An idea I’ve been kicking around for the last few years — and we can call it, loosely, phenomenological — is that technological intervention into a given form of life projects the relevant pre-technological category as normative or natural. The pre-tech form, we think, precedes the technologized one; and it seems like we can escape or resist the latter by turning back to the former. But in fact, I think this is wrong on both counts. The pre-tech category follows from the technological intervention. Turning back to the former merely, and even pitilessly, re-asserts and re-enforces the latter.
Take the example of “live music.” We may revere and treasure this, as the pre-tech form of recorded music. And we may suppose that we are stepping outside the somewhat dehumanizing space of modernity when we go to take in some live music. But clearly: the very idea of “live” music totally depends on its recorded analog. Prior to recording, live is just what music is. Therefore, every time we talk up “live” music, as something special or pre-technological, we are proclaiming our allegiance to the technological intervention — recording — that allows the “pre-tech” form to be there.
Or consider the concept — beloved by lit profs — of orality. That is, spoken language, prior to, or outside, its written form. Anthropologically, it stands to reason (sorry, Derrida) that human beings spoke before they wrote. Accordingly, we get a phenomenological thrill when we turn back to, or feel like we can turn back to, oral literatures: In Homer, or in the West African bards, or in some of the pre-contact cultures of the Americas. But it is exactly like the point about live and recorded music: Only when there is literacy is there such a thing as orality. Until and unless the written word confronts the spoken one, spoken is just what a word is. Talking up “orality” does not take us one single step outside the circle of technological power that is literacy. Quite the contrary.
This is not to say that we have no reason to want phenomenological liberation. We have every reason to want that. It is to say, rather, that we are not liberated, in any field or form of life — literary, cultural, civic, or political — by fetishization of what we take to be pre-tech categories. For the latter are projected by, and lead back to, the very technology that is in question.
Where does this go? Lots of places, I think. But all will be governed by versions of the same insight. The way to liberate our consciousness is not to de-technologize. The way to liberate our consciousness is not to care.
Libber leeber 