Post Phenomenology
Phenomenology is a relational ontology – subject and object are co-constituted in the intentional act of perception. Husserl’s famous consciousness of…something. Post-phenomenology adopts this insight then inserts technology into the relation, as Don Idhe says, technology can occupy the position of the ‘of’ as it becomes a part of the relationship. The place the technology is interposed in the relationship is on a kind of scale from ‘embodied’ to ‘background’, via ‘alterity’ relations. It should be said that the technologies in question are ‘multi-modal’ – they have no essential fixed nature and can move between these categories.
This is paricularly interesting in the case of hermeneutic relations, where multistability opens up the posibility of multiple interpretations of the same gestalt. (The example given is of an fMRI scan interpreted differently by doctors ). What’s interesting is that to uncover a meaning through hermeneutics would involve taking the historical, situated context of its production into account including the intentions of the author, and to separate this from the interpreters context. The post-phenomenological approach allows a sort of intentionality of the object, which puts it quite a long way from phenomenology and is heading towards the idea of the ‘cognitive assemblage.’ (N.Katherine Hayles) or Karen Barad’s agential realism. Interesting also is the way the analysis stops at the surface of the screen – why not go on to query the intentions of the designers.
If i think about how the pp method might apply to a complex task like playing a piece of music on a clarinet (if this can be considered a technologically mediated experience) a lot is revealed. What seems immediately apparent though is there is not just one intentional object in consciousness, but several, each in a different kind of relation to the subject. I think it’s usual in phenomenology to say a familiar object or tool will ‘withdraw’ when in use, becoming ‘zuhanden’ (‘ready-to-hand’) and a musical insrument might be expected to do so. But it doesn;t: i find the business of playing more like an alterity relation as far as the instrument is concerned: it’s materiality constantly speaks back, from the resistance of the reed to the action of the keys and the feel of the holes in the instrument’s body. It isn’t just a matter of lumpy physical properties (like the thumb-rest digging in, which i ignore) but its musicality. I’m in a hermeneutic relation to the score, on 2 levels, as a sequnce of symbols to be interpreted as bodily configurations and as a narrative with meaning with requires a corresponding emotional position from me for that meaning to be heard.