This spring I received the happy news from my university in Pilsen that my proposal for a grant project had been approved. Specifically, I was given a two-year grant to start “evangelising”, in the Czech and Slovak context, a new current of philosophising about technologies called postphenomenology. The prefix “post” alone makes it clear that this is a current that in some way builds on phenomenology.

While in Husserl we would find a philosophy of technology only indirectly, between the lines of his commentary on Galileo’s telescope, in his pupil Heidegger we naturally find the text The Question Concerning Technology, which explicitly tries to come to terms with technologies philosophically. Heidegger, however, is not interested in individual technologies; instead he comes up with an analysis of Technology with a capital “T”. In his conception, technology is a monolithic, abstract and all-embracing force that compels humans to perceive the world only as a reservoir of energy: because of technology, the world and nature become useful only when humans can pigeonhole them with their calculating intellect into the form of energy usable for the needs of technology.

Postphenomenological analysis rejects Heidegger’s view of technologies, in which individual technologies and their real, everyday being are reduced to a single abstract and all-embracing force. For connoisseurs of phenomenology and those interested in it, I can mention that, in my view, Husserl and Heidegger perform on technology a reduction and a cutting-off from the real world very similar to the one Husserl himself criticised in his Crisis of European Sciences, the reduction performed in the first half of the twentieth century by the science of the time and by a philosophy of science influenced by positivism. Unlike the so-called “classical phenomenology” of Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, postphenomenology places technologies and material culture at the centre of its interest and examines concrete, existing technologies.

In postphenomenology as founded by the American philosopher Don Ihde, we find, besides phenomenology, a very strong influence of two other intellectual currents. With its prefix “post”, postphenomenology also suggests a certain affinity with postmodernism, for it is programmatically anti-essentialist and anti-Cartesian, it rejects the split between subject and object, Husserl’s transcendental ego and his view “from nowhere”, and, last but not least, it applies a relational ontology as the cornerstones of its research focus and of its analysis of technologies. At the same time, it draws inspiration from the fields that emerged in the 1980s, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and technoscience, which give postphenomenology an empirical focus unusual for a philosophical movement: by means of empirical research and case studies, the postphenomenologists, led by Don Ihde, Peter-Paul Verbeek, Robert Rosenberg and Evan Selinger, examine the real effects and influences of the materiality of individual existing technological artefacts on human perception and thinking, namely by a thorough study of the role technologies play in mediating and co-constituting the intentional relation of the human being to the world through material artefacts. Peter-Paul Verbeek likes to sum up the role of empirical research for postphenomenological philosophising about technologies with the slogan that it is a “philosophy of technology”, but also a “philosophy from technology”.

If anyone concluded from this description that postphenomenology could benefit from closer contact with the (new) media theory of Harold Innis, Marshall McLuhan and their followers, I can only agree. After all, the Belgian expert on McLuhan’s media theory, Yoni Van Den Eede, is the editor of two collections, essential in my view, in which an important interaction takes place precisely between these two currents of thought. And I certainly do not think they are the first and last interdisciplinary collections on the borderline between media theory and postphenomenology.

This brings me back to the subject of the conference. On 19 November, the aforementioned first conference on the topic of postphenomenology will take place at the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts, University of West Bohemia in Pilsen. It is a student conference and we primarily welcome students of master’s and doctoral programmes, but we will be glad if experienced academics who would like to share their thoughts with younger colleagues also present papers at the conference.

I named the conference Postphenomenology, Mind and Media, by which I wanted to suggest that, although the main topic is postphenomenology, other topics from the philosophy of mind and media theory are also welcome, provided they try to reflect on the relation between the human being, thinking and technology (for McLuhan, all technologies are media). At the same time, the name suggests that, since this is the first postphenomenological conference in our country, I do not expect many pure-bred postphenomenologists to be found on Czechoslovak soil. Naturally, if there is a philosophical movement we can call “at home” in the Czech Republic, it will be, relatively uncontroversially, phenomenology. But postphenomenology rejects Husserl’s transcendental ego and almost the whole of Heidegger’s philosophy of technology, and so I myself am curious whether “classical” phenomenologists will be able to come to terms with postphenomenology. For this reason too, we will certainly welcome at the conference experienced experts on phenomenology who would give us their opinion, however brief or critical, on the present and future development of postphenomenological thinking about technologies.

Venue and date:
19 November 2020
10:00, room SP319
KFI FF ZČU
send abstracts to abstrakty@postfenomenologie.cz
conference website www.postfenomenologie.cz