– By way of introduction, why and how were you drawn to the philosophy of technology?
– It probably goes back to my boyhood where I loved to tinker and invent things in my Kansas farm environment. But then also during my graduate school days I was at MIT (2), so I got to meet a lot of leading inventors, engineers and the like while I was doing my PhD in philosophy. And then, when I got my first post PhD job, the interdisciplinary course that I was assigned to had to do with leisure in a work society. In those days people were thinking that technology was going to give us all some leisure time so that we could have a new Athens and reinvent philosophy. It was clear to me that this was not the case, and I decided to look at the concept of work. As I did this I realized that even intellectual work entails material tools. So that was what stimulated my early beginnings in technologies – an interest which has grown trough the years of now nearly forty years of work on the philosophy of technology.

– Why and in what ways is the philosophy of technology important?
– I think it should be pretty obvious that virtually every industrialized country, whether it is European, American, or Northern Asian, is a technologically saturated society. When I taught my first philosophy of technology classes, one of the things I would do was to ask the students to simply make an inventory of all the material objects that they used in a given day. And the people who were conscientious realized that there were hundreds, and then when you think of the big mega-technologies including communication, media, transportation, etc. – our lives are textured by technologies. Consequently, not only if we are going to reflect upon cultural life, but also upon the most intimate parts of life, questions of technology come up. So, it seems to me that philosophy of technology is a demand which arises from our style of cultural life.

In recent years, influential studies such as Friederich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) and Hans Ulrich Gumbrect’s Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (2004) have put the materiality of the media on the agenda, and terms such as “media archaeology” and “media technologies” have now entered the vocabularies of media scholars. During the same time period, several studies have focused on embodied experience, and phenomenology seems to be going through a renaissance. The current phenomenological approaches tend to attach importance to the way experience is transformed by media technologies: Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990), D. N. Rodowick, Reading the Figural, or, Philosophy after the New Media (2001), and Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (2004).

– By the late 20th century the philosophy of technology took an empirical turn. This is also the case in media studies, and lately there has been much focus on instrumentation or media technologies and the material aspects of the media. What is your take on this turn?
– I think I have to say I was ahead of that. My interest in instrumentation goes back to the seventies, first in terms of instrumentation in science but also in terms of instrumentation in media. When it comes to the latter, I have been particularly interested in the way television, cinema, internet, telephone, and the like, transform the way we communicate. Each one of these media has a different kind of selectivity and as a consequence each one develops, as humans use it, different styles of communication. It is important that we take looks at specific media and this is, of course, what counts for the empirical turn. Secondly, I think that the empirical turn for the most part came out of a lot of people being influenced by science studies in the late 1980s, where social scientists like Bruno Latour and Karin Knorr Cetina began to do specific studies of laboratory life. This style of analysis and investigation then spread to other disciplines, including the philosophy of technology.

– How does your approach to the philosophy of technology relate to the so-called divide between continental and analytic philosophy?
– My background is both. I had a lot of analytic training while I was a PhD student in philosophy. But I have also done much work on existentialism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics – partly due to an earlier theological interest, but on through graduate school I did my dissertation on Paul Ricoeur, who is a French phenomenological-hermeneutic philosopher. So, I tend to be somewhat of a hybrid. Although in recent years I have been more influenced by American pragmatism which right now, of course, is heavily within analytic philosophy. I took a more classical and experimental turn, however, to be friendly to the kind of analysis that I was doing.

Ihde prefers case-based research which investigates the role played by instruments, technologies, or media by taking concrete practices as its point of departure. His aim is not, however, to reduce technologies to practice or to dissolve them into their contexts. Rather, he aims at revealing patterns of use which says something about the transformative powers of particular technologies. Ihde’s approach is postphenomenological, and he does not seek to attain independent and timeless essences. He does not, however, categorically reject all talk about identity and media specificity, such as is the case with many a postmodernist or antiessentialist scholar. Rather, he clears the way for an alternative understanding of the term ’identity’ by focusing on selectivity, style, and multi-stability.

– You refer to your own approach by the term ‘postphenomenology.’ What is implicated by ‘post’ in this context, and in what ways do your approach differ from the classical phenomenological approaches of, say, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger?
– It is very hard to do this in a few sentences, but I’ll try. In my readings of pragmatism and phenomenology, both of which attack the early modern Cartesian kind of epistemology, I concluded that Husserl’s turn to a modification of subject/object epistemology was basically a mistake, and that John Dewey’s turn to a more experimental, organism/environment kind of model, which gets away from subjectivity, was a better kind of turn. So, I sort of adapted the pragmatist critique of early modern epistemology, and then I went on to do the empirical turn, to do concrete examinations of particular technologies. But what I retain of phenomenology – and I think this is really the core of classical phenomenology – is what I call variational method. This method implies that you, in your analysis, want to do a go-through of the range of possibilities to see what things are variant and what things are not variant, and out of that emerges the model of what I call multi-stability. So, if you will, my substitution for Husserl’s essences is the notion of multi-stability.

What makes Ihde’s approach particularly interesting, not only in the context of the philosophy of technology but also in the context of media studies, is that he works across disciplinary boundaries. He refuses to draw absolute boundary lines between science and the humanities, on the grounds that knowledge formation on both sides of the alleged gulf consists in critical, interpretive activity rooted in material practices. According to Ihde, the social sciences and the humanities are much too focused on models which privilege text and linguistic discourses. To counter this tendency, he is developing a material hermeneutics which is to provide us with tools that make us able to deal with the non-linguistic aspects of the objects under inquiry.

– The philosophy of technology has, according to you, everything to do with hermeneutics. But you also talk about the need to expand hermeneutics. Can you elaborate on that?
– Yes, hermeneutics traditionally has been very language and text oriented. And I think this is a characteristic of most social sciences and humanities – that they focus upon things that are easily put in linguistic-textual kinds of forms. Now, this focus is out of line with contemporary experience, because of so much of the media having shifted us to become more aware of images, particularly visualizations but also auditory transformations in electronic music, etc. So, what I am calling material hermeneutics is meant to supplement or complement classical hermeneutics by looking at how we are to get material things to evidence themselves, or metaphorically, to speak. And when it comes to this, it seems to me that the natural sciences have become the better investigators. They can examine lots of things that do not have any kind of textual-linguistic component and yet answer the kinds of questions that could be raised about them. Thus, my material hermeneutics is an attempt to get social scientists and humanists to look much more at the sort of instrumentation used by the natural sciences, which is able to yield stuff from matter, whether it is animal, plant, or mineral.

– To follow up on your comments about images and natural science, for some years now you have been conducting a project on imaging technologies. What are the most important findings of this project?
– I think the most important result of this yet unpublished book is the discovery that we, in the late 20th early 21st century, have entered into what I call a second scientific revolution. The kinds of imaging which come out of the sciences now, x-rays, gamma rays, radio waves etc., can exceed any of our perceptual capacities that were never possible before the 20th century. To that you add the great analytical machines, namely computer processes, which turn image into data and data into image. This creates a new kind of constructive, manipulable imaging which, I think, yields better and more robust knowledge in science, and of course it yields similar and parallel results in media.  

– To conclude, which of your books do you consider the most important?
– The two books that have been most commented on, what should we say, the best sellers, are of course my early Experimental Phenomenology: An Introduction from 1977, where I worked out my version of variational theory and the notion of multi-stability, and then Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth from 1990, which is my most systematic philosophy of technology book. Those are my two signature books, so to speak. Then after the 1990s, when I became more interested in the sciences and in ‘Technoscience’ as I call it – combining technology and science – I think the three that are most important are Instrumental Realism: The Interface between Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Technology from 1991, which looked at both analytic and continental philosophers of science and technology as well as the role of instruments through them, and secondly, Bodies in Technology from 2002, which has been translated into a number of languages already and which looks at the role of materiality and embodiment in a range of disciplines such as science studies, philosophy of science, and philosophy of technology, and then finally – short of the imaging book which is yet to be published – Expanding Hermeneutics: Visualism in Science from 1998. In that book I kind of outline a program for reconceiving the practices of sciences upon hermeneutic models and look at the way that sciences have developed a very sophisticated visual hermeneutics in its practice. So, those are the more important of the cadre of now twenty authored and edited books.

The empirical turn has made itself felt in the Norwegian context too, and the new interest in media technologies and the materiality of the media have resulted in several large research projects, such as the media-archaeological project Aesthetic Technologies 1700-2000 (2002-2007) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the project Media Aesthetics: Materiality, Practice, Experience (2003-2007) at the University of Oslo, and the project New Media as Cultural Techniques and Forums for Communicative Action (2003-2008) at Volda University College and the University of Bergen. Ihde is affiliated with the latter project as an international contact.

References:

(1) Peter-Paul Verbeek, “Material Hermeneutics,” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, Vol. 6, No. 3 (2003).

(2) Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Aud Sissel Hoel is Associate Professor of Visual Communication in the Department of Art and Media Studies, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Hoel met Ihde during a research stay at Stony Brook University in 2007. The interview took place on June 15, 2007.