In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

131 9 Ihde’s Albatross: Sticking to a “Phenomenology” of Technoscientific Experience Robert C. Scharff Ihde’s work occupies a unique position in technoscience studies, no doubt due in part to his development of a creative but still recognizably Husserlian phenomenology. Ihde himself, however, has recently called phenomenology his albatross (CT 131–144, 128–130): he cannot get rid of it. He adds, however , that when phenomenology is properly defended against old misperceptions and expanded to concern itself with human-technology relations, does he need to get rid of it. Labels, he concludes, might just as well be embraced; they stick anyway. Ihde’s self-conception successfully highlights what is interesting and important about his work. It also, I think, hides a weakness. Without any doubt, give him three cheers for his systematic descriptions of our technoscientifically structured lifeworld and for his epistemic defense of the phenomenological approach he employs in developing these descriptions. Together, they offer a welcome alternative to the much less experientially astute and often epistemologically naïve accounts typically offered by analytic philosophers and social scientists. Do you want to consider concretely how it is to “be” with technology —and how a phenomenologically informed account of this is neither “objective ” (i.e., causal and third-person) or “subjective” (i.e., as objectivity freaks assume phenomenology must be)? Read Ihde. On the other hand, Ihde’s phenomenological descriptions can often seem strangely apolitical and “neutral.” Granted, he knows that technology is not an unmixed blessing, and he insists there should be “technoscience critics.” Like science critics, he explains, those engaged in technoscience studies must not only be more expert than amateur about what they describe, but also less than “total insiders” in how they react to it (EH 127–136).1 Only in this way 132 Robert C. Scharff can they achieve the proper evaluative distance from the technoscientific practices that concern them. Yet in the end, this seems to me to be too much a case of “do as I say, not as I do.” In Ihde’s own writings, new technologies are embraced, the expansion of technological mediation is everywhere noted, and some instances of technoscientific excess and inefficiency are mentioned. Yet for anyone who displays less enthusiasm than he does for human-technology relations, or whose criticisms of technoscientific culture are systematic or overtly political, Ihde has mostly dismissive names (e.g., romantic, nostalgic, utopian, absolutist, pessimistic totalizer). For thirty years, he has continued to believe that “a rigorous phenomenological analysis of [humantechnology ] relations poses . . . the best way into an understanding of both the promises and the threats of technology” (TP 15).2 Here is Husserl having the last word, for it is above all Heidegger who is being rejected here. Heideggerians love their laptops, Ihde likes to say. My interest in this paper, however, is not to see better justice done to Heidegger—though I think he deserves it. And Ihde is certainly right that some of Heidegger’s followers are too quick to embrace “globally” the master’s critique of technoscientific hegemony and too slow to ask locally where that leaves us now. So, Ihde’s complaint does have a target. Nevertheless, I believe that his dismissiveness of Heidegger’s allegedly “pessimistic totalizing” is off the mark. It has, moreover, the potential to diminish the power of Ihde’s own findings, not just to help perpetuate the familiar Heidegger-bashing myths about how out of touch this poor Swabian peasant was with the real world. To the extent that it can be done in a short paper, I suggest below and argue a little for the view that Ihde’s weakness here may well be a consequence of precisely his loyalty to that same phenomenology, which Ihde already, for other less worrisome reasons, calls his albatross. Ihde’s Pioneering Phenomenology of Technoscience I start with Ihde’s contributions. After all, without them, there would be nothing to critique. Consider this comparison. In a famous essay, Gadamer claims that the “central question” of our age is “how our natural view of the world—the experience of the world that we have as we simply live out our lives—is related to the unassailable and anonymous authority that confronts us in the pronouncements of science.” Moreover, Gadamer thinks that precisely because this is the central question, as philosophers, “our task is to reconnect the objective world of technology, which the sciences place at our disposal and discretion...

Share