Please take a minute to think about this

What do you think, are the following categories wise if I try to sort out my research data (a collection of written texts about transhumanism) with the following categories. This is not yet the analysis phase of the research, merely a way to categorize the material. I am trying to create some crude categories that help me to differentiate various ways of looking at human-technology relation in transhumanism.

1. Performative

– Technology has a function.

– Tools, enhancements, etc.

2. Cognitive

– Technology affects thinking and/or is somehow experienced by the subject

– Mental abilities, communication, spirituality

3. Esthetical

– Technology makes things “better”.

– Human perfection (body), rationality

4. Philosophical

– Technology defines categories

– Societal aims, things deemed good or bad.

 

The list has a lot of contradictions etc., but do you think it would be useful in finding very crude categories. After I get this going, I’ll start getting results. And of course, you will be the first to know 🙂

 

Preparing the argument: The technology-actor problem

I decided to start establishing some ground by trying to define some initial model for the ‘actor’. Some major assumptions have to be taken if one wishes to connect technology and to subject to a larger ‘macro theory’. This is a problem in any such research because it is very difficult to compel readers to accept the leap from the particular technology and it’s user to a larger scheme of ‘technology-as-culture’. However, this is something I hope to do and Alain Touraines theory actually implies it.

Here is a crude first version of my hypothesis.

An actor is an actor because it constitutes an active individual. In order for an individual to be active, it has to be able to perform intentiotal action. What exactly I mean with intention here is not relevant. We can just assume that intention means that an individual is able to make assessments, make choices based on those assessments and act upon the made choice. Clearly, this is what humans – or any intelligent beings – are able to do and it defines us as actors in our lives. So, an actor is flesh and blood. How can we then make a ‘leap’ from an individual actor or act to a larger scheme, like Touraines ‘action system’?

Well, I’m not yet prepared to make that argument but I hope I’ll get that far some day.

With my crude outline of an actor I’ll define technology as follows. An actor can either accept or decline what she considers ‘technology’. This means, that I assume technology as something given. Obviously a more precise definition of technology should start with the question of what is technology, but, since I’m just trying to get a handle on the whole, this will do.

Okay, so, technology is something given, so what our actors call technology could be pretty much what we in our mundane speak also call technology. Computers, railways, tooth pics, etc. The point I am making here is that technology is something that has intrinsic relevance to the actor. If not, then it would be irrelevant so the actor could not really accept or decline it. It would be invisible or to use an analogue, it would be like the tapestries of your home: they are there, but you don’t really notice them until you start focusing on them.

So, technology is relevant in a way that an actor can accept or decline it. An actor therefore has an opinion about technology so we can say (in a crude way) that the actor can have intentions that have something to do with ‘technology’.

Technology is not a ‘discourse’. In other words, it is not something that is just built out of meanings. People who are used to the foucaultian way of thinking would do well with just assuming that technology posits a kind of a discourse, a cultural text, and that would be all. The analysis would concentrate on the discourse and the actor would pop up equally constructed within (or with) that discourse. I’m sure you are aware, that this is also a very crude way to talk about Foucault.

Now, here is where I make my epistemic hand in hand with Touraine. At the center of my analysis there is a ‘flesh and blood’ actor that has a certain relation with the thing she calls technology. That’s great, but how does this play out when I try to connect this particular actor situation with some wider context, like an institution or – the biggest of them all – culture?

Let’s call a particular piece of technology an artifact. Now we have actors who can identify artifacts to be part of something they refer to as technology. Artifacts are, in a way, ‘owned’ by the actor. Different actors share the concept of an artifact and they all agree that it is a technological ‘thing’. If one feels like it, one can envision technology as being an attribute of the artifact.

Now, we have a flesh and blood actor that can touch, use and talk about real objects as pieces of technology.

At least for me, it gets tricky here. Since technology is something actors have to be able to identify and what they can also use, are there some competences or resources the actors must possess to identify an artifact as ‘technology’? If not, then how can anyone argue that a particular artifact has the attribute ‘technology’? It seems, there has to be some cultural (or cognitive, if we assume we are talking about people as actors) competence to ‘see’ technology.

I believe that actors must have some knowledge that helps them to classify things as technology. I am making an argument that technology is defined within a cultural system all though it does exist as an object and it can have causal or functional properties even if it is not identified by actors. This is probably something Ulrich Beck’s theory on ‘risk’ has in the theories epistemic assumptions.

This is one reason I’d like to have a real actor in my vision. If we treat technology as discourse, it would look much the same as above but there would be a very big problem in trying to relate the technology as discourse to a particular person or even a particular event in space and time.

Now, I have an actor with intentions and with an ability to identify technology and technology that is an objective part of ‘reality’ but what can also be ‘classified’ as artifacts.

I now assume that actors can relate to each other. To put it simply, they can talk and understand one another. This means they can communicate by using technological artifacts and they can also communicate about ‘what is technology’. Here I assume that the ‘culture’ of technology starts building on top of the world of artifacts. In fact, the reason these actors can even have technological artifacts is that they were together able to grasp the concept of ‘technology’ and then identify some objects as ‘technological’.

In the empirical world (?) there is a concept called ‘the technology divide’. It is often used in reference to the modern communication technology and it roughly means, that some people (children, poor, elderly) do not have the same access to technology as some technology savy individuals. In other words, some people have access to technology and they know how to use it. In our modern world this is an increasingly growing source of inequality.

I am assuming, this is how technology can be viewed as creating social relations among different groups. By using a simple dual model we can say that there is a divide between techno elites and techno populus. I’m not yet claiming that these are class differences, but I’m going in to that very direction with this argument on some other post.

At this point, I am defining the transhumanist concept of technology as follows.

Technology constitutes a cultural system where some people are more able to own and use technology. All technological artifacts draw their meaning from this shared cultural bed of knowledge. Transhumanists operate on a unique knowledge base withing a larger culture of technology. This means, that they can give extra meanings or new meanings to artifacts other people use for other purposes (like genetic engineering) or what other people don’t even consider ‘relevant technology’ (like perhaps creating a super artificial intelligence).

And, since technology is defined with a culture of ‘transhuman technology’, this culture gives the base for the cultural orientations, that Touraine speaks of when he conceptualizes the conflicts with actors: the elites and the popular classes have different cultural orientations to the same objective environment. We can talk about a ‘transhuman way of life’ as such a cultural orientation to the world.

With this definition I can start working on how actors relate to each other socially and how these relations can be seen as a creation of different and conflicting ‘classes’. The interesting part here is that the conflict is (at least partly) created by the use of technology. To do this, I’ll have to figure out how the ‘relation’ is built up from groups to institutions and organizations and ultimately to the tourainean concept of historicity. This is especially interesting in connection with transhumanism, since their ‘utopian’ technology does have a possibility to create really big cultural differences among social groups.