[Xmca-l] Re: Noumenal and Phenomenal

[Martin John Packer]

A few days ago I offered a quick answer to Greg’s question, below, and said that there was a longer one.

The longer answer is that in 1994 Bruno Latour wrote a detailed critique of Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology of technology, later published in Pandora’s Hope. I attach the text. Certainly, Heidegger was deeply pessimistic about technology, while Latour is generally very optimistic. But in the course of his critique Latour basically rediscovered many of the very points that Heidegger made about the role of technology in human existence (as Soren Riis has noted). 

What did Latour discover? That technology does not transform us: it is us. That technology does not simply bridge subject and object, person and world, merely as means to achieve a goal, it displaces and transforms human agency, indeed it transforms human being. His concluding words: “Artifacts…. They mediate our actions? No, they are us.”

And the relevance to Greg’s question? Latour’s text is titled “On Technical Mediation: Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy.” A central part of his analysis is the description and distinction of four meanings of the term ‘mediation’: as translation, as composition, as black-boxing, and as delegation. In other words, to untangle the ontology of technology, Latour had to unpack the notion of mediation. 

Martin
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