The task of this third program concerning technology and the lifeworld is distinctly contemporary. Its aim is a partial topography of lifeworld curvatures. Here I have to make a limiting choice. I shall not be so bold or high-altitude as to claim a total topography; yet I wish to catch up, in this analysis, some of the important issues that have been raised concerning contemporary technologies. I have chosen to do a partial topography which reads the lifeworld primarily in terms of an important and relatively new set of technologies, which I shall call image-technologies. These include not only pervasive television, cinema, and photography but also computers--in terms of both word and number capacitiesand computer graphics, etc.
This is a middle-level choice for topography, simultaneously concrete enough to remain intuitively tied to embedded technologies and also speculative and broad enough to capture what I believe to be unique or distinctive to the postmodern era. What are the shapes to
technological non-neutrality in this postmodern lifeworld?
I have called the present situation "postmodern" not simply to be fashionable but because, in its widespread use, it is a term that an-nounces an awareness that we are in a transition out of the aura of the modern into what is not yet easily nameable. If this is so, it is difficult either to be sure about the present state of affairs or to make a claim strong about possible, let alone probable, trajectories. Yet there are
discernible vectors which do appear; and those, however loosely associated with image-technologies, are of particular interest. They also have the advantage of keeping the inquiry focused upon the praxis and perception, both micro- and macro-, of the lifeworld.
The stance I have taken throughout attempts to avoid both the utopian and dystopian temptations that easily become the sins of many interpreters of technology. Yet in now sketchingin however suggestive a set of linesthe curvatures of high-technology culture, I must recognize that the restraint of mere description will be surpassed. Both one's hopes and one's fears are bound to show through. I recognize that I am a citizen of the very lifeworld being drawn and, as such, I experience both the loves and the hatreds that one always has for one's own country.
Here, too, I must confess the similar love/hate relationship I have for technologies. I share the larger fears of many of the critics of technological civilization that, lacking the necessary conservational ethic and law we need, we may already be close to having irreversibly fouled our own earthjust at the moment we have fully inherited it. That gloomy possibility, while not inevitable, is enough to signal death with a whimper for the human lives on the planet. I fear that possibility more than the otherdeath by bang through the possibility of global, nuclear holocaustwhich is also possible, although not inevitable.
I reject the notion made popular by Heidegger that "only a god can save us." Nor do I have any faith that this could or would happen. In what I shall claim is rather a heightened sense of contingency; we must more than ever see to our own fate, by deeply and even caringly looking after our technologically textured world. While we cannot simply "control" itsince the question is wrongly framedthere are directions that can be taken in crucial interstices that can do some significant nudging.
Many of these, too, belong within the range of image-technologies. But if I am eschewing utopianism, neither do I wish to be dystopian. The contemporary technological world shows distinct advantages, which have so thoroughly become taken for granted that it is easy to overlook those changes, over all previous "worlds." We do not even experience the existential sense of what those changes have been. The most positive and dramatic change to affect daily life has been in the area of medical and health changes. Gone are a host of diseases: polio, smallpox, and all but vestigially, cholera and diphtheriathe once often-fatal childhood diseasesand others so numerous that the list would fill the page. One could say that this change is also ambiguousin some crucial areas of the world it has had as a side effect the deleterious effect of population increases that complicate poverty; but in the developed countries, again through the adaptation of birth- control technologies, that problem has also disappeared. One could also say that the religious sense of the contingency of deatha
phenomenon daily close to the fourteenth-century European world when the plague wiped out a third or more of the populationhas been lost as a religious meaning. But I, for one, do not regret that loss; and while I do think our present attitudes towards death and the institutional ways in which we deal with it clearly need improvement, I would not want to exchange ours for the lost past sense of impending death. In these and many other ways, I admit rejoicing in modernity.
The navigational examples I have used throughout this book also relate to my own positive experience of technology. I am a "religious" sailor in that it is not too far from the truth to claim that sailing is my secular substitute for religion in its ritual, celebratory, and other re-
deeming elevation functions. Here I am unromantically, thoroughly modern in taste. I am willing to argue that the contemporary high-tech sailboat is greatly superior to and even more in touch with the natural elements than any traditional craft. I can appreciate particularly the smells of tar and wet hemp associated with old wooden boats, and I like the sounds of their creaking works. But having sailed enough of their number, I know full well that the capacities of performance in my own series of fiberglass, fin-keeled, high-aspect sloop-rigged boats is such that, in both extreme conditionsin which higher-pointing ability alone makes for greater safetyand in normal conditionswith more ease of handling and enjoyment and in upkeep, with a much higher ratio of sailing to repairit is more than enough to compensate for whatever nostalgia there may be for the wooden ancestry.
Moreover, the modern high-technology boat, precisely in its capacity to allow oneself to be embodied through it, places one more closely in tune with wind and water than was so through the insulated and dampened result in the resistance-to-maneuvering of the older wooden vessel. A landlubber's analogue here is something like the experience of the road one has through the precision sports car compared to the old American large bomb of a cargood for comfort and "aiming" but not for enjoying the tortured high mountain roads here in Tuscany. Unavoidably, I have now revealed that I can also praise technology in close-to-uncritical fashion, a paean uncharacteristic of the previous restraint. This will not diminish the deeper sense of ambiguity that must be maintained if critique is to remain genuine. With that, I turn to the hard and somewhat speculative task of outlining the curvatures of the contemporary technological lifeworld as seen specifically via the roles of image technologies.
A. Pluriculturality
The first curvature of the contemporary lifeworld now acquired is what I shall call pluriculturality. It is a lifeform arising out of the use of image-technologies catching up to cultures. I shall use this neologism to contrast with the cross-cultural and the multicultural, which are related phenomena not necessarily formed by technological mediations.
There is a persistent illusion of neutrality that associates with all technologies. Its most simplistic form, the neutrality of mere objects in contrast to motivated uses by subjects, has been avoided here by the use of the relativistic model that refuses to dissociate subject from object, user from technology. But the illusion can persist precisely because of the multistability we have noted, in which a multiplicity of users can pick up and use technologies in such different ways. This occurs also at the level of a cultural hermeneutic, in which technologies get embedded differently. The emergence of pluriculturality will
be seen as the clue to an essential non-neutrality and will serve as a way of deconstructing this illusion at the cultural level.
Pluriculturality is the distinctively postmodern form of the multi-cultural. It arises in and through image-technologies and is taken into the acquisitions of the lifeworld. Its very appearance mimics aspects of the multistable. Image-technologies are exemplified by a series of technologies including television, cinema, and also computer VDTs with both word and number processing as well as graphics, photography in all its forms, etc. Each of these image-technologies has the capacity to 'reproduce' or 'produce' "images." (Phenomenologically, I am very uneasy with this language of image, because this usagenow too widely used to simply discardis steeped in the Platonistic copy and
representationalism theory that phenomenology has overthrown. Phenomenologically, an 'image' is itself a "thing itself," that is, a distinctive phenomenon. It is positive, with its own appearance, and does not necessarily belong at all to "representation" but is a distinctive
presentation. I shall use the language of image, placing it in single quotes to indicate the rejection of its associated epistemology.)
We often take these technologies to be simply neutral "reproducers" of some real thing into an isomorphically produced "image." But no critical user or expert in the medium believes this any more. Indeed, the camera is an excellent example of technological non-neutrality, precisely in the sense that any photo transfigures the object which is "taken." The subtler the transfiguration, the greater the illusion of neutrality; but to sharper, late-twentieth-century eyesat least, in comparison to early viewers not yet educated to transfigurations this illusion is now seen more as an illusion of representation.
The naive viewer does not miss the importance of being "taken" and transformed by the camera. In the mid-fifties I did a study trip on Southwestern Native American cultures, which included visits to Navajo, Hopi, and Taos settlements. Each group reacted differently to the camera. Navajos were reluctant or refused to have their pictures taken. The explanation given was that the 'image' was really taking something away from the person whose picture was being taken. This had almost "material," although a "spiritual" material, sense. The Hopi, also reluctant, sometimes gave as a reason a belief that such photos would be put to a use which would somehow exploit them perhaps used profitably for a magazine for which the person being taken would not benefit. The Taos group did not mind their pictures being taken at allas long as they were paid for the operation! In each case, there was a perception of the non-neutrality of picture taking, although not praised or contexted in a way we might put it.
Although a rigorous phenomenology of transfiguration would be appropriate, it would fit better into the earlier transformations of vision already noted. What I have in mind here is rather that illusion of neutrality arising out of the capacity of image technologies to convey, to
picture any visualizable subject matter whatsoeverin this special case, the ability to convey but transfigure cultural subject matter. To convey cultural 'images' was one of the early uses of photography in the now 100-year-old National Geographic magazine. It
revolutionized the atmosphere of living rooms of many families by bringing pictorially to many provincial folk the variety of world cultures not previously known. It revolutionized what was acceptable in its own tradition beginning in 1896, for example, by depicting bare-breasted women. Placed in the more objective context of authentic photos of authentic peoples, the previously forbidden subject matterfor children, at leastbecame acceptable. The first visual education about female anatomy for many a young boy at the turn of the century belonged to precisely this convention of the Geographic.
What lies deeper than the fascination of the viewer in the now clearly innocent datedness of this practice, however, is the opening to pluriculturality that also begins to show through this use of technology. To bring another culture before one is not a one-way relation. It is an inter-relation, even at the seemingly trivial level of magazine photography. The analogue to the culinary revenge of the tale is the 'image,' which begins to transform the previously isolated or insulated home.
Again, there is a relation between the growth of image-technology on a quantitative basis to the qualitative leap occurring within the
proliferation. The Geographic's multicultural display was but an early opening to the virtually constant interculturality now seen daily on the evening television news. No informed modern can be unaware of cultural distinction.
Today's informed child, through watching television anthropology documentaries, will know something about phenomena such as pot- latches, respect for ancestors, puberty initiatory rituals, and a whole range of cultural phenomena paralleling similar documentary knowledge about black holes and the red shift in astronomy. That child is a better-informed child than the counterpart child at the birth of the
Geographic. Alongside the esotericism of the anthropology documentary is the often more appealing imagery of MTVthe channel we
almost always find still on the set when our baby-sitters leave. Beyond "reproducing" imagery, contemporary television produces imagery of its own sort. It creates something of its own subculture. The produced, refracted, and fragmentary 'images' of pop TV are the bricolage remains of photography put into motion but which produce their own variants.
This knowledge through 'images' is not neutral, either. It is as far from the Garden as all the other forms of technologically mediated knowledge we have noted. The contemporary outcry against relativism is yet another form of nostalgic protest. The protesters experience the diminished stature our own history takes in the response to and submergence in the multiplicity of other cultures. But at the same time
the appearance of a produced, "image saturated" popular culture, itself filled with multicultural fragments, is also perceived as threatening. Cultural relativism, however, is only a trivialized and often degraded form of pluriculturality. It is also the sign of the pervasiveness of the
pluricultural.
One reason why the Geographic's excellent early imagery can appear so innocent to us today is that it occurred at the end of the world explorations when it was still possible to sense both missionary zeal and simple Western chauvinism. Each exotic culture 'imaged' could be fascinating but also understood as "primitive" or "savage" and thought to need to be brought into "our" modern era.
Now that our world has impinged upon theirs, there is now a counternostalgia directed at having lost the "primitive" and the "savage." Only their cultural echoes or remains exist. And these are sometimes borrowed, bricolage style, into the songs, clothing, and fashions of popular culture.
If, for a moment, this appearance of pluriculturality is read as the latest variant upon a series of science knowledge revolutions, an
interesting set of parallels emerges. Textbook orthodoxy concerning science knowledge explosions usually follows an almost ritual mythos: a new science appears in a theory that in turn changes a major previously held belief, which must be abandoned/decenteredand a new era of informed knowledge emerges.
The Copernican Revolution presumably decentered the geocentric universe, displacing earth and the human to an orbit of the sun,
eventually to the status of a minor planet within the Milky Way. The Darwinian Revolution, by relating humans to the primates, presumably decentered anthropocentrism. If the explosion of the cultural is just the twentieth century's latest knowledge explosion, does this mean that the decentering of Eurocentrism is about to occur? Are we at the brink of a decentering of the Western cultural universe? That is clearly the fear felt, now being debated in higher education.
Without necessarily endorsing the orthodox views of knowledge explosions, there is an interesting instrumental parallelism in what followed each of the mentioned Revolutions. In each, new instruments were devised; they in turn brought into perceivability what was previously unseen. The transformation of both micro- and macroperceptions followed, which then led to changes of sensibility. Today's array of technologies that make the pluricultural present is the spectrum of image-technologies accompanying this basically only century-old familiarization. Accelerated by the instantaneity of world communications, the present Revolution is now rapidly being disseminated. Intercultural history is, of course, much older than its image-technology mediated history. A deep reading of our history shows that intercultural exchanges exist at each crucial moment of that history. But with the acceleration of the intercultural during the voyages of discov-
eryparticularly to the New World, then to the Pacific and previously unknown parts of the Eastthe fascination also accelerated. The macroperceptual changes which make for a revolution, however, were not that easily accommodated or absorbed. Those took longer; a perceptual history reveals something of the difficulty our ancestors had with perceiving the "other."
Columbus remained convinced at his death that the Arawaks and Caribs he discovered were but tribes of East Indians somewhere off the coast of the mainland. The slowness of a cultural, perceptual revolution is also evidenced in the representations of the New World peoples by colonists and missionaries.
Early colonial representations of the New World's indigenous peoples look oddly Europeandrawn in classical Renaissance styleexcept for the frillery of feathers and the depiction of clothing (or lack of it). In North America it was not until the near demise of the original
environments of Native Americansthrough the works of Catlin, Remington, and early photographythat realistic representational likenesses began to appear. Nor does one have to choose Western examples to illustrate the same point. Early Japanese representations of Perry's fleet have the same cultural centric appearancein this case, Japanese. In both instances, initial cultural contact is not yet the pluricultural.
Preceding pluriculturality, in yet another parallel to past knowledge explosions, was the development of a new science: anthropology. Anthropology followed the voyages of discovery by several centuries. Exploration, with the opening to the West of the peoples of the New and Pacific Worlds, served as a change in the lifeworld equivalent to that of medieval technology for the birth of science. This already- established multicultural experience was only later to lead to the reflective and scientific examination of cultures; but, once entered, the frontiers of cultural history were to be no less changed in a revolutionary manner than any of the previous decenterings.
No matter how slow the gestalt was to appear, once the explosive trajectory is launched, it begins a cumulative and quantitative expansion, now multiplied in typical magnificational form by our image-technologies. The first quantitative result in an "exploded" canon. The previous canon can remain what it is only so long as it is small enough and select enough to remain sedimented. With at first linear, then horizontal