Page 269 - Contribution To Phenomenology

262 DON IHDE

In one sense, there has ah*eady been a decentering of Eurocentrism.
Our second generation critics of technology recognized that, although they
did not see the source nor the level at which the decentering was
occuring. And—although it may seem strange at first—our choice is not
and cannot be either resistance or reaction. It could be that we can
choose, to some degree, whether to read this pluriculture nostalgically,
and thus negatively with respect to changes which have already occured,
or celebratorily, in the recognition that a proliferation of cuisines, musics,
or cultures may, in fact, enrich our own histories.
What could be called the "shape" of pluriculture, however, is distinctly
postmodern. It has the richest palate of cultural possibilities in human
history, but it is also something of a "floating feasf in which the older
hierarchical, foundational, and core structures no longer occur. There is,
or can there be, any single "best" cuisine, or music, or literature—but
there can be and is a new variety out of which we may now fashion our
own inventions. That is no small feat for the "end" of modernity.

VI. Conclusion

If now we look back at the itinerary I have taken, and consider the rise
of pluriculture to herald a certain decentering of Eurocentrism, it will
be seen that its occurance is such that it did not correspond to the
internalist critiques of technological culture in the following ways:
Its content is not internalist, but cross cultural. What becomes
attractive is often the exotic, the different, the other.
Its form, however, is not any coherent or single other culture, but the
bricolage of culture fragments in ever new mixes, not unlike the
cinematographic or televisual maleable narrative.
Its appearance was not a direct confrontation of high altitude "theory,"
but a growth and expansion from "below," the praxical and the popular.
Its historical antecedents are more like the eclectic periods of cross
cultural trade, technological innovation, exchange, than any moment of
high theory.
And, as "postmodern," it is probably transitional, but its trajectory is
not likely to be either the reassertion of the Eurocentric, nor the return
to traditional forms.
And, if there is a danger, the danger is precisely one which may
undercut the motivational sources of technoscience itself—if technoscience