Curator's Note
My title includes a "hashtag" to draw attention to an absence in most discussions about technology. This theme week follows the Consumer Electronics Show, and, if Twitter or tagged blog posts offer any indication, CES seems to facilitate utopian dreams about technological futures without things that #FAIL (to function, win, or succeed). While the New York Times explains how the "#" character is used to tag posts on sites like Twitter, copy-editors can remind us of another use: the "#" designates an absence as a symbol for the need to enter an absent#space where one did not exist. Hashtags on Twitter aim to provide a meta-meaningful context for (often terse) comments but, similar to my title, fail to provide an overt connection between words by jumping from thought-filled phrase to under-developed theme. Discussions about technology at CES foreground fantasies about faster, newer, prettier, and thinner things by displacing conversations about older or failing devices. These discussions, like many others about technological things, fail to address the meaningfulness of technological failure.
What do we learn about the "thingness" of technologies when they "fail" to function? And, more poignantly, what might we learn about our misperceptions about "things" when we cannot or will not fulfill their expectations? This Intel advertisement problematizes the significance of successful, human invention. This robot's reaction to being viewed as an object seems anything but artificial, which prompts us to consider things beyond their use-value, as some-thing other than use-filled. The robot's anthropomorphic form might prompt our sympathies, but I wonder if or when we feel similarly sympathetic about other technological things. Maybe we fail to consider our inter-faced influence–how hard we use and abuse our technological things–when software glitches or computers fail to function, when things begin to reveal how improperly we understand our ability to inter/face an/other.
Each person participating this week on In Media Res will provide a unique response to the question that titles our theme, "What are these Technological Things?", and I hope our discussions about technology might also open up the possibility to re-/consider the power of failure. Let us consider the significance of failure by thwarting an emphasis on successfulness and mastery, which, Judith Halberstam argues, allows us to refigure our power over others toward relationships with others and things.
Comments
Vectors of failure
Thanks for this thought-provoking post, kicking off what promises to be a fascinating theme week. Just a few thoughts:
Simultaneously, though, the discourse of novelty itself can be seen to involve a form of technological failure (and I think this duality might be related to your thoughts on the double nature of the hashtag). The new technology, demanding from us awe and amazement against the background of the old, is presented much like the show-stopping special effects of sci-fi film: these disrupt narrative, demanding to be looked at as effects, as things that are amazing in their own right and not due to their instrumental value (i.e. they exceed their usefulness vis-a-vis the storytelling purposes of film). Similarly, the processors touted in the clip here are "amazing" only to the extent that they are presently being looked at rather than put to work (and forgotten) in the context of labor, a project, and the pressure to be productive. The clip seems to acknowledge this paradox by framing the discussion in the co-workers' lunch break, in a space supplementary to work. At the same time, it counteracts the non-productivity of novelty, the failure that is fascination, by juxtaposing the "amazing" processors with an even more amazing robot, whose advancedness we recognize as still futuristic, hence not ready for production (or productivity), thus creating space for those processors to be both productive and interesting (if not amazing).
Vectors of failure (continued)
[Continued from previous comment]
Following Heidegger's tool-analysis in Being and Time, the thingliness of technologies is itself a function of failure: due to breakage, the hammer fails to be absorbed in the user's concernful employment towards the end of a given project. Then it appears as a thing (present-to-hand rather than ready-to-hand). And while this may not be the whole story, Heidegger's analysis is instructive in the present case, as it highlights the processes by which sophisticated marketing both invokes and disavows or displaces several vectors of failure (obsolescence, fascination, and malfunction) to produce highly paradoxical technological things, things that are productive and fascinating at once.
Thanks again for your great post. I look forward to following the discussion!
Struggling Against, Struggling With
I'm intrigued by your suggestion that there is a kind of power in the failure of (my words) dead tech. Today I am reading a nice post discussing the translation into Swedish and Dutch of Object-Oriented Ontology-type writings. This author, over at Commoniser, puts forward some interesting tidbits about the translation of sak as "object." Similar to the debates that surrounded Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics there is a potential for (or potential need toward) antagonism that one needs to be sensitive to when entering into object relations.
But in addition to this dramatic/controversial aspect of being oriented towards objects, I'd like to also introduce another consideration. You're right to point to the marketing of the newness of tech at places like CES as deliberately excluding the potential for outmoded tech objects. While we may lose dead tech to the kind of urgency that CES-type hype creates, dead tech does something really interesting: it appreciates.
This appreciation happens as the relationships between humans and dead tech continue. As the prescribed roles for the once-new gadget gets repurposed. In Ghana I was amazed to see the bricoleur-styled engineering that kept tro-tro taxis going: pieces of rubber from old tyres and chunks of wood married into the suspension system, for example. The objects reveal new ways of being useful and as such their value is extended and enhanced. Thanks, MacGyver!
In this sense, I am at odds with Heidegger's protestations about the ready-to-hand and the constant reduction of the world to a standing reserve. Appreciating what is at hand is a process of appropriating and making appropriate to the context in which one finds oneself (maybe Oneself, as a collection of things). To remain only concerned with the anthropocentric in this process, I grant you, is likely to be harmful, but there are ample reasons to think and examples in our collective histories to model ourselves after that can be trusted to serve us well in future endeavors.
Systems Failure
Technological progress via accretion and through complete replacement are both problematic.
The former because with every modication, every concession made to new utilities and purposes, the resulting technology becomes rigid and baroque; the horrors of maintaing old COBOL business applications are emblematic; maintaining binary compatibility in each subsequent version of Windows is another.
The latter poses problems of different types; brand new technologies tend to be consilient, but they are untested, largely unintegrated, simple by being simplistic. They are not sufficiently evolved. If they are paradigm-shifting technologies, the expertise and comfort of the old paradigm becomes a liability rather than an asset. Concepts such as non-relational databases or eventually consistent data or multithreaded, monotonic programming all fall into this area. (As an interesting example, read this discussion of reverting from Scala to Java in development: http://codahale.com/downloads/email-to-donald.txt)
In either case, the technological environment is jarred yet again away from equilibrium, with neighboring technologies and our very psychology and sociology playing perpetual catch-up.
Withdrawal Symptoms
One interesting, and often overlooked, developments in the OOOsphere is the use of materialism to account for object-oriented principles–such as anthrodecentrism–that were first conceived by Graham Harman, primarily through his radical re-reading of Heidegger's tool-analysis. For example, while the concept of 'withdrawal', or the idea that objects always obtain a reality in excess of any relation, can be accounted for using the ready-to-hand/present-at-hand analysis described above, it can also be thought of in more materialist terms, whereby the presentation and prehension of an object is considered in terms of the manifestation of virtual potential. Levi Bryant does this, and has written about his material approach as recently as today at his website Larval Subjects.
I mention this because, to me, decentering the appreciation of objects from human domination entails accounting for an object's 'becoming', or rather an object's capacity to become. There are any number of possibilities for doing so (I attempt to delineate four in this video), but any approach, I think, must allow for ontological differentiation prior to epistemological representation (being before knowledge).
That's important, since the appreciation of objects is additive and subtractive, but not ontologically determinative. In other words, appreciation may involve the manifestation of different qualia or alteration of certain objectal assemblages, but even absent these changes, an object's 'appreciation', in terms of becoming, remains, as objects move through–and I would argue create their own–spatiotemporality. Relations between objects aren't stagnant.
For me, that leads back to an important point that you make about the primacy of the encounter (if I'm putting words in your...computer screen, please say so). Relata and the act of relating precede any given relation. Thus, to adequately think through the appareciation, as well as the failure, of entities requires an investigation of the formation and delimiation of sensibilities at the point of the encounter, prior to an outward extrapolation of actancy. I tend to think the focus, here, should be on the 'how' of an encounter as much as the 'what' in terms of the aesthetics involved, if that makes sense.
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