Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing (Studies in Literature and Science)

Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing (Studies in Literature and Science)

Mark B.N. Hansen

Language: English

Pages: 352

ISBN: 0472066625

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Critics of contemporary culture have argued that critical theory must keep pace with technological change and, in the process, have instituted a theoretical model that restricts consideration of technology's impact on human experience to those dimensions that can be captured in language. In this wide-ranging critical study of poststructuralism's legacy to contemporary cultural studies, Mark Hansen challenges the hegemony of this model, contending that technologies fundamentally alter our sensory experience and drastically affect what it means to live as embodied human agents.
Embodying Technesis examines how technological changes have rendered obsolete notions of technology as machine and as text. Voicing a sustained plea for rethinking the technological, Hansen argues that radical technological changes--from the steam engine to the internet and virtual reality--have fundamentally altered conditions of perception and, in so doing, changed the prevailing structures of modern experience. By emphasizing the dynamic interaction between technologies and bodies, between the diffuse effects of technological shifts and the collective embodied experiences of contemporary agents, Hansen opens the path for a radical revision of our understanding of the technological.
Mark Hansen is Assistant Professor of English, Princeton University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

reason.24 To glimpse the rhetorical reduction at stake in technesis, let us focus briefly on the role metalepsis plays in the paradigm case of technesis in twentieth-century theoretical discourse. As I shall show in detail in chapter 4, Martin Heidegger's mature meditation on modern technology in "The Question concerning Technology" owes its force and its cogency to a fun- damental metaleptic reversal. While Heidegger unequivocally asserts the ontological secondarity of technology on the

uncontrollable surging ahead of invention [or simply of technical mediation] past all attempts to predict it or legislate it" (Brand 1987, 19). Such a revenge perfectly instantiates the cat- egory of "technological drift" that political philosopher Langdon Winner coins to describe such unintended consequences of technological innova- tion. More precisely, the revenge of the technological real instantiates Win- ner's twofold notion of technological drift as a designation for the "preg- nant

the privileged category for describing the domain of embodiment, incorpo- rating practices assimilate our embodied experience of technological change into the space of structured cultural ritual and, in so doing, form a kind of relay station on the path toward inscription. By predigesting the nondiscur- sive, as it were, they make it ready for conversion into language. Hayles explains: First, incorporated knowledge retains improvisational elements that make it contextual rather than

attached to the discovery of truth and the realization of good" (61). From Lyotard's perspective, then, our contemporary imperative to develop technology is not fundamentally different from the necessity we fall under as natural creatures subject to evolutionary chance. • 67 'cosmolocal' complexification than the work of human genius attached to the discovery of truth and the realization of good" ( 6 1 ) . From Lyotard's perspective, then, our contemporary imperative to develop technology

it lives. (43; emphasis added) In foregrounding the incompatibility between nervous systems (explicitly modeled as inscriptional agents) and the modern complexification of the material domain, Lyotard describes the very divorce of theoretical knowl- edge from experience that I have attributed to the industrial and thermody- namic revolutions. In the process, he adds an important element to the pic- ture previously sketched-a concrete understanding of how the human use of technology (e.g.,

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