Bodies in Technology (review)

Don Ihde is a noted philosopher of technology, and Bodies in Technology is the latest in a long list of publications representing his efforts to understand technology from a phenomenological perspective. In all his work on technology, Ihde draws on Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-61) and his notion of the "body-subject"—that is, the notion that as subjects we are embodied, and to that extent our being is inextricably enmeshed in the world. This irreducible relationship between body and world is the sole source of meaning.

Ihde begins Bodies in Technology in precisely the same way, but he identifies two additional ways in which meaning is generated from out of this primordial relationship. There is a second dimension of socially/culturally constructed meaning arising from the existence of this fundamental (or phenomenal) body in the world with other body-subjects. A third dimension of bodily meaning is seen where the phenomenal and social body intersect with technology and human desire, and this is the specific area of inquiry in Bodies in Technology.

From the hammer to the Internet, Ihde's claim is that experiencing the world through technology gives rise to a utopian impulse whereby our human finitude is overcome and our technologies become our idols. This utopian impulse generates "technofantasies" that seem to endow our body with extended "reach" in the world. According to Ihde, technofantasies predate modernity, but in our postmechanical (or postmodern) age such fantasies go so far as to posit a "virtual reality" that is preferable to reality itself. In sum, then, Ihde is interested in exploring how our sense of embodied self is transformed via contemporary technology.

Ihde's text is divided into four parts. Part 1 thematizes the various ways in which we live our bodies in their phenomenal and social dimensions within the context of a world textured by technology. Here Ihde seizes on the distinction between the real and the virtual, and from that distinction he develops both a phenomenology of embodiment (whereby technology corrects or enhances the perceptual faculties of the body) and a phenomenology of disembodiment (whereby technology projects and objectifies the body). Ihde is particularly interested in disembodiment because it underlies the notion of a "virtual" body, which involves a kind of visualization of the body as generated by various technologies. This leads to a discussion in part 2 about the ways in which scientific instruments have traditionally been employed in a visualist mode. Though Ihde concedes that this visual mode has allowed science to produce a rich hermeneutics of physical phenomena, he argues that it is nonetheless culturally constructed and has cast scientific evidence in a way that privileges more virtual bodies over situated bodies-in-the-world.

Part 3 presses for the primacy of situated bodies in dialogue with scholars engaged in science studies, namely Andrew Pickering, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour. Part 4 brings the theme of situated bodies to bear on Ihde's larger philosophy of technology. Ihde contends that while the attempt to bring the monolith of technical progress under rational control is wrongheaded, one can enter into the human situatedness underlying technological practice both at the research and applied levels in order to effect normative change. A reflective epilogue on "technoscience" examines the convergence of popular and scientific virtualities in light of historical and epistemological developments.

Readers of Ihde's earlier work on technology will find much that is familiar in Bodies in Technology. The notion of the body-subject looms large in much of this work, and indeed, four of the eight chapters here are reprinted from other sources. However, what is new in this volume is a prolonged thematization centered on the body-subject as it relates to technology in general and virtuality in particular. Though I finds Ihde's conclusions a bit thin and tentative, a phenomenological analysis of the body's relationship to technology is long overdue. Bodies in Technology is philosophically...