Aagaard, Berg Friis, Sorensen, Tafdrup and Hasse (Eds.). Postphenomenological Methodologies: New Ways in Mediating Techno-human Relations. (Lexington Books: 2018) ISBN: 9781498545235, 296 Pages
The methods that are presented in Aagaard, Berg Friis, Sorensen, Tafdrup and Hasse each ask the prospective researcher to make a hermeneutic shift with respect to a variety of human-technology interrelationships. This hermeneutic shift allows the postphenomenological researcher to describe the reciprocal interaction between human and technology in its phenomenality. Beyond this hermeneutic shift and the resultant phenomenal descriptions, it remains unclear whether there is a method to postphenomenology at all.
I first came across the term “postphenomenology” while researching the book Expanding the Category “Human” (Lexington Books: 2017), where I wrote about it at length. I am still optimistic about the areas of inquiry it opens to humanistic psychology and to human science in general. Coined by the American philosopher Don Ihde (1995), postphenomenology examines the reciprocal human–technology interrelationship. Ihde has long been a proponent of taking seriously the role of technology in the mediation of human experience and maintains that phenomenologists need not peer suspiciously at technology from a distance or in fear that it may contaminate the purity of human experience. Technologies abound, and they have increasingly become woven into the fabric of human existence.
In Technology and the Lifeworld (IUP: 1990), Ihde imagines a world in which technology does not mediate between human and world. He conjures a vision of Adam, the first biblical man, whose bare feet tread the unmanicured garden landscape and whose bare hands push against the underbrush of an untamed jungle. Until he has cleared for himself a seat, or a comfortable pathway upon which to walk, Adam’s relationship to nature is unmediated by anything that could be thought of as technology. With the Garden of Eden scene as the background, we quickly see just how diverse and widespread are the technologies upon which we rely.
Ihde (1990) differentiates two types of human–technology relations: (1) where technology amplifies human-nature interactions and (2) where technology produces a new interaction. An example of amplification can be seen with any human ability. I can make out the objects on my dresser with my naked eyes, but with a telescope I can count the stars of the Andromeda Galaxy. Examples of a technologies that produce new relations include the many medical imaging technologies: ultrasound, EEG, fMRI and so on. Each produces information about internal bodily processes that we cannot access through our awkward and untrustworthy interoception. (In his works that follow, additional human–technology relations are enumerated, and many of these have received attention in Postphenomenological Methodologies.)
The use of both types of technologies transform the ways in which we inhabit the world. Adam can get around in the jungle by pulling bushes apart with his hands and tearing the vines with his fingernails, but a machete handles these jobs with greater ease. The machete has certain limitations to what it can easily clear, and these indirectly dictate the pathway that Adam finds to his water source. As the machete is absorbed into Adam’s being-towards-hydration, it deposits a bit of machete-likeness into how this event unfolds. Even in his perception, the shrubs will begin to announce themselves to the machete-wielding Adam in terms of their clearability. Humans use technology, and the latter transforms the former.
Following the lead of Ihde’s Technology and the Lifeworld, postphenomenologists investigate this reciprocal human–technology relationship. It is phenomenological insofar as it takes being-in-the-world as its subject matter. The “post-” comes from the perspective of openness with respect to technology. Where mid-century phenomenologists such as Martin Heidegger have decried the transformation of Dasein at the hands of technology (such as in his paper “A Letter Concerning Technology”), postphenomenologists wish to include technology within their phenomenological worldview.
To be fair, neither Heidegger (with his hammer) nor Merleau-Ponty (with his blind man’s cane) were strangers to carrying out phenomenological investigations of technology. To this end, it is not immediately clear why the postphenomenological movement did not adopt a different moniker such as “phenomenology of technology.” However, the reason begins to unfold in the introduction to Postphenomenological Methodologies.
Despite following a series of books, articles and at least a decade of dedicated annual conferences, the practice of postphenomenology had no established methodology at the time of the publication of Postphenomenological Methodologies. In their introduction, Aagaard and others explain how “[p]revious publications… have offered sophisticated analyses of technologies from guns and cell phones to synthesizers and earbuds, but have not dealt with the issue of methodology” (p. xi).
Postphenomenology is not a method; it represents a particular kind of hermeneutic shift in focus. In phenomenological terms, it is a means of generating meaningful descriptions of lived experience as they have been transformed by technological mediation. In the first book released by editors of the Lexington Books series “Postphenomenology and the Philosophy of Technology,” Robert Rosenberger and Peter-Paul Verbeek explain that postphenomenological studies each have two things in common. They “investigate technology in terms of the relations between human beings and technological artifacts,” and they “combine philosophical analysis with empirical investigation” (p. 9, italics original). For example, in her Postphenomenology of Cell Phones, Galit Wellner (2015) describes how four separate generations of mobile devices have transformed human communication and attention, each in their own way.
Descriptions of human experience, including human–technology interrelationships, are not to be confused with phenomenology. Descriptions aim at the phenomenality of experience, whereas phenomenology has been developed as a rigorous philosophy—one that is capable of examining the human condition. While phenomenal descriptions supply important data for phenomenological investigation, they do not alone satisfy the rigor of phenomenological inquiry. As Danish philosopher Dan Zahavi (2018) reminds us in his critique of the phenomenological methods of Max van Manen and Jonathan Smith,
When thinkers like Husserl, Scheler, Sartre, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty engaged in phenomenological philosophizing, they most definitely were not simply seeking to offer fine-grained descriptions of the qualitative character of different experience; they were not simply seeking to attend to hitherto unreflected and unnoticed aspects and details of lived experience. (p. 6)
Phenomenological philosophers of the past century have relied on descriptions of phenomenality to resolve important philosophical conundrums such as the difference between perception and hallucination (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), the ethics inherent in human relations (Emmanuel Levinas), the structure of human consciousness (Edmund Husserl) and the modes of being and existence (Heidegger). A phenomenology of technology would not stop at descriptions of the human – technology relation, but would rely on such description to shine a light on being. Given the failure of previously published postphenomenological literature to address or establish methodology, I was pleased to see that Aagaard and others had written a book to do just that.
The book begins with a welcoming foreword by Ihde, who introduces the reader to the now-24-year-old study of postphenomenology (a term first introduced in his 1995 edited work, Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context). In the introduction, the editors describe the aforementioned lack of an explicit methodology and discuss the key concepts of intentionality, embodiment and multistability. The first two are likely familiar to readers of phenomenology, but the latter is a term frequently used by Ihde and described at length in his book Experimental Phenomenology: Multistabilities, which is now on its second edition (SUNY: 2012). Multistability is the term that Ihde uses to describe how a given object or technology has a multiplicity of features, and each transforms its meaning for its user. Multistabilities are not unlike Heidegger’s (1962) qualities of objects that retreat from our view while in use. A coffee cup is useful for sipping my coffee or for holding a book open on a certain page, but the qualities that make coffee-sipping possible are absent when used as a place-holder. An emphasis on multistabilities encourages careful attention to the qualities that make a particular object useful, as well as the qualities that are of consequence even if not readily apparent.
The excitement begins on pages xvi-xvii of the introduction, when the editors call for an empirical turn. “Our issue with postphenomenology” they write, “is not that it is too empirical, but that it is not empirical enough” (p. xvii). Unfortunately, the editors fail to deliver on this promise.
As an educator with interests in the role played by technology in the virtual classroom (Whitehead & Hughes, 2019), I was particularly interested in the opening chapter by Adams and Turville titled “Doing Postphenomenology in Education.” The chapter lists four existing methods that the authors have found consonant with postphenomenological research from which the reader may choose, but these receive only references for further reading and no discussion. This is followed by a literature review of postphenomenological research in education, but once again the series of studies listed accomplishes little more than mentioning that such research has been done. The bulk of the chapter focuses on the phenomenological method of Canadian educator Max van Manen. In Phenomenology of Practice (2014), van Manen is careful not to articulate steps of a phenomenological method that his readers might follow, and instead encourages his readers to take a hermeneutic approach — one that benefits from a variety of practices such as reflection, reading, writing, conversation and so forth. “The ambition of phenomenology of practice is simple,” Adams and Turville explain, it is “to describe and reflect on a phenomenon of professional or personal interest by attending to the prereflective or everyday lifeworld” (pp. 11-12). As their definition shows, what is recommended is not a method per se, but a practice for generating phenomenal descriptions.
In the second chapter, Tobias Röhl succeeds in differentiating two types of pedagogical objects in the classroom, which he gives the cumbersome names “quasi-transparent media” and “epistemic object.” The former refers to any object through which information or ideas are shared. In the classroom, students do not engage directly with the projector-as-projector but with the ideas that are transmitted through the projector-as-medium. If operational, the projector and screen disappear into the background and the ideas occupy the foreground. In comparison, epistemic objects are the focal point of discussion. A model of a brain in a physiological psychology classroom is both the brain-object and the idea of the brain as a dynamic lump of nervous tissue in the students’ heads. Both classifications of objects are helpful in their own unique ways, producing readily apparent objective properties as well as disappearing into the background of pedagogical insight. What Röhl describes is a hermeneutic shift with respect to the media and models of instruction and accomplishes a detailed description of their phenomenality. There is no discussion on what insights this has for epistemology, pedagogy or the intersubjectivity of knowledge.
Aagaard has authored the third chapter, which investigates the ways in which digital screens and cellular phones have a two-fold nature of covering and uncovering (lethe, Aletheia; Heidegger, 1962). When I shine a flashlight on the table before me, I illuminate the table-top while also casting a shadow on the chairs that sit opposite me. In this manner, Heidegger has explained that any dis-covering or dis-closing is also a simultaneous covering or closing. Borrowing the term “wall-window” from Wellner (2011), Aagaard demonstrates how digital devices open their user up to a nonlocal world of information, entertainment or social interaction while simultaneously creating barriers to the local world of potential interactions. If I am being entertained by a YouTube video while sitting at the dinner table, I cannot also be listening to my wife as she tells me about her day.
The concluding discussion in Aagaard’s chapter hints at an underlying attitude of postphenomenological scholarship that deserves attention. He issues an apology for including empirical data (that is, semi-structured qualitative interviews): “I am not advocating an incorporation of some sort of naïve positivism into postphenomenology nor proposing that our discussions turn into closed questions answered only by empirical material” (p. 54). This statement is decidedly peculiar in a book that has been written about methodology. There seems to be an implicit push against the collection or analysis of empirical data among postphenomenologists. Aagaard extends this to the articulation of methodological design and procedures of empirical phenomenology as well, explaining how he has found it “useful to dispel this restrictive view of knowledge” (that is, the phenomenological epoché; p. 55). Instead of following a methodological procedure and allowing empirical data to inform his analysis, Aagaard explains how he does the reverse, reading postphenomenological theory and using it to “generate empirical material” (p. 55).
Postphenomenological methodology receives no further clarification in the chapters that follow. In chapter four, for example, Moa Petersén explains how her chapter “should […] be seen as the account of a pilot project, and the arguments put forward […] treated as ideas rather than truths” (p. 67), and in chapter five, Fernando Secomandi explains how readers “who want to conduct postphenomenological field studies must look elsewhere for methodological guidance” (p. 83). It seems that Aagaard and others are actually opposed to any articulation of methodological procedure. But the editors know this, of course. In their introduction, they have written that “[t]he goal of this anthology is not […] to offer definitive rules for conducting postphenomenological research” (p. xii).
As it does not articulate a method for postphenomenological research, the title Postphenomenological Methodologies seems misleading. If this was what you were looking for in a book with this title, then you may need only read the beginning of the chapter summaries section of the book’s introduction. In order to carry out this style of research, your work must only meet two criteria:
[I]t must be anchored in an anti-essentialist, relational ontology (the “post-“ part) and it must take departure in embodied experience (the “phenomenology” part). Apart from that, the field is wide open. […] [W]e believe that a certain cross-pollination of intellectual vocabularies is very fertile when letting a thousand methodological flowers bloom. (pp. xviii)
These criteria depart from those set forth by series editors (described above) by stipulating anti-essentialism and dropping the empirical part. Consequently and sadly, rather than clarifying the methods of postphenomenological research, Postphenomenological Methodologies has actually accomplished the opposite.
Finally, the book suffers from inconsistent copyediting and a general lack of editorial cohesion. Some chapters read beautifully while others have run into unfortunate translation problems, featuring awkward punctuation, word-choice and phrasing.
Patrick M. Whitehead, PhD, is an assistant professor of psychology at Albany State University in Albany, Ga. He is the author of Expanding the Category “Human:” Posthumanism, Nonhumanism and Humanistic Psychology (Lexington Books: 2017) and Psychologizing: A Personal, Practice-based Approach to Psychology(Rowman & Littlefield: 2016). He has been published in The Humanistic Psychologist, the Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, the Community College Journal of Research and Practice and the Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology, among others.