Facing Janus: Reframing the Question Concerning Technology – Part 3 of 3

Bernard Stiegler: What Will We Become

Bernard Stiegler has reframed the question concerning technology around the concept of human becoming. Stiegler sees an intrinsic relationship between the evolution of human beings (anthropogenesis) and technology (technogenesis). Stiegler makes two central claims: (1) that human beings are inherently technological and (2) that they develop through the evolution of technology. For Stiegler, the question concerning technology is not “How shall we act?” or even “How shall we live?” but rather “What shall we become?”

Stielger claims that human beings are intrinsically technological. His claim rests on the connection between technics and time as he explains:

There is today a conjunction between the question of technics and the question of time, one made evident by the speed of technical evolution, by the ruptures in temporalization (event-ization) that this evolution provokes, and by the processes of deterritorialization accompanying it. It is a conjunction that calls for a new consideration of technicity. The following work aims to establish that organized inorganic beings are originarily and as marks of the de-fault of origin out of which there is [es gibt] time—constitutive (in the strict phenomenological sense) of temporality as well as spatiality, in quest of a speed “older” than time and space, which are the derivative decompositions of speed. Life is the conquest of mobility. As a “process of exteriorization,” technics is the pursuit of life by means other than life (Stiegler, Bernard, Technics and Time, I: The Fault of Epimetheus, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, Originally published as La Technique et le temps, 1: La faute d’Epiméthée, Galilée: Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, 1994, 17.)

While Stiegler agrees with Heidegger’s claim that Dasein is a temporal being, who is thrown into existence and stretched along between birth and death which constitutes the historical temporality of Dasein (Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1962. Originally published as Sein und Zeit. Tubingen: Neomarius Verlag, 1926. Ibid., 174, 425, 427.) he questions whether this temporality is a intratemporality and criticizes Heidegger for overlooking the fact that human temporality is externalized in technics. As such, Dasein is essentially “prosthetic,” that is, Dasein is always seeking to temporalize itself externally through artefacts (Gaston, Sean, “Technics of Decision: An Interview,” Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 8, no. 2 (August 2003): 156.) Stiegler explains:

Mortals are prosthetic, that is to say they are endowed with artefacts and are capable of altering the artefacts which they adopt. In this sense, they are not doomed to a predestination, they “have to be” what they are, they are destined to decision, that is, to time understood in this sense, which is not that of life (Ibid., 156.)

Additionally, Dasein temporlizes itself technically as Stiegler points out.

Dasein is outside itself, in ec-stasis, temporal: its past lies outside it, yet it is nothing but this past, in the form of not yet. By being actually its past, it can do nothing but put itself outside itself, “ek-sist.” But how does Dasein eksist in this  way? Prosthetically, through pro-posing and pro-jecting itself outside itself, in front of itself. And this means that it can only test its improbability programmatically (Stiegler, Technics and Time, 234.)

The temporality of Dasein is constituted prosthetically which also means that time is constituted through technology or what Stiegler prefers to call “technics”. Time is therefore inscribed in technics which leads Stiegler to conclude that human becoming, that is its temporality, is through technology. He calls the mode of human becoming “epiphylogenesis” which involves “the evolution of the living by other means than life (Ibid., 135.)” Whereas, Heidegger saw being and time as constitutive of Dasein’s facticity, Stiegler argues that it is constituted in an “epigenetic layer of life” which is an “epigenetic sedimentation, a memorization of what has come to pass, is what is called the past, what we shall name the epiphylogenesis of man, meaning the conservation, accumulation, and sedimentation of successive epigeneses, mutually articulated (Ibid., 140.)” At a very primitive and basic level, language can be seen as an epigenetic layer and therefore a technic through which human beings temporalize themselves. If we now return to Heidegger’s notion of technology as a mode of disclosure we can see the implications of Stiegler’s claim.  If Dasein is temporal, and time is constituted through technics as Stiegler claims, then technology becomes the mode of human becoming.

The contrast between Heidegger and Stiegler could not be more stark. Whereas Heidegger sees an ontological distinction between Dasein and the tools it takes up, Stiegler sees both as intertwined. This intertwining is a process of externalization which he refers to as instrumental maieutics. Instrumental maieutics is the process whereby human temporality is externalized through the use of instruments and simultaneously given back to the human being. Stiegler puts it this way, “the cortex is determined by the tool just as much as that of the tool by the cortex: a mirror effect whereby one, looking at itself in the other, is both deformed and formed in the process (Ibid., 158.)” This claim is similar to Marx’s claim that “man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and his social life (Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Stanley Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), 241.)” Human becoming is intrinsically linked with technological development.

Stiegler’s anthropology gets its metaphysical bearings by returning to the myth of Prometheus retold by Plato in the Protagoras (Plato, “Protagoras,” in Plato: Complete Works, eds. John M. Cooper and D.S. Hutchison (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 320d-322d.) In Plato’s retelling of this myth the gods assigned Prometheus (forethought) and his brother Epimetheus (afterthought) the task of assigning powers and abilities to mortals. Epimetheus begged Prometheus to let him have the exclusive responsibility of assigning powers and abilities to the mortals. Prometheus agreed, and Epimetheus began assigning powers and abilities in such a way as to bring harmony and balance to the natural world. But, by the time Epimetheus came to the human being he was out of powers and abilities and Prometheus had to steal the art of fire (empuron technen) (Plato, “Protagoras,” 321e.) from Hephaestus in order for the human being to have a power and ability. Stiegler sees this myth as pointing to a fundamental “lack”  or “de-fault” (défaut ) in the metaphysical origins of the human being which is overcome through technics; that is to say the art of fire compensates for the human beings lack of power and ability. Human beings are metaphysically undetermined and contingent; that is, human beings are finite. This leads Stiegler to claim that “discovery, insight, invention, imagination are all, according to the narrative of the myth, characteristic of a default.” The origins of human technology are therefore bound up with the origins and finitude of humanity. Thus, for Stiegler, the question concerning technology is not “How shall we act?” or “How shall we live?” but rather “What shall we become?” As Sean Gaston, has put it:

For Stiegler, the technical is more than the tool, more than the machine: it involves the invention of the human. Life is already reliant on technics. Technics makes the transmission of the past and the anticipation of the future possible.     Without technics there can be no memory, no heritage, no adoption, no invention.  Technics give us time (Gaston, Sean, “Technics of Decision: An Interview,” Journal of Theoretical Humanities, Vol. 8, no. 2 (August 2003): 151.)”

Stiegler views technics as “the horizon of all possibility to come and of all possibility of a future” which philosophy has “repressed as an object of thought (Stiegler, Technics and Time, ix.)” In response to this repressive approach Stiegler has argued that “the modern age is essentially that of modern technics (Ibid., 7.)”

Conclusion

In this article, I have attempted to present three ways the question concerning technology has been re-framed in order to bring into relief what is really at stake in the question. I began with Hannah Arendt’s reframing of the question around human activity. Arendt’s analysis of the question concerning technology pointed to a Janus-faced problem. On the one hand technology makes us masters of our world through machinery. On the other hand, it also puts the capability of destroying the world in our hands. Next, I presented Martin Heidegger’s reframing of the question around the human being. Heidegger recognized both the danger and the possibilities for human life in its relationship with technology and highlighted art is a way of coming closer to the dangerous power of modern technology so that its saving power may shine forth. Finally, I presented the view of the contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler who reframes the question around human becoming. Stiegler’s insight into the interrelationship between technics and time and his conclusion that human temporality is constituted technologically helped to bring into relief what is really at stake in the question concerning technology, namely, that the future of humanity will be determined through technology.

Technology has been part of human life since the dawn of consciousness and it will not fade from the mortal horizon. Human beings are inherently technological, in fact we are human because we are technological, and therefore our destiny is bound up with a Janus-faced system full of threats and promises. To face Janus we must learn to act and live in a free and reflective relationship with technology, mindful of the dangers and hopeful of the promises so that who we become will remain human and not monstrous.

Facing Janus: Reframing the Question Concerning Technology – Part 2 of 3

Martin Heidegger: How Shall We Live?

Martin Heidegger reframed the question concerning technology around the concept of human being. Heidegger’s 1953 essay “The Question Concerning Technology” approaches the question of modern technology as a pervasive and Janus-faced fact of modern human life. Drawing on Rousseau he captures the problem in his opening statement: “everywhere we remain free and chained to technology (Heidegger, Martin, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Ferrell Krell, 1977, repr. New York: Harper Collins Publisher, 1993, 311.)” Technology cannot be approached uncritically, according to Heidegger. Instead, it must be approached freely and reflectively because the essence of technology, as a way of revealing the totality of being, is enframing which both endangers and saves being.

Heidegger argues that “technology is a way of revealing (Ibid., 318.)” To ground this claim he recovers the Greek understanding of technology (techne) as revelatory (aletheia) and suggests the natural triadic process of physis-poesis-aletheia for understanding how technology can be revelatory (Ibid., 317-319.) Heidegger points out that for the Greeks; physis (Nature) was the “arising of something out of itself,” as such it was a disclosure or unconcealment (aletheia) of being (Ibid., 317.) This process of this unconcealment was understood as a “bringing-forth (poesis)” of being. The same was true for crafts or works of art (techne). The craftsman or artist brings forth or reveals what is concealed in nature (Ibid., 318.) Thus, Heidegger concludes, technology is a way of revealing, a way of bringing forth the totality of being. The problem, of course, is that not all revealing is poetic. Heidegger claims that the essence of modern technology is enframing (Gestell) (Ibid., 325.) As such, modern technology is a type of revealing that orders and determines. As Heidegger puts it, “enframing means the gathering together of the setting upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing reserve (Ibid., 325.)” Heidegger contrasts this type of revealing with the Greek notion of techne as a poesis of aletheia. Although both the Greek understanding of techne and modern technology are both forms of aletheia, they reveal the totality of being in vastly different ways (Ibid., 326.) Techne as poesis allows nature to “come forth in unconcealment,” whereas modern technology as Gestell, challenges nature to come forth as a “standing reserve.” Nature is therefore set upon, ordered and determined in a way that leads to a concealment of its truth instead of a revealing of it. Modern technology in this mode of revealing is therefore dangerous (Gefahr) both to Nature and to humanity (Ibid., 331.)

In order to illustrate the distinction between poesis and Gestell Heidegger offers the example of a hydroelectric power plant that sets upon the Rhine River as a source of power (standing reserve) and an old wooden bridge “joined bank with bank for hundreds of years (Ibid., 321.)” The power plant enframes the river in such a way that it can no longer be a river but must be a power source. The bridge on the other hand, while equally technological, allows the river to be what it is: a river. But Heidegger does not leave the issue separated into categories of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” technology. Instead he turns to face the Janus-faced question concerning technology and reframes it.

Heidegger recognizes that technology is ambiguous (Ibid., 338.) Given that the essence of modern technology is enframing, it “blocks every view into the propriative event of revealing” and therefore endangers the truth of being (Ibid., 338.) But enframing also “lets man endure… that he may be the one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the essence of truth (Ibid., 338.)” Thus, the essence of modern technology as enframing both conceals and reveals the truth of being and therefore contains both a danger and a saving power (Ibid., 338.) But, as Heidegger points out, while “we can look into the danger and see the growth of the saving power” we are nevertheless “not yet saved (Ibid., 338.)” We must find a way of living in a “free relationship” with technology (Ibid., 311.) The question is not “Do we accept or reject technology?” but rather “How do we live with it?” Heidegger’s answer to the question concerning technology reframed in this way is: art. Art is essentially poetical and therefore contains the potential for “the bringing forth of the true into the beautiful (Ibid., 339.)” Heidegger does not say that art will poetically reveal the truth of being; only that it is possible (Ibid., 340.) But art is a way of coming closer to the dangerous power of modern technology so that its saving power may shine forth.

But have Arendt and Heidegger missed something in their analysis of modern technology? Is it possible that Arendt in her ardent concern for the human condition has missed a vital aspect of it that changes our understanding of the relationship between humanity and technology? Is it possible that in Heidegger’s characterization of technology as separate from nature he has missed a common foundation for both? Bernard Stiegler thinks this is the case.

Facing Janus: Reframing the Question Concerning Technology: Part 1 of 3

Introduction

The question concerning technology is a perpetually human question that arises from a Janus-faced technology that holds within it both threats and promises. The technological progress of human history is a testament to this fact with its advances in science and medicine that gave birth to both cures and curses, like polio vaccines and the atom bomb. It is therefore necessary to continually reframe the question concerning technology in order remain in a free and reflective relationship with it. In this article, I will attempt to present three ways the question has been re-framed in order to bring into relief what is really at stake in the question. I will begin with the approach of Hannah Arendt in her book The Human Condition where she reframed the question around human activity.  Next, I will present the approach of Martin Heidegger who reframed the question around the concept of human being in his essay “The Question Concerning Technology.” Although Arendt’s work appeared after Heidegger’s essay it provides an effective historical framework within which to situate Heidegger’s approach . Finally, I will present the view of the contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler who reframes the question around human becoming. Each of these attempts to reframe the question concerning technology will point us in the direction of what is at stake in our relationship to technology and allow us to face Janus in a free and reflective way.

Hannah Arendt: How Shall We Act?

Hannah Arendt has reframed the question concerning technology around human activity. More specifically, she has distinguished between three types of human activity; namely, labor, work and action. For Arendt, labor “corresponds to the biological process of the human body,” work is “the unnaturalness of human activity… that provides an ‘artificial’ world of things,” and action is “the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter (Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958), 7.)” Labor assures the survival of both the individual and the species (Ibid., 8.) Work assures the permanence and durability of our fragile human existence through the manufacture of artifacts (techne)(Ibid., 8.) Action creates history through founding and preserving political bodies (Ibid., 9.) For Arendt the realm of human activity is constitutive of the human condition. What is interesting about Arendt’s account of human activity is the conclusion she draws about the human condition. She writes:

The human condition comprehends more than the conditions under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence. The world in which the vita activa spends itself consists of things produced by human activities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men nevertheless constantly condition their human makers (Ibid., 9.)

The “things produced by human activities” conditions their producers. The made becomes the maker. This is the problem of technology which leads Arendt to ask “How shall we then act?”

For Arendt, the modern advent of automated technology begins with a transition from tools to machinery which ceases to involve an adjustment of the tool to the man and instead requires the adjustment of the man to the machine (Ibid., 147.) She sees it developing in two distinct stages. She marks the first stage with the invention of the steam engine which led to the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century (Ibid., 148.) Arendt characterizes this stage as relatively banal in that it “was still characterized by an imitation of natural processes and the use of natural forces for human purposes (Ibid., 148.)” However, in the next stage Nature was no longer imitated, it was “denaturalized” and separated from the artificial world of human fabrication (Ibid., 148.) This stage arose through the use of electricity and came to condition the use of all future technology(Ibid., 148.) It is during this stage that the Arendt sees the loss of the categories of homo faber (the tool maker) for whom ends were achieved through the use of instruments. The end result is the assembly line of manufacturing (Ibid., 149.) Arendt calls this stage: automation. It involves “channeling natural forces into the human world” so that they become mechanized and artificial(Ibid., 149, n.12.) One obvious example of this type of “channeling of natural forces” is atomic energy which brought with it the threat of global annihilation. As Ann Chapman has pointed out, the stability of the earth is threatened by automation because the new elements, chemicals and organisms that develop as a result of automation are incorporated into the “processes of the earth [and] are in effect the starting of new natural processes. These new processes mean that nature can no longer be relied upon to behave in the same way as it did in the past (Chapman, Ann, “Technology as World Building,” Ethics, Place and Environment, Vol. 7, no. 1-2 (March/June 2004), 68.)” The consequences of this transition raise the question of technology. If our actions, namely automated manufacturing through machines, are changing the earth so that life itself is transformed and even jeopardized, how should we act? Arendt concludes by saying:

….. homo faber, the toolmaker, invented tools and implements in order to erect a world, not—at least, not primarily—to help the human life process. The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the      slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things,  or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things (Arendt, The Human Condition 151.)

Arendt’s analysis of the question concerning technology points to a Janus-faced problem. On the one hand technology makes us masters of our world through machinery. On the other hand, it puts the capability of destroying the world in our hands also. No philosopher has reframed this aspect of the question more cogently than Arendt’s former teacher Martin Heidegger.

The Horse YouTube Rode in On: Part 4 of 4 – Between Frankenstein and Metropolis

In order to formulate a response to technology that is both responsible and thoughtful it might be helpful to consider Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis. The character Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein represents an enthusiastic response to technology and the worker class in Metropolis can be seen as representing Luddite rejection of technology. Both Frankenstein and Metropolis; however, point towards a more critical response that is both thoughtful and responsible.

“The world was a secret” that Victor Frankenstein “desired to discover.”[1] He “pursued nature to her hiding places” until, to his horror, he gave life to inanimate matter.[2] Commenting on this aspect of the novel Langdon Winner has written that “Victor Frankenstein is a person who discovers, but refuses to ponder, the implications of his discovery” and “Victor’s problems have now become those of a whole culture.”[3] Winner’s comments suggest that enthusiasm for technology must be tempered by critical thinking.

Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1926) depicts “man’s schizophrenic love-hate relationship with the Brave New World of Technology.”[4] The futuristic world of Metropolis is divided between the ruling class who reside in The Eternal Gardens and the workers who reside in the Worker’s City. When the worker’s realize that they are being oppressed by the ruling-class through the technological manipulation of the proto-mad-scientist Rotwang and his Machine Man, they revolt and declare “Death to the Machines!” The workers destroy the machines that support The Eternal Gardens and therefore jeopardize the lives of the ruling class and themselves. But again, as with Victor Frankenstein, their actions are rash and unreflective. Their actions are reminiscent of the Luddites who destroyed the mechanized looms during the Industrial Revolution of the 19^th century because it threatened their jobs.  The truth is: change is inevitable and it happens through technology. What is required is a more thoughtful and responsible engagement with technology.

YouTube rode into the modern world on the back of Leland Stanford’s horse “Occident” that Eadward Muybridge captured on film with all four feet off the ground. As strange as it sounds, this is the how technology works. The manifest purposes of innovators like Eadward Muybridge, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley are eventually replaced by more latent purposes through reverse adaptation that occurs in increasingly more complex technological systems. It is unlikely that technological progress will stop and even more unlikely that any human attempts to stop it would be successful or beneficial. What is required is a more thoughtful and responsible engagement with technology. We must not rush to embrace every new and emerging technology with a blind enthusiasm like modern Victor Frankensteins. Nor should we become neo-Luddites and declare “Death to the Machines!” Instead we should we should develop a more reflective response that takes the form of questioning that Martin Heidegger suggested at the conclusion of his essay “The Question Concerning Technology” where he wrote, “The closer we come to the danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become.”[5] The most human response to technology is the one that makes use of our most human capacity: the ability to think.

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[1] Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, ed. J. Paul Hunter, 1818,  Reprint (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1996), 20.

[2] Ibid., 34.

[3] Winner, Autonomous Technology, 313.

[4] Webster, Chris, “Film and Technology,” in An Introduction to Film Studies. ed. Jill Nelmes, 1996. Reprint (New York: Routledge, 2001), 73

[5] Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” 341.

The Horse YouTube Rode in On: Part 3 of 4 – The Complexity of Manifest and Latent Purposes

By placing the stories of Eadward Muybridge and YouTube side by side it becomes easy to see how the origins of technology are often strangely dissimilar from their later manifestations. The possibility of a common citizen asking a Presidential candidate a question through the medium of video and receiving a response through that same medium that is simultaneously broadcast around the world most likely did not occur to Muybridge when he first  developed his rapid-shutter camera to capture “Occident” in motion. Indeed the manifest purposes of Leland Stanford and Eadward Muybridge to determine whether a horse galloping at full speed has all four feet off the ground concealed a more latent purpose: to go beyond the limits of the human visual capacities and arrest motion in a technical apparatus. This latent purpose eventually became a form of entertainment. Muybridge became a trapper of sorts; capturing bodies in their intermediate stages of motion and entertaining audiences with the “frenzy of the visible.”[1] This form of entertainment became a multi-billion dollar film industry.

YouTube’s later attempts to democratize this industry by giving the individual consumer the power to produce, publish and disseminate films in a free and public interface was an example of a manifest purpose, but perhaps a more latent purpose was to capture, control and commodify an emerging genre of film. The controversial issues of censorship, copyright, privacy, and even public access to the democratic process have all emerged from wanting to democratize the entertainment industry. It has even given rise to more advanced technologies such as video fingerprinting in an effort to control video commodities.  Muybridge’s “frenzy of the visible” is now enframed[2] in a complex technical apparatus.

Why does this occur? What are the conditions that give rise to manifest purposes expressed at the origin of a technology being replaced by more latent purposes that eventually develop the technology in ways unforeseen at its creation? Langdon Winner has suggested that the process of reverse adaptation as a possible reason for this phenomena. His thesis, simply stated is, “that beyond a certain level of technological development, the rule of freely articulated, strongly asserted purposes is a luxury that can no longer be permitted.”[3] At the core of this process is a reversal of the means-end logic in which the “ends are adapted to the means available.”[4] Latent purposes emerge as new ends are adapted to new means.[5]

Winner identifies five patterns of reverse adaptation that occur in technological systems.[6] The operative purpose in each of these patterns is control extended and executed through planning.[7] (1) Technological systems can control the markets relative to its operations through vertical integration, market control, and contracts.[8] (2) Technological systems can control or influence the political processes that attempt to regulate its production and operating conditions.[9] (3) Technological systems seek a “mission” that corresponds to its technological capacities in order to avoid extinction.[10] (4) Technological systems propagate or manipulate the needs it serves by tying consumption to a meaningful and happy life through advertising.[11] (5) Technological systems can discover or create crises such as an external threat or a resource shortage that justify their expansion.[12] Within each of these patterns manifest purposes are replaced by latent purposes through the inversion of the means-ends logic.

Given the complexity of technological systems, the reality of reverse adaptation inherent in these systems, and the possibility of “unfortunate consequences in the world at large”[13] we are faced with a response dilemma. How are we to respond to technology given the apparent risks? Should we reject it completely or embrace it enthusiastically? I want to suggest that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis offer insights into a possible response.

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[1] Williams, Linda. Hardcore: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 37-38.

[2] Heidegger, Martin, “The Question Concerning Technology,” Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, 1977 (Reprint, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993), 325.

[3] Winner, Autonomous Technology, 238.

[4] Ibid., 238.

[5] A current example of this phenomena is Apple’s iPhone. Until the technology was available to synchronize online email servers, contacts, calendars, and tasks lists there was not a demand for an integrated application that would synchronize these various functions in a single iPhone application.

[6] Winner defines system as “large sociotechnical aggregates with human beings fully present, acting, and thinking.” Winner, Autonomous Technology, 242.

[7] Ibid., 239.

[8] Ibid., 242.

[9] Ibid., 243.

[10] Ibid., 244.

[11] Ibid., 246-247.

[12] Ibid., 248-250.

[13] Winner, Autonomous Technology, 3.

Monkeys, Mirrors and Empathy: Neurophysiology’s Phenomenological Turn

In the late 1990′s neurophysiologists Giacomo Rizzolatti, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi, and Vittorio Gallese began publishing articles about their research and discovery of what they termed mirror neurons.[1]In their study of macaque monkeys, they observed that neurons in the anterior intraparietal area (AIP) and in the ventral part of the frontal premotor area 6 (F5) which typically responded when a monkey performed an action also responded when the monkey observed another monkey performing an action. Upon further investigation the researchers discovered a neurological circuit which was capable of transforming action observation into action execution. [2] These findings led researchers to examine human participants where they discovered the same neurological system in operation:

Fadiga, Fogassi, Pavesi and Rizzolatti (1995) stimulated the motor cortex of normal human participants (transcranial magnetic stimulation) and simultaneously recorded motor-evoked potentials. They reasoned that, if the observation of a movement activates the premotor cortex, this activation should induce an enhancement of motor-evoked potentials elicited by the magnetic stimulation of the motor cortex. Fadiga et al. found that motor-evoked potentials were selectively enhanced when the participants observed the experimenter grasping objects. Based on this result, they suggested that there is a brain system which is sensitive to both action observation and execution in humans. This issue was also addressed by the use of positron emission tomography (Rizzolatti et al. 1996b). The main finding was the presence of a selective activation in the posterior part of the left inferior frontal gyrus when participants observed the experimenter in the act of grasping objects.[3]

These findings prompted researchers to hypothesize that mirror neurons subserve the capacity of individuals to recognize actions made by others.[4]

In 2001, Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) was used to locate the specific areas of the brain that were activated during action observation. Results indicated that when object and non-object related actions were observed the AIP and F5 areas of the brain organized the actions somatotopically[5]which means that internal images of the actions observed were generated in the premotor cortex where one might expect to find a mental rehearsal of a an act to be performed.[6] Mirror neurons are therefore neruomechanisms that facilitate a type of inward imitation.

On the basis of this research Vittorio Gallese formulated the shared manifold hypothesis which proposed that the human capacity to understand other human beings as intentional agents constituted an inter-subjectivity that made social relations possible.[7] Gallese theorized that human beings are social animals for whom the ability to identify others of their own kind is vitally important. He explains:

As humans, we implicitly ‘know’ that all human beings have 4 limbs, walk in a certain way, and act in peculiar ways. Identity is articulated on many different levels of complexity. It can be subjected to increasingly complex tests in which different species might score differently, but it is nevertheless the membership fee all individuals have to pay in order to self-guarantee the sense of belonging to a larger community of other organisms. Identity is so important within a group of social individuals because it enables them with the capacity to better predict the consequences of the future behavior of others.[8]

Gallese observes that there are two types of identity: self-identity and social identity. Self-identity allows individuals to individuate themselves and social identity allows individuals to situate themselves within a larger community.[9] These identities are the result of social cognition active within inter-subjective relationships. Gallese points out that infants are capable of imitating the mouth and facial movements of adults within their first 18 hours of life.[10] This innate capacity to mirror the behavior of others points to the neuromechanism that facilitates social cognition and identity.

Gallese theorizes that this shared manifold of human of inter-subjectivity, is the basis for empathy. Given, the discovery of mirror neurons and their activation during action observation he hypothesizes the same neural substrate is operative during expression observation and therefore constitutes a subpersonally instantiated common space in which an individual can understand the emotions of others.[11] He points out that the word empathy originally had an aesthetic connotation and described an imaginative act where an observer located themselves within a work of art. He explains:

Empathy is a later English translation [Titchener, 1909] of the German word ‘Einfühlung’. It is commonly held that Einfühlung was originally introduced by Theodore Lipps [1903a] into the vocabulary of the psychology of aesthetic experience, to denote the relationship between an artwork and the observer, who imaginatively project himself/herself into the contemplated object. But the origin of term is actually older. As pointed out by Prigman [1995], Robert Vischer [1873] introduced the term in 1873 to account for our capacity to symbolize the inanimate objects of nature and art. Vischer was strongly influenced by the ideas of Lotze [1858], who already in 1858 proposed a mechanism by means of which humans are capable of understanding inanimate objects and other species of animals by ‘placing ourselves into them’ (sich mitlebend … versetzen’).[12]

But Gallese does not see empathy as a solely intellectual act. In fact, he argues that empathy is deeply grounded in the experience of a lived body.[13] This insight led Gallese to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl who observed that perception is predicated on an awareness of the acting body.[14] But, it was the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty that most intrigued Gallese; specifically, his notion of intercorporeality.

Gallese found in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception support for his hypothesis that the relationship of self and other is governed by a dynamic system of reversibility.[15] Gallese cites the following passage from Phenomenology of Perception as suport for his shared manifold hypothesis:

The communication and comprehension of gestures comes about through the reciprocity of my intentions and the gestures of others, of my gestures and intentions discernible in the conduct of other people. It is as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body and mine his.[16]

Gallese interprets Merleau-Ponty’s notion of reciprocity as philosophical support for his neurophysiological evidence of mirror matching mechanisms that facilitate empathy.[17] However, Gallese is quick to point out that he is not suggesting that individuals can understand others in the same way as they understand themselves. The shared manifold hypothesis does not reduce alterity to sameness; a common criticism of Merleau-Ponty. On the contrary, the shared manifold simply enables and bootstraps mutual intelligiblility.[18] The social implications of this hypothesis are readily apparent. Mutual intelligibility between human persons allows each person to demarcate themselves from the larger social community in order to develop an individual identity, while simultaneously situating each individual within the social community. This type of social cognition provides a balanced equilibrium between the need to express our individuality and uniqueness, and the necessity to follow the social ‘rules’.[19]

The most observable problem with Gallese’s phenomenological turn is his claim that mirror neurons operate at a subpersonal level. Even more problematic, Gallese appeals to a passage from Phenomenology of Perception in support of his claim seemingly unaware of Merleau-Ponty’s explicit argument in this work against the reduction of perception to third person processes[20] like mirror-neurons. And yet, Gallese is pointed in the right direction. Merleau-Ponty is working with a particular principle, namely intercoporeality, that does serve as a basis for empathy but it is not a neurophysiological mechanism. Instead, it is the structure of a embodied subject living in the world.

[1] Rizzolatti,G., Fadiga, L.,Gallese, V.,&Fogassi, L. “Premotor Cortex and the Recognition of Motor Actions.” Cognitive Brain Research 3 (1996): 131–141. See also Gallese, V., Fadiga, L., Fogassi, L., & Rizzolatti, G. (1996). Action recognition in the premotorcortex. Brain, 119, 593–609.
[2] Craighero, Laila, Luciano Fadiga, Giacomo Rizzolatti and Carlo Umiltà. “Visuomotor Priming.” Visual Cognition, 1998, 5 (1/2), 110–111.
[3] Craighero, et al. “Visuomotor Priming,” 111.
[4] Buccino, G., et al. “Action Observation Activates Premotor and Parietal Areas in a Somatotopic Manner: an fMRI Study.” European Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 13 (2001): 400.
[5] The correspondence between the position of a receptor in part of the body and the corresponding area of the cerebral cortex that is activated by it.
[6] Buccino, et al. “Action Observation,” 401.
[7] Gallese, Vittorio. “The Roots of Empathy: The Shared Manifold Hypothesis and the Neural Basis for Intersubjectivity.” Psychopathology 36 (2003): 171.
[8] Gallese, “The Roots of Empathy,” 171-172.
[9] Ibid., 172.
[10] Ibid., 172.
[11] Ibid., 176.
[12] Gallese, “The Roots of Empathy,” 175.
[13] Ibid., 176.
[14] Ibid., 176.
[15] Ibid., 176.
[16] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge Classics, 2002, 215.
[17] Gallese, “The Roots of Empathy,” 176.
[18] Gallese, “The Roots of Empathy,” 177.
[19] Ibid., 177.
[20] Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception, 64.

The Ethical Frame, Part 3: Rupture and Redemption in The Reader

Having established a methodological approach to film as an ethical frame and having teased out a Levinasian notion of ethical time and discourse I will employ these insights in an analysis of the recent film The Reader. As this analysis will show, The Reader serves as a frame for discussing and debating the moral issues surrounding the Holocaust and Germany’s responsibility. David Hare, who wrote the screen play for the film, has written that the film was an attempt to articulate the dilemma of the succeeding generation of Germans who were wrestling with issue of truth and reconciliation.[1] The film is concerned with the rupture of the holocaust which called into question everything we believed about humanity and the hope of redemption. This observation demonstrates the intentional ethical frame of The Reader and the latent capacity of films in the Cinema of Redemption to serve as agents of temporal rupture and ethical provocation.

Four questions punctuate The Reader and constitute diachronic ruptures in which the Other is revealed and redemption becomes possible. Each question is answered in the film by one of the characters but remains unanswered for the audience. The questions reveal our responsibility for the Other and provoke us to moral action. These questions become catalysts for redemption, not just for the characters but for the audience as well.

Do You Love Me?

The film opens with the central character and narrator Michael Berg reminiscing about a time when he was fifteen in the Germany of the 1930s and became violently ill on a tram. Unable to control himself he vomits on the tram and gets off at the next stop and wanders the streets until he becomes exhausted and pauses in alley way where he vomits again. Hanna Schmitz, a moderately attractive middle-aged tram conductor, happens upon him, takes him to her apartment, cleans him up and walks him home. This act of kindness and compassion overwhelms and arouses the young Michael Berg. For the next three months, Michael remains confined to his bed with scarlet fever. After his recovery he returns to Hanna’s apartment to thank her for her kindness. During the visit Michael catches sight of Hanna undressing and when she sees him watching her she seduces him. This begins a series of regular sexual liaisons after Michael gets out of school each day. During their encounters Hanna asks that Michael read to her. They read Homer, Chekhov, Lessing, Twain, and others.

After several weeks of their affair, Michael and Hanna agree to meet on her tram when her shift ends. Michael boards the second car of the tram that Hanna is working on but she is in the first car. Michael anticipates that she will move back to the second car but she doesn’t. In fact, she acts as if she doesn’t know him. Michael is hurt by this and follows Hanna to her apartment when she finishes her shift but she asks him to leave. He is devastated by her actions but Hanna is indifferent to his feelings. He cannot believe that this woman whom he loves could treat him in this way. Their argument escalates and he leaves but returns a short time later. He fears their relationship is ending but Hanna does not seem to mind. She is cold and indifferent. He tells her that he cannot imagine living without her and then asks her, “Do you love me?” She looks at him oddly as if the question is unintelligible. Suddenly, her indifference is ruptured by Michael’s question. The reverberations of a vulnerable Other echo in the question. She is bound to this Other, this boy whom she has seduced and used for her pleasure and intellectual stimulation. She is responsible for him. She nods and invites him to bathe with her. Her nod is not an answer but simply an affirmation of Michael’s proximity and her responsibility. She redeems him from despair with a nod. The question exceeds the bounds of “what is love?” and “who is loved?” The echo of the Other that makes love possible resounds in the question and reverberates in the ears of the audience. The affair ends abruptly after Hanna is notified that she is being promoted to a clerical position at the tram authority. Michael arrives at her apartment the next day only to find it empty and no sign of Hanna. He becomes distraught and mourns for his loss.

Have You Spent Much Time Thinking About The Past?

The film, then leaps to Michael’s days in law school in the 1960s where he takes a course taught by a professor who is a holocaust survivor. As part of the course the professor has the students attend a trial of several female SS guards who were accused of allowing 300 Jewish prisoners to die in a burning church during the Allied liberation of Auschwitz. Michael is shocked to see his former lover, Hanna Schmitz, among the defendants. During the trial a survivor of Auschwitz testifies that each of the guards on trial participated in the selection process that led to the extermination of prisoners under their watch. She adds that Hanna Schmitz had favorites that she would invite to her room to read to her and pass over in the selection process. Michael is reminded of their affair and how he used to read to her. When the court produces a handwritten report of the church fire Hanna’s fellow defendants testify that she wrote the report. Although she denies the allegation initially she eventually admits to writing it to avoid providing handwriting sample. Michael then realizes that Hanna is a functioning illiterate and would rather accept responsibility for genocide than admit her illiteracy.

When the judge asks Hanna about her role in the selection of prisoners for the gas chambers and whether or not she knew that she was sending them to their deaths; she admits that Auschwitz was an extermination camp and, quite matter-of-factly, admits that it was their job to select certain weaker and sickly prisoners for extermination in order to make room for new prisoners. Hanna, lives a Dasein-centric life embedded in synchronic time. There is no room for the otherness of the human beings to break into Hannah’s world. The human beings under her charge are interpreted in reference to her. They are prisoners because she is their guard. In, Hanna’s world there is only the referential totality of the prison camp.

Hanna’s embeddedness in a synchronic temporality is revealed when she asks the judge, “What would you have done?” The question ruptures the synchrony of the film. The questioner becomes the questioned. The judge appears to not even understand the question. He is shocked that Hanna is unaware of how she could have acted differently. She was only doing her job, she says. They were prisoners and she was a guard, she says. She had to make room for others. Her question to the judge exceeds the frame of the film and spills out into the audience. The echo of the Other resounds in the question as the one for whom we are responsible. The question provokes us to ask ourselves what we would have done in Hanna’s position. Redemption stands at the nexus of our vulnerability and our responsibility for the Other.

Michael, lives a Other-centered life overwhelmed by diachronic time. Michael is stunned to witness Hanna’s lack of remorse and the apparent banality of evil. How could this woman who had shown him such kindness, compassion and love, have committed such a heinous act without any remorse? Michael looks at the faces of survivors in the courtroom. He is overwhelmed by a temporal disjunction that cuts across his previous life with Hannah, his role as a student, and his own naive perspectives. Human beings were murdered. He cannot reduce them to prisoners. He is responsible for them and, ironically, he is responsible for Hannah. Michael can answer Hannah’s question, “What would you have done?” because he is vulnerable to the Other echoing in the question.

When Michael visits Auschwitz and plunges into a moral crisis. Michael is faced with a moral dilemma. He can notify the court that she is a functioning illiterate which would humiliate Hanna and absolve her of primary responsibility or he can remain silent and preserve her from shame and allow her to be convicted. Michael chooses not to disclose her secret and to let justice work itself out. Hanna receives a life sentence and is sent to prison. Michael goes on to begin his career, marry, and have children, leaving his past with Hanna behind.

[1] Hare, David. “Truth and Reconciliation,” The Guardian, December 13, 20008.

The Ethical Frame, Part 2: The Reader and Synchronic Time

Time is a crucial theme in the work of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Lévinas. It stands as a point of divergence between these two thinkers. For Heidegger, time is a product of a solitary subject in the world. For Lévinas, time is a relationship between a subject and the Other. In this essay, I will compare and contrast each of these thinker’s notions of time and argue that Heidegger’s notion of time is Dasein-centric[1] and leaves no room for the other, while Lévinas’ notion of time is Other-centric and creates space for difference. The point of these distinctions will be to demonstrate that Heidegger’s notion of time makes justice impossible and Lévinas’ notion of time makes justice possible. I will then apply this analysis to the two principle characters in the film The Reader. Assuming our previous characterization of film as an ethical frame and The Reader as an example of the Cinema of Redemption I will argue that the character Hannah Schmitz lives a Dasein-centric life embedded in synchronic time; whereas, the character Michael Berg lives an Other-centric life overwhelmed by diachronic time. By employing these two characters in this way, The Reader can be characterized as confronting the audience with an ethical dilemma by employing the element of temporal disjunction.

For Martin Heidegger time is the horizon for the understanding of Being and temporality is the Being of Dasein, which understands Being.[2] In a certain sense, Heidegger sees being and time as synonymous terms. Dasein is a temporal being, which Heidegger calls Being-in-the-world, who is thrown into existence and stretched along between birth and death.[3] The stretching along between birth and death constitutes the historical temporality of Dasein.[4] Dasein is a historical being in time. Time is therefore Dasein-centric.

Heidegger observes that birth is the beginning of dying for Dasein and that its existence is a Being-towards-death.[5] Death, Heidegger says, is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein.[6] Death confronts Dasein with its finitude. Additionally, death reveals the possibility of Dasein’s potentiality-for-Being.[7] Dasein responds to death by either fleeing from it (falling) or anticipating it (resoluteness) both of which constitute an existential structure that Heidegger calls care.[8] Birth and Death are connected in the between of Dasein’s care. [9] Heidegger describes the structure of care as a primordial structural totality of Being-ahead-of-itself (future), Being-already-in (past), and Being-alongside-entities-within-the-world (present).[10] Unlike things which simply persist through time, Dasein is aware of the past, present and future as a meaningful integrated whole. However, Heidegger is adamant that Dasein is first and foremost a furtural being in that Dasein, in its own most potentiality-for-Being, comes toward itself.[11] The essence of Dasein’s existence is therefore the temporalization of its temporality.
[12]

In The Reader, Hannah Schmitz, lives a Dasein-centric life embedded in synchronic time. When Hannah is asked at her trial why she did not release prisoners from a burning barn she responded that she was a guard and her it was her job to prevent the prisoners from escaping. There is no room for the otherness of the human beings burning to death in the barn to break into Hannah’s world. The people inside the barn are interpreted in reference to her. They are prisoners because she is their guard. In, Hannah’s world there is only the referential totality of the prison camp. Her embeddedness in a synchronic temporality is revealed when she asks the judge “what would you have done?” She is clearly not blind to other options. The prisoners must die because her role as guard does not allow any other option.

[1] Dr. Charles Bambach (University of Texas at Dallas) and Dr. Gilbert Garza (University of Dallas) recently made me aware that this characterization of Heidegger only represents the early-Heidegger and does not take into account the onto-centric shift in the later Heidegger.
[2] Heidegger, Being and Time, 39.
[3] Ibid., 174, 425.
[4] Ibid., 427.
[5] Ibid., 426.
[6] Ibid., 294.
[7] Ibid., 307.
[8] Ibid., 84.
[9] Ibid., 426-427.
[10] Ibid., 237, 238.
[11] Ibid., 373.
[12] Ibid., 378.

The Event of the Other

As I have been reading the work of Heidegger, Levinas and Caputo, I have found myself blending their insights into a phenomenological model of the other. Caputo uses the term event to subvert onto theology and deconstruct the word God so that as an event, rather than a being, it can be freed from the limitations of a linguistic prison like a name or definition. The term event comes from the Latin word evenire which means come out or happen. The word is constructed from ex which means out and venire which means to come and from which we get our word venue. Venues are places where people come to experience a happening. This word seems very appropriate for describing what Levinas means by the other. If we understand the other as an event instead of a they(or tool)-for-us (Heidegger), then the other is free to happen in unexpected ways (beyond our expectations) in all of their strangeness and radical alterity. As an event and not a being-for-me imprisoned in my categories, concepts, and definitions, the other can startle me and unsettle me from my narcissism.

Drinking Coke With Heidegger

What does a Coke bottle mean in a world where there is no such thing as Coke in particular or bottled beverages in general? How are we to understand “Coke bottle” apart from a world in which “Coke” and “bottle” have meaning? Hubert Dreyfus (UC Berkley) has explored these questions in his Fall 2007 lecture on Heidegger’s Being and Time (available on iTunes for free). I am now listening to this lecture series for the third time and Heidegger’s concept of worldhood is finally becoming clear.

Dr. Dreyfus says that Heidegger distinguishes three types of being. The first way is translated as present-at-hand and relates to substances whose properties can be analyzed. Gold is an example of present-at-hand. The next type is what Heidegger calls ready-to-hand and relates to equipment. A hammer is an example of ready-to-hand. Finally, there is Heidegger’s beloved Dasein which is German for being-in-the-world and relates to any being that takes a stand on its own being. Human beings are examples of Dasein. Both present-at-hand and Dasein have self-sufficientt being; that is, their being is not contingent upon on the being of anything else. However, ready-to-hand does not have this type of self-sufficiency. In fact, equipment such as hammers have their being only within a world in which there are nails, wood, and carpenters. Hammers are meaningless or unintelligible (Dreyfus’ term) without something to hammer. The being of hammer is contingent on the being of nails, lumber, and carpenters.

Coke bottles are the same way. Without Coke or bottled beverages the bottle as equipment is meaningless. Dr. Dreyfus’ points out that in the movie The God’s Must Be Crazy a bottle drops out the sky into a primitive culture which is unfamiliar with Coke. The bottle is meaningless as equipment and becomes a rolling pin (I haven’t seen the movie so I am taking Dr. Dreyfus’ word for it.) In order to be a Coke bottle in that culture there would need to be such a thing as Coke or bottled beverages.

Heidegger’s notion of worldhood reveals how much we take for granted in our every day existence. The simple act of drinking a Coke is revealed to be tethered to a host of other referentials that allow such and act to be intelligible. It has also caused me to be more reflective about the average-every-day world I live in.