Last time, I set up a topic by reading Brett Frischmann’s and Paul Ohm’s “Governance Seams.” Governance seams are frictions and inefficiencies that can be designed into technological systems for policy ends. In this regard, “Governance seams maintain separation and mediate interactions among components of sociotechnical systems and between different parties and contexts” (1117). Here I want to suggest that governance seams have a very close relation to phenomenological ones. To get there, let me take a detour into an older philosophy of technology paper, Albert Borgmann’s “Moral Significance of the Material Culture.” Borgmann is concerned with what he takes to be the way that moral and ethical theory ignore material culture, whether they emphasize theory or practice. Via a paper by Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, he arrives at a distinction between things that he calls “commanding” and “disposable.” The moral complaint is about the “decline of commanding and the prominence of disposable reality” (294). Following them, Borgmann distinguishes between a musical instrument and a stereo.
“A traditional musical instrument is surely a commanding thing,” he writes:
“It is such simply as a physical entity, finely crafted of wood or metal, embodying centuries of development and refinement, sometime showing the very traces of its service to many generations. An instrument particularly commands the attention of the student who, unless she is a prodigy, must through endless and painstaking practice adjust her body to the exacting requirements of this eminently sensitive thing.” (294)
After some more similar description, emphasizing the multisensory experience of witnessing someone play an instrument, he turns to the stereo. Certainly a “stereo produces music as well or, in fact, much better” and some stereos are big. Nonetheless, “as a thing to be operated, a stereo is certainly not demanding. Nor do we feel indebted to its presence the way we do when we listen to a musician. We respect a musician, we own a stereo” (295). The stereo is on the rise, perhaps because “the history of the technology of recorded music is the history of obliging ever more fully the complaint about the burden and confinement of live music,” or “more positively” it is a “promise to provide music freely and abundantly” which is tied to “the promise of general liberty and prosperity – the promise that inaugurated the modern era” (295).
The next few paragraphs are predictable: the average consumer “does not even begin to understand” the device, and “as a consequence music has become a disembodied, freefloating something, a commodity that is instantly, ubiquitously, and easily available” (296). “Music has been mechanized and commodified” (ibid). An instrument is a thing, and a stereo is a device:
“A thing, in the sense in which I want to use the term, has an intelligible and accessible character and calls forth skilled and active human engagement. A thing requires practice while a device invites consumption” (296).
In “the typical American home … it becomes obvious that devices and consumption have replaced things and practices” (296). Food, linguistic practice, literacy, highways, and tall buildings, theme parks, and pretty much everything else you can think of in material culture represent a morally significant turn away from things and toward devices, and that’s bad because things like stereos “appear to disengage people from their physical and social environment” (298).
Okay! I’d always filed this paper in the same part of my mind that I filed Heidegger and Ellul, as a general rebellion against modern technologies on behalf of words like “authenticity.” The exact way that Borgmann’s account is impoverished struck me very clearly one time at a philosophy of technology conference, where the paper was on my mind and I walked past a basement techno club. The recorded, electronic music very clearly created its own kind of space, enabled its own multisensory experience, and facilitated all sorts of social engagement in ways that that parlor music does not. Borgmann may not like any of that, but to say that it doesn’t facilitate “skilled and active human engagement” is to beg the question by presupposing that only one kind of engagement is actually “human.”
Nonetheless, Borgmann’s paper came to mind when reading Frischmann and Ohm because it underlines the extent to which governance seams overlap with phenomenological seams. Let’s define a "phenomenological seam" as something that introduces an inefficiency or gap in one’s experiential flow. Our perceptual systems are designed to be efficient, and they do things like assume that the contours of our experience will continue as they are to the point that we don’t notice unexpected things, as tricks like the selective attention test demonstrate. Interruptions of this efficient system come at all sorts of points, and they can be conceptualized as seams in the same sense that Frischmann and Ohm use the term.
One easy example, Heidegger’s, is when the tool that you need isn’t available in the way you need it. For the Heidegger of Being and Time, ordinary experience is in terms of doing things, as for example when I am involved in making something in a workshop. If I am hammering a nail, I don’t ordinarily experience the hammer as such; instead it’s an intentional aspect of my project. But what happens when I need a hammer, and the object is either missing, inapt for the job at hand, or broken? Phenomenologically, this forces me to see the hammer as an object for the first time (where’s the damn hammer?). It’s hard to overstate how important this is to Heidegger’s account; here, I want to notice that each of these can be a phenomenological seam, and that phenomenological seams can be intimately tied to regulatory seams (I’m drawing for this Heidegger reading on an older paper I did on digital rights management).
There’s three kinds of phenomenological seams in this part of Heidegger: an object can become “conspicuous,” “obtrusive,” or “obstinate.” Conspicuousness is a matter of simple unusability and “presents the thing at hand in a certain unhandiness” (68/73 (references to the Stambaugh edition, followed by the German)). For example, if my work is interrupted because the computer is unplugged, the computer becomes conspicuous in this sense. Conspicuousness can be a regulatory strategy, as when enforce “downtime” on our children’s phones.
Obtrusiveness is a function not of something being at hand and unusable, but of something being “not „at hand‟ at all” (ibid.). That what we need is missing then makes what we do have seem obtrusive and unusable; as Heidegger puts it, “the more urgently we need what is missing and the more truly it is encountered in its unhandiness, all the more obtrusive does what is at hand become, such that it seems to lose its character of handiness” (69/73). Hiding your kid's phone would be an example and attempts at technology bans could also fall in this camp. The “TikTok ban," for example, would make it impossible to obtain the app in Google’s or Apple’s app stores. It would simply not be there (true, one could probably still obtain is somehow, but it would be a lot harder: regulation often works because it makes something harder to do, which means fewer people will bother to do it).
A third mode is obstinacy, in which “what is unhandy is encountered not only in the sense of something unusable or completely missing, but as something which is not missing at all and not unusable, but „gets in the way‟ of taking care of things.” Thus, “unhandy things are disturbing and make evident the obstinacy of what is initially to be taken care of before anything else” (69/73-4). When you try to draw a picture of Donald Trump choking on his own ego on Gemini, and it replies that it can’t draw real people, that guardrail is phenomenologically obstinate in Heidegger’s sense. You know it can make such a picture, it just won’t. Sometimes this obstinacy is a good thing, as for example when AI systems add in layers to prevent defamation or the production of child pornography.
Such phenomenological seams interrupt the efficient flow of experience, and they can be designed or encountered. It is perhaps not accidental that Borgmann calls an instrument a “thing” – it’s material thingliness is precisely what is made manifest by the interruptive presence of the stereo. Perhaps when he wanted to experience a musical instrument, only a stereo was available. Or perhaps, this is a fourth mode of the missing hammer, when some other kind of tool crowds out one’s ability to experience the hammer (Heidegger complained a lot about devices that facilitated writing, like typewriters, as Derrida pointed out in his late “Word Processor” essay).
Next time I’ll continue this thread.
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