Page 264 - Contribution To Phenomenology

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURAL REVENGE 257

What I am suggesting here is not only are there multiple patterns of
the outcomes of cultural changes, which range from those of a highly
successful conqueror dominating a supressed culture, even, perhaps
extinguishing it, to many modes of mixtures, but also to the conqueror
itself becoming the conquered, but that such encounters also motivate
much historical and cultural change.
In the history of technology this is well documented—Lynn White Jr.
has shown how much medieval technology was an adaptation of
borrowings from the Far East, in particular, to European power needs.
If windmills were originally prayer wheels; they became windmills and
windpumps, etc. What may be less noted, however, is that periods of
high technological development may abo be associated with high trade
and intercultural moments as well.
The Hellenic and Roman Periods were considerably more productive
of engineering and technological innovations than the Period of Classical
Greece. The post-Orient Medieval Period ateady cited in White was also
noted. In both cases, the history of technological innovation could be
associated with equally high periods of intercultural exchange. And, to
anticipate a later observation, such periods in pre-technoscience times
often did not correspond to the periods of high theoretical development,
such as that of the rise of philosophy in ancient Greece or the develop-
ment of high logics among the late Medieval theologians. Eclectic,
cosmopolitan, and high trade periods seemed to favor multiplying
technologies with or without high theory!

rv. Pliuiculture

Many of the above examples, however, are pre-technoscience and more
general with respect to cross cultural phenomena. "Pluriculture," I
contend, is a distinctly late modem form of cross culturaUty. It is the type
of cross culturality which takes shape and embodiment in the enviornment
of contemporary "image technologies."
Pluriculture is dominantly shaped by technological mediation, that of
the image and communication technologies. First, we must note several
features of this mediation:
Image technologies mediate "representabiUty" in a kind of quasi-
reaUsm different from the traditions of "handwork" art imagery. I shall
begin with photography as an example: early representations of Native
Americans by artists travelling with the Conquistadors, look like