Dorrestijn, "Technical Mediation and Subjectivation: Tracing and Extending Foucault's Philosophy of Technology"

 -       The next few meetings will focus on the reception and use of Foucault’s work in
the philosophy of technology
-       How do philosophers of technology use Foucault’s work? How do they
draw on Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality to better
understand technology?

The group began with questions...
1.      What do we make of his approach of reading Foucault from the
perspective of philosophy of technology?
2.      How are we to understand agency and freedom in relation to philosophy
of technology? How could we use technology so that technology becomes
ours? Couldn’t there be unethical ways of making technology ours?
3.      What is meant by “human being” and “subject” here? Is the human
significant for a philosophy of technology or for Foucault even?
4.      How does the analysis through power tie up with the analysis of the
ethics of subjectivation? How do the two figures of technical mediation
show up in section four? Could there be another way to connect power and
ethics?
5.      How do the four moments of subjectivation express Aristotle’s 4
causes? 233
6.      How do figures of mediation link with ethical problematizations?
233-234

The group then discussed...
1.      One approach would be reading philosophy of technology through
Foucault. Another approach would be coming from a Foucault scholar,
which noted that philosophy of technology has distinctive subfield
concerns and we can use Foucault to try to answer these questions or concerns.
2.      Anti-humanism follows from hybridization. How do you have a
philosophy of technology that is normative using Foucault? Humanism
smuggled in to early Foucault through the attempt to differentiate
dominant strands of philosophy of technology from the critical theory
and Heideggerian traditions. Is the human important for philosophy of
technology? Ethics is defined in terms of the agency, freedom and
mastery of human beings? Ontology of philosophy of technology: human
agents, nonhuman agents, technical objects, nontechnical objects.
3.      Dorrestijn wants a conception of distributed agency in Foucault, in
which subject as always networked and hybridized.
4.      What is the best interpretation of Foucault’s discussion of mastery
in antiquity such that it wouldn’t be assimilated to some of the things
Heidegger is concerned about? No fully developed account of mastery in
Foucault.
5.      Why not emphasize pragmatics?
6.      The technical mediation approach tries to approach technology as an
end in itself.
7.      It is one thing to deny instrumentalism and another to claim that
technologies can be instrumental and something more.

 

Aristotle's Causation     Foucault's Ethical Fourfold

material                          ethical substance
formal                            mode of subjectivation
efficient                         askesis (or ethical work)
teleological                    telos (or goal or aim)