensurable, i.e., as to whether the struggle and working-through carried out by the analyst and analysand, with the aids of techniques, can be resolved and overcome in the figure of a `healthy’, or `cured’ patient.

As we have seen already, what gives technique its vitality is its subject matter - the (ego) life of the patient, which is both anticipated by, and exceeds, the limits of the technique. Freud even acknowledges that, if a technique is a struggle against resistances, the ego is something that struggles against this very struggle.¹⁵⁶ Psychoanalytic technique is not applied to the `human mind’, as in the case of behavioural psychology, but to the life-history of a human. With behavioural psychology, the completeness of the method and its outcome is determined in advance, by focusing on abstracted, objective characteristics of behaviour, such as measurable response to stimuli, etc. The outcome of analysis, by contrast, is not known in advance, the facts dealt with are those submitted by the analysand themselves, and by the varying practical contexts over the course of treatment. The wager of psychoanalysis is that this, more practice-based, selection process is more `truthful’, in the sense that what emerges in analysis, by conscious or unconscious selection, will be what is more relevant or meaningful to this particular case or person. This is the type of dynamic we have explored above. Freud himself characterises the two types of procedures as id-analysis (explication of hidden motives using techniques and interpretation), and ego-analysis, which is a determining of the character and particularities of the current patient, i.e., an analysis of the features which emerge through the practice of psychoanalysis. The therapeutic effort is always a work of mediation between the clinical and personal, “During the treatment our therapeutic work is constantly swinging backwards and forwards like a pendulum between a piece of id-analysis and a piece of ego-analysis.”¹⁵⁷

Whereas the id-analysis is directed at the `mechanical’ workings of the unconscious, the practical subject matter, the life-history of the analysand, must be grasped in its properly historical character, that is, in its processual and developing nature. Psychoanalytic technique, which is directed towards putting the past in play, to explicate and overcome it, finds within this aim its own incompleteness. By encouraging, or provoking, the work of remembering, understood as anamnesis, it constitutes its subject as a historical subject. Or, in other words, as an unfinished subject. As Gadamer writes, “To exist historically means that knowledge of oneself can never be complete [ Geschichtlichsein heisst, nie im Sichwissen aufgehen ]”¹⁵⁸ Technique, as an aid to memory, brings with it all the ambiguities of Plato’s pharmakon.

Aside from these philosophical understandings of history and incompleteness, the reasons Freud himself examines for the difficulty of the ego in relation to its own `completeness’ are numerous, and range from `innate’ factors and dispositions (depending on their libidinal type, patients may be as `granite’ or `soft clay’, with the first type being strongly resistant, and changes to the second type being impermanent), to external factors such as stress and aging (“psychic entropy”). Persistent throughout Freud’s essay is a tension between his reflections on psychoanalysis (and its technique) and his reflections on the unavoidable question of `human nature’, especially in its historical character. This is another instance of what Ricoeur maintains throughout his readings of Freud - that psychoanalytic reflection always leads towards philosophical speculation, that encounters with Freud lead us to encounters with Hegel. Freud’s own terminus of philosophical reflection is Empedocles whose fundamental principles of love and strife resonate with Freud’s own conflicting cosmic forces; Eros and `destructiveness’, which underpin the development of the ego, and guarantee its forever unsettled state. All these characterizations result in a crucial point; if there existed an `ideal ego’, an ego which would embrace therapy wholly, psychoanalytic technique would indeed find completion. Instead, all ego states are already “altered” states. They have their own patterns, peculiarities, investments, traumas, and so on. In this sense, technique does not operate in an `ideal’ setting, such as a laboratory, but takes place in the real world and through real structures and living processes. Any alterations effected during therapy are always alterations of alterations. Freud describes this point as follows:

We know that the first step towards attaining intellectual mastery of our environment is to discover generalizations, rules and laws which bring order into chaos. In doing this we simplify the world of phenomena; but we cannot avoid falsifying it, especially if we are dealing with processes of development and change. What we are concerned with is discerning a qualitative alteration, and as a rule in doing so we neglect, at any rate to begin with, a quantitative factor. In the real world, transitions and intermediate stages are far more common than sharply differentiated opposite states. In studying developments and changes we direct our attention solely to the outcome; we readily overlook the fact that such processes are usually more or less incomplete – that is to say, they are in fact only partial alterations.¹⁵⁹

Pushing this point even further, and coming close to Ricoeur’s own thoughts on the symbol and mythology, Freud suggests that `alterations’ to understandings, such as therapeutic insights and transformations, conserve prior alterations in their structure. Developments are not ’successive’, “…replacements do not take place all of a sudden, but gradually, so that portions of the earlier organization always persist alongside of [sic] the more recent one…What has once come to life clings tenaciously to its existence. One feels inclined to doubt sometimes whether the dragons of primeval days are really extinct.”¹⁶⁰ Owing to these factors, which render it extremely difficult to “quantitatively” assess analysis, the question of whether analysis is terminable or interminable is left open at the theoretical level. Furthermore, it implies that no technique or technology will ever be total, at least when it comes to questions of human understanding.

Nevertheless, even when questions remain open at the theoretical level, this does not exclude a resolution at the practical and technical levels, by bringing about a sense of mastery (as opposed to control). To introduce this question in the essay, Freud quotes Sándor Ferenczi: “analysis is not an endless process, but one which can be brought to a natural end with sufficient skill and patience on the analyst’s part.”¹⁶¹ For Ferenczi, improvements in skill and discipline can yield positive results, a view which resonates with Foucault’s technique de soi. Freud, though, always the humanist (and pessimist), calls this recourse to technique a “comforting assurance”, and asserts, instead, “Analysts are people who have learned to practice a particular art; alongside this, they may be allowed to be human beings like anyone else.”¹⁶² Being practiced by flawed human beings, analysis never guarantees a resolution, and can always elude mastery, yet it does promise resolution and mastery, a fact that cannot be disclosed through theory or technique, but only through practical experience, for example in the case of agreement,

I am not intending to assert that analysis is altogether an endless business. Whatever one’s theoretical attitude to the question may be, the termination of analysis is, I think a practical matter. Every experienced analyst will be able to recall a number of cases in which he has bidden a patient a permanent farewell rebus bene gestis.¹⁶³

Determining whether “things have gone well”, is a matter of practical wisdom (phronēsis). On this point, Freud and Ricoeur are in accord with one another. One of the returning motifs in Ricoeur’s work is the notion of a `poetic resolution’ to a `theoretical aporia’. Despite the inscrutability of time, we create works which express temporal experience (narratives); despite the heterogeneity of meanings across languages, we translate; despite the impossibility of forgiveness, we forgive; despite the persistence of trauma, we heal. These examples all attest to the fact that an artful or poietic work does not belong to the theoretical structures that it responds to (otherwise it would be impossible). Instead, it emerges through the experience of working-through aporias at the practical level.

I have aimed to elucidate three key features of psychoanalytic technique that demonstrate the ways in which it should be moved from being taken in a general sense as a method or art of discerning hidden meanings in human consciousness, toward a greater appreciation of its fundamentally regional character. The evolution of psychoanalytic technique, guided by insights from this region of analytic experience and the concrete work of engaging with patients, shows that it becomes less and less an intellectual tool of explication, and more of a techne or skill of handling the “thing-like” character of discourse, that is, those aspects of language which behave in ways not bound to relations of “meaning”, but which still are recognisable as forces, displacements, distortions, and so on. The wager of psychoanalytic technique understood in this sense is that if one pays attention to the (technical) ways in which resistances form, and aims to address this aspect of the analytic experience, new narrative paths and orientations will emerge organically.

However, the task of working-through resistances is not one of moulding or adapting the patient’s identity, but rather a redirecting of desires and motivations in new directions. This means that the analysand’s concrete life history must be taken as the start and end-point for the technique. The technique does not `suggest’ or impose a model of health or flourishing for the analysand, but rather works with, and through, the pre-given material found in their life history and self-understanding. It does not aim to totally nullify or demythologize idols, but rather to situate them on a more appropriate plane of understanding, through which they become unmasked and seen as scattered aspects of the imaginary and therefore of oneself.

Psychoanalytic technique is inextricably linked to the practical tasks of application and understanding. It remains distinctive from practical concerns with meaning, but is fundamentally bound to the symbolic, lived experience of the psychoanalytic procedure of investigation. Techniques of transference consist in bringing into play aspects of the implicit understandings of the analysand so that these understandings can be made more explicit and worked through. This conception of technique is instructive for hermeneutics more generally, as it highlights the recursivity of experience, especially practical experiences which are mediated by various registers or frameworks. The persistent tension between the techne or craft of psychoanalysis, involving a handling of and struggle against resistances, and the field of meaning (the analysand’s life history) to which it is applied, gives rise to a form of hermeneutic understanding which is not one of interpretation as “explication”, but of interpretation as involving a mixture of tasks of clarification alongside a “playing with” prehistories and hidden subject matters. The meanings which emerge through this process are different from the types of meaning which emerge from an “intellectual” or philological interpretation of a text.

Finally, we must ask if there is not an asymmetry between psychoanalytic technique and practical understanding. The practical understandings of a subject will always involve `concealed’ elements, and will always remain subject to change and transformation through encounters with a plurality of frameworks and registers. In this way, psychoanalytic technique can only go so far in the important works of mourning, remembering and becoming a subject. Outside of the analytic experience, these tasks must be continued indefinitely, “Melancholy is not simply a psychic disturbance. It is a threat inscribed in each of us, once we begin to consent to sadness, to fatigue, to discouragement. Its name then is despair, the ”sickness unto death“ described by Kierkegaard.”¹⁶⁴ The struggle for resolution undertaken by a person entering a course of therapy, aided by the analyst, is both terminable and interminable. Simple alterations to our self-understanding are often sufficient to determine that a course of therapy has finished, even if the over-arching (metapsychological) goal of technique is to effect a more fundamental cure. This, of course, leaves us vulnerable to regressions, new problems, new forms of repetition, and so on, but recognising this vulnerability is crucial to understanding the limits of any technique applied to historical subjects. If the human self is defined in relations to its practical, historical character, then all techniques that are aimed at altering or effecting human life are bound to fail or remain “incomplete”.

Extrapolating from these readings of psychoanalytic technique by Ricoeur, it is possible to suggest a hermeneutic account of technique as being both related-to and different-from immediate practical understanding. Ricoeur’s positive account of psychoanalytic technique allows us to consider the productive and dynamic roles that techniques play in uncovering practical meanings at a distance. Ricoeur’s view of technique, here, also suggests its critical function – it is also a “nontechnique”, a mode of distanced reflection on practical understanding that opposes itself to the more radical ’distance’ of modern technology. In the next chapter, these features of hermeneutic technique will be explored in relation to narrative distanciation. Narratives works, like psychoanalytic techniques, can be considered along the lines of a `technique’ that is also a ’nontechnique’. In the context of “modern technology” and its approach to time, narratives offer a productive distanciation of our experience of time.

As with Ricoeur’s critical account of psychoanalytic technique taken in isolation, Simpson’s analysis of technologies and time argues that the problem with modern technology is that it alienates us from the temporal flux of practice. Similar to psychoanalysis, where meaning is a feature of the dialogical, analytic experience, Simpson reads practice as a human space where meaningful relations can be disclosed. Meaning cannot be anticipated in advance. It can only be encountered in the concrete experience of learning through non-identical repetitions. Whereas technology approaches time through the attitude of linear planning, the meaningful repetitions of practice follow the serpentine motion non-identical repetition outlined by Pickstock. Practical repetitions contribute to the formation of a self that is more concrete and inscribed within a particular outlook, one the one hand, and more adaptive and capable of bearing change and variation, on the other, “The mark of strength of a thing as an ingrained habitude would be its spontaneity and adaptability, since a string disposition is not merely fixed and stubborn but capable of originality and improvisation.”¹⁷¹ According to Simpson, modern technology alienates us from these experiences since it offers easy applications and displaces the need to “work-through” a situation. A practice-oriented approach recognizes that meaning is a complex phenomenon that is arrived at through deliberations and practical judgements originating from within the procedure or practice itself, rather than being derived in advance using an external theory or method.

This approach to practice is continuous with a hermeneutic one. Hermeneutics is firstly a confrontation with actual texts and discourse, not a confrontation with theoretical structures. Owing to the temporal nature of the reading experience, time is an immanent property of meaning, one which cannot be reduced through systemization or rationalization. A text or situation cannot be read `instantaneously’. There is always the synthesizing activity of a subject/participant (comportment), as well as the variable nature of practices themselves (history, dialectic of tradition/innovation). Both processes are always ’in-between’, and resist any unmediated grasping of their contents.

As Michel Foucault has noted, hermeneutic understanding, then, involves a degree of `subjection’ to these indeterminate features of practice.<sup>172</sup> In order to become a subject, one has to `subject’ oneself to external constraints. The hermeneutic wager is that giving up ’control’ of a situation allows one to perceive and understand it better. Control, in this sense, would refer to `knowledge of’ a situation, especially theoretical knowledge (episteme). Giving up the types of control gained through the certainty of theoretical knowledge leaves one in a vulnerable, uncertain position, but it is this uncertainty that allows an individual to develop a mastery of a practice. One becomes a hermeneutic subject through this process of subjectivation; by allowing a text to instruct, to subject oneself to it rather than having it as an object of study, its full implications are allowed to unfold. It becomes not only a source of knowledge and information, but also a potential source of transformation.

This approach embraces vulnerability as a necessary condition of understanding and self-transformation. In contrast, the technological attitude, according to Simpson, views the experience of vulnerability as ’alienating’, and as something to be avoided when possible. Simpson writes:

Technology, in its attempt to subdue time’s characteristic flux, aims to “domesticate” time by harnessing the future predictability and reliability to the present. As a result, being in time comes to be viewed as an alienating rather than as a productive condition. I suggest further that, in predisposing us to experience time as the “other” to be subdued or annihilated, technological civilization threatens to marginalize project of meaningful doing, the stuff of which stories are made.¹⁷³

Here, we can see that what Simpson sees as threatened by technological civilization is what Ricoeur calls mimesis₁, the living, material configurations from which narratives are drawn. As technological attitudes become more dominant, we become more alienated from, and inclined to guard against, all those `chance’ aspects of lived experience, the twists and turns of human life that are not ’preprogramed’ or ordered through the technological representations of time, that provoke reflection on ourselves and the formation of a narrative self. For example, not so long ago travelling across the Atlantic Ocean involved boarding a ship and journeying for a long period of time. Upon arrival at your destination, your life may have been profoundly altered, you arrive in a `new world’, both in the sense of a new geographical location, as well as potentially having a new ’worldview’. Today, the journey has been transformed by technology; you board a plane and the journey lasts only several hours. You are served refreshments and watch a few movies. Your arrival in a `new world’ is no longer an event of the same proportions. In this sense, the symbolic networks of the lifeworld have indeed been altered through multiple technological innovations. For Simpson, these alterations are ultimately nihilistic - a prenarrative field of experience whose codes encourage us to act in uniform, efficient ways ultimately eclipses, precisely, the ’prenarrative’ sense of this field. `Potential’ stories, as Ricoeur calls them, begin to fade away.

In short, like the long journey across the Atlantic, we endure praxis; repetitions are not carried out to better `optimize’ an action leading to a production, but rather are carried out for their own sake, so that one can learn a practice well and better understand it. It is in this sense that practice always has a duration, and technology, according to Simpson, views this duration as dangerous because of the threat of alienation it implies. A hermeneutics of practice, on the other hand, views the encounter with the other (including the self as other) as necessary in the process of self-formation and transformation. Practical understanding is powerful because it often `alienates’ us from ourselves, allowing previously unseen or unfelt expectations to come to the fore and be productively challenged.

Below, Simpson’s critique of technology will be explored further. His reading helps to articulate crucial features of hermeneutic practice, and the way in which these features provide a strong foundation for a criticism of modern technology. Importantly, technologies and practices are drawn closely together in certain respects – both involve relations to history, meaning, and representation. In the end, what differentiates them is a question of attitude or comportment. It is not technology as such that is a problem, but the way in which it becomes a part of the fabric of everyday life, and in doing so alienates us from a risky confrontation with practices. However, it will also be suggested that Simpson’s strong approach, which argues that technologies alienate us from practice, ultimately conceals the way that technologies depend on practical applications and regulation by human interlocutors. This line of thought follows Simondon’s lead, who argues that fears regarding the ’automatic’ nature of technology end up alienating us from understanding them better. Like narrative, many technologies depend on a process of concretization, a process that occurs in practice and over time (Chapter 7).

Simpson’s characterization of the technological attitude to time as standing against the practical understanding of meaningful duration recalls Heidegger’s criticism of `ordinary’ time that stands against, and causes forgetfulness of, our more `authentic’ relation to the world as revealed through care (Sorge).¹⁹⁴ While Ricoeur agrees with Heidegger’s claim that our relation to the world is fundamentally one of care, he disagrees that this mode of being is more authentic than existing within the `everyday’ or derived time of modern society. As has already been discussed, Ricoeur aims to account for the mixed nature of practical understanding as involving relations of both belonging (care) and the distanciated structures that mediate this belonging. Structures and representations that mediate our practical participation in the world, for example clocks and calendars, indeed displace us from a more ’primordial’ relation to the world, but in doing so also disclose new possibilities for action. Furthermore, the co-existence of distanciated forms of mediation and immediate, practical concerns is inevitable for Ricoeur. Practical relations with the world always have an intentional structure that can be clarified and translated into structural modes of expression. A farmer who participates `authentically’ in the tending of the land and growing of crops, even independently of the support of calendars and clocks, does so in a way that “non-identically repeats” a relation to the world (i.e., through relations of anticipation and retention), and therefore, over time would inevitably develop a recognition of certain features that could be separated from this experience and identified as constants,

Thus, Dasein’s “being ahead of itself,” for instance, can already be seen to harbor certain features of datability—it seems unlikely that after several seasons of planting my crops, after all, I should fail to notice some recurrent markers of seasonal change corresponding to my actions—and with them the beginnings of an inevitable fall into Heidegger’s external or “ordinary” time.¹⁹⁵

Therefore, a purely phenomenological account of temporality leads to an encounter with the question of the time that persists in the material world, independently of me, since this time effects temporal experience externally, or at a distance, and provides a framework for translating lived experience into a repeatable, identifiable format. However, these external, derived representations of lived experience are themselves limited by the continued interactions of living, acting subjects. For Ricoeur, calendar time opens out onto the time of the now, or the time of initiative. For example, certain dates are rendered significant through the actions and histories of particular communities.

Narratives, in contrast to both the time of technology (“time of the world”) and the lived experience of time (“time of the soul”), offer a “third time” that mediates both. The totalizing tendency of the “time of the world” (the time of the plot which renders each event of a narrative meaningful in relation to the whole), is frustrated by the “time of the soul” that is inscribed within the plot in narrative time,

It is the `objective’, cosmological time onto which lived time is inscribed which provides the basis of its totalization; and the fundamentally open structure of lived time itself, however successfully refigured, that frustrates it. The totalizations of historical narratives (mimesis 2) are fractured as they run up against the open futural time of the active reader, which they refigure (mimesis 3), but which, ultimately, they can never fully enclose. Or, to put it another way, the present is characterised by the basic autonomy of a de-totalizing `space of experience’.¹⁹⁶

Ricoeur’s understanding of narrative mediation provides a way of reconceiving the tension outlined by Simpson between the time of practices and the time of technology. The application of a narrative work within the world of action (mimesis₃) is understood as a “de-totalizing” act because it productively responds to the totalizing features of narrative. The features of narrative that lead to this conception of the space of application as an open, indeterminate negotiation between works and human actions will be highlighted here. Firstly, narrative emplotment is conceived of by Ricoeur as a dynamic integration or configuration of heterogeneous parts into a concordant whole. This activity differentiates narrative from life and constitutes it as a work. Secondly, as a work it produces its own temporality that mirrors human action and therefore renders it intelligible. This means that any structural comprehension of narrative must be related to hermeneutic questions of understanding and reception. Finally, narrative application is understood as a productive activity. The re-appropriation of narrative worlds back into the lifeworld is a difficult procedure – the nature of hermeneutic application, which renders certain features of a work significant or insignificant, means that every act of reading generates a new understanding of the same work.

Ricoeur’s work on narrative in Time and Narrative centres around the thesis that, “Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence.“¹⁹⁷ Narrative and time are, for Ricoeur, locked in a relation of mutual becoming. The first part of the statement continues Ricoeur’s break with Heidegger by advocating the crucial, epistemological function of mediation in relation to our `human’ understanding of temporal being. Temporality is not only lived and felt and the level of primordial being-toward-death, it is also an everyday, common, and historical phenomena, that is ‘counted’ or articulated through a plurality of finite, and shifting, modes of representation, with the most exemplary of these being narratives. This first part of the statement also has a bearing on our understanding of the human-technology relation. If technologies do not articulate time through a `narrative mode’, does that mean their time is non-human? This, precisely, may be the power of technology, from a post-modern or post-structuralist perspective. It allows for the exploration of an `inhuman’, or posthuman, space of becoming. We are no longer bound to narrative forms of the past and their corresponding understandings of (human) temporality, and are instead free to travel along inhuman time-scales, intense `lines of flight’ and so on. On the other hand, this is also something to be cautious of when it comes to technology. As we saw, for Simpson the time of technology is a linearized time that alienates us from the temporal flux of human practice. In this account, the time of technology is the time of ”planning“, whereas the time of practice is one of learning and meaningful repetition. Narrative, seen as a practical (poietic) way of appropriating and rendering-meaningful cosmic time, would be seen from this perspective to be opposed to technological time. The repetition and transmissions of narratives is different to the repetition encountered with technological processes.

The second aspect of the quote, where narrative becomes a condition for temporal existence, is also important. Narratives are not only ways of appropriating and making sense of temporal experience, they also affect and condition our experience of the world. They can do so in a more immediate sense, as in the case of the transformative experience of a powerful work of literature, or they can do it in a more `invisible’ or unconscious sense, as in the case of ideological narratives or even the narratives underlying the constructed apparatus for measuring time (the mythological and cosmological roots of calendar time, etc.).

It is the productive circularity of Ricoeur’s core thesis on narrative and time that is of interest here. Narratives are not only practical means of rendering time sensible, they are also objects that stand against experience, possessing a life of their own and a series of effects that reach beyond the temporal relations they aim to represent. They not only imitate human affairs, they also form worlds of their own. The logic at work here is similar to the logic we have been exploring already. However, what the discussion of narrative adds is a particular emphasis on the way in which acts of configuration inform our understandings of time. Technologies, too, gather together heterogeneous parts and relations into concordant `wholes’, which initially emerge from practical experience, but also stand against it in their artificiality. In this sense, both narratives and technologies share in the process of what Gilbert Simondon calls `concretization’ (Chapter 7). The way they are formed is both inventive and natural; inventive in the sense that narratives involve productive imaginative leaps beyond current norms and understandings, yet natural in the sense that as configurations they gain an independence from both author and context, they become autonomous, transmissible units or `worlds’ in themselves. Similar to the way a natural scientist approaches an autonomous living being, the reader of the text approaches something which at first is unknown, has a life/world of its own, is falsifiable, and so on. For Simondon, technologies follow a similar path to narratives, from abstraction to concrete existence. The configurational features of narrative, highlighted by Ricoeur, have already been applied as a framework for understanding the ways technologies, against Simpsons’ characterization, also possess modes of temporal organisation that are mimetic, i.e., that correspond with human understandings of time.

With these points in mind, this section will explore the features of narrative techniques of configuration, with emphasis on the practical/intelligible character of narrative representation.

For Borgmann, in a similar sense to Simpson in the previous chapter, our traditional senses of practice are in danger of being overturned by modern technology. In particular, practice as a way of developing focus is threatened by modern technology. Once again, it is not necessarily technology or techne in-itself that is being questioned, but the “tightly patterned character” of a society dominated by technology. Indeed, techniques have always accompanied human life, but when technology becomes more effective and general, it transforms our relation to it in a negative way. Borgmann argues that the greatest danger posed by technology is that we become `alienated’ from our practices. The comfort of the device renders practical being-in-the-world a `burden’ in contrast, an approach that is similar to Simpsons (we are alienated from practices),

As long as we overlook the tightly patterned character of technology and believe that we live in a world of endlessly open and rich opportunities, as long as we ignore the definite ways that we, acting technologically, have worked out the promise of technology and remain vaguely enthralled by that promise, so long simple things and practices will seem burdensome, confining and drab. But if we recognise the central vacuity of advanced technology, that emptiness can become the opening for focal things. It works both ways, of course. When we see a focal concern of ours threatened by technology, our sight for the liabilities of mature technology is sharpened.²³⁵

Focal concerns require time to develop. The `promise’ of technology, which appears infinite, perpetually distracts us from the time of the present. Why take the time to develop a meaningful, focused relation with a milieu, when the milieu is constantly being transformed and updated by technological innovation? Even if we were to consider that there are many reasons why doing so might be beneficial, we are persuaded by the rationality perpetuated by the “tightly patterned” technological network of devices that affects our worldview and makes focused practice seem `obsolete’ or irrational.

Borgmann utilizes hermeneutic understandings of practice and praxis to develop a critical account of modern technology. What is at stake is the practical relation between persons and things. In the case of the technological device, the person is no longer a part of the relation - the device does all the work, is pre-programed to disclose certain features, contains its own promise, and so on. In the case of the ’thing’ as a feature of practice, on the other hand, the relation between humans and objects becomes crucial. Things are transformed from utilitarian devices into `focal things’. It is practice, with all its associated features - the motivations and actions of an agent, the indeterminate flux of time, patterns of meaningful, differentiating repetition – that enables the thing to `thing’ (emanate), in Heidegger’s sense of the term.²³⁶ Truths are revealed that are the product of interlocking phenomena - subject, environment, qualities of the thing - rather than the rational, `comforting’ truths of the device. In short, “what must be shown is that focal things can prosper in human practices only.”²³⁷ Devices that alienate us and eschew practical understanding can find no place to flourish.

As with Ricoeur’s distinction between the univocity of the sign and the equivocity of the symbol, the device is distinct from the thing due to its singular or specialized functionality. Whereas signs tend towards abstraction, symbolic meaning is bound to a context or interpretation. For Borgmann, the thing is bound in a similar sense,

A thing, in the sense in which I want to use the word here, is inseparable from its context, namely, its world, and from our commerce with the thing and its world, namely, engagement. The experience of a thing is always and also a bodily and social engagement with the thing’s world. In calling forth a manifold engagement, a thing necessarily provides more than one commodity.²³⁸

Whereas a thing will contain multiple, and even ambiguous, meanings depending on contextual and interpretive factors, devices tend toward a logic of availability. That is, over the course of many historical iterations, devices work to make a single function more and more available to the user. Rendering a single function accessible entails concealing the corresponding functions that are needed to produce it (the machinery of the device for example). The ubiquity and ease of obtaining warmth in industrial societies is a product of this technological tendency, “We get a first glimpse of the distinctiveness of availability when we remind ourselves that warmth was not available, e.g., in Montana a hundred years ago.”²³⁹ In this time, warmth was neither “instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, [nor] easy”.²⁴⁰ As different technological solutions progress, the various means of achieving the goal of making heat more available recede, and what remains is a single, univocal function, “The wood-burning stove yields to the coal-fired central plant with heat distribution by convection, which in turn gives way to a plant fuelled by natural gas and heating through forced air, and so on.”²⁴¹ In contrast, the stove or hearth is considered a proper thing, since it contains multiple functions which are unfolded by the actors engaging with the thing,

Thus a stove used to furnish more than mere warmth. It was a focus, a hearth, a place that gathered the work and leisure of a family and gave the house a centre. Its coldness marked the morning, and the spreading of its warmth the beginning of the day. It assigned to the different family members tasks that defined their place in the household. The mother built the fire, the children kept the firebox filled, and the father cut the firewood. It provided for the entire family a regular and bodily engagement with the rhythm of the seasons that was woven together of the threat of cold and the solace of warmth, the smell of wood smoke, the exertion of sawing and of carrying, the teaching of skills, and the fidelity to daily tasks.²⁴²

The hearth, due to this ordering and revealing power, is a focal thing. The idea of a focal thing is appropriated from Heidegger. It is something that “gathers the relations of its context and radiates into its surroundings and informs them.”²⁴³ Borgmann points out that the Latin word focus means hearth, and he takes the example of the fireplace as paradigmatic of pretechnological modes of focus, “the fireplace constituted a centre of warmth, of light, and of daily practices.”²⁴⁴ In contrast, the device paradigm is represented by the heating plant; decentralized and foreboding.

Importantly, the device is constituted through the promise of technology.²⁴⁵ The promise of technology is found in the criteria of availability mentioned above, and in order for this promise to succeed, the means of obtaining the promise must be concealed, since they are difficult, uncertain, burdensome and un-available, “A device such as a central heating plant procures mere warmth and disburdens us of all other elements. These are taken over by the machinery of the device. The machinery makes no demands on our skill, strength, or attention.”²⁴⁶ Therefore the device, no matter how complex, can be reduced to its univocal purpose of making its function more available, and indeed all industrial technologies can be reduced to the same process or tendency, resulting in a technological pattern that persists across heterogeneous artefacts.

Both Borgmann and Ricoeur’s comments on technologies and technological rationality, suggest that all devices and technological systems manifest the same, univocal essence. Generating more forms of technologies, or finding new ways to apply existing technologies would not advance or subtract from this essence, it would simply count as “identical” repetitions of the same that would contrast with the “non-identical” repetitions of practice and practical understanding. For example, Catherine Pickstock discusses the logic of identical repetition in a way that corresponds to the proliferation of many commercial forms of technology. Things that repeat identically proceed “via an accumulation of differences, united by their identity as expressing a univocal being in a successive orientation, and by the asyndetic successivity itself.”²⁴⁷ Whereas, what Borgmann calls focal things are the foundation for practices, a practical relation with devices that repeat identically is more akin to a Sisyphean struggle, since the things or devices themselves have no inherent meaning and therefore,

none of them would be more than itself, rich with a plenitude of significance to which neither they nor we are equal, yet the more themselves for that very reason, and so the better to guide us. Instead, they could only be moved about, or swapped one for the other in an attempt to relieve tedium, a process which Kierkegaard described as the `rotation of crops’.²⁴⁸

To avoid the nihilistic `rotation of crops’ implied by forms of action corresponding to the device paradigm, Borgmann argues that our response should lie in a rehabilitation of social practices, a resoluteness and focused awareness of things, “The turn to things cannot be a setting aside and even less an escape from technology but a kind of affirmation of it.”²⁴⁹ Focal activity involves a “vow” or commitment to the power of human action, i.e., it involves developing a new way of social life. ²⁵⁰ For Borgmann, “the peril of technology lies not in this or that of its manifestations but in the pervasiveness and consistency of its pattern,“²⁵¹ and because of this, ”technology must be countered by an equally patterned and social commitment, i.e., by a practice.“²⁵²

However, as I have been discussing so far, practical understanding, following Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, incorporates both distanciation and belonging. In Ricoeur’s sense, a focal thing would also be an appropriated thing, its focal characteristics might not only be due to human practice, but also to internal features of its design. There would always be aspects of the thing that transcend our practical engagement and demand a critical evaluation. The question is, does this critical, distanced reflection on the thing disrupt our focus of it? As we have seen, the disruption of distanciation is also the condition for a renewed belonging. If we see technological devices as the product of a distanciated perspective on a practice, then we can begin to trace the ways that they are reflective of practice. As explored in Chapter 1, David Kaplan has argued that hermeneutics needs to go beyond the transcendental approach to technology (in this case an analysis of its tightly patterned character) and embrace the empirical turn in the philosophy of technology. Meaning is not only a product of practical comportment, but also of material relations between things and technological configurations. In relation to phronēsis, a crucial feature of practice that will be discussed below, Kaplan discusses the idea of `tact’ in a situation. Tact is a skill learned through experience, and something which may be instructed by technologies, which often provide practical solutions to problems,

This connection between tact and practical wisdom has completely dropped out of the contemporary conversation of technology. But what is largely at issue in questions concerning the good life in a technological age is the notion of appropriateness of conduct. Technology is shot through with tact. It answers key questions such as how things ought to be designed, how they should be used, how they should affect others, how they should be governed.²⁵³

In other words, the immanent features of devices themselves contain an ’ought’, both in terms of their design and how they suggest certain uses. The questions is whether this ought is straight-forward and univocal, or whether it genuinely addresses a subject and provokes meaningful engagement. Since Borgmann correctly points out that the more functional and comfortable a device is the more it recedes from view and negates engagement, the task is to discover ways that the device is also dysfunctional and provokes a practical response.

As I have argued in previous sections with regard to hermeneutic application and appropriation, unstable features of practice are also essential in our understandings of meaning. Practical understanding also involves broken vows and disturbed focus. Discourse, case-histories, and narratives are all fragile worlds whose shape is determined as much by how they are appropriated as by their own, internal, rational structures. However, what I have also tried to show is the productivity of technique, which is always also distinct from singular practical scenarios. An aspect of this productivity is the alterity implied by the distance of technique, a distance which makes application a process or struggle, rather than an unmediated grasping of meaning. In this sense, focus is powerful, when held, because it is always threatened by disruption. This threat is an aspect of the nature of focus and the `present’ of practice, and is what makes appropriation a task rather than something immediately given. The truth of practice is given as much by the device that draws us away from it, as the focal thing that we are already related meaningfully to.

For Ricoeur, who emphasises the inescapable fact of mediation and condition of the `shattered cogito’, it might be more appropriate to speak of the refracted focus of practices and things. The thing that is fully in focus is held in that place by the `distractions’ kept out of focus. For this reason, Ricoeur criticises Heidegger’s `direct’ ontology, revealed in this case by the focal thing emanating, and suggests instead an `indirect’ ontology. In order to understand the focal thing it is necessary, also, to explain, from a distance, those features that are `unfocused’ or on the margins. To clarify the structures and frames which are mediating our focus and `belonging’ without us being aware of it. A reflective engagement with the workings of devices, as Kaplan suggests, can reveal their practical value beyond the impracticality that appears through a consideration of their function or `promise’.

Peter-Paul Verbeek argues that Borgmann achieves a significant departure from Heidegger in that his analysis of devices and the way they shape human behaviour and action counts as a more concrete account of technology. However, whereas Borgmann predominately focuses on the negative consequences of the device paradigm, Verbeek aims to articulate the productive capacities of the device,

Borgmann’s conclusion that only nontechnological things have the ability to engage human beings and that technological artifacts only invite disengaged consumption, however, is too hasty, as I shall shortly show. He focuses too narrowly on the forms of engagement that technology discourages or renders impossible, while ignoring that devices can indeed promote engagement as well.²⁵⁴

In the second part of this chapter I explore Verbeek’s alternative account of the `device’, in order to examine how devices can also “promote engagement”. Verbeek aims to draw out the thingly character of technological artefacts. He utilizes an example of what we could call a focal device - a ceramic heater design by the collective Eternally Yours. This device, a product of modern technology, plays on the exact features of practice that Borgmann is advocating. Rather than designing a heater that would be `invisible’, a Dutch design collective created a heater that would have to be placed in the centre of the room and require engagement. They recreate the `focal thing’, the hearth, in the figure of the device, and in doing so, bring what was once at the margin into focus. This, I argue, should be the critical approach of a practice-oriented philosophy in relation to technology – not pushing modern technology further away from the sphere of practice and focus, but bringing it into direct confrontation with practice, to see if practical engagement will have anything productive to say.

Here, I aim to examine the question of the limits of techne, gestured towards by the opening Gadamer quote, by focusing on the ways in which uncertainty and wisdom relate to each other in practical settings.²⁵⁵ The work of Aristotle, which never ceases to be a source of philosophical reflection and innovation (virtue ethics, virtue epistemology, etc.), will provide the background for this part of the discussion. The fields of technology and postphenomenology lend themselves especially well to an Aristotelian understanding of ethics. In particular, this subsection will argue that the intellectual virtues of techne and phronēsis as described by Aristotle feature prominently in Peter-Paul Verbeek’s postphenomenological approach to technological mediation and morality. I will argue that Verbeek’s work aids in collapsing distinctions between these virtues, with the result that our practical and ethical deliberations about technologies can be reconceived in a more productive way. However, I will also point to the limits of this approach by drawing on Ricoeur’s link between practical wisdom and tragic wisdom.

Aristotle’s distinction between the practice-based virtues of techne and phronēsis suggests that in processes of application there are two types of `skill’ at work. On the one hand, there is the know-how associated with techne, knowledge relating to how technologies work or operate. On the other hand, there is the wisdom associated with application. It is not enough to simply understand the operations or design of technologies; we must also have a sense of the horizon or context in which these technologies may function. In this way, the two fields of application, designated in this section through the virtues of techne and phronēsis, could be delineated by the skills associated with knowing how (techne) and knowing when (practical wisdom). Furthermore, whereas techne pertains to operations knowledge, phronēsis is linked to orientations knowledge. The strength of Verbeek’s work, I argue, lies in the way that it draws out the interrelationship between these two types of skills and knowledge sets. For Verbeek, understanding what technological mediation does, in a practical sense, means understanding both how (moral) subjects are shaped by technologies, and also how technologies themselves work and are shaped in relation to interpreting and acting subjects. He brings to the foreground the productivity of the tension associated with application, taken in its hermeneutic sense, and demonstrates how this tension can be put to work in relation to our moral self-understanding.

However, this differentiation between knowing how and knowing when also leads to a recognition of a fundamental incommensurability between the two types of skills. There is always a `technical ignorance’ that no amount of wisdom can overcome. Similarly, practical wisdom is challenged by shifting contexts and horizons due to new developments in technologies and technical knowledge. Because of the conflictual and often asymmetric nature of these two types of practical skills, there persists what Ricoeur calls the “tragedy of action” in all practical life.

With these points in mind, this part of the chapter is divided into two subsections. The first (1) examines the ways that wisdom and technologies complement and presuppose one another in practical settings, while the second (2) provides further reflections on this approach by drawing a link between deinon and phronēsis. I argue that, although Verbeek’s account of technological mediation succeeds in reconciling the types of skills associated with design and techne with the moral insight associated with practical wisdom, his approach does not go far enough. Against the backdrop of a post-phenomenological understanding of technologies it is important also to recognise the inherent tension or fault at the heart of practical life and application, a fault which cannot be simply overcome through wisdom, but rather persists due to the incommensurability between wisdom and technologies.

As this thesis is concerned with hermeneutic questions of application, it is useful to move beyond the question of artefacts and design, towards the question of the `threshold’ across which many technological applications take place: the interface. Technologies, which in one way or another, are directed towards producing effects in the world, can only be `guided’ or instructed to do so via an interface, that is, at a distance. Not `distance’ in the sense of being separated from, but distance in Ricoeur’s sense of distanciation; interfaces introduce an intermediary position between us and a technological process that enables us to participate in this process whilst remaining distinct from it. The difference between a plumber fixing a pipe, or a computer engineer writing code, and a person washing their hands in a sink or opening a window on their computer screen, represents two different ways of participating in the same process. The plumber or engineer has a specific set of concerns. Although they stand `outside’ a system, in a position of control, the concerns that guide their action and choices are `internal’ to the system they are working with - their concerns are ’cybernetic’ and direct. In contrast, the person washing their hands or running applications on their operating system is also engaging with the system, but is bringing along their own set of concerns to the process, concerns which may be `external’ to the functioning of the technical system. If the relation between the engineer and the system is cybernetic, the relation between the `user’ and the system is indirect and recursive – shifts in interface design affect user experience, and user expectations affect the design and application of technologies.²⁸⁷ This logic was explored in Chapter 2.

To think of an interface as a `threshold’, then, is perhaps misleading. It does not stand as a `window’ between two worlds, one technological and the other human. Rather, from the perspective of `world’ and ’action’, it is a necessary mediation. The potential worlds contained in technological arrangements only come into effect via the interface.

Hermeneutic appropriation or application, as we have seen, involves two stages; understanding a text, language, discourse, etc. in-itself, in its context, and so on, and understanding oneself in light of the text. Application is the concrete fusion of these two horizons, a self-understanding reflected through a particular, historically-rooted expression. This self-understanding does not just `happen’, it is ’enacted’, through the reading process. As Ricoeur and Gadamer highlight, since the text, or language, always has its own `nature’ or ’being’ (autonomy), and therefore is always to some extent `foreign’ to us, application/appropriation as a fusion of horizons is also the act of establishing a common ground across a distance. The initial distance (due to history, inscription, culture, etc.) is a necessary condition for the appearance of this common ground. To have something at a distance is also to allow an in-between, indeterminate space to emerge between oneself and the thing-at-hand, a space that can potentially be filled or `negotiated’ in the process of engagement (e.g., reading). If, as Heidegger points out, technology, although appearing proximate, is always at a `distance’ from us,²⁸⁸ then the interface can potentially be seen as the medium across which a “common ground” may emerge.

The question when it comes to the interface is whether the space of ’negotiation’, mediated by it, is fully controlled. Are `users’ of interfaces merely passive operators of technological processes? Or, rather, is the space mediated by the interface a properly liminal space, a space of communication “in and through distance”, with the ’agency’ of both sides playing significant but distinct roles? For David Lewin, the logic of the interface aims to render us passive users, even if it never totally achieves this goal.

Lewin’s essay on the interface argues for the relevance of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics in relation to questions of technology. He dismisses the idea that Ricoeur’s work has nothing to say about technology simply because it does not discuss it thematically. Rather, drawing on Heidegger and central tenants of hermeneutic thinking, Lewin suggests questions of technology cannot be avoided since in modern times it conditions our interpretative structures. It has become a feature of our historically effected consciousness, and as such its structures resist thematization, “Like Heidegger’s famous example of the hammer, a hermeneutic is most presence in its absence.”²⁸⁹ Because of this, the way to approach technology, following Heidegger, is directly; not by way of devices and artefacts, but through inquiry into its essence (das Wesen der Technik). Or, rather, we should approach devices and artefacts themselves indirectly, by inquiring into the essence that underpins their design. This allows one to fully grasp technology’s nature as a condition of disclosure, rather than as a set of identifiable processes or objects, “If we can expand our understanding in this direction, then technology is only secondarily defined by artefacts, but is to primarily be understood as the way in which the world shows itself.”²⁹⁰

For Lewin, what is specific to this historical epoch or condition of the human is the question of freedom, “modern technology is the context in which the question of human freedom arises.”²⁹¹ This is the point at which Ricoeur’s work becomes meaningful, since his is a philosophy that charts a path between Cartesian understandings of the subject and Nietzschean testimonies of the fragmented, rhetorical self. That is, freedom is not synonymous with autonomy, in opposition to heteronomy, instead, it involves aspects of both.²⁹² Lewin sees this polarity repeated in discussion of modern technology;

Agency is too often seen in polarized terms as either the possession of the sovereign subject - in which case technologies are simply neutral devices that we take or leave – or a feature of autonomous technology that has gotten out of hand. Within the context of hermeneutical philosophy, agency is not a concept that can simply be applied to a subject (or an object, namely, technology), but is meaningful only within a particular interpretive context.²⁹³

Furthermore, as discussed in the first chapter, the reason technology is a particular concern for hermeneutics is because of the modes of rationality it entails, “[technological rationality] seeks to displace a hermeneutic relation to being.”²⁹⁴ Lewin sees these two poles of concern, the displacement of a hermeneutic relation to being by technological rationality, and the historical disclosure of questions of human agency and freedom, manifested in the technical interface.

Lewin’s description of the logic of the interface conceives it as being aimed at the erasure of practical wisdom; it seeks to destroy the hermeneutic relation to the world. He writes; “Behind all technologies is a basic desire to foreground functionality and conceal complex operations; to foreground ends, and conceal the means to those ends.”²⁹⁵ As was mentioned in the previous chapter, Aristotle understands phronēsis as the capability to deliberate about ends in relation to the means of achieving those ends. Following this, the threat of the interface lies in its concealing of complexity through the presentation of functionality, it conceals its own means and therefore practical concerns. Devoid of practical concerns we cease to become persons and instead are reduced to `users’. Complex operations are presented to us as simple `buttons’ and `icons’. Ends are presented as being easily within reach, there is no longer a need for deliberation. As devices themselves become more complex, their interface design becomes simpler and more sophisticated, they become easier to use. In this way, the `being’ of the device (complexity) is circumscribed by the technological rationality embodied in the interface,

This tendency towards circumscribed functionality gives us the impression that device does not exist with an interpretive context, but within a decontextualized utopia of functionality. As attractive as this utopia seems to be – it is, after all, exactly what the user wants the device to achieve – it negates the hermeneutic dimension of existence by its presentation of unmediated function.²⁹⁶

It is still something that `mediates’, but it conceals this fact by closing down possibilities of (or the need for) interpretation through its utopia of functionality. `Alterity’ is not admitted into the design of the interface since it disrupts functionality. In this way, it seeks to erase the sacred or symbolic aspects of existence. The symbolic, as we saw, is the realm of double-meaning and uncertainty, of the possibility of the self being other than itself. Whereas the symbol “gives rise to thought”, “the device only ever does what we ask of it. In so doing it cannot give rise to genuine thought.”²⁹⁷ If technology works to conceal its own interpretive context, then, according to Ricoeur’s view of autonomy indicated above, it works to negate human freedom, which always appears against an interpretive background.

Nevertheless, Lewin’s criticism of the interface follows the same course as a Ricoeurian hermeneutics of suspicion. That is, he seeks to unmask the `technological hermeneutic’. The interface, in its mode of circumscription — in seeking to eliminate the need for interpretation — gives rise to the thing it aims to conceal, “From a philosophical point of view, the technological hermeneutic discloses its own negation of alterity and thereby its effort to conceal hermeneutics only serves to demonstrate a deeper hermeneutic taking place.”<sup>298</sup> This `deeper’ hermeneutic is a more general hermeneutic concerning our (human) relation to things, which technology participates in. Since, for Ricoeur, we are never wholly `free’ nor wholly `determined’, the rationality of the interface can never totally conceal this relation to the thing. While admitting that questions of agency and freedom should not be too quickly solidified, for example by being attributed to “only certain kinds of humans, or certain `higher’ species”, Lewin does not want to “simply wish away this primary distinction [between persons and things] that informs Ricoeur’s work at the deepest level.”²⁹⁹

For Lewin, the technological hermeneutic is unmasked by appealing to this ontological distinction between persons and things; the being that gave rise to technology (Dasein) can never be wholly eclipsed by it, since it always remains something other than a mere object. As we become ’users’, our fundamental capability to instantiate a relation to the world, even a technological one, is reflected in the interface, even as it aims to conceal this capacity.

However, just as with the device in the previous chapter, the interface itself can potentially be seen to have a thing-like character, in that its modes of presentation include moments of reflexivity and what Galloway calls unworkability. This feature of the interface is revealed by focusing, instead, on the practical language of the interface, as opposed to the logic that underpins this language. Or, to use Gadamer’s terms, the “nature of a thing” as determined by theoretical or technical knowledge, is something different than the “language of a thing”, which is more reflective of the participation of both subject and thing in the process of coming to know.³⁰⁰ To move from one to the other is to move from the ontological to the practical field. With this in mind, I will now turn to Galloway’s reading of the interface. Galloway reads it through the lens of aesthetics and politics, and it is these features which bring us closer to the practical `language’ of the interface, which remains distinct from its ontological `logic’.

In the above-mentioned distinction between the `nature of things’ and the `language of things’, gestured toward by Gadamer, one of his aims is to undermine our presumption to know a thing fully by determining its nature. Whereas both of the everyday expressions, “Es liegt in der Natur der Sache“ and ”Die Dinge sprechen für sich selber“, seem to express the common Enlightenment attitude of asserting a necessary distinction between (biased) subjects and objects in the pursuit of knowledge, when examined closer a crucial difference emerges. The type of knowledge associated with the nature of the thing is gained through methods and procedures, aimed at either identifying or controlling materials, and is associated broadly with the modern, scientific worldview. The language of a thing reveals something different about its nature. What a thing `says’ includes its relation to an observer or participant. At the theoretical level, the difference between the nature and the language of a thing is knowledge that is determined by establishing a system of correspondences, on the one hand, and knowledge being revealed within particular paradigms or horizons, on the other. At the practical level, we have the difference between techne and practical understanding repeated. A techne or technique is aimed at working with, and often controlling, the nature of the thing, whereas practical understanding works by allowing the thing to speak for itself. ’Thing’ here is taken in Gadamer’s sense to refer not only to material things, but also the subject matter. Whereas, practically speaking, we must call upon a variety of techniques and methods when analysing a discourse, we are also called on to acknowledge the effects of the subject matter, how it impacts me and alters my identity. Viewing the thing in terms of its `nature’ keeps me at a distance, while the language of the thing implicates me.

The appeal to the “language of things” has a polemical accent, “It expresses the fact that, in general, we are not at all ready to hear things in their own being, that they are subjected to man’s calculus and to his domination of nature through the rationality of science.”³⁰¹ Whereas a distanced examination of the nature of the thing ensures progress and advancements of human knowledge, Gadamer asserts a more fundamental indeterminacy in the person-thing relation, expressed through the medium of language. Before truth is a `correspondence’ between the nature of the thing and our abstract knowledge of it, it is a `linguistic agreement’ that occurs between person and thing, with neither possessing absolute agency, “The agreement about things that takes place in language means neither a priority of things nor a priority of the human mind that avails itself of the instrument of linguistic understanding. Rather, the correspondence that finds its concretion in the linguistic experience of the world is as such what is absolutely prior.”³⁰²

The spirit of this distinction is at work, as I read it, in Alexander Galloway’s book, The Interface Effect. His project aims to move away from ontological accounts found in many influential media theorists, towards a consideration of the practical effects of contemporary technologies, i.e., he moves from a consideration of the nature of the interface towards the language of the interface. The tradition he appeals to is similar to the tradition discussed in the previous chapter in relation to the alternate understanding of techne as being related to questions of the self. In contrast to theorizing media qua media, he wishes to return to questions of mediation, i.e., to move away from a focus on objects and media artefacts, towards the activities they instantiate. Whereas he reads Kittler and McLuhan as “conservative” in their focus on media objects, where techne “is substrate and only substrate”, he gestures towards “an alternate philosophical tradition that views techne as technique, art, habitus, ethos, or lived practice.”³⁰³ In this tradition, mediation is not reducible to an easily resolved `middle’ position, a point (in this case, an artefact) outside the mediating activity itself. Just as in the case of hermeneutics, where a `mediated’ dialogue does not mean an externally ’resolved’ dialogue, but rather a dialogue which is carried along by the indeterminate force of language itself, mediation, as opposed to ’media’ cannot be reduced to an objective state;

When Kittler elevates substrates and apparatuses over modes of mediation, he forfeits an interest in techniques in favour of an interest in objects. A middle – a compromise, a translation, a corruption, a revelation, a certainty, an infuriation, a touch, a flux, is not a medium, by virtue of it not being a technical media device.³⁰⁴

Approaching interfaces from the perspective of `mediation’, as opposed to `media’, means putting them in the difficult position of being in-between. This entails a double-bind: the in-between is at once responsible for distinguishing between two points, whilst at the same time being in no clear place itself. Whereas boundaries such as ’windows’, door-frames, and so on, clearly delimit two places, the interface, conceived of as activity, is by nature non-fixed and indeterminate. The more `coherent’ or fixed an interface becomes, the more it withdraws from view and the less it resembles an interface. On the other hand, the more `incoherent’ it becomes, the more it draws attention to itself and the less it actually `mediates’ anything. For Galloway, this aspect of mediation means that the relation is not “chronological, spatial, or even semiotic,”³⁰⁵ rather, it is a systemic one. On this point he quotes Michel Serres:

Systems work because they don’t work. Non-functionality remains essential for functionality. This can be formalized: pretend there are two stations exchanging messages through a channel. If the exchange succeeds – if it is perfect, optimal, immediate – then the relation erases itself. But if the relation remains there, if it exists, it is because the exchange has failed. It is nothing but mediation. The relation is a non-relation.³⁰⁶

Here, we have the tension repeated that we have been exploring so far. For Lewin, the danger was that the logic of the interface (the reduction of complexity to easily negotiable operations) would succeed in its aim, therefore `erasing’ or concealing that a mediation process is occurring (that the interface mediating and re-presenting the complexities of the technology). However, Lewin admits that this process can never succeed completely, and that a recognition of this point reveals a `deeper’ hermeneutic at work (the hermeneutic relation between modern technology and human freedom, between totality and finitude, and so on). In this way the interface is both anti-hermeneutic (in its aims) and hermeneutic (in its failure to succeed), it is both `technological’ (in the negative, critical sense), and `hermeneutic’ (disclosive). Galloway carries this point further and categorizes the interface as unworkable. The idea of the unworkable interface is intended to eschew the false polarity between `Iris’ and `Hermes’; “Representation is either clear or complicated, either inherent or extrinsic, either beautiful or deceptive, either already known or endlessly interpretable. In short, either Iris or Hermes.”³⁰⁷ Instead, both aspects are contained within the interface, both `coherence’ and `incoherence’, and it is the perpetuation of both these forces that render it a mediation process. In this sense, the idea of the unworkable interface is similar to Ricoeur’s own formula for narrative representation — `concordant discordance’.

The terms `coherence’ and `incoherence’ refer to the aesthetic qualities of the interface. Galloway illustrates the difference with reference to a painting by Norman Rockwell, Triple Self-Portrait, and a parody of this image that appeared in Mad magazine. The first is emblematic of the coherence of the interface – the portrait self-consciously gestures towards its own artifice, but only to render this artifice more solid and centred. It draws the viewer towards an appreciation of the face, whilst aiming to conceal the interface or mediation process that brought their eye to rest at this point. It is a celebration and centring of craft and representation as such, “There is a circulation of coherence within the image that gestures toward the outside, while ultimately remaining afraid of it.”³⁰⁸ In this reading, the painting self-consciously gestures toward an anticipated audience member (one familiar with questions of representation, craft, etc.) in order to pre-empt and fulfil their desire to interpret or understand the image. In short, it shrewdly eschews the problematic space of hermeneutic application – it `mediates’ on the viewers behalf whilst also concealing that the mediation has taken place. Yet, to read it solely in this semiotic way, that is, in the way it aims to gesture towards paratextual elements in order to reify its own expression, is to miss out on the crucial gesturing process itself. Galloway iterates here that the interface is always an effect: “The stress here is that one must always think about the image as a process, rather than as a set of discreet, immutable terms. The paratextual (or alternatively, the nondiegetic) is in this sense merely the process of outering, of exteriority.”³⁰⁹

The image from Mad magazine replicates the image, but highlights and intensifies the elements responsible for the `outering’ process in the original, rendering the disavowal of the Rockwell image more visible. The illustrator of the Mad image, Richard A. Williams, is not concerned as much with questions of technique or art, as he is with provoking a response in the viewer. In this way, he embraces the ’unworkability’ of the interface more so than Rockwell, viewing the space of application as a territory to be conquered rather than as an uncertainly to be avoided,

Every ounce of energy within the image is aimed at its own externalization. Looking back at the history of art-making, one remembers that addressing the viewer is a very special mode of representation that is often saved or segregated or cast off and reserved for special occasions. It appears in debased forms like pornography, or folk forms like home video, or marginalized political forms like Brechtian theatre, or forms of ideological interpellation like the nightly news.³¹⁰

Galloway’s point in tracing the workings of these opposing forces is to subsequently map the corresponding “regimes of signification” they imply. The Rockwell painting, and its aesthetic of coherence, presents the interface without actually `enacting’ it, whilst the Mad magazine parody `enacts’ the effects of the interface without believing in its content. These two approaches correspond to two types of political activity; `coherent’ politics, which is centralised, organised, etc., and `incoherent’ politics, which is politics that seeks ruptures with past configurations. These four categories are then permutated to produce four `regimes of signification’:

1. Ideological: an aesthetics of coherence, a politics of coherence;
2. Ethical: an aesthetics of incoherence, a politics of coherence;
3. Poetic: an aesthetics of coherence, a politics of incoherence;
4. Truth: and aesthetics of incoherence, a politics of incoherence.³¹¹

For Galloway, the interface effect, as seen at work in videogames like World of Warcraft where a representational depiction of a world or scene is overlaid by multiple dialogue-boxes and menus, signals a shift in current political regimes from the “ideological” to the “ethical”.³¹² The term ethical here refers simply to the practical dimension of the interface effect. The coherent modes of politics it produces can range from Brechtian Marxism to what Galloway calls the “ludic economies” of contemporary times – in which we are both encouraged to `play freely’ and `express’ ourselves as much as possible, whilst being encircled by cybernetic loops of reference (so that it is always a `controlled’ play).³¹³ In the case of World of Warcraft,

The game displays an aesthetics of incoherence in that it foregrounds the apparatus (statistical data, machinic functions, respawn loops, object interfaces, multithreading, and so on), while all the time promoting a particularly coherent politics (protocological organisation, networked integration, alienation from the traditional social order, new informatic labor practices, computer-mediated group interaction, neoliberal markets, game theory, and so forth).³¹⁴

We could also add the examples from the design collective Eternally Yours, discussed earlier (Chapter 5) – works which seek to foreground the `unworkable’ interface of the device to provoke an ethics of product sustainability.

The third regime, the `poetic’, is probably the regime where one would tend to place many forms of hermeneutic thinking, since hermeneutics often emphasizes the inherent value of a work, and indeed Galloway does associate Heidegger with this regime. The category `poetic’ resonates with poiesis,

It is labelled “poetic” simply because it aligns itself with poiesis, or meaning-making in a general sense. The stakes are not those of metaphysics, in which any image is measured against its original, but rather the semiautonomous “physics” of art, that is, the tricks and techniques that contribute to success or failure within mimetic representation as such.³¹⁵

The practicality of the interface is linked to its aesthetic incoherence, which distinguishes it from a Heideggerian “work of art” – a coherent work that draws together, with the aid of techniques and practical experience, a finished or `complete’ thing. The aim of a work of art in this sense, is not to conform to a “metaphysical” ideal, but to present in a unified, intelligible form, its own conditions of making. The interface is indeed more `technological’ in this sense, its incoherence foregrounds its own technique and tool-like character. It can either become a tool for performatively reinforcing a certain ideological politics, or it can become a destabilising tool for performing a `truth’.

Yet, in contrast to Heidegger, the work of Ricoeur and Gadamer is marked by its turn to the centrality of practical engagement with others when thinking about the work of understanding. If, for Heidegger, the work of art `gathers’ together its conditions by presenting them, Ricoeur and Gadamer’s rehabilitation of appropriation and application means that any gathering or consistency of a work is vulnerable to being overturned by interpreting communities. In particular, for Ricoeur, an explanation of the work, a decoding and critique of its techniques and structures, is crucial to the process of understanding it. In this sense, a technique is never celebrated in-itself, but only in relation to the historical or communal background against which it becomes visible and effective. This places Ricoeur’s account of a work somewhere in between the idea of a coherent, unified work, and an incoherent interface-mediated experience. In line with the thrust of this thesis, which places emphasis on the co-determining movements of appropriation and construction, hermeneutics would be placed somewhere in between the regimes of `ethics’ and `poetics’ - a work is marked both by the sincere intention to `say something about something’, whilst also being ’plagued’ by rhetorical strategies, failures of technique, etc., aspects which call out for further reflection and engagement. Similarly, the political side of the work is determined by the mixed nature of the work; communities are defined both by the traditions that condition them and the innovations they bring about in trying to break with tradition. In this way, there could be a fifth regime:

1. Hermeneutic: aesthetics of concordant discordance, politics of tradition-innovation

With regard to the earlier discussion of technology and time, drawing on the work of Simpson, it was argued that technology shifts our focus from participating in the meaning of a practice to `valuing’ the frame of a practice. For Simpson, there was a cost in this shift of attention; meaning is conditioned or presented `within’ a frame of reference, so that the valuation of a frame itself results in a translation of meaning from something conditioned to something determinable in advance. Galloway has a similar conception of the technical interface, its perpetual `framing’ results in an `unworkable’ erasure of content. However, for Galloway the outcome of such a framing is not fixed in advance. He focuses on the `unworkability’ of the interface as an effect-producing phenomenon, and therefore as practical. It is practical because its negativity (negation of content, of direct presentation) provokes a response from a self. As a symptom of the failure of technique, it is also the beginning of practice.

Galloway’s claim that the computer instantiates a `practice’, not a ’presence’, quoted at the outset of this chapter, stems from this notion of the unworkable interface. As I have argued, practical understanding is constituted not only through relations of belonging (in this case a ’politics’) but also through distanciation (in this case an `aesthetic regime’). The interface participates in practical understanding by standing a distance from it. In particular, practical considerations arise due to the negativity or unworkability of the interface. By highlighting the unworkability of the interface, Galloway enables us to perceive the failure, or incompleteness, as the heart of a functioning interface, but also to perceive the crucial role the receiver of the message plays in constituting the effects of the interface. Its mixture of both coherent and incoherent representations, of its need to draw attention to both itself and to a space beyond itself, means that a subject engaging with the interface is tasked with negotiating these tensions. Or, rather, with appropriating them, since the term ’negotiating’ may suggest that the `user’ somehow `completes’ the work of mediation. It would be more appropriate to say that the user temporally resolves tensions through developing a practical stance in relation to the interface and its technical lacunas. In hermeneutic thought, the experience of failure gives rise to the need for reflection, not for intellectual reasons, but due to the need for practical closure. When we experience failure, our pre-understandings of the world, and therefore our patterns of understanding that make up our identity, are put into question. Reflecting on failure is more than a technical or intellectual endeavour, it involves a reflection on our conditions of belonging to a world, and for these reasons failure effects reflection, or `gives rise to/provokes’ it in Ricoeur’s terms. Galloway comes to a similar conclusion about the interface, its unworkability means the interface should be understood through its ’effects’, and therefore through the role it takes up in its space of application. As a counterpart to the unworkability of the interface, we find a myriad of practical solutions, `workarounds’ and hacks. Galloway highlights the political and ideological questions arising in that space, but his overall aim is to historicize the interface against tendencies to reify a `ludic’ mode of existence suggested by it.

Galloway’s definition of the interface as an effect, and therefore as practical, resonates with earlier investigations into the practice-technique dialectic. The potential problem of the interface, for Galloway, was the rise of the regime of what Deleuze calls `control societies’; interfaces both embrace the `freedom’ of a playful, interacting subject, whilst simultaneously controlling them. Whereas for Lewin the interface threatens to annihilate human freedom, for Galloway it `economises’ freedom.

The work of Brenda Laurel can be illustrative here. Her book, Computers as Theatre, written from the perspective of a practitioner theoretically reflecting on her field, implicitly employs key hermeneutic concepts to articulate the structure of human-computer relations. Her approach is, in many ways, phenomenological. She explores the question by focusing on the experiential dimension of human-computer activity, and does so by inquiring into the structures and forms that shape this experience, structures which she argues are remarkably similar to those outlined by Aristotle in his Poetics.³¹⁶ Aristotle’s Poetics is also a key source for Ricoeur’s theory of narrative and, therefore, the two approaches overlap at various points. The implicit hermeneutic grounds for her inquiry appear in these Aristotelian understandings of performance and representation, but even more so in her overall framing of the computer-human situation as one in which a common ground is being sought for through the activity of participating subjects within pre-established structures/constraints. Just as narrative representations for Ricoeur are understood as mimetic, the interface, in seeking a common ground, repeats the practices it is aiming to enable (for example, composing a spreadsheet) in a technological mode. This mimetic function, as with narrative, introduces a difference which enables the emergence of innovations and new procedures from within the context of the representation itself, for example, new techniques or ways of doing something that arise due to the processing power of computers.

The idea of a common ground is a difficult one, as it may seem at first sight to be built around the exclusion of the other (of the alterity of the machine, for example). If this were the case then it would bring the computer-human interaction in line with what Lewin was arguing about the logic of the interface. Computers and interfaces would be seen as objects that lead us to think in a technocratic way; the shared ground of computer-human interaction would be an impoverished one, devoid of meaning and alterity. However, this is not the sense in which Laurel uses the term common ground. For hermeneutics, a `commonality’ of sense, does not exist prior to engagement, as something fixed that a conversation works towards. Rather, commonality emerges in and through the understanding process. Aiming to understand the other does not necessarily mean aiming to find what we have in common. The idea of the ’other’ is already built-in to the concept of a common ground - it is meaningless to come to an agreement with oneself. Agreement is not something that can be `programmed’ in advance. In fact, it is the inverse of something that can be anticipated, it emerges only through the transformation of oneself through revision of one’s expectations or anticipations in the face of the other. There is a `formation’ process occurring, but it is not led by either side of a dialogue, but by the process of interaction itself,

We say that we “conduct” a conversation, but the more genuine a conversation is, the less its conduct lies within the will of either partner. Thus a genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct…No one knows in advance what will “come out” of a conversation. Understanding or its failure is like an event that happens to us…All this shows is that a conversation has a spirit of its own, and that the language in which it is conducted bears its own truth within it – i.e., that it allows something to “emerge” which henceforth exists.“³¹⁷

So, the fusion of horizons is not brought about by will or wilful action, but by interaction. Furthermore, understanding, or the production of a commonality across a distance, is an “emergent” phenomenon. A common ground is something that happens to be produced through interactive engagement. This conception of understanding and commonality is mirrored by Laurel. For example, she traces the different, historical senses of `conversation’ between computers and humans - in earlier cases computers were controlled using knobs and dials, later by punch cards, followed by early forms of visual display (“glass teletypes”) and command line interfaces, etc. All situations in which humans and computers were imagined to be `conversing’ in a “tit-for-tat” manner, “a person does something and the computer responds.”³¹⁸ However, “as advanced linguistics demonstrated, there is more to conversation that tit for tat. Dialogue is not just linearized turn taking in which I say something, you go think about it, then you say something, I go think about it, and so on.”³¹⁹ An alternative approach to conversation emphasizes the importance of a common ground, therefore transforming the `role’ the interface plays. The interface is not just a `messenger’, carrying instructions between users and the system, instead, “it forms a shared context for action in which both [person and computer] are agents.”³²⁰ For example, she cites the work of Susan Brennan, writing,

Brennan’s work was aimed at designing human-computer interfaces so that they offer means for establishing common ground (“grounding”) that are similar to those that people use in human-to-human conversation, such as interruptions, questions, and utterances and gestures that indicate whether something is being understood.³²¹

Laurel’s own work stresses the performative and representational character of this common ground, comparing the work of an interface designer with that of a set designer for a theatre production, “both create representations of objects and environments that provide a context for action.”³²² As with a theatre production, series of actions achieved in human-computer interaction develop temporally, and this temporal sequence is also itself a product of interaction and is represented by the interface, as in cases when the interface conserves prior actions and re-presents them to users. An application contains a potential range of actions and outcomes, but the sequence that becomes actual is left open to be determined by concrete the human-computer interaction itself.³²³ This temporal aspect of the interface is a trace of the incompleteness of the technological hermeneutic which Lewin discussed. The interface does not only present a range of functions, it also presents itself: “What is represented in the interface is not only the task’s environment and tools, but also the process of interaction – the contributions made by both parties and the evidence of the task’s evolution.”³²⁴

This `feedback’ from the interface is important in understanding the productive nature of human-computer interaction. Certainly, many forms of interface feedback are designed to invisibly `nudge’ us towards specific actions, which makes the feedback process more a means of coercion than collaboration. However, as we saw from Galloway’s description of the interface, it is often `unworkable’, it presents us with its own uncertainty and failure, forcing a practical resolution.

Whether coercive or unworkable, the point for Laurel is that it is firstly temporal. In relation to the earlier discussion of technology and time, Laurel’s work challenges assumptions that technology is aimed primarily towards the reduction of temporality (and therefore uncertainty). All the dramatic potential of temporal experience, thwarted expectations, catharsis, fulfilment, and so on, are to be found in the design of computers and interfaces. As she writes:

Assume for a moment that you have gone to the theatre not knowing what is playing. You sit in your seat. Anything is possible until the curtain goes up. When you face a computer screen, anything is possible until you turn on the device and see what sorts of applications and affordances are present.³²⁵

That is, the computer-human experience takes place over a dramatic, flux-like timeframe. It even has a beginning-middle-end structure, starting with switching something on, not knowing fully in advance what is to be expected, or what will cause an end-point to arrive. The fact that machines and software applications are, to a large extent, ’pre-programmed’, containing a `limited’ or prescribed range of possibilities, does not concern Laurel. Taking her cue from theatre and Aristotle, she asserts instead that all meaningful experience involves constraint. Her `structuralist’ approach to software design is not to be confused with an overly-technical desire to `control’ or map experience in advance. She writes: “As a structuralist, I have been assailed by both theatre and computer people for taking what they perceive as a rather bloodless approach. Structure is not always well understood, and even when it is, its uses are seen to be analytical rather than productive.”³²⁶ Instead, paying attention to structure, at the level of software-design, is akin to the configurational task of narrative emplotment explored in Chapter 4. As with Ricoeur’s account of time, human temporality cannot be grasped independently of its structuration and emplotment in narrative from. By drawing attention to these features of computer and interface design, Laurel is highlighting its reflective relation to human understandings of meaning and temporality.

Whereas it is easy to identify the ways in which various structures mediate our experience of playing a video game, or participating in an interactive simulation, Laurel emphasizes that mediating structures provide dynamic contexts across all levels of computer-human interactions. For example, the appeal of many spreadsheet software applications is not simply their functionality, it is also the representative mode of the interface. This representative dimension provides a more `pleasing’ structuring of an action. To illustrate this, Laurel uses the example of deciding whether you can afford to buy a new house. She outlines the steps of the task that would involve preliminary evaluations, entering data and formulas, making trade-offs, creating an artefact, etc. She charts these steps using the format of a Freytag curve. At each level, the software provides formal parameters for an action, but requires guiding and input from the person using the application. There is direct feedback from calculations; you can witness how changing one factor of a decision may alter other factors, and determine better which variables to give more weight to. You can format and create an `artefact’ of the process, and “print the whole thing out to show my husband so that he, too, will be convinced”.³²⁷ In contrast, you could execute the same task using a pencil and paper, but “the action would lack organic wholeness; rather than the elegant Freytag-like curve, the action would more likely consist of long, flat-line segments of calculation punctuated by periods of analysis and planning with a completely different representational context and ‘feel’.”³²⁸As an alternative, spreadsheets like Excel are,

successful largely because they do an extremely good job of supporting whole actions with a satisfying degree of complexity, magnitude, and completeness. One could perform the same whole action as that in the previous example with a calculator, an abacus, or even a pencil and paper, but its magnitude (in the sense of duration) would be excruciatingly excessive.³²⁹

Again, in contrast to Simpson’s view of technology and time, Laurel is arguing that the design of software and interfaces includes considerations of what counts as a `meaningful’, or at the very least, pleasurable, use of one’s time.

Although, Laurel does not use this language, Ricoeur’s notion of the “world of the text” is helpful here. As we saw in the cases of narrative and structuralism, there is a difference, for Ricoeur, between the `raw material’ of language, and even of various structures (myths, genres, tropes), and the world that is formed from the combination of these materials. The world of the text is always in excess of the component parts that make it up, thus rendering a structuralist or analytic account incomplete. Laurel has a similar perspective when it comes to the interface. Just as in the case of theatre, when the actual material components of a production (set backdrops, actors, scripts) combine to produce an effect which is something other than the pure material relations of the parts making up the effect, the interface effect is something other than a direct expression of the material parts of the machine. For example, in relation to the above example of the spreadsheet software, she writes:

Here we must separate the activity from its artefacts. The representation of a manuscript or spreadsheet as we manipulate in on screen is in fact pretend, as compared to physical artifacts like data files (in memory or on a storage medium) and hard copy. The artifacts are real (as are actors, lighting instruments, and scenery in a play), but the rules involved in working with the representations of dramatic actions or interactions are distinct from the artifacts.³³⁰

Why is this the case? Why the need for a supplementary rule-set in dealing with a technological device such as a computer? There are two main reasons, which I believe are related. The first reason is the expected one; someone engaging with a machine simply needs a different frame of reference for the engagement to take place, one that they are more familiar with. In Laurel’s case, she draws parallels with traditions of representation, of our human capacities to `suspend disbelief’, to `play’, and so on. A software engineer will engage with the machine on a different level, just as the author will approach the construction of a text differently than the reader who takes it up in a new context. As we saw earlier in the case of narrative, a narrative is not simply an isolated system of signs and their relations, it is also an intelligible, organic whole, and the same is true in the design of computers, they are meant to be engaged with at the level of intelligibility and practical reason, not only at a rational level. In the case of commercial computers, especially, a designer’s consideration of user experience outweighs considerations of maximizing the functionality of the machine. The machine functionality is not foregrounded, but instead is relegated to the level of an invisible ’constraint’, a formal condition for the actual engagement that takes place between the person and computer,

Engagement is only possible when one can rely on the system to maintain the representational context. A person should not be forced to interact with the system qua system; indeed, any awareness of the system as a distinct, “real” entity would explode mimetic illusion, just as a clear view of the stage manager calling cues would disrupt the “willing suspension of disbelief” for the audience of a traditional play.³³¹

Laurel argues that instead of being concerned with representing what that machine is doing, designers need to pay more attention to representing what the interactor with the machine is doing. In contrast to Lewin’s analysis of the logic of the interface, these alternative design concerns actually disrupt the pursuit of functionality. The logic of the interface is not a transcendent essence that transforms complex technological phenomena into utopias of functionality, rather, for Laurel, the program and the interface (and by implication, person using the interface), develop alongside one another,

How should an interface come to be? In effective interaction design, the interface does not simply come last; it develops throughout with the entire design process. It is deeply entwined with functionality. It shows sensitivity to the interactor and sometimes even constrains functionality that cannot or need not be touched effectively by the interactor. If we think of an application as an organic whole, the process by which it is created should be organic as well.³³²

This question of how the interface `comes to be’ leads us to the second reason for the supplementary rule-set. If the first reason is ’practical’ (interfaces need to employ familiar rules of representation to encourage engagement), then the second is `ontological’. Like Galloway, Laurel conceives the computer primarily as a medium, as opposed to an artefact. She enumerates this point as her first “design heuristic”: “Think of the computer not as a tool, but as a medium.”³³³ Furthermore, it is a medium with a history, which Laurel herself has participated in forming, and an open future. It is the uncertainty of what exactly computers can do, combined with the participatory medium of the interface that makes it an ontological question.

Throughout Laurel’s book, one of the key ideas she draws on from Aristotle is the difference between potentiality and actuality. Just as the integrative force of a narrative or theatre production gains its meaning effect from the way it closes-down the multiple potential outcomes or modes or representation, the software applications and interface designs of computers also constrain the `potentialities’ of the machine. When we engage with spreadsheet software we may forget the extent of the power of the machine that is running the software, but this is necessary for a meaningful engagement to take place.

Laurel’s primary aim is to encourage designers of interfaces and software to see their practice in a new way, through the lens of Aristotelian views on poetics. The practical skills required to orchestrate a theatre production resemble those which are called upon to produce a flourishing `user-experience’. Of course, a large amount of the pleasure derived from using computers or technological devices comes from increases in efficiency, power and so on, but the role of the designer is to constrain and redirect this potentiality in a way that will be meaningful for someone engaging with the device. Overall, this prioritising of the very `human’ side of human-computer interactions shifts focus from thinking about what a device is, to what it can do, and even, how it can `perform’ (with the term `performance’ taking on a different significance than it might usually have when placed alongside a description of a computer).

At the background of all these reflections, though, are questions about what technology is. Designers are also constrained by limitations of the device, as well as assumptions about what a computer is, “The characteristics of the interface for any given representation are influenced by the pragmatics of usage and principles of human factors and ergonomics, as well as by an overarching definition of what computers are.”³³⁴ Aside from defining a computer as something that mediates human experience, the question of what they are, or what they will become is left relatively open. The openness of this question, though, is part of the nature of computers. It seems that what Laurel is describing is a classic hermeneutic circle of understanding, applications inform the construction of underlying structures, which in turn bring forth new possibilities for application and design.

It could be argued that technology serves a fundamentally different social function than, for example, theatre or poetry. We might be able to say that other representational mediums contain a broader socially agreed upon purpose, to represent to society the tragic or comic nature of life in the case of theatre, to express `eternal truths’ in the case of poetry, and so on. Yet what is being mediated or brought into view by computers? Is it, as Lewin argued, a `utopia of functionality’, devoid of alterity and uncertainty? Or, as Galloway argued, an indoctrination into the network-culture of control societies? These are, of course, the wrong questions to ask. Any `broader’ social or cultural purpose or framework is precisely what Heidegger criticised as a technological attitude. The point is, rather, that the hermeneutic circle between computers and their representations, that persists across all modes of representation, creates an indeterminacy that can only be resolved through practice and action. This is the point that Galloway helped us arrive at, and Laurel, too, sees this crucial practical aspect of computers, leading her to end her reflections on a note of hope, “Our lives are torn up by what we see looming in the future of Gaia. We succumb to the temptation to be always busy, to collaborate with our existing culture personally and professionally. Alternatives are difficult to imagine. And yet, we all know that we must not only imagine but make them…Hope is an active verb.”³³⁵

Whether the interface is a mode of concealment, an unworkable mediation, or a common ground, its mediation is never total. This means that it acts as an opening for a consideration of the hermeneutic link between human agency and technology. The phenomena of the interface implies that there is always an in-between point of negotiation or interpretation that underlies our practical engagements with technologies. However, Galloway’s point that this indeterminacy can give rise to a ludic economy, a controlled mode of play that would never extend beyond the interface (either towards a deeper understanding of ourselves or of the technologies themselves), is important. The next chapter considers how a hermeneutic account of play, which Ricoeur argues is a key moment of appropriation, can potentially resolve this tension. The task will be to investigate whether what I have called the hermeneutic circle between technologies and their individual, practical modes of presentation is a vicious or virtuous circle. As we have seen, for Ricoeur, the work of understanding involves mediating between two perspectives – an objectifying, explanatory approach, and a participatory, engaged approach. So far in this section, I have considered the ways that technologies potentially shape human understanding, whether it be in a negative or positive sense. In the next chapter I will suggest that Ricoeur’s account of play and appropriation provides a way of thinking about how human understanding can shape technology.

Simondon’s work is useful for characterizing the world of technics and its difference and integrity in relation to the world of human, practical concerns.³³⁷ Like the world of the text in the case of Ricoeur, the `world’ of the technical object is an autonomous one. Similar to Iser’s retrieval of the parasitic nature of fiction in relation to ordinary language, the technical object has a parasitic relation to practice – it does not directly `respond’ to practical dilemmas (these, in fact, are constraints on technical evolution), rather, it has its own internal commitments or logics. As with Ricoeur’s account of psychoanalytic techniques, the technical object is formed through relations of force as opposed to meaning (for example, the laws of physics, thermodynamics, etc.). Nevertheless, features of the technical object are still intelligible and meaningful in relation to human practical understanding, since the technical object has a transformative effect on the lifeworld through the emergence of new sets of relations and variables that correspond to concrete technical ensembles (the “associated milieus” of concrete technologies). Like the work of fiction, this distanciation of technologies from practices enables the creative production of imaginative variations on established understandings.

One of the crucial, and most lasting, aspects of Simondon’s analysis of the technical object is the emancipatory character of his reading. His explanations of technics are a critical attempt to transform our everyday attitudes towards modern technologies,

Culture behaves toward the technical object much in the same way as a man caught up in primitive xenophobia behaves towards a stranger…The alienation in question is not caused by the machine but by a failure to come to an understanding of the nature and essence of the machine, by the absence of the machine from the world of meanings, and by its omission from the table of values and concepts that are an integral part of culture.³³⁸

Against an elevated `humanism’ that treats machines and technologies as inert tools that carry out the human or social projects more efficiently, on the one hand, and an unjustified fear of the ’automated’, world-threatening nature of the machine, on the other, Simondon asserts that these ideological positions blind us from properly understanding the nature of technics. To emancipate the human from these self-defeating perspectives, it is important to think about technologies in terms of their becoming, which is at once independent from, and co-emergent with human life. Rather than seeing ourselves as either masters or slaves of technology, we should see ourselves as collaborators with technological processes. This emancipatory perspective is paralleled in Ricoeur’s understanding of the text. The work of understanding, before considering the will or agency of the reader/participant (or author), embraces the long detour of reading and analysis. As with questions of the technical object, the `freedom’ of the reader is always relative to the work being considered. Like the text, technics encourages the development of an enlarged self, against a self that either asserts its dominance (by reducing technology to a tool), or disappears completely from the world (as would be the case in processes of enframing).

The convergence with the way Ricoeur and Iser discuss the activity of reading and the way Simondon discusses the becoming of technology is also found in their understandings of concretization. In the case of the act of reading, we saw that concretization was a productive process in which the horizons of the reader and horizons of the text were fused. The text has its own reality, independent of the concerns of the reader, meaning that the act of reading is not a simple assimilation of ideas or transmission of information. Instead, it is an active struggle, guided by cues from the text, the répertoire of the subjects engaging with the text, differing reading and composing strategies, and so on. All these mediating factors work to engender the fusion of horizons. The temporal nature of a text means that its objective character cannot be reduced to the subject-object distinction, but is an object that is constituted by the “wandering viewpoint”. A text cannot be abstracted from this wandering viewpoint and condensed into easily transmissible units of knowledge or information. All these factors render the reading process a process of concretization. The text, as a communicative medium, only takes effect in existence, through this process of (re)configuration by the reader. Prior to the reading process, the worlds of the text are only `proposed worlds’ or potential worlds.

In the preface to On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, John Hart writes that Simondon’s term concrétude is difficult to render in English, with the closest possible terms being concretization or concrescence. However, he does offer a useful image, taken from M. C. Richards, to explain the idea of machine `concrétude’.<sup>339</sup> The crafts (in this case, pottery), offer a suitable mode of practice for thinking about the relation between function and meaning in relation to making. When crafting an object, strong coordination is required between an understanding of the meaning of the object and the corporeal gestures and activities required to bring about that intended form. A necessary symmetry needs to be established between the two – it is not enough to simply have the intended form `in mind’ without the habitual knowledge of how to achieve it, and similarly it is not enough to know how to perform certain actions without understanding their purpose. These factors are drawn on by Richards in her book on centring, “It is the assertion by Richards of the inconvertible strength and symmetry of the combination which makes her combination of pottery and writing so important. Her concept of centering and fusion in the potter’s craft has the best chance of providing a language for machine `concretude’ in Simondon.”³⁴⁰

Technological becoming or concretization follows a similar process of centring: internal technical laws and the demands of natural milieus or particular technical ensembles are in conflict with one another, but the negotiation of this conflict is central to the concretization process. Similar to the part-whole relation in hermeneutics, the `technical object’ (the whole) is realized through concrete instances which differentiate it, just as individual machines are made up different parts working together. Unlike, Borgmann who suggests that the parts of machines or devices can all be reduced to the overall functionality or purpose of the device (and therefore can be swapped-out, altered, improved, etc., without changing the overall purpose), Simondon’s approach suggests that individual parts of a concrete technical object all have their own heterogeneous functions that are coordinated as a working whole. Altering a single part introduces a new set of functions to be integrated, and this process is not straight-forward. The new functions introduced by individual parts can reveal new possibilities for the whole, provoking radical transformations of the functioning of the machine. Therefore, in Simondon’s case there is a perpetual tension between the parts of the machine and the overall function or purpose of the machine, which makes concretization a dynamic, recursive process.

So, concretization is understood in terms of a fusion – the coordinated integration of different systems or horizons into a new configuration. This is why, for Simondon, it is incorrect to think about technology in terms of production. It is not a `tool’ or process designed to produce a particular outcome or artefact. If something is produced, it is the tangential result of a concretization process. The fusion of various converging series of technical processes gives rise to utilizable outcomes (or may not). The point is that it is firstly the internal dynamics of the technical object that generate the concretization, rather than, for example, the `needs’ of a society, “It is not the production-line which produces standardization; rather it is intrinsic standardization which makes the production line possible.”³⁴¹ It seems here that Simondon is arguing for a poietic account of technics, as a way of resisting the temptation to view it as simply `productive’, in the economic sense.

For a user of a technology, understanding its meaning can be difficult, since its genesis is more the result of a series of technical innovations, immanent to the technical object, rather than being related directly to its use in the lifeworld. For example, a technological configuration, such as the petrol engine, can be applied in a variety of different contexts (lawnmowers, boats, cars, etc.), and therefore its meaning is not exhausted by any one of these particular applications. For this reason, an examination of the utility of a technology does not yield a better understanding of its function or purpose,

We can get the same result from very different functionings and structures: steam-engines, petrol-engines, turbines, and engines powered by springs and weights are all engines; yet, for all that, there is a more apt analogy between a spring-engine and a bow or cross-bow than between the former and a steam-engine; a clock with weights has an engine analogous to a windlass, while an electric clock is analogous to a house-bell or buzzer. Usage brings together heterogeneous structures and functions in genres and species which get their meaning from the relationship between their particular functions and another function, that of the human being in action. ³⁴²

For Simondon, the individuality of a concrete technology can only be explained by recourse to a specific form of analysis. The meaning of particular technologies cannot be discerned through events of usage, but through a reflective or explanatory account of the inner workings of the technology itself. In the above quote, the (social/practical) category “engine” does not account for the different configurations that make up various species of engine, and that lend them their individual quality. In other words, if we wish to understand the essence of a technical object, practice or practical usage is the wrong point with which to begin. Rather than analysing how a technology is utilized in determining its meaning, Simon suggests instead a more genealogical approach – technologies move from abstract models to concrete unities. `Artisanal’ techniques, for example, are seen to be more abstract. They depend on the coordinated influence of a number of external factors. They are more likely to be individuated by `chance’ elements; perhaps an artefact is made-to-order, supply of certain materials is low so others are substituted, and so on. In short, abstract technologies depend on practical compromises in their functioning. A technology becomes concrete through an internal process of integration, which, in a sense, negates the need for environmental compromises. In Aristotle’s terms, techne loves tyche -- the genesis of the technical object involves a struggle with chance or non-controllable elements in the process of developing its own self-sufficient form. For example, in relation to the technical configuration of an engine:

It could be said that the modern engine is a concrete engine and that the old engine was abstract. In the old engine each element comes into play at a certain moment in the cycle and, then, it is supposed to have no effect on the other elements; the different parts of the engine are like individuals who could be thought of as working each is his turn without their ever knowing each other…the integration of the particular unit into the ensemble involves a series of problems to be resolved, problems that are called technical but which, in fact, are problems concerning the compatibility of already given ensembles.³⁴³

The more fragmented a technological ensemble is, the more abstract and vulnerable it is. A concrete technology is one with a high level of coordination and integration. The `technical’ problem involving the convergence of different structures into an integrated whole, is distinguished from the `practical’ problem of finding compromises and partial solutions for incomplete technologies,

Therefore, the technical problem has to do with the convergence of structures in to a structural unity rather than with the seeking of compromises between conflicting requirements…It is such a convergence that gives the technical object its specific identity because, at any given time, an indefinite plurality of functional systems is not possible. Technical species are a great deal more restricted in number than the destined uses of technical objects. Human needs diversity to infinity, but directions of convergence for technical species are finite in number. ³⁴⁴

In hermeneutic terms, the “specific identity” of individual technologies is related to their horizon -- their internal, concrete configurations already have a historical meaning. Their past innovations and constructions, which they have negotiated and integrated on the way to becoming more concrete, now shape and determine their future possible innovations. Concrete technologies are also finite. In Gadamer’s terms, they are subject to their own history of effects. Like a text they have an autonomous nature, the internal meaning of technology is the source of its genesis and resulting concreteness, as opposed to its significance (human significance). For example, the automobile is a revolutionary technological innovation from a social perspective, yet its emergence was the product of a practical compromise between the “technical species” and the nature of the human operator,

The more a car must meet the critical needs of its user the more its essential functions are encumbered by an external bondage. The body-work becomes loaded with accessories and the shape no longer approximates a stream-lined structure. The made-to-measure feature is not only inessential, it works against the essence of the technical being, like a dead weight imposed from without. The car’s centre of gravity is raised, and bulk increased.³⁴⁵

Simondon’s work parallels that of Simpson and Borgmann to an extent. Technologies and practices are seen to be in conflict with one another. However, as an inversion of the earlier perspective offered by Simpson and Borgmann, Simondon sees social/practical compromises as threatening to the evolution of technologies, rather than vice versa. Instead of seeing technologies being nihilistic modes of representing (enframing) practices, practices are seen to anticipate and represent technological innovations in ways which stifle the individuation process of a technological species, human needs and desires tend to render inessential features of technologies more significant. From Simondon’s perspective, there seems to be an irresolvable conflict between practical understanding, taken in a humanist sense, and technological becoming. Concrete technologies are akin to biological entities, they possess their own individualities and structures. The office plant and the computer could be said to be analogous in this sense; both are individuated phenomena that have been abstracted in order to enhance a practical working environment.

However, Simondon does offer a solution to this conflict. We must abandon our `humanist’ pretensions and embrace a new mode of the human that is a collaborator with technologies. Whereas the `essence’ of a technical species has its own internal tendency, and therefore has an integrity resembling that of natural phenomena, its becoming is also a process laden with affective consequences, and these consequences can indeed be felt at the practical level. Concrete technologies produce associated milieus. When Ricoeur asserts the integrity and autonomous nature of the text, he does so in order to accentuate its worldly character – a world which is at once distanced and inviting. The same can be said of Simondon’s reading of technologies. For hermeneutics, the notion of an enlarged self entails the crucial factor of transformation -- the act of reading is a concretization because its effects alter self-understanding in a way that is irreversible. We do not simply approach a text or narrative with the intention of fulfilling our own needs or desires, instead, we expect to feel our desires and outlooks challenged by the world of the text. The expectations of the reader, and the challenges presented by the world of the text, are transformed into a new, inseparable, configuration embodied in the enlarged self. Whereas technologies are in conflict with practices, their associated milieus offer points of engagement and transformation. A technology that `fits in’ well with an already on-going practice, for example a technique employed by an artisan, has less of an effect on established practices than a fully-formed concrete technology that demands to be taken on its own terms.

The reason technologies produce associated milieus is because, in the process of becoming more concrete, technologies must adapt to the surrounding environment. Much of this adaptation process is impacted by human operators, “The technical object is delimited to a certain extent by human choice which tries to establish the best compromise possible between two worlds.”³⁴⁶ However, adaptation must be taken in a particular sense. It does not mean that there is already a fully-formed environment in which the technology must carve out its own niche. Rather, adaptation is a type of recursive activity, where the environment is also produced, retroactively, by the adaptation process, “The adaptation-concretization process is one which causes the birth of an environment rather than being the result of an already established environment.”³⁴⁷ In other words, technologies both find a place within an ongoing milieu, whilst at the same time inaugurating new connections and values which also affect the shape of this milieu. The individuation of a technical object is effected by this adaptation process, “such individuation is possible because of the recurrence of causality in the environment which the technical being creates around itself, and environment which it influences and by which it is influenced. This environment, which is at the same time natural and technical, can be called the associated milieu.”³⁴⁸

The associated milieu, which is a mixture of the environmental and the technical, must be distinguished from the practical environment of the human agent. Simondon asserts the circularity (recursivity) of the adaptation process because he wants to highlight that the associated milieu of the technical object is not a fabricated milieu. The relationship between a world and the technical object is one of mutual dependence. The technical object has, in Canguilhem’s terms, a vital value.³⁴⁹ Again, it must be acknowledged that there is a difference between an abstract and a concrete technical object, but a concrete technology is one which is integrated into a milieu, and this integration entails a selection process. Certain features of the environment which are favourable to the development of the technology are highlighted, or in hermeneutic terms, disclosed, by its concrete existence.

Can these selections become meaningful for human practices? Perhaps they do not give themselves up easily to interpretation. More may be ’disclosed’ to the existing human being by dwelling by a river bank among the large pillar-like trees, than explicating the fluid mechanics of the hydroelectric dam which lies further down the river. In other words, there remains something `other’ in technical evolution, it has its own logic and development process, which is not concerned with the vital values of the `human’ (beyond the human-as-operator). However, if, taking Simpson’s view of meaning discussed earlier, meaning is a condition of practice, rather than a value to be extracted from the practice, then it may be possible to view the associated milieus of technologies as important for considering how practical conditions shift alongside the evolution of technologies. Taking Simondon’s view of technical evolution seriously, means accepting that the formation of associated milieus is an in-human operation. The worlds conditioned by technological adaptations are worlds we arrive in as others, and which must be approached through an attitude of engagement and discovery. Technological associated milieus are not comforting, familiar worlds, fabricated for our own benefit, instead, they are disruptive and foreign. In this way, approaching concrete technologies is akin to approaching a text, it involves the demand to alienate oneself from one’s own assumptions about technology.

The concrete nature of technologies suggests that they can potentially be thought of as hermeneutic objects. Simondon’s work highlights that individual technologies possess their own horizons and internal meanings that can be disclosed by combining an analysis of their technical features with a genealogy of their past iterations. At the practical level, the associated milieus of technologies help shape what counts as valuable in the lifeworld. I have suggested that Simondon’s account of the technical object shares some features of Ricoeur’s understanding of distanciated structures; both have an autonomous existence; their meaning is something contained within the configuration or work itself rather than in the `minds’ of the users engaging with or producing these structures. However, whereas texts, narratives, linguistic structures, and so on, are hermeneutic because they repeat personal, historical or cultural concerns, the technical object seems to offer no place for the human self. Therefore, if hermeneutics centres on ideas of Bildung, including Ricoeur’s directing of his hermeneutics towards the task of understanding better, what do we learn about ourselves from engagements with technologies? Simondon’s answer to this question involves the overcoming of social prejudices about technology and liberating ourselves from a humanist conception of our existence and nature. I suggest that Ricoeur’s work, too, allows the possibility for thinking about the productive effect of technology on self-understanding, provided that a difference is retained between techniques and practical understanding.

What we learn through appropriating these complex, foreign, and incomplete configurations is a lesson about human freedom. As David Lewin argued, this is the guiding question of a technological epoch. However, whereas Lewin suggested that technology reveals the question of freedom and self-determination in a negative way by displacing the question, below I will re-read this displacement as a potential opening or opportunity to put our assumptions in play. Through technological engagement, the apparent freedom of an ego is replaced by the playful (free) interactions of structures and self-understanding. A literal engagement with technology must be overcome for this approach to become operative. A literal engagement is one that disavows the symbolic features of technology.

Within the context of our everyday interactions with technologies, devices and systems appear initially through their utility. In this sense, technologies do not address us or invite a free participation in the same way as an artwork or text. The utility of technology is linked to what Borgmann calls the “tightly-patterned network” of technologies – devices exist within a network or configuration which progressively aims towards fulfilling a certain promise (making resources more available with increased efficiency, producing higher levels of comfort, reducing risk, etc.), and in this sense individual devices are substitutable. In this way, no particular device exists only within a concrete context. As we saw, for Ricoeur linguistic understanding is predicated on an inseparable relation between language-systems and the symbol, i.e., the point at which a language system can be traced back to its origins in the lifeworld, as a feature of a particular historical tradition or an existential insight about sacred being-in-the-world. The inseparability of context and mediating structure seems to be absent in technologies according to the hermeneutic critique.

From this perspective, technology does not address us as vulnerable, capable agents, in the same way that the symbol `calls out’ to us and implicates us. Whereas entering into a dialogical interaction with an artwork or text can be seen as a voluntary act (even if it is a voluntary submission to the message of the work), the utility and substitutability of technological artefacts means that we can neither enter into dialogue with them, nor simply walk away (as we could in the case of a painting). For example, in the run-up to a recent U.S. Supreme Court case regarding the question of whether or not the tracking data for your mobile phone should be considered as `private’ and therefore as protected under the Fourth Amendment, the magazine Wired featured an article with the title “Supreme Court Must Understand: Cell Phones Aren’t Optional”.³⁵⁰ In the article the authors write:

The problem is that cell phones are no longer meaningfully voluntary in modern society. They have become central to society’s basic functions, such as employment, public safety, and government services. The cell phone is a revolutionary technology, but its real value comes not from its technical capabilities, but from its near-universal adoption.³⁵¹

This description of mobile phone technology mirrors Lewin’s analysis of the logic of the interface – the technology `behind’ it is “revolutionary”, but these “technical capabilities” are circumscribed by the utility of the device. Furthermore, as with Lewin’s analysis of the interface, the utility of the mobile phone actively denies the deliberative freedom of its users - we do not even have a choice as to whether to use one or not.

The authors of the Wired article identify the value of technology with its social effects. A hermeneutic account, on the other hand, should not stop at this `literal’ level. If we want to read technologies as symbolic, the literal, or `sign’ value of the mobile phone needs to be read in relation to what the authors identify as the broader capability of the device. As we saw, Ricoeur’s understanding of the symbol, the point at which hermeneutics begins, asserts that sign-structures operate in relation to a concealed symbolic (ambiguous) substratum. Interpretation is a work that aims to reactivate and renew these symbolic features by putting them into play in new ways (appropriation). In this case, the technological capability of the mobile phone, which exceeds its use within a utility-driven configuration, is the symbolic dimension of the phone. This symbolic meaning cannot be separated from its effects within a particular economy of use, but it nevertheless exceeds these effects and remains open to different interpretations and uses.

Ricoeur himself articulates this tension, between hegemonic utilizations of technology and a recognition of the alternative possibilities concealed by this utility, “[T]he modern praxis most caught up in technology presupposes a prior agreement about the possibilities and norms of what is taken to be a meaningful being-in-the-world. Tradition is both the bond and the setting for this understanding.”³⁵² The hermeneutic task lies in revealing this dependency on tradition and history, so that new possibilities and futures can emerge.

The hermeneutic suspicion of technology succeeds in acknowledging a dimension of technology neglected by Simondon – its tendency to mask or conceal itself. The unmasking of technology can occur by appealing to its symbolic rootedness in praxis. Both a critique or suspicion of the broader network or paradigm of technological effects, and an attestation of the indeterminate, inventive, world of technics concealed by these effects overlap in articulating a limit of technology – from the critical hermeneutic perspective the limit is representative of technology’s impracticality, while for Simondon the limit is an enabling limit which constitutes technics as a world. The key here is that the limit, on both accounts, opens up a space for practical wisdom to operate. Either practical wisdom is left to take over where technologies fail, or, it acts as an `operator’ – it negotiates compromises between the demands of the technical object and the societal or cultural demands.

Utilizing aspects of Ricoeur’s work explored so far, I suggest that this limit should be conceived as a horizon, across which appropriation occurs. The horizon of technology is found in its practical applications. In keeping with a hermeneutic account of a horizon, it is not a fixed, graspable point. Instead, it is a projection of a field of possibilities which are variable and uncertain, and which imply the perspective of a subject or individual. Throughout Section 4 I have discussed various way that this horizon is visible, in terms of the multistability of the device, the presentational features of the interface, and the associated milieus of technical objects. The thinkers who articulate these perspectives also emphasize the role that practical understanding plays in the negotiation of these horizons.

Engaging with technologies at the level of presentation is different than a direct examination or critique of the technical object or tendency itself. Participating in technological presentation, both in a critical and appropriating way, permits a fusion of horizons to emerge between a technical tendency and practical understanding. Crucially, this mode of enragement leaves both sides open and vulnerable. Practical participation in technological milieus does not answer the question of what technology is or may become, but is aimed, inversely, at keeping this question open.