The History of the Philosophy of Technology: Hidden philosophers of technology
Chair(s): Massimiliano Simons (Maastricht University, Netherlands, The)
The History of the Philosophy of Technology posits the philosophy of technology as a wide-ranging and comprehensive field of study that includes both the philosophical study of particular technologies and the different ways that technology, more broadly, has been considered philosophically. Influenced by the history of the philosophy of science, the history of ideas, and the history of the humanities, our aim is to examine how different individuals and traditions have thought about technology historically. This includes, but is not limited to: the work of different thinkers throughout history, both well-known and overlooked figures and narratives, including non-western traditions and narratives that engage with technology; analyzing the cultural, social, political, and sociotechnical contexts that have shaped philosophical responses to technology, including historical responses to new and emerging technologies; exploring the disciplines and intellectual traditions whose impacts can be traced across different philosophies of technology, including Science and Technology Studies (STS), the history of technology, critical theory, phenomenology, feminist philosophy, hermeneutics, and ecology, to name only a few; histories of different "schools" of philosophical thought about technology, for example French philosophy of technology, Japanese philosophy of technology, and Dutch philosophy of technology; mapping the hidden philosophies of technology in the work of philosophers (e.g. Foucault, Arendt, Sloterdijk) and traditions whose work is not often associated with technology (e.g. German idealism, logical empiricism, existentialism, lebensphilosophie); and, exploring the contributions of literature, art, design theory, architecture, and media theory/history towards a philosophy of technology.
This panel focuses on hidden philosophers of technology. Examining the work of scholars who fall outside of what are typically considered philosophers of technology can draw out perspectives and methods that useful for thinking about technology. In this panel, the work of Walter Benjamin, Bertrand Russel, and Hannah Arendt will be explored as philosophies of technology.
Presentations of the Symposium
Irradiating the Intimate: the Storytelling of Walter Benjamin's Technological Revolution of the Intimate
Dominic Smith
University of Dundee
•1932-1934: Walter Benjamin writes, collects and rearranges a set of stories on his Berlin childhood. The story he settles on for last, ‘Moon’, relates a childhood night terror and shifts from the unnerving effects of moonlight on everyday objects to a reflection on the ontological question: Why is there something rather than nothing?
•29 January 1933: Benjamin delivers what would be the last of 93 broadcasts he gave for German regional radio, 1927-1933. The broadcast comprises readings from his story set. Hitler becomes German chancellor the next day, and his torchlight procession becomes the first nationwide broadcast on German radio (Rosenthal 2014: xx-xxi). Benjamin, a left-wing Jewish intellectual, is forced into exile in France in March 1933.
•1987: A ‘final version’ of Benjamin’s story set is discovered and posthumously published as a new edition of Berlin Childhood around 1900 (Benjamin 2006). The original ending of ‘Moon’ is cut, and ‘Moon’ shifts from the end of the text to the main body.
The technologies with which Walter Benjamin is best associated, thanks to his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproducibility’, are photography and film. As I argue in my book Bridging Benjamin (Minnesota University Press, forthcoming), however, and as the above-assembled events show, there are timely stories to be told about another medium in which Benjamin was not merely a critic, but a practitioner and educator: radio.
Part one places the first event in terms of recent work on Benjamin’s cosmology (Neyrat 2022). It argues that ‘Moon’ expresses, for the space of childhood, what Hui has theorised as a ‘cosmotechnics’ (Hui 2019, 2021). Part two relates a hidden story of the second event: the Nazi ascendency meant Benjamin was unable to broadcast a scheduled radio play he had written for children, ‘Lichtenberg: A Cross Section’, the transcript of which tells of strange moon beings who use fantastical technologies to study terrestrial life (Benjamin 2014). I here read ‘Lichtenberg’ as an obverse of ‘Moon’, and argue that it exhibits a practice of localising philosophy through story. Part three focuses on the third event. I argue that the posthumous rearrangement of ‘Moon’ is consistent with a storytelling practice the story already expresses: against reifying the intimate as a sentimental possession, ‘Moon’ shows that to tell the story of something intimate is already to irradiate it and render it a kind of ghost, in the manner of the bright flash of photography filling up a room. Against a recent reading of ‘Lichtenberg’ by Peter E Gordon (2023), I conclude that all three of the events about storytelling discussed in this paper have something much more important to tell us when connected up: a story not merely about radio as an audio medium, but as an intimate and haunting form of irradiation that has become a necessary infrastructural condition for our contemporary networked age.
References
Benjamin, W. 2014. ‘Lichtenberg: A Cross Section’. In Radio Benjamin, L. Rosenthal (ed.), 336-359. London: Verso.
Benjamin, W. 2006. Berlin Childhood around 1900. Translated by H Eiland. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Gordon, P. E. 2023. ‘President of the Moon Committee: Walter Benjamin’s Radio Years’, The Nation. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/walter-benjamin-radio-years/ (accessed 14 December 2024).
Hui, Y. 2016. The Question Concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Hui, Y. 2021. Art and Cosmotechnics. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.
Neyrat, F. 2022. Le cosmos de Walter Benjamin: un communisme du lointain. Paris: Éditions Kimé.
Rosenthal, L. 2014. ‘Walter Benjamin on the Radio: An Introduction’. In Radio Benjamin, L.Rosenthal (ed.), ix-xxix. London: Verso.
Arendt and the Philosophy of Technology
Jurgita Imbrasaite
University for Applied Sciences Europe, Hamburg
This paper explores Hannah Arendt’s contributions to the philosophy of technology, situating her analysis of the Vita Activa in The Human Condition within the broader historical discourse on technological transformation. While artificial intelligence (AI) exemplifies the disruptive potential of modern technologies, Arendt’s framework offers an alternative to the prevailing utilitarian perspective that reduces technology to its service or disservice to humanity. Instead, she invites us to consider technology as an environment that reshapes the human condition and opens possibilities for plurality and collective life.
Central to Arendt’s thought is the concept of "work" (Herstellen), grounded in the classical notion of techné as a purposeful activity distinct from the flux of nature. Drawing on Aristotle’s distinction between poiesis (making) and praxis (acting), Arendt highlights how work creates a durable, human-made world, a shared "in-between" that sustains political and social life. Unlike Aristotle, who subordinated techné to higher forms of knowledge, Arendt elevates its significance, emphasizing the stabilizing role of durable artifacts in anchoring human activity.
Modern technology, however, disrupts this framework. According to Arendt, it not only radically changes what we do when we are active but also alters our worldview and the structures through which we understand existence. Arendt critiques the shift from world-building “work” to "technical doing" (technisch tun), which she describes as a fundamental transition to the technical creation and channeling of nature-like processes directly "into the world itself." She attributes the notion of automation to the cycle of nature, such as a seed containing a tree and being indistinguishable from it during growth, to explain how technical processes, increasingly automated in her time, mirror nature-like processes. These processes dissolve distinctions between means and ends, beginnings and outcomes, product and process. AI exemplifies this transition, challenging traditional boundaries and undermining the durability of the human-made world. Yet, Arendt’s insights also open the possibility of understanding AI as part of a new "technological condition" comparable to nature, a condition that could reliably support human activity without being subordinated to anthropocentric goals.
By moving beyond the utilitarian framing of AI as a servant to humanity, this paper argues for rethinking technology as an evolving environment. Revisiting Arendt enables us to critically reimagine the role of technology in shaping the conditions for plurality and political action in an increasingly interconnected world.
Technology and Historical Time: Insights from the Annales and Hermeneutics
Darryl Cressman
Maastricht University
Using Ferdinand Braudel's distinction between the longue durée and the history of the event, one of the consequences of the empirical turn has been a methodological bias towards the history of the event, which has come at the expense of longer periods of historical time. This may seem like an obvious bias because by its very nature, technology, like politics, seems well-suited to the short time span and the immediate distinctiveness of the event (or the artifact, in this case). The popular imagination abounds with stories that frame and anticipate new technologies as transformative and historical consciousness is strongly influenced by narratives of sociotechnical disruption and abrupt breaks with the past. Yet, the choice of historical time is not fixed, "historical time, far from being a 'natural' phenomenon, is fundamentally a cultural one" (Le Goff 1988, p.3). It would not be incorrect, for example, to consider the relationship between the social and the technical through moments of rapid transformation and change. But it would also not be incorrect to suggest that these moments of sociotechnical change are inseparable from longer historical continuums within which they occur and through which difference and disruption blends seamlessly into an almost indistinct similarity. To favour one over the other is rarely nothing more than method, fashion, or habit.
In this talk I use examples from the history of musical culture to propose concepts and terms well-suited for thinking about technology through longer periods of historical time that extend beyond any one technology. To do this, I turn to the tradition of hermeneutic philosophy, and in particular the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, to connect the discussion of historical time to the ways that historical experience informs our interpretations of technologies. From this, I translate Hans Robert Jauss' (1982 [1960]) concept of a "horizon of expectations" for the study of technology, examining how this concept can explain how individual and collective engagements with new and emerging technologies are always pre-conditioned by the experiences and habits that have been developed through engagements with existing technologies.
I conclude by suggesting that an attention to sociotechnical continuities can point to ways of thinking about technology that are well-suited to critiquing contemporary capitalist society. Resisting the capitalist imperative to desire, celebrate, fear, and consume the spectacle of the new can, at the very least, point to continuities that connect sociotechnical ways of being that fall outside of contemporary techno-socio-economic priorities: "the shrinking of the consciousness of historical continuity is more than an aspect of decline – it is necessarily linked with the principle of progress in bourgeois society" (Adorno 1970, p.13, qtd. in Schmidt 1981, p.2). Although the examples I use are neither political nor contentious in the conventional sense of the term, the concepts, ideas, and terms that I draw from this example can, hopefully, prove to be useful for larger critical ambitions.
|
