Page 258 - Contribution To Phenomenology

Chapter 10

Technology and Cultural Revenge

Don Ihde
SUNY, Stony brook

Abstract: Of all the cultural products of Euro-American recent
history, technoscience is probably the most powerful No nation
has ever successfully colonized the world, nor gotten its language
to be the lingua globale, nor even gotten its arts universalized. But
technoscience is a world phenomenon which has englobed the
earth. In this essay I focus upon one particularly powerful strand
of contemporary technoscience—its "image'' and communications
technologies—which play an especially important cultural role in a
technologically englobed earth. We are all familiar with and use
them: television, cinema, telephonic and computer networks, even
the newer 'fax" technologies. Correlated with these image and com-
munications technologies, I focus upon the emergence of what I call
pluriculture, a unique form of late modem crossculturality. And,
within pluriculture, I shall examine a set of theses around
"technology and cultural revenge."

I. Technoscience

In the philosophical literature concerning technology there is a deep
irony. On the one side technoscience—as it has begun to be called—is
extolled as a unique, distinctly Euro-American phenomenon of modernity.
According to this intepretation, it originated out of the specifically
European philosophical penchant for theory-turned-science, which was
welded to a technological embodiment in experiment and instrumentation,
and became a cultural form which spread throughout the world itself. In
one sense, one could claim that this development is the high point of
the Western philosophical, scientific and technological phenomena.

251
M. Daniel and L. Embree (eds.). Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines, 251-263.
© 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.