Embracing the Interface

(this post was written by Kyle on December 15, 2005, and it concerns & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & )

“In metaphysics, a being is in a relation with what it cannot absorb, with what it cannot, in the etymological sense, comprehend.” - Emmanuel Levinas, Totality & Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority.

What is the ontological status of that space where the software meets the hardware? I’m not speaking technically here. Technically, that space is way out of my league. I think it is way out of most people’s league, including most computer programmers nowadays. In the programming world, there is a kind of “when I was a kid…” complaint about object-oriented programming1 and graphical-user interfaces,2 whereby the complainer makes it known that back in the halcyon days of modern technology, computer programmers actually knew how to program in machine and assembly language. While there are still a number of these freaks in the field, computer programming has exploded to where the people who actually know how to program in the machine are an extremely small percentile. In the world of HTML, Javascript, Applescript, Flashscript, Automator, REALBasic, etc., almost anybody who can read can do at least a little bit of computer programming. If you stretch the term far enough, hell, just dragging and dropping a file to a folder is a form of computer programming.

When I speak about the ontological status of the space between the software and hardware, I’m speaking, not technically, but metaphysically. The metaphysical world is a few paces away from the physical world (whereas the virtual world is a few paces toward3 — and the imaginary is a few paces above4 — the physical). So the space I’m talking about here is not quite real and not quite virtual. The real world would be the space of the silicon. The virtual world would be the space of the GUI. The space between them, where the real and virtual interact, where they engage each other, this is a metaphysical space.

I imagine that this space is metaphorical to that space wherein the human body and the human mind interact.5 The difference, of course, is the difference of freedom. According to our experience, the human mind is free6 to make its own decisions; but computers are not free — they only do what the human mind has told them to do (even if that human is not the user, it is at least the human programmer). But I don’t want to address the freedom issue right now. The freedom issue is a theme for science-fiction.7 Rather than address the nature of the relationship, I would rather address the space in which the relationship occurs.

I want to know if this is the space of the computer. In the same way that a commuter is the one who commutes, the computer should be understood here as “the one that computes.” Computer, of course, comes from compute, which in its turn comes from the Latin com-, which means “with,” and putare, which means “to reckon.”8 The computer, then, is the one who reckons with the information provided by the software before passing it on to the hardware (and vice-versa), similar to the way the human is (metaphorically) the one who reckons with the information provided by the mind before passing it on to the body (and vice-versa). The computer is the unifying “entity” that is comprised by the hardware and software. It has no form, much as consciousness has no form. If it is formed at all, its form reveals a space, not matter — the eye of the hurricane formed by the rotating walls of wind, for example.

The way that humans interact with the computer is through the interface. The interface is no more the computer than the human face is the human. What lies behind that face? Can we ever really know? Will there be, someday, a look on that face that tells us something that we are not ready to face?

Martin Heidegger writes:

Everything, then, depends on this: that we ponder this…and, recollecting, watch over it. How can this happen? Above all through our catching sight of what comes to presence in technology, instead of merely staring at the technological. So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will to master it. We press on past the essence of technology.9

The whole essence thing is controversial. Essentialism doesn’t fly in too many philosophical circles nowadays. But when it comes down to it, essentialism cannot be separated from identity. Dawn Sarli uses the Buddhist notion of temporality as “a working model as to how we can live with claimed identities at only specific points in time.”10 By grafting temporality onto the common notion of essentialism, Sarli reforms it, but her theory allows for change to coexist with essentialism. There is no essential thing that exists outside of time, something that has always been and will always be. “What we call a ‘being’…, according to Buddhist philosophy, is only a combination of ever-changing physical or mental forces or energies…”11 Sarli’s reformed essence, then, does not represent the same kind of essence that Heidegger writes about, which is unchanging.

How does this effect the essence of technology as he sees it? For one, it stops all of his talk about the coming to presence of technology. Beings don’t come into presence, they become presence. Technology can’t be known until it becomes technology. Heidegger senses this, and he calls that moment, “the revealing.” But revealing implies the presence of a being, a hidden being, prior to this moment. Heidegger suggests that the form of this presence can be discerned, as we can discern the form of the child even if it is covered by a blanket. He calls this form Enframing. And well, it gets all weird from there. It makes a certain sense in its way, but that’s only if you grant him the possibility of a being before being. Before the concept of an essentially-temporal identity, it might have been comfortable to allow him this. But after it, we don’t need his comfort-blanket between being and presence.

But the question remains, what will it mean to come face to face with technology? When we meet the computer at the interface, what will we be meeting?

Heidegger’s questioning about the essence of technology leads to further questions. It leads to an investigation of technology. His essay is the intellectual history of his investigation. He claims that, when technology finally crosses over12 to presence, man will fail to ever experience the original revealing, “and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.” The essence of technology, when it comes to presence, will stunt us.

This may be best shown through the technology that comes to presence as writing.13

Albert Borgman tells us that, prior to writing, we were oral creatures. We committed to memory epic poems that were thousands of lines long. We could read the earth to find our way. We knew our ancestral heritage. We had a strong command of interpersonal interaction. These skills defined us as humans, serving as barriers between humanity and all the other beings.14

After we became literary creatures, however, everything changed. Writing meant we didn’t have to commit our cultural heritage to memory. Maps seemed a lot easier than trying to remember just which tree trunk pointed the way home. A paper trail of birth and death certificates gave us permission to forget the faces of our great-grandfathers. And finally, the written code of the Internet meant we didn’t even need to have social skills in order to survive. By not utilizing these faculties, they have become atrophied. Stunted.15

According to Heidegger, the coming to presence of the essence of technology as writing not only affected, but stunted the essence of humanity.16 Borgman may not agree to the metaphysical cause, but he’d agree to the effect. As would Plato, who made the same argument in his Phaedrus.17

In his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy,”18 Jacques Derrida considers Plato’s argument, one of the first recorded arguments for privileging the oral over the written. In part, Plato’s dialogue is the retelling of the same argument as it occurred between an Egyptian god, Theuth and the king of the gods, Thamus. Derrida understands the movement between speech and writing, the relationship between speech and writing, as akin to the movement, the relationship, between the father and son. He writes:

Writing is the miserable son…A son abandoned by his father. In any event, the son is lost. His impotence is truly that of an orphan as much as that of a justly or unjustly patricide…Writing can thus be attacked, bombarded with unjust reproaches that only a father can dissipate—thus assisting his son—if the son had not, precisely, killed him…All this is done in order to ensure that the dead father, first victim and ultimate resource, not be there. Being-there is a property of eternal speech. And the site of the fatherland. Writing, the outlaw, the lost son.19

Derrida shows us that the change that Heidegger and Borgman see as a stunting of our more original, more essential humanity is nothing other than the change of generation. We didn’t become less than human with writing. Instead, we became Human 2.0. Original Humanity + Writing is a version change.

Of course, because of the way that “up” functions metaphorically as “better,” it seems natural to think of the “upgrade” to Human 2.0 as better than Human 1.0. But as anyone who has ever upgraded a computer knows, what you gain by adding features is usually balanced by the whole host of problems that those new features will cause. The upgraded software, then, isn’t necessarily better. Sometimes it’s just different. After any upgrade, it’s natural to have second thoughts. You may have been more skilled with an earlier version. Perhaps the upgrade is a massive upgrade, and it is unrecognizable compared to the previous generation.20 But once the upgrade has been made, once the features have been let out of the box, so to speak, it becomes difficult to put them back.

Which would seem all the more reason to keep watch. Heidegger says as much, but his keeping watch is just that: a watching, a witnessing. Heidegger’s response to technology is not an engagement with technology. It cannot be, because the essence of technology, as he understands it, is still coming to presence. We can’t engage it because it is isn’t here yet. Furthermore, when it gets here, it will be as something more original than us. If we read Heidegger through Derrida, we see that the former understands this as the father coming home. When the essence of technology comes to presence, we will be judged: “…it banishes man…”21; “…it could be denied to him…”22; “…the granting that lets man endure…”23. Unfortunately, “human activity can never counter this danger.”24 There seems to be nothing we can do, but sit, and wait, and watch.25

While Heidegger wants us to keep a watch for technology, Andrew Feenberg wants us to keep watch over technology. Feenberg utilizes the concept of democracy to show us how we can engage technology. Technology, he holds, is not comprised of some metaphysical essence. It cannot be divorced from the technical objects in which we engage it. He doesn’t deny that, as a species, humanity has many “flaws” that seem directly caused by technology.26 But where Heidegger blames the essence of technology, Feenberg blames humanity itself.

This sounds like a more mature response to me: as democracy is a more mature form of governance than fascism; as the son who accepts responsibility for his own actions is more mature than the son who lays all the blame at the grave of his father.

For Feenberg, the legitimate concerns of essentialism can best be understood by seeing “the single fundamental distinction…[as] the distinction between the dominant and subordinate subject positions with respect to technological systems.”27 Technology, for Feenberg, is not the technical object or system; instead, technology is the social space where designer meets user.

To illustrate his point, he considers a typical example of a technical object: the house. The house, he contends, is a machine for living. To its builder, a house is the systems that occur there: electrical systems, plumbing systems, structural systems (e.g., the dining room’s relation to the kitchen), etc. But to its residents:

The house also undeniably belongs to our lifeworld and is not merely an efficient device for achieving goals. Of course it does achieve goals, for example, sheltering us from the weather, but it obviously does far more than this and belongs to the realm of meaning as much as anything we can name.28

The designers of the house have one purpose for its use in mind. The residents, another. To look for anything essential in the house is to look in the wrong place. Instead, one must look at the relationships between the different purposes to which the house is put to use. If there is a disharmony here, it is not the house’s fault. For Feenberg, any disharmony found at the site of the technical object is caused by humans, and thus, can be resolved by humans. He writes:

Real change will…come…when we recognize the nature of our subordinate position in the technical systems that enroll us, and begin to intervene in the design process in defense of the conditions of a meaningful life and a livable environment.29

His response to the concerns raised by Heidegger’s essentialist questioning is user-designed technology. This strategy manifests, to a limited extent, in the open-source movement. Open Source is a political and technological movement in the world of computer programming. Open Source means that the source code to a piece of software can be read, redistributed, and modified by anyone. There is no “programming team” in the traditional sense of the word. Decisions are not made behind closed doors. Instead, “people improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs.”30 Open-source software is software made by the people and for people. It is democracy written in Unix.

This idea is taken even further by eMachineShop founder, Jim Lewis, and the concept of custom manufacturing:

The concept is simple: Boot up your computer and design whatever object you can imagine, press a button to send the CAD file to Jim’s headquarters in New Jersey, and two or three weeks later he’ll FedEx you the physical object…’Designing stuff used to be just for experts,’ Lewis says. ‘We’re bringing it to the masses.’31

Both of these examples, we should note, depend upon the users having a knowledge of source code languages or the skill to manipulate a design through computer-aided drawing. We seem to expect a high level of education from our users before they’re allowed to directly influence the design aspects of technology. But what about the average Josephine, who has too many responsibilities to take the time to achieve the level of knowledge and skill that she would need to make the “real change” Feenberg writes about?

Larry Hickman agrees with Feenberg’s democratic move, but to address the lay-person issue, Hickman reminds us that John Dewey’s conception of the expert is not the same as Feenberg’s dominant technical actor: “Experts can be experts only if they are in close contact with the problematic situations concerning which they are the putative experts. There is no such thing as an expert in the abstract.”32 Hickman continues with a quote from Dewey, “The man who wears the shoe knows best that it pinches and where it pinches, even if the expert shoemaker is the best judge of how the trouble is to be remedied.”33

In Josephine’s case, she doesn’t have the wherewithal to fix the problem facing her. There are experts who do, however. By putting Josephine face to face with an expert — who is defined so by her ability to listen to, understand, and solve Josephine’s problem —, Josephine has contributed a valuable part of the design process.

I think Hickman may be onto something, but at the same time, he still depends on Josephine to take the initiative and get into contact with the expert. In today’s modern world, few people, it seems are willing to take the initiative on anything. Is there a solution that works not just for a democratically-responsible user, but also for the “real” layperson, the one who feels too busy to take on anything new?

Earlier, we discussed writing as a technological object. As the technical object serves as the space where Feenberg’s dominate and subordinate technical actors engage,34 writing serves as the space where the authentic writer35 and reader engage. The ethical relationship between the authentic writer and the reader, which is itself a complex mess, has at least one essential aspect: The authentic writer does not try to confuse the reader. Of course, it’s bound to happen, such is the nature of the reading process, but the authentic writer commits the words to paper without any intension of causing confusion. This has the effect of establishing a trust between the authentic writer and the reader. This trust then elevates the position of the reader to authentic reader.36 The authentic writer writes for the authentic reader. The authentic reader, in turns, reads for the authentic writer. The authentic reader comes to the space of the writing for the authentic writer in the way a mother goes to a her son’s little league game, not because she wants to see him play, but because she wants to be there for him. The trust that the authentic writer bestows upon the authentic reader is one of presence. The authentic reader will be there when the authentic writer needs her to be. The ethical relationship between them is one of trusting in the other’s presence. Looking through the space of the writing, they come face-to-face.

I suggest that this metaphor can work to ease the frustration that many individuals find in modern technology. Feenberg has shown us that technology is the social space where technical actors engage. Hickman has asked the designers to consider the users on the other side of that space. And I want to ask the users to consider the designers. But unlike Feenberg who just wants users to consider designers before storming their binary Bastille, I would like us(ers) to not simply consider, but to be considerate.37 As the user comes face-to-face with the computer, the user must remember that it is just a metaphorical way of coming face-to-face with another human being. The quality of that interaction then, the respect it engenders, should approach the quality and respect of more traditional social interactions. As we look into the computer, we must consider who is looking out.

I began this paper by asking about the ontological status of that space between the hardware and the software. That question led us to Heidegger’s question about the essence of technology, which was reformed by Sarli’s grafting of the Buddhist notion of temporality to the Western essence. The effect of this reformation allowed us to have an identity (ever-changing though it may be) without having to desire an essential aspect to anything. Once we cast aside Heidegger’s comfort-blanket essentialism, we were still faced with the fears he had conjured up about technology’s effect on humanity. These fears were buttressed by Borgman and Plato, and they seemed to point to a stunting, a degeneration, of the essence of humanity. Luckily, we had Derrida to show that what Heidegger, Borgman, and Plato said was little more than an abstracted version of “when I was a kid…”. Any semblance of stunting was not cause by degeneration, but by plain old generation, plain old change. But change is never just change. It occurs through the effects of interacting forces. Feenberg showed us the forces at work in technology, viewing them in a dominant/subordinate relation. Hickman’s use of John Dewey, however, revealed that this does not have to be the relation; it can become the relation of the Deweyan expert to the layperson, which is a relationship based on respect. I then contended, using the metaphor of the relationship between the authentic writer and the authentic reader, that this relationship can be extended beyond respect into one of trust.

If the space of the computer is characterized by trust, is it irrational to think that, someday, trust may elevate to love? If the space of the computer becomes characterized by love, if it becomes a space where love is made, is it out of the realm of possibility that this space may someday be filled, as the space of the womb is filled with the becoming present? Can humanity someday come face to face with its own child? And if we can, shouldn’t the history of that child be a loving history?

Heidegger writes, “So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain held fast in the will to master it.” Humanity has already suffered (is already suffering) the tragedy that accompanies the objectification of the subject. As we begin to consider the possible ontological status of the space that is technology, perhaps we better consider our maturity as a species. Have we learned our lessons? Can we accept responsibility? In short, is humanity ready to have a child?

Here there is a kind of question, let us call it historical, whose conception, formation, gestation, and labor we are only catching a glimpse of today. I employ these words, I admit, with a glance toward the operations of childbearing — but also with a glance toward those who…turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.38

Fear is okay. Every parent is afraid.

But even the face of the monstrous child calls for our love.

Footnotes

  1. “The idea behind object-oriented programming is that a computer program is composed of a collection of individual units, or objects, that act upon each other, as opposed to a traditional view in which a program is a list of instructions to the computer.” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming, Dec. 13, 2005. ♠
  2. “What I saw in the [GUI] was the caveman interface: you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user.” An IBM technician quoted by Mike Tuck, “A real history of the GUI,” Sitepoint, http://www.sitepoint.com/article/real-history-gui/2, Dec. 13. 2005. ♠
  3. “The coming to presence of technology harbors in itself what we least suspect, the possible arising of the saving power [emphasis added].” Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” The Question Concerning Technology & Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 32. ♠
  4. “You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above…” The New King James Bible, http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=2&chapter=20&verse=4&version=50&context=verse ♠
  5. The embodied-mind concept of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson holds that there is no separation between body and mind. But I am speaking metaphysically here, and as the two of them write, “metaphysics stems from metaphors.” George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 542. ♠
  6. Free is not being used rigorously here. â™ 
  7. Regardless of the story therein (which I have not read), is not the question that comes across in the title “I, Robot” a question of freedom for machines? ♠
  8. “Compute,” Online Etymology Dictionary, http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=compute, Dec. 13. 2005. ♠
  9. Heidegger, 32. â™ 
  10. Dawn Sarli, Being: The Self of the Moment: Identity Ethics & Budhism (unpublished paper, 2005), 2. â™ 
  11. Walpola Rahula, What The Buddha Taught (New York: Grove Press, 1959), 20. The way this quote works in the context of Buddhism, immortality is outside the frame of discourse. â™ 
  12. Quoting Plato, Heidegger writes, “Every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing forth [Her-vor-bringen]” (p.10). The temporal-essentialist has to ask, “Crosses over from where?” ♠
  13. As the essence of humanity come to presence as males, females, and everything in between and beyond, technology itself comes to presence in many forms. â™ 
  14. Albert Borgman, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 47-54. â™ 
  15. Ibid. â™ 
  16. Do we understand, now, why Heidegger is considered nostalgic for a more perfect, original past? â™ 
  17. The relevant chapter in Borgman’s is a discussion of Plato’s Phaedrus. ♠
  18. Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” , trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). ♠
  19. Ibid, 145-146. â™ 
  20. Many Macintosh users still complain about the horrors of Microsoft Word 6.0 as compared to Word 5.0. One of programmers on the upgrade wrote later, “We spent so much time, and put so much effort into, solving all the technical problems of Mac Word 6.0 that we failed to make the UI of Mac Word 6.0 behave like Mac Word 5.0.” (Rick Schaut, “Mac Word 6.0,” Buggin’ My Life Away, Feb. 26, 2004, http://blogs.msdn.com/rick_schaut/archive/2004/02/26/80193.aspx, Dec. 13, 2005 ♠
  21. Heidegger, 27. Emphasis added. â™ 
  22. Ibid, 28. Emphasis added. â™ 
  23. Ibid., 33. Emphasis added. â™ 
  24. Ibid. â™ 
  25. Or perhaps create art. The closing section of Heidegger’s essay seems to imply that through art, which was also called techne by the Greeks, we may allow for a safer revealing than that which might reveal itself through Enframing (the essence of modern technology). I says perhaps and seems because you can’t always tell with Heidegger. See 33-35. ♠
  26. I suspect he would only admit to “modern technology.” I stand with Derrida on this issue. He argues in Of Grammatology for the understanding that humanity cannot be divorced from language. As language is what makes us us, and as language is the first technology, the flaw caused by technology is akin to original sin. ♠
  27. Andrew Feenberg, (London: Routledge, 1999), x. â™ 
  28. Ibid, xi. â™ 
  29. Ibid, xiv. â™ 
  30. Open Source Initiative, , Dec. 13, 2005. â™ 
  31. Clive Thompson, “The Dream Factory,” Wired Magazine, issue 13.09, Sept. 2005, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.09/fablab.html, Dec. 13, 205. ♠
  32. Larry Hickman, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 139. â™ 
  33. Ibid., 140. â™ 
  34. “Thus what essentialism conceives as an ontological split between technology and meaning, I conceive as a terrain of struggle between different types of actors engaged with technology and meaning [emphasis added].” Feenberg, xiii. ♠
  35. While attributing the writer’s anguish to the fact that “writing restricts and constrains [meaning]…”, and comparing the anguish to “the anguish of a breath that cuts itself off in order to reenter itself,” Jacques Derrida includes in an endnote, “This is why one senses the gesture of withdrawal, of retaking possession of the exhaled word, beneath the language of the authentic writer, the writer who wishes to maintain the greatest proximity to the origin of his act” [“Force & Signification,” , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: U of Chicago, 1978), Endnote 23, 303]. See the novels of Samuel Beckett for an example of this gesture. â™ 
  36. The temporal process may be off here. The elevation of the reader has always-already occurred the moment the authentic writer begins to write. â™ 
  37. This latter must come in tandem with Hickman’s request. If the designers refuse to consider the users (and to consider them as other than the end piece in a technical system), the users should offer them no consideration. As the authentic reader should not exist for non-authentic writer, the authentic user should not exist for the non-authentic designer. ♠
  38. Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” Modern Criticism and Theory, ed. David Lodge with Nigel Wood (London: Harlow, 2000), 103. [This essay is also in ]â™