The previous article was another piece written by hastily asking for reinforcements. On the one hand, that was indeed because I have not been diligent enough lately; on the other hand, I was also busy planning the proposal for my doctoral dissertation, eager to design the overall line of thought, and as a result I could not settle down to concentrate first on some specific issue. The earlier “experience report” was like this too, and so is this set of reading notes on Heidegger’s later thought. Although they are all written rather superficially and in a somewhat scattered way, they really do have to do with a certain strategy for structuring my dissertation.
If this Heidegger piece were given a title like “Is Heidegger a technological pessimist?”, then obviously it could be written up as a fairly complete paper, and Teacher Wu also said that my first half was written comparatively well. But this time I still followed my own line of thought, after all, the later parts are more important for my doctoral dissertation.
The reason I want to sort out Heidegger’s line of thought is, in fact, to sort out my own. To articulate a set of media ontology or media phenomenology (actually I am still very hesitant about this title, and have even wondered whether I should simply change it to “environmental ontology”…), it is not enough merely to graft Heidegger and McLuhan together; it is even less enough just to quote Heidegger’s so-called “jargon,” those frightening “terms.” I cannot sink to the level of so many Heidegger scholars in China. In my own exposition, I cannot use “Dasein,” cannot use “unconcealment,” and it is best not to use “Gestell (enframing)” either; nor can I talk about the “clearing” or “luminosity,” and although “clearing the field” is the translation I coined, it is best not to mention that either. To truly inherit Heidegger, one must begin by freeing oneself from his jargon.
The term “interface” is one concept I have recently come to attach considerable importance to. The “clearing” can be transformed into “interface”; every technology unfolds an “interface.” In fact, translating interface as 界面 is rather interesting: inter is clearly closer to the meaning of “介,” whereas “界,” though derived from “介,” is now mainly used in the senses of world, realm, boundary, and line of demarcation, and is not usually taken to mean mediation. Yet such a translation seems to suggest the connection between mediation and worldhood.
By the way, let me also mention a question raised in today’s seminar, namely whether there is some prior, natural mode of perception (the mode of constitution of the perceptual field, Merleau-Ponty). I think it is not appropriate to posit some “natural” state as an archetype. The mode of constitution of the perceptual field, or what McLuhan calls the “sense ratio,” is family-resemblant, cultural, historical, and cultivated within a technological environment. In addition, I actually think it would be quite interesting if one could do some philosophy of education here: how are human perceptual capacities cultivated under a certain technological environment, and what relation do different educational methods bear to the constitution of perceptual experience? Unfortunately wnn seems unwilling to go on doing her philosophy of education. Now when I see jq working on environmental issues, I think it would be nice to do some environmental phenomenology; when I see wnn’s background in online education, I also think it would be nice to do some philosophy of education. Alas, should this be called mutual inspiration, or indecisiveness? … I’d better just single-mindedly work on my media environmental studies…
As for the cultivation of the sense ratio, I think current electronic technology embodies two possibilities. One is more tactility: with the development of virtual reality technology, more and more touch-based elements may be incorporated into human-machine interaction. But another possibility is less tactility. Since a complete simulation of touch is after all quite difficult, the advantage of vision still has the potential to keep expanding. In all previous technological environments, even if touch was suppressed, it still retained a unique significance, namely “control”: the senses of sight, hearing, and smell are all receptive, and their main mode is to receive information unidirectionally, from outside inward. Of course vision is a little special. People originally always imagined light shooting out from the eyes to actively explore things, but on the one hand this imagination may precisely derive from the dominant position of touch; on the other hand, even this “projected light” was not thought to possess the power to directly or obviously manipulate things. At most, some people believed that the focusing of the gaze would stir up a certain agitation in the object, but no one really used vision to manipulate things. Electronic technology, however, provides this possibility. You may sit motionless in front of a screen and merely move your eyeballs, and the computer will recognize your intention and produce a marked, immediate response, as if your gaze could directly control the target behind the screen; moreover, with very little resistance, no pain, and everything as you wish. If a person is cultivated in such a technological environment, what sort of perceptual mode will he form? How will he understand concepts such as “grasp,” “control,” “comprehend,” “infer,” “basis,” “importance,” “power,” and so on and so forth? All of these concepts contain the intention of touch…
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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