1.1. What This Book Is About
Given the rapid development of new technologies such as smart devices, robots, and artificial intelligence, and their impact on the lives of people and on society, it is important and urgent to construct conceptual frameworks that help us to understand and evaluate them. What is the knowledge and experience involved in the interactive use and design of digital devices, how can we grasp the phenomenon that our new machines are not just tools but take on more agency and become more âsocialâ, and what are the normative implications of these changes in terms of the ethics and politics of technology? Philosophers of technology can help to ask and address these questions.
Benefitting from a performative turn in the humanities and social sciences, drawing on thinking about the performing arts, and responding to gaps in contemporary artefact-oriented philosophy of technology, this book moves thinking about technology forward by using performance as a metaphor to understand and evaluate what we do with technology and what technology does with us. Focusing on the themes of knowledge/experience, agency, and power, engaging with Plato, and discussing some pertinent ethical issues such as deception, the narrative of the book moves through a number of performance practices: dance, theatre, music, stage magic, and (perhaps surprisingly) philosophy. These are used as sources for metaphors to think about technologyâin particular contemporary devices and machinesâand as interfaces to bring in various theories and insights from and about these fields that are not usually employed in philosophy of technology.
The result of this trajectory through metaphors and theories is a sequence of gestures and movements towards a performance-oriented conceptual framework for thinking about technology which, liberated from the static, vision-centric, and dualistic metaphors offered by traditional philosophy, can do more justice to the phenomenology of our daily embodied, social, kinetic, temporal, and narrative performances with technology, our technoperformances. This approachâone could call it a performance-oriented phenomenology which includes building blocks for a performative epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and politicsâenables us to asks the crucial performance-shaped questions such as: How do we move, how are we moved, and how should we move and be moved? And who moves what or whom? Who should be allowed to move what or whom? What or who organizes, scripts, and directs our movements? How are our illusions created? With regard to contemporary technologies that get more autonomous and intelligent this means asking: What happens in terms of experience, agency, and power when our machines direct, play, choreograph, deceive, and write usâwhen we no longer move them or move with them, as we do with tools and older machines, but when they move us? What does this mean for the role of the designer-magician? And what can and should be our performative-philosophical response?
In the end we will see that performance and its related concepts are more than a metaphor: it makes sense to say that we perform with technology and that technology choreographs, directs, conducts, and deceives us on the many stages of contemporary social life. It even organizes and shapes the theatre of our thinking.
1.2. What This Book Does and What It Responds to: Philosophy of Technology and the Performative Turn
This book is not about performance as such nor is it about technology used in the performing arts. It is about technology and about how to think about technology, including how to do philosophy of technology. It is concerned with all kinds of technologies, but its focus is on new and emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs) and, in particular, on new smart and more autonomous digital technologies such as robots and artificially intelligent devices that are experienced and designed to be more than things. How can we understand that experience and design, and how can we conceptualize their normative effects?
Philosophers of technology and scholars in science and technology studies (STS), media studies, and related fields have been asking such questions for a while now, and during the past decade there have been interesting and fruitful discussions on the specific qualities and effects of more autonomous and intelligent devices, such as their moral standing or the issue of deception. These discussions are now entering public debates on technology. Yet what is often missing from these discussions, especially in ethics of technology, is a more explicit, elaborate, and critical reflection on the metaphors underpinning the arguments and views, including the epistemological, metaphysical, and aesthetic assumptions related to these metaphors. Metaphors are part of the philosopherâs toolbox, but they should also be scrutinized. Otherwise the discussions risk becoming dogmatic. For example, postphenomenology (Verbeek 2005) has occasionally borrowed theatre metaphors from Latour in order to suggest, for example, the âscriptingâ of our behaviour by technology, but it has not critically reflected on these metaphors, let alone fully used their potential. And arguably neither has Latour, who has drawn extensively on drama metaphors (e.g., in Akrich and Latour 1992, in actor-network theory, and later in, for example, Latour 1993) without really discussing his use of these tools. Moreover, contemporary philosophy of technology after the empirical turn has been very object-oriented: the focus was and is on technological artefacts. For example, postphenomenology has been concerned with how things mediate our perception and action (Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2005). Critical theory of technology (notably Feenberg 1999, 2010), influenced by STS, has also been focused on material artefacts. STS, too, following Latour, has been concerned with things, with ânon-humansâ, This turn to things has delivered many fruitful insights into the phenomenology and hermeneutics of technology and human-technology relations. But it has also obscured or neglected some aspects of what humans do and how they do itâwith technology. In particular, postphenomenology has not sufficiently conceptualized the social and temporal dimension of technological use and technological experience (and indeed of human existence) (Coeckelbergh 2017). The focus has been mainly on individual human-technology relations and, as will become clear by the end of this book, use and users of technologies have been modelled in a rather static way, ignoring movement. Finally, while in the mentioned research fields there has been sufficient discussion about the ethics of ICTs, for example the ethics of machines such as robots, there has been far less work on technology and politics, including technology and powerâpartly because a lack of a more comprehensive and appealing phenomenology of the social, including use as a social phenomenon.
One way to start addressing these lacunas is to question and tinker with the metaphors we use to think about knowledge and experienceâwith regard to technology and more generally. A dominant metaphor that powers traditional discussions in philosophical epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophy of science, etc., and which still exerts its influence on thinking about technology, is that of looking at a work of art, for example in the context of a museum. Many philosophers tend to argue about knowledge and experience in a way that focuses on what and how we see, what and how we perceive, and in doing so place themselves and the âordinaryâ people they talk about in the role of detached observers that look at something: an object, a problem, the truth, a fact, and indeed a technological artefact. Think about Platoâs allegory of the cave, which is all about seeing reality or not, or about discussions in the history of modern philosophy which discussed whether knowledge is based on what we see through the senses or what we see via reason. Today some philosophers are still wondering how âmindâ and âworldâ are connected, after first having separated them by means of the metaphor of an observing mind looking at an external worldâthus neglecting more performative, embodied, and participative models of mind and knowing. More generally, philosophers tend to discuss how to see things in the right way; their own activities (thinking, arguing, etc.) are framed by means of a visual metaphor.
In philosophy of technology the metaphor has also been put to work. For example, Heidegger wrote in Being and Time (1996) about tools that are present or that withdraw when we use them. The latter phrase goes some way towards a different, use-oriented view and implies movement but retains the visual metaphor and is still a view: Heideggerâs epistemology and metaphysics of Being is all about seeing, appearing, and revealing. Consider also his âThe Age of the World Pictureâ (1977): Heidegger questions the modern world picture and the modern project of representation, but the alternative he sympathizes withâthe Greek apprehending he tries to uncoverâis also a visual affair: an unconcealment. Heideggerâs view is part of a Western tradition in which physics, metaphysics, and epistemology are all about getting the picture right.
Most contemporary philosophers of technology do not fare better. They talk about the appearance of the machine versus what the machine really is, about the existence of objects independent of human perception, or about âmultistabilityâ and things that stand in between an âIâ and âworldâ and shape our perception (Ihde 1990). In all these cases, the underlying metaphor is looking at the world (e.g., a picture) from a distance with both the subject/observer and the object/world being rather static, immobile. The dominant metaphor remains looking at a work of art. We stand back and observe. The metaphor belongs to a detached and visual aesthetics, ignoring the idea of a more active and participative relation to the world.
This is not to say that there is no potential in contemporary thinking about technology for a more performative view. Postphenomenologyâs initial interest to conceptualize the use of technology (Ihde) or its use of Latourâs drama-based language (Verbeek) could in principle have led to a more performance-oriented approach. But this has not happened; the visual metaphor has been dominant and mediation, a central concept in postphenomenology, is imagined as a visual in-between. If a metaphor of the arts is borrowed at all, it is still, like in Heidegger, one from the visual arts.
But what happens if we change the metaphor?
In the 20th century, philosophy and the social sciences have started to develop elements of what has been called a âperformative turnâ, elements which are still further developed today. For example, in philosophy of language, Austin (1962) introduced the idea that sentences do not only say something about the world but are also sometimes performative: so-called speech acts also âdoâ something. Butler (1988) argued that gender identity is constituted through performative acts. In philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive science, the insight emerged that perception is a more active matter than previously thought. This suggested that the metaphor of vision is limited when it comes to understanding how we know and experience. Today there are efforts to move towards different ways of thinking, using different metaphors. For example, NoĂ« (2004) argued that perceiving is way of acting. In thinking about art, Penny (2017) has recently argued that a non-dualistic, enactive, and embodied cognition approach helps to reveal the performative dimensions of art practices, arguing for a performative aesthetics. And in the social sciences, Goffman (1956) understood the social life as a kind of theatre (see Chapter 3). Apart from Latour and especially Pickering (1995), who has developed an interesting performative conception of technological agency in scientific practice, not much of this performative turn work has been used in philosophy of technology and STS. And neither Latour nor Pickering did so in a systematic and critical way that fully, directly, and openly engages with, articulates, and analyzes the metaphors from the performing arts they use. Moreover, in line with STSâs origins in social studies of science, Pickering focused on performances in science. But here I am more interested in our everyday living with technology.
This book explores what happens to thinking about technology if we use the metaphor of performance. What happens if we use the metaphor of performance, in particular in the sense of âthe performing artsâ such as dance, theatre, music, and magic, for thinking about technology? What kind of phenomenology and critical theory might emerge from this work? How can experience and use of technology be conceptualized with the help of these metaphors? And given philosophy of technologyâs insights about the non-instrumental roles of technology and the current emphasis on intelligent automation technologies in robotics and artificial intelligence: how can this metaphor help us to think not only about what we do with technology but also what technology does with us?
Metaphors, however, are not just given. We cannot just look at them, as if they were off the shelf devices or tools ready to use. Rather, they need to be articulated, crafted, worked out, used, and, indeed, performed. It is not clear, for example, what dance is or what theatre is, what kind of experience and knowledge is involved, what it means to dance, choreograph, act, or direct, etc. We need to clarify and work out what all this is about. If we want to âapplyâ the metaphors, this work needs to be done first. (âFirstâ is a bit misleading since, as we will experience, there is no clear border between working out a metaphor and âapplyingâ it, since any application always feeds back into the metaphor itself.) For this purpose, this book engages with philosophical and interdisciplinary work on the performing arts in at least three ways.
First, this exercise includes theories about dance, theatre, music, and stage magic. There is a growing body of theory and philosophy about the performing arts, for example in performance studies and dance studies. Philosophers of technology should not neglect this body of knowledge, especially since some of it reflects on (performing) arts and technology. This is an interesting project in itself. However, my main purpose in this book is not so much to learn from or comment on what these scholars say about performance, process, temporality, or even about technology but rather to further develop my applications of the performance metaphor to thinking about technology by bringing in philosophy and theory about specific fields in the performing arts. This is in no way meant to reduce the performing arts or theory about these arts to a resource for metaphors or to what is said in this book; obviously there is much more going on in these fields and much more can be said about performance in all its diversity. But my focus is on a specific type of knowledge transfer and conceptual operation that aims to help philosophers of technology to move on.
Second, the book also engages with an emerging field called performance philosophy, which offers research on the relationship between performance and philosophy (for example work by Laura Cull, Andrew Bowie, or Arno Böhler) and suggests not only that philosophy can help to understand performance but also that we can interpret and practice philosophy as performance. Again, there is much more to be said about this interesting field and in general phi...
