Moved by Machines: Performance Metaphors and Philosophy of Technology 9780367245573, 9780429283130

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This unique and innovative book changes the very framework for doing philosophy of technology by introducing and developing a performancebased method of analysis. It is a moving investigation of how machines move, how this movement shapes our understanding of their social position and status, and how we, in turn, are moved by our technology. —David J. Gunkel, Northern Illinois University, USA

Moved by Machines

Given the rapid development of new technologies such as smart devices, robots, and artificial intelligence and their impact on the lives of people and on society, it is important and urgent to construct conceptual frameworks that help us to understand and evaluate them. Benefitting from tendencies towards a performative turn in the humanities and social sciences, drawing on thinking about the performing arts, and responding to gaps in contemporary artefactoriented philosophy of technology, this book moves thinking about technology forward by using performance as a metaphor to understand and evaluate what we do with technology and what technology does with us. Focusing on the themes of knowledge/experience, agency, and power, and discussing some pertinent ethical issues such as deception, the narrative of the book moves through a number of performance practices: dance, theatre, music, stage magic, and (perhaps surprisingly) philosophy. These are used as sources for metaphors to think about technology—in particular contemporary devices and machines—and as interfaces to bring in various theories that are not usually employed in philosophy of technology. The result is a sequence of gestures and movements towards a performance-oriented conceptual framework for a thinking about technology which, liberated from the static, vision-centred, and dualistic metaphors offered by traditional philosophy, can do more justice to the phenomenology of our daily embodied, social, kinetic, temporal, and narrative performances with technology, our technoperformances. This book will appeal to scholars of philosophy of technology and performance studies who are interested in re-conceptualizing the roles and impact of modern technology. Mark Coeckelbergh is full Professor of Philosophy (Philosophy of Media and Technology) at the University of Vienna. Previously he was Professor of Technology and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University, UK, and President of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. He is also involved in policy advice as member of the High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence of the European Commission and the Austrian Council on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence that advises the Austrian Federal Transport, Innovation, and Technology administration. A prolific writer and passionate researcher, he is the author of numerous articles and ten monographs, including Growing Moral Relations (2012), Human Being @ Risk (2013), Environmental Skill (2015), Money Machines (2015), New Romantic Cyborgs (2017), and Using Words and Things (Routledge, 2017).

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

The Act and Object of Judgment Historical and Philosophical Perspectives Edited by Brian Ball and Christoph Schuringa Perception, Cognition and Aesthetics Edited by Dena Shottenkirk, Manuel Curado and Steven S. Gouveia Philosophical Perspectives on Moral and Civic Education Shaping Citizens and Their Schools Edited by Colin Macleod and Christine Tappolet Explanation in Action Theory and Historiography Causal and Teleological Approaches Edited by Gunnar Schumann Spatial Senses Philosophy of Perception in an Age of Science Edited by Tony Cheng, Ophelia Deroy, and Charles Spence Transhumanism and Nature A Critique of Technoscience Robert Frodeman Freedom to Care Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture Asha Bhandary Moved by Machines Performance Metaphors and Philosophy of Technology Mark Coeckelbergh For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Philosophy/book-series/SE0720

Moved by Machines Performance Metaphors and Philosophy of Technology Mark Coeckelbergh

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Mark Coeckelbergh to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-24557-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-28313-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Lotte

Contents

Acknowledgementsx 1 Introduction

1

2 Dancing With Technology: How Machines Move and Choreograph Us

15

3 Acting With Technology: How Machines Act and Direct Us

48

4 Making Music With Technology: How Machines Play and Conduct Us

83

5 The Magic of Technology: How Machines Create and Manage Our Illusions

105

6 Thinking With Technology: How Machines Stage Our Thinking

128

7 Conclusion

153

Index160

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to the editor from Routledge, Andrew Weckenmann, for supporting this book project, and the anonymous reviewers for their interesting comments. I  would also like to thank Zachary Storms for organizational assistance, Lena Starkl for supporting me with literature search, and the students from my performance and technology seminar for the nice discussions we had during class. Let me also take the opportunity to mention at least some of the people and places that are directly or indirectly part of the history of my thinking about performance and technology, which started in the UK in Leicester and London and continues here in Vienna: Thomas Freundlich in Helsinki, Kerry Francksen in Leicester, Alexander Gerner in Lisbon, Alva Noë in Berkeley, Oliver Schürer in Vienna, Jaana Parviainen in Tampere, Guida Mauricio in Brussels, and Sabine Rüter in Munich. It was (and is!) great to meet and discuss with these wonderful persons from the worlds of academia, dance, and theatre. And last but not least, I am grateful to my daughter Lotte, who brings dance into my everyday life.

Figure 0.1 Tanja Illukka and Thomas Freundlich in Human Interface (2012) Source: Photo by Uupi Tirronen. Courtesy of Thomas Freundlich, Choreography and Robot Programming

1 Introduction

1.1. What This Book Is About Given the rapid development of new technologies such as smart devices, robots, and artificial intelligence, and their impact on the lives of people and on society, it is important and urgent to construct conceptual frameworks that help us to understand and evaluate them. What is the knowledge and experience involved in the interactive use and design of digital devices, how can we grasp the phenomenon that our new machines are not just tools but take on more agency and become more “social”, and what are the normative implications of these changes in terms of the ethics and politics of technology? Philosophers of technology can help to ask and address these questions. Benefitting from a performative turn in the humanities and social sciences, drawing on thinking about the performing arts, and responding to gaps in contemporary artefact-oriented philosophy of technology, this book moves thinking about technology forward by using performance as a metaphor to understand and evaluate what we do with technology and what technology does with us. Focusing on the themes of knowledge/ experience, agency, and power, engaging with Plato, and discussing some pertinent ethical issues such as deception, the narrative of the book moves through a number of performance practices: dance, theatre, music, stage magic, and (perhaps surprisingly) philosophy. These are used as sources for metaphors to think about technology—in particular contemporary devices and machines—and as interfaces to bring in various theories and insights from and about these fields that are not usually employed in philosophy of technology. The result of this trajectory through metaphors and theories is a sequence of gestures and movements towards a performance-oriented conceptual framework for thinking about technology which, liberated from the static, vision-centric, and dualistic metaphors offered by traditional philosophy, can do more justice to the phenomenology of our daily embodied, social, kinetic, temporal, and narrative performances with

2  Introduction technology, our technoperformances. This approach—one could call it a performance-oriented phenomenology which includes building blocks for a performative epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and politics—enables us to asks the crucial performance-shaped questions such as: How do we move, how are we moved, and how should we move and be moved? And who moves what or whom? Who should be allowed to move what or whom? What or who organizes, scripts, and directs our movements? How are our illusions created? With regard to contemporary technologies that get more autonomous and intelligent this means asking: What happens in terms of experience, agency, and power when our machines direct, play, choreograph, deceive, and write us—when we no longer move them or move with them, as we do with tools and older machines, but when they move us? What does this mean for the role of the designermagician? And what can and should be our performative-philosophical response? In the end we will see that performance and its related concepts are more than a metaphor: it makes sense to say that we perform with technology and that technology choreographs, directs, conducts, and deceives us on the many stages of contemporary social life. It even organizes and shapes the theatre of our thinking.

1.2. What This Book Does and What It Responds to: Philosophy of Technology and the Performative Turn This book is not about performance as such nor is it about technology used in the performing arts. It is about technology and about how to think about technology, including how to do philosophy of technology. It is concerned with all kinds of technologies, but its focus is on new and emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs) and, in particular, on new smart and more autonomous digital technologies such as robots and artificially intelligent devices that are experienced and designed to be more than things. How can we understand that experience and design, and how can we conceptualize their normative effects? Philosophers of technology and scholars in science and technology studies (STS), media studies, and related fields have been asking such questions for a while now, and during the past decade there have been interesting and fruitful discussions on the specific qualities and effects of more autonomous and intelligent devices, such as their moral standing or the issue of deception. These discussions are now entering public debates on technology. Yet what is often missing from these discussions, especially in ethics of technology, is a more explicit, elaborate, and critical reflection on the metaphors underpinning the arguments and views, including the epistemological, metaphysical, and aesthetic assumptions

Introduction 3 related to these metaphors. Metaphors are part of the philosopher’s toolbox, but they should also be scrutinized. Otherwise the discussions risk becoming dogmatic. For example, postphenomenology (Verbeek 2005) has occasionally borrowed theatre metaphors from Latour in order to suggest, for example, the “scripting” of our behaviour by technology, but it has not critically reflected on these metaphors, let alone fully used their potential. And arguably neither has Latour, who has drawn extensively on drama metaphors (e.g., in Akrich and Latour 1992, in actornetwork theory, and later in, for example, Latour 1993) without really discussing his use of these tools. Moreover, contemporary philosophy of technology after the empirical turn has been very object-oriented: the focus was and is on technological artefacts. For example, postphenomenology has been concerned with how things mediate our perception and action (Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2005). Critical theory of technology (notably Feenberg 1999, 2010), influenced by STS, has also been focused on material artefacts. STS, too, following Latour, has been concerned with things, with “non-humans”, This turn to things has delivered many fruitful insights into the phenomenology and hermeneutics of technology and human-technology relations. But it has also obscured or neglected some aspects of what humans do and how they do it—with technology. In particular, postphenomenology has not sufficiently conceptualized the social and temporal dimension of technological use and technological experience (and indeed of human existence) (Coeckelbergh 2017). The focus has been mainly on individual human-technology relations and, as will become clear by the end of this book, use and users of technologies have been modelled in a rather static way, ignoring movement. Finally, while in the mentioned research fields there has been sufficient discussion about the ethics of ICTs, for example the ethics of machines such as robots, there has been far less work on technology and politics, including technology and power—partly because a lack of a more comprehensive and appealing phenomenology of the social, including use as a social phenomenon. One way to start addressing these lacunas is to question and tinker with the metaphors we use to think about knowledge and experience— with regard to technology and more generally. A  dominant metaphor that powers traditional discussions in philosophical epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, philosophy of science, etc., and which still exerts its influence on thinking about technology, is that of looking at a work of art, for example in the context of a museum. Many philosophers tend to argue about knowledge and experience in a way that focuses on what and how we see, what and how we perceive, and in doing so place themselves and the “ordinary” people they talk about in the role of detached observers that look at something: an object, a problem, the truth, a fact, and indeed a technological artefact. Think about Plato’s allegory of the

4  Introduction cave, which is all about seeing reality or not, or about discussions in the history of modern philosophy which discussed whether knowledge is based on what we see through the senses or what we see via reason. Today some philosophers are still wondering how “mind” and “world” are connected, after first having separated them by means of the metaphor of an observing mind looking at an external world—thus neglecting more performative, embodied, and participative models of mind and knowing. More generally, philosophers tend to discuss how to see things in the right way; their own activities (thinking, arguing, etc.) are framed by means of a visual metaphor. In philosophy of technology the metaphor has also been put to work. For example, Heidegger wrote in Being and Time (1996) about tools that are present or that withdraw when we use them. The latter phrase goes some way towards a different, use-oriented view and implies movement but retains the visual metaphor and is still a view: Heidegger’s epistemology and metaphysics of Being is all about seeing, appearing, and revealing. Consider also his “The Age of the World Picture” (1977): Heidegger questions the modern world picture and the modern project of representation, but the alternative he sympathizes with—the Greek apprehending he tries to uncover—is also a visual affair: an unconcealment. Heidegger’s view is part of a Western tradition in which physics, metaphysics, and epistemology are all about getting the picture right. Most contemporary philosophers of technology do not fare better. They talk about the appearance of the machine versus what the machine really is, about the existence of objects independent of human perception, or about “multistability” and things that stand in between an “I” and “world” and shape our perception (Ihde 1990). In all these cases, the underlying metaphor is looking at the world (e.g., a picture) from a distance with both the subject/observer and the object/world being rather static, immobile. The dominant metaphor remains looking at a work of art. We stand back and observe. The metaphor belongs to a detached and visual aesthetics, ignoring the idea of a more active and participative relation to the world. This is not to say that there is no potential in contemporary thinking about technology for a more performative view. Postphenomenology’s initial interest to conceptualize the use of technology (Ihde) or its use of Latour’s drama-based language (Verbeek) could in principle have led to a more performance-oriented approach. But this has not happened; the visual metaphor has been dominant and mediation, a central concept in postphenomenology, is imagined as a visual in-between. If a metaphor of the arts is borrowed at all, it is still, like in Heidegger, one from the visual arts. But what happens if we change the metaphor? In the 20th century, philosophy and the social sciences have started to develop elements of what has been called a “performative turn”, elements

Introduction 5 which are still further developed today. For example, in philosophy of language, Austin (1962) introduced the idea that sentences do not only say something about the world but are also sometimes performative: socalled speech acts also “do” something. Butler (1988) argued that gender identity is constituted through performative acts. In philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive science, the insight emerged that perception is a more active matter than previously thought. This suggested that the metaphor of vision is limited when it comes to understanding how we know and experience. Today there are efforts to move towards different ways of thinking, using different metaphors. For example, Noë (2004) argued that perceiving is way of acting. In thinking about art, Penny (2017) has recently argued that a non-dualistic, enactive, and embodied cognition approach helps to reveal the performative dimensions of art practices, arguing for a performative aesthetics. And in the social sciences, Goffman (1956) understood the social life as a kind of theatre (see Chapter 3). Apart from Latour and especially Pickering (1995), who has developed an interesting performative conception of technological agency in scientific practice, not much of this performative turn work has been used in philosophy of technology and STS. And neither Latour nor Pickering did so in a systematic and critical way that fully, directly, and openly engages with, articulates, and analyzes the metaphors from the performing arts they use. Moreover, in line with STS’s origins in social studies of science, Pickering focused on performances in science. But here I am more interested in our everyday living with technology. This book explores what happens to thinking about technology if we use the metaphor of performance. What happens if we use the metaphor of performance, in particular in the sense of “the performing arts” such as dance, theatre, music, and magic, for thinking about technology? What kind of phenomenology and critical theory might emerge from this work? How can experience and use of technology be conceptualized with the help of these metaphors? And given philosophy of technology’s insights about the non-instrumental roles of technology and the current emphasis on intelligent automation technologies in robotics and artificial intelligence: how can this metaphor help us to think not only about what we do with technology but also what technology does with us? Metaphors, however, are not just given. We cannot just look at them, as if they were off the shelf devices or tools ready to use. Rather, they need to be articulated, crafted, worked out, used, and, indeed, performed. It is not clear, for example, what dance is or what theatre is, what kind of experience and knowledge is involved, what it means to dance, choreograph, act, or direct, etc. We need to clarify and work out what all this is about. If we want to “apply” the metaphors, this work needs to be done first. (“First” is a bit misleading since, as we will experience, there is no

6  Introduction clear border between working out a metaphor and “applying” it, since any application always feeds back into the metaphor itself.) For this purpose, this book engages with philosophical and interdisciplinary work on the performing arts in at least three ways. First, this exercise includes theories about dance, theatre, music, and stage magic. There is a growing body of theory and philosophy about the performing arts, for example in performance studies and dance studies. Philosophers of technology should not neglect this body of knowledge, especially since some of it reflects on (performing) arts and technology. This is an interesting project in itself. However, my main purpose in this book is not so much to learn from or comment on what these scholars say about performance, process, temporality, or even about technology but rather to further develop my applications of the performance metaphor to thinking about technology by bringing in philosophy and theory about specific fields in the performing arts. This is in no way meant to reduce the performing arts or theory about these arts to a resource for metaphors or to what is said in this book; obviously there is much more going on in these fields and much more can be said about performance in all its diversity. But my focus is on a specific type of knowledge transfer and conceptual operation that aims to help philosophers of technology to move on. Second, the book also engages with an emerging field called performance philosophy, which offers research on the relationship between performance and philosophy (for example work by Laura Cull, Andrew Bowie, or Arno Böhler) and suggests not only that philosophy can help to understand performance but also that we can interpret and practice philosophy as performance. Again, there is much more to be said about this interesting field and in general philosophers can learn more from it than is reflected in this book. But here I focus on my own project rather than trying to do justice to all its insights: I  use some claims from the field to support my point that philosophy of technology itself can also be conceptualized as performance. Third, the book moves in a direction that is sympathetic to process thinking in metaphysics and epistemology and more generally to work in philosophy and the social sciences that takes seriously the temporal dimension of human experience and practice (for example in STS work by Wajcman on technology and time). There is also engagement with some of Plato’s dialogues, especially in the chapters on theatre, stage magic, and philosophy. And with regard to contemporary philosophy, I benefit from Noë’s use of the choreography metaphor. Philosophers of technology could benefit from engaging more with these rich philosophical traditions and promising directions of thinking. However, the emphasis in this book is not on discussing what other philosophers have said but rather on going directly to the performing arts (and theory about

Introduction 7 the performing arts) and working out what using these arts as metaphors implies for thinking about the development, use, and experience of technology. This limitation to the performing arts, and in particular the performing arts of dance, drama, music, and stage magic, also gives the book more focus, since the term “performance” can mean many things. The meanings of this term range from what happens in performing arts (performance as an act in theatre, for example) to action in general, capability (competence, potential, as in the German word Vermögen), achievement (success or output, as in “this machines performs well”), and even power (German: Macht)—consider, for example, McKenzie’s Perform or Else (2001) and my references to Foucault in this book. I focus on the meaning of performance in the context of performing arts, although the other aspects and meanings of the term performance will remain relevant, for example when I  will discuss skill or design. Furthermore, beyond the arts (in a narrow sense) there are other interesting performative practices to learn from. For example, Gunkel (2018) has argued that computer games are a medium for doing philosophy: we can learn from it to explore questions about the nature of reality, for example. This is also true for philosophy of technology, and sometimes I will use material from game studies. One could also learn from studies of sport as a performative practice. However, my focus here is mainly on the performing arts. It is also a limitation of this book that its metaphors are mainly and implicitly based on Western forms of performance. Clearly there are many non-Western forms of dance, theatre, music, and so on, many of which do not share all the features of, for example, Western “drama” or “contemporary dance”. There is a body of work on non-Western performances that could be used to further elaborate the project proposed in this book. For example, Okagbue (2007) has written insightfully about performances in Africa and today many Western choreographers and theorists are interested in Japanese theatre and dance forms—ancient and more modern (see for example Fraleigh 2010 on Butoh). And even within Western performing arts there is a lot of diversity. More work is needed in this direction. This book already provides some room for this, firstly, by its choice of the central concept “performance”, which is already a more inclusive term than for instance “drama” or “theatre” (the former has a modern Western ring to it, the latter is linked to its ancient Greek, including Aristotelian, roots), and, secondly, by being critical about mainstream Western thinking about performance. The reader will meet criticism of Plato’s view of performance and see that my text lacks the modern Western obsession with writing-based art forms such as modern drama and classical music, for example, by including improvisation— which also has its place in the Western tradition, for example in jazz and

8  Introduction blues music—and by stressing embodied performance. Moreover, and keeping in mind that this book is not mainly about the arts but about technology: I have recently argued for a Wittgenstein-inspired view of technology which places technology firmly within social-cultural wholes such as games and a form of life (Coeckelbergh 2017). Examining and using metaphors from performance in non-Western cultures in order to think about technology would fit within that broader project. This limitation, therefore, is not at all a limitation in principle. A further constraint I  already mentioned: while the book is about technology in general, I will focus on ICTs and especially on contemporary smart and increasingly more autonomous technologies. Frequently the word “machines” is used for such intelligent and autonomous technologies. This is somewhat problematic since it suggests that these technologies always and only come in the form of visible and separate artefacts such as robots, for example, whereas there are also less visible or invisible technologies, including technological infrastructures and distributed and networked systems. It is also not clear where the line is between machines and non-machines. For example, how intelligent and autonomous does the machine need to be? Robots are machines, but some call a wheel or a lever already a machine. And is software in itself a kind of machine? Nevertheless, “machines” is a useful term to evoke the meaning of intelligent and autonomous technologies and the related idea and concern that these technologies increasingly do something with us rather than the other way around. Hence, I shall use “machines” in the main title and chapter titles, rather than “technology” or “technologies”.

1.3. Method and Structure of the Book In order to grasp and develop what it means to use performance as a metaphor for understanding technology, the book’s chapters follow the following method or procedure. In each chapter, a different performing arts field is chosen—not as a topic of study as such but as a source of metaphor and of related performance theory that helps us to create a metaphorical bridge to the use and development of technologies. For example, in the next chapter I will start from (theory about) dance and choreography. What kind of experience, knowledge, and practice is this? Then the metaphor and theory are applied to (a) what we do with technology and (b) what technology does with us. For example, it is asked what it means to “dance” with technology and what happens if technology itself becomes a “choreographer” of our lives. In the course of each chapter, I give concrete examples of ICTs that include contemporary intelligent and autonomous digital technologies, for example in the area of robotics or social media. I will also discuss the potential ethical and political applications. For example, if technologies such as social media choreograph us, what does this mean for the power others and technology exercise over us?

Introduction 9 This is the structure of the book: Table 1.1 Overview of the Chapters Metaphor/Practices (General)

Metaphors/Practices (More Detail)

Chapter 2 Dancing With Technology: How Machines Move and Choreograph Us

Dance

Dancing Choreography

Chapter 3 Acting With Technology: How Machines Act and Direct Us

Drama/Theatre

Acting Script Writing and Directing

Chapter 4 Making Music With Technology: How Machines Play and Conduct Us

Music

Making Music Composing and Conducting

Chapter 5 The Magic of Technology: How Machines Create and Manage Our Illusions

Stage Magic

Doing Stage Magic Scripting and Stage Setting

Chapter 6 Thinking With Technology: How Machines Stage Our Thinking

Philosophy as Performance

Doing Philosophy Organizing Thinking

As is clear from this table, I distinguish between performing (e.g., dancing or acting or playing music) and shaping the performance of others (e.g., choreography or directing or conducting). I will need this distinction in order to show that and how technology is not only a tool we use in our daily lives (what we do with technology) but also assumes the role of shaper and organizer of the structure, grammar, and narrative of these lives and indeed what and who we are (what technology does with us). Moreover, while I take my main inspiration from the performing arts as they are usually defined (e.g., theatre, dance, and music), this exercise moves towards a broader understanding of the term “performing arts” when its meaning is extended to philosophy. As we can learn from performance philosophy, philosophy itself can be conceptualized in terms of performance. In Chapter 6 I will further reflect on this. I will add that philosophy is not only an embodied-performance but also a technological practice and apply the idea to thinking about philosophy of technology, which can also be understood as performative and as being itself shaped by technologies and media. As often in philosophy and science, study object and study subject touch and overlap. But instead of hiding or forbidding this, as in modern science and philosophy, we can be upfront about it and do something with this insight for thinking about what philosophers of technology can and should do. For example, this approach enables us to ask: What kind of performances can and should philosophers of technology engage in? Only writing and talking or also other kinds of performance? Is it enough to write a book and develop a

10  Introduction vocabulary and a way of speaking, as I do in and with this book, or are other kinds of performance desirable or necessary? At the end of the book, in chapters 6 and 7, I will further reflect on these issues. Let me now give a more detailed overview of the chapters: After this introductory chapter (Chapter 1), which explains the existing gaps and why it is necessary to think in a more systematic way about how we can use performance metaphors in thinking about technology, I  turn to the first metaphor. Chapter  2 uses the metaphor of dance to describe how what we do with technology always includes the moving body. Based on dance studies and philosophy of dance literature, I first give an overview of different aspects of dance: embodied experience, bodily movement, and, related to that, situatedness in (and creation of one’s own) time and space and rhythm, social interaction and different perspectives, and technological mediation. Then I discuss what this means for understanding our daily use of technology, now understood in terms of movement: as users of technology we are embodied, moving, social, and technological beings. We move with technology. I  show that this is also true for so-called “virtual” technological practices such as computer games and virtual worlds. I argue that contemporary philosophy of technology (including Ihde) has taken into account embodiment but has not sufficiently conceptualized movement, temporality, and the social aspects of technology use. I  also explore what it means if technology becomes a co-dancer and even a choreographer of our movements, shaping and organizing our movements, for example as users of smartphones and social media. Influenced by Parviainen and Noë and in response to thinking about the good life and technology, I suggest an ethics and politics of technology that asks questions about the kinetic normativities in our technological culture, with respect to the good life and to power. An extension of Foucault is proposed, which includes political choreography and micro-movements as mechanisms of power. In Chapter 3 I do the same exercise with the theatre metaphor. In this case the metaphor is already implicitly used in philosophy of technology, for example in Latour. But a more upfront and systematic reflection on the use of the theatre metaphor, using philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, Hume, Austin, Searle) but also sociological work (Goffman, Turner, Schechner) and gender studies (Butler), reveals further aspects of the metaphor which can be employed to frame what we do with technology, in particular the social dimension of use, which in turn concerns role playing and also includes more bodily and kinetic aspects. I argue that technology is not only and not so much a co-actor (Latour uses the term ‘actant’) but more like a director (together with humans: co-director) of our plays. Latour’s script metaphor is also useful here. I  also mention Pickering’s work, although it is not clear if the metaphor comes from the theatrical or the technological sphere. I argue that the theatre metaphor cannot only be used to talk about what things do (Latour, Verbeek)—and

Introduction 11 here it must be asked in what sense, precisely, things can “act”—but also to conceptualize technological practices as intrinsically social practices, in which for example the concept of role is also important. I give the example of social media as theatre and also point to role playing in computer games. And again, it turns out that the performance metaphor helps us to attend to the many normative aspects of our dealings with technology. Given the importance of script in the current literature, the chapter also includes work on the use of language, including rhetoric and narrative: who or what writes the script of the social theatre? Engaging with Ricoeur and drawing on my own recent work with Reijers, I explore the idea that technology is not only our director but the (co-)writer of our narratives: the playwright of the narratives of our daily lives and the narratives of our societies. This tells a richer story of the human-technology relation and its normative, social, and temporal aspects than Latour’s use of the act and script metaphor. Chapter 4 turns to a performance practice that is neglected in contemporary philosophy of technology: music. We can use the metaphor to reveal the experience and use of technology as embodied, skilful, social, and technologically mediated. Here the emphasis is on the development of skill and improvisation—also in relation to new ICTS used to record and create music. Dreyfus’s work is used as is literature that bridges music and technological practices. But the chapter not only helps us to understand our interactions with technology in more material, embodied, and skill-oriented terms; it also raises the question if we are playing our instruments or if the instruments are playing us. This question becomes especially relevant when artificial intelligence gets better and when, in general, smart technologies are involved in so many of our activities. Are our behaviour and routines composed and conducted by humans (ourselves or others) or by machines, or by both? What or who shapes the rhythm of our lives? Does technology speed us up and determine when we do what we do? Do we have some freedom to improvise? What kind of ethics and politics can work with these kinds of questions? I suggest a kind of posthumanist view but one that acknowledges the difference and significant role of the human. The question of control and the role of the human are also discussed in Chapter 5, which takes stage magic as a point of departure. Like in the other chapters, first a better understanding of the practice is achieved by reading literature that comments on this field. Then the metaphor is applied to the design and use of technologies. Designers turn out to be a kind of stage magician that creates illusions for us. Or rather: the designers and we co-create our illusions through use. The metaphor also helpfully brings in the aspect of timing again—something very important in stage magic. We deceive, deceive ourselves, and are deceived by means of technology. Technologies are tools for trickery and magic. But what if technology becomes more intelligent: does it become the main magician?

12  Introduction These observations raise many normative but also metaphysical questions. Is the design of illusions through technology a kind of deception, and, if so, is it necessarily bad? Who are the master designers of our illusions? There are ethical, social, and political questions, including the question of power. What happens if we give more power to technology and if we accept the magical worlds it creates? Or is there only one world? Is technology the magician or are we willing or unwilling co-magicians? Inspired by Tognazzini and further developing my recent work on this subject, I reflect on the ethics and metaphysics of technological practices as magic practices. The chapter will also include the metaphor of animation and puppet theatre (and of course one could also think of computer animation), a metaphor that is also very relevant for our dealings with technology. Who or what is animated by whom? With the help of the performance metaphor, I  move from Plato’s puppet theatre (and the Platonic interpretation of that theatre) and its corresponding dualistic epistemology and ethics which often informs discussions about technology, to a non-Platonic, performance-oriented conceptualization of theatre and magic, a non-Platonic metaphysics, and hence a non-Platonic view of technology use and experience. I also suggest again that a posthumanist acknowledgement of the agency of technology (as actor, director, magician, etc.) does not rule out nor even require that humans play the role of co-magician. This can refer to the designer but also the user: without the user, the magic does not work. I also point to less visible, less intended, and more “grammatical” effects. Technology not only does things or tells us what to do; it also shapes how we do things and organizes our performances. Technology scripts and sets the stage. In the course of the chapter I will give the example of assistive devices such as Alexa and comment on Flusser’s thinking about design. I end with a non-Platonic, performative ethics of honesty that is social and situated. Chapter 6 then moves to philosophy itself, and in particular philosophy of technology. If we take the performance metaphor seriously, which throughout the chapters leads to the insight that it is more than a metaphor, that the borders are porous or even that the doors of the theatre are wide open, then what does this mean for our understanding of what we do when we “do” philosophy? What does it mean to understand philosophy itself as performance? Influenced by recent literature in the field of performance philosophy (e.g., Cull, Bowie, Böhler) and continuing my engagement with Plato (this time his views on rhetoric), I  use performance philosophy’s more embodied and performative conception of philosophy as a metaphor for understanding technology: I stress participation, embodiment, rhythm, situatedness and immanence of technology, and its use and users. I also continue my discussion of deception: based on my reading of some of Plato’s dialogues on rhetoric, I comment on persuasion and persuasive technologies, distinguishing between two

Introduction 13 different views. I also argue that philosophers should critically question their own media and technologies, as Plato did when he questioned writing, and consider the idea of philosophy as a transdisciplinary practice, for example collaborating with, or even merging with, the arts. Moreover, I reflect on the role(s) of the philosopher (I distinguish between Socratic and non-Socratic choreography) and on the question if and in what sense technologies, and in particular machines, shape our thinking. Inspired by Noë, I ask how it is possible that we can reflect on that question from a distance, given that that reflection is mediated by technologies. And what happens if philosophy of technology, through a performative turn, becomes aware not only of its own performativity and social nature but also of its being technologically mediated? What is philosophy of technology’s performative response? In the last chapter, Chapter  7, I  present my conclusion. Since I’m not a stage magician, I’m happy to reveal this conclusion beforehand: I  will conclude that the book provides some elements of a framework for thinking about technology—one could call it a performance-oriented phenomenology and ethics of technology—that takes its inspiration from the metaphors offered by the performing arts. This yields a number of insights that could not have been achieved without a performative turn. Taken together, they present use(rs) and experience of technology as embodied, moving, social, temporal, situated, narrative, and so on. The metaphors help us to (re)conceptualize some important normative problems related to technology, and gives us tools to (re)formulate what happens if technology shapes our lives in ways that go beyond functioning as a mere tool. These insights are critical of, but may also contribute to, postphenomenological and critical theories of technology. In these senses, throughout the book the metaphor becomes metamorphosis. First, performance will turn out to be not just a metaphor but also a concept that makes sense of phenomena. We will see that the examples often slide into instantiations or phenomena of performance rather than (applications of) metaphors of performance. I believe that that is not a problem but an interesting result of the performative research and writing process. Second, the entire exercise of this book is transformative to the extent that it results in a transformation of theory about technology, which takes on the form of (elements for) a theory of technoperformance. Finally, perhaps the most transformative move comes towards the end, in Chapter 6: the results also include the insight that as philosophers, and as philosophers of technology, we are also performers—with technology. The play with metaphors thus ends with the promise of metamorphosis in and of the role of philosophers of technology themselves. I formulate again two different roles for philosophers, connected to different ways of how to reach the good life: one is Socratic kinesitherapy understood as a re-education of how to best move, based on a recollection of the truth (that is, a pre-existing truth); the other is participative and improvised

14  Introduction finding out how to move together when no such pre-existing truth is given. I argue that both thinking in general and searching for the good life with technology in particular can be understood as improvised performance. The implications of this performative intervention still remain to be seen or, rather, to be performed. Now let the show begin.

References Akrich, Madeleine, and Bruno Latour. 1992. “A  Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies.” In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by Wiebe Bijker and John Law, 259–64. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–31. Coeckelbergh, Mark. 2017. Using Words and Things: Language and Philosophy of Technology. London: Routledge. Feenberg, Andrew. 1999. Questioning Technology. London: Routledge. Feenberg, Andrew. 2010. Between Reason and Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fraleigh, Sondra. 2010. Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Goffman, Erving. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: Social Sciences Research Centre. Gunkel, David J. 2018. Gaming the System: Deconstructing Video Games, Game Studies, and Virtual Worlds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1977. “The Age of the World Picture.” In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, 115–54. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit. Translated by J. Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York. Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by C. Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McKenzie, Jon. 2001. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Okagbue, Osita. 2007. African Theatres and Performances. London: Routledge. Penny, Simon. 2017. Making Sense: Computing, Cognition, Art and Embodiment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, & Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2005. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

2 Dancing With Technology How Machines Move and Choreograph Us

2.1. Phenomenology of Dance and the Moving Body If we want to use the metaphors of dance and choreography for thinking about our daily dealings with technology, we need to know more about these experiences and practices. What kind of experience is dance experience and what kind of knowledge is involved in dance? Although, and in contrast to many other art practices, dance has not been studied by many philosophers, there is a small but interesting field, philosophy of dance. Much of this work is concerned with the phenomenology of dance, the moving body, and choreography, and usually connects with the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. Let me summarize and comment on some of these texts and their philosophical sources, using Kozel and Sheets-Johnstone as reference points. This will reveal different aspects of dance (indicated in bold). The emphasis will be on the embodiment and movement of performance. This will form the background for the next sections in which I will use the metaphor of dance and choreography to say more about how we move with, and are moved by, technology. Body and Embodiment Most texts in this field focus, perhaps naturally, on phenomenology of the (moving) body and embodiment. For example, in Closer (2007) Susan Kozel has connected live performance with philosophical phenomenology, in particular Merleau-Ponty. She sees phenomenology as a way to integrate “intellect with sensory experience” (2), to show that the body is the basis of knowledge and experience, and to give a voice to “the lived experience of dancing bodies moving in space and time” (32), and in this way also to breathe life into phenomenology (48), bridging theory and practice. Let us look in more detail at Merleau-Ponty in order to elaborate the aspect of embodiment. In Phenomenology of Perception (2005), Merleau-Ponty argued that subjectivity is bound up with the body: we enter the world through our bodies (Merleau-Ponty 2005, 475), we experience the world through

16  Dancing With Technology our bodies (239). We may sometimes experience our body as an object, but we also exist as a body. We do not only have our body, but we also are our body. He writes: “The body is the vehicle of being in the world” (94). This also has implications for knowledge: knowledge of the body and knowledge more generally speaking. Merleau-Ponty argues that we know our body by living it, not by reflection. He stresses lived experience: Thus experience of one’s body runs counter to the reflective procedure which detaches subject and object from each other, and which gives us only the thought about the body, or the body as an idea, and not the experience of the body or the body in reality. (231) I know my body via the world and at the same time my body is also the medium of my knowing of the world: my body is “the pivot of the world” (94), “we are in the world through our body” and perceive the world through our body (239). Or as Klemola has summarized it: “it is our body, the lived and conscious body that opens the world to us. It is simultaneously both the means and the center of our existence” (Klemola 1991, 72). In Cartesian thinking, Merleau-Ponty argues, this kind of knowledge has been downplayed and the medium of ideas and rational authorship has been emphasized. It has focused on objective and detached knowledge of the body. But underneath that knowledge we can discover another kind of knowledge: we can “relearn to feel our body” and in this way rediscover our body and indeed our self, our “natural self” (Merleau-Ponty 2005, 239). As Gallagher and Zahavi put it: We do not first become aware of the body and subsequently use it to engage with the world. We experience the world bodily, and the body is revealed to us in our exploration of the world. Primarily, the body attains self-awareness in action. (Gallagher and Zahavi 2010, Section 4) Merleau-Ponty also writes about the body in movement. Considering the spatiality of one’s body, he argues that I know where my limbs are through a “body image” or body schema. (Merleau-Ponty 2005, 113) Without thinking about it, I know where my limbs are. I also know the spatiality of my body. This is a starting point, the background for my experiences of phenomena and of my performances. He uses the metaphor of the theatre: Bodily space can be distinguished from external space and envelop its parts instead of spreading them out, because it is the darkness needed in the theatre to show up the performance, the background

Dancing With Technology 17 of somnolence or reserve of vague power against which the gesture and its aim stand out, the zone of not being in front of which precise beings, figures, and points can come to light. (Merleau-Ponty 2005, 115) Then Merleau-Ponty turns to action and movement: he considers the body in movement, how it inhabits space (117), and how we perform with our body. He argues that we do not need representational knowledge and he criticizes intellectualism. In line with Husserl and Heidegger, he sees knowledge as bound up with our being in the world, but stresses the bodily aspect of this being in the world and links intentionality not so much with thinking but with motility, which he defines as “basic intentionality” (158). He writes: “Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can’. . . . Movement is not thought about movement, and bodily space is not space thought of or represented” (159). Instead, we project ourselves towards things through the body and its movement. The moving body is a medium: “Consciousness is being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body. A movement is learned when the body has understood it” (159–60). Instead of first forming a representation of an object and then transporting the body to a point in space, the body inhabits space and time and understands its world without symbolic or objective representation (162). Motility already gives meaning, and our bodily and spatial being is a condition of possibility for thought and perception (164). This was a revolutionary insight and its implications are still not entirely used and elaborated in all areas of contemporary philosophy. An exception is a current in philosophy that embraces what is now known as an embodied and enactive approach and often connects to both MerleauPonty and cognitive science. For example, Alva Noë has argued that “perceiving is a way of acting . . . something we do” (Noë 2004, 1). Instead of representing or reflecting, we probe, touch, and move around. Perception is not a process in the brain that constructs internal representations but “a kind of skilful activity on the part of the animal as a whole” (2). And Gallagher (2009) has argued that cognition is a form of action. We know and experience as we do things and as we move. In cognitive science, there is also an influential strand that stresses the embodied, situated, and enactive character of mind and cognition (e.g.,  Varela, Thomson, and Rosch 1991). Recently Simon Penny has rightly argued that we can learn a lot from these kinds of approaches for understanding interactive arts practices. Mind-body dualism cannot account for such practices; we need a new performative aesthetics instead of one based on the plastic arts (Penny 2017). Influenced by Pickering (1995), whose work I will discuss in the next chapter on the theatre metaphor, Penny argues against representationalism and proposes an aesthetic theory based on a performative ontology (Penny 2017, 414). For such a project, not only

18  Dancing With Technology cognitive science but also Merleau-Ponty’s thought (and the philosophers he influenced such as Dreyfus) is useful. For dance, the emphasis on the body and the attention to motility is of course very relevant. Merleau-Ponty himself already mentioned dance when he wrote that the body “comprehends” movement (165). But his insights reach far beyond dance: they also enable us to better understand everyday movements. It is at this point in the text that Merleau-Ponty gives the examples of a woman with a feather in her hat who feels where the feather is, driving a car through a narrow opening without measuring, and the blind man’s stick that extends touch—examples well known in philosophy of technology. We also find the still very relevant everyday example of typing, which shows that the typing is incorporated and does not require objective representation (167), and the example of playing an organ: Merleau-Ponty writes that the organist’s body and his instrument are “merely the medium” of the relationship between score and the sounding notes (168). Indeed, one may question who or what is the instrument. Furthermore, musical instruments are often used in an embodied relation to the human: through the development of skill, they become incorporated. Phenomenologically, they merge with the human. (See also my chapter on the metaphor of music.) But these are not only examples of technological embodiment, as Ihde and others use them in philosophy of technology; they are also and perhaps primarily examples of a knowledge we gain through movement of the body—examples of moving with technology. For instance, it is very interesting for the purpose of this book that Merleau-Ponty understands typing as a performance, in particular a performance of “movements” (167). It is that (embodied) performance and those movements that give us (embodied) knowledge and meaning. Meaning is not necessarily constituted by consciousness; the body (and I stress: the moving and performing body) also generates meaning; it is the basis of knowledge and meaning and is in this sense itself what Merleau-Ponty calls a “meaningful core” (170). This is an important point for both philosophy of dance and philosophy of technology. The latter has only very selectively read MerleauPonty. As said, embodiment is not just a particular human-technology relation (Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2005); it is the very way we exist in the world. And while entirely in line with much other work in the humanities and social sciences in the second half of the 20th century, by now there has been sufficient attention given to the body and embodiment in philosophy of technology—at least in postphenomenology and in particular in the work of Don Ihde (Ihde 1990, 2002)—there has been much less attention to movement and performance. Inspired by Merleau-Ponty and focusing on embodiment in relation to new technologies, Ihde has argued that we should move beyond “outdated seventeenth-century epistemology that does not recognize embodiment or performance or the production of knowledge” (Ihde 2002, 128). It is an exceptional moment when

Dancing With Technology 19 he does mention performance, but neither in this book nor in his work as a whole does he sufficiently elaborate on the movement and performative aspects of our use of technology (which he could have done by picking up the movement and performance aspects in Merleau-Ponty). His focus remains on body and embodiment; in his work the body does not move enough. But there is more to say about dance. As Kozel rightly remarks, while Merleau-Ponty addressed movement, he does not go far enough (Kozel 2007, 38). With “not far enough” I  mean that the theory of the body schema is still mainly a theory of perception (Merleau-Ponty 2005, 239), not a full theory of the moving body or of dance. There is much more to say about movement and about the knowledge and experience in dance, and much of that goes beyond the phenomenology of perception. Dance as a Happening, Flow, Know-How, and Skill What is dance experience? To dance is to move one’s body. But there is more: if we attend more closely to the phenomenology of dance (and perhaps movement in general—see later), there is also something happening, and this further questions the model of the Cartesian modern agent who thinks, represents, and acts on the basis of that thinking and representation; Kozel observes that to dance is also being danced and being moved: “the dancer dances and is danced by the force that she sets in motion” (38). We animate our body but then the movement of the body is further animated as it moves through time and space: The dancing-danced, or chiasm between moving actively and letting ourselves be moved by things, or people, or the world, is about expanding the space between control and being controlled. . . . More than the rest of us in our daily patterns of movement, the dancer mentally controls her body but also plays at the edges of control, letting physical momentum chart a path through space. The rigidly conscious subject withdraws and returns by degree.  .  .  . It is as if movement were determined by the temporality of the dance that is in the process of emerging . . . the dance dances through the dancer. (Kozel 2007, 39) Another way of putting this is that the dancing body is “both the mover and the moved” (Parviainen 2002). This point about dancing as a doing and as a happening (at the same time) also bears some analogy to the presence and making of different kinds of knowledge in dance. On the one hand, the dancer is aware of what she does and thinks about it. She is also aware of her body and movements. This is what Fraleigh calls “a conscious, intentional position towards the body as an object of attention” (Fraleigh 1987, 14). On the

20  Dancing With Technology other hand, the dancer may reach a state in which there is know-how but no explicit thought and reflection. Both can alternate, or even exist at the same time. For example, there are rules of choreography one needs to follow but at the same time one enters what Kozel calls a “flow” (see also Csíkszentmihályi 1990). Kozel remarks that even improvisation “occurs within loose rules and the flow is about entwining a version of rational critical thought process with the flow of movement, speech, and affect” (Kozel 2007, 51). It seems that both aspects are present in dance. And maybe sometimes there is no rational critical thought at all. (Note that in some cultural forms the absence of rational thought and control is encouraged and aimed for, for example in the Western tradition we find it in Dionysian dance and ritual. As Nietzsche put it, such dancers, at least when they are in the dance, “have forgotten how to walk and speak” (Nietzsche 1999, 120).) Shaun Gallagher has done further conceptual work departing from Merleau-Ponty but also moving away somewhat from his view: he distinguishes between “body image”, which is about perceptual monitoring, attitudes and beliefs about one’s body, and “body schema”: “a  system of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring” (Gallagher 2005, 24). Following ­Merleau-Ponty and Gallagher, I have argued1 that this gives us two modes of experience/knowledge in dance: one is about representation and knowing-that (propositional knowledge), whereas the other is knowledge-inaction and knowing-how. The latter is about embodied skill. The dancer may well need explicit knowledge through instruction, but without the experience of movement and dance she cannot learn the dance. Both modes or aspects are necessary for leaning the dance and for dancing. One learns the dance through dancing, not only through instruction. As with all skills, the main challenge is the acquisition of embodied knowledge. Following Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) we could add that maybe in the beginning there is more instruction, whereas the expert dancer has more implicit knowledge. Perhaps it is also true that at a high (the highest) level of expertise and when one is “in” the flow of dance, there is no longer purposeful, intentional action. As Fraleigh puts it: Mastery in dance does not rest on wilful domination of ourselves in our movement. . . . Grace, freedom, and mastery appear as wilfulness disappears and as effortless ease is achieved. (Fraleigh 1987, 20) In such a state there is what in psychology is known as “flow”: when the person is fully immersed in the activity, the self disappears and there is only spontaneous action and joy (Csíkszentmihályi 1990). As we have seen, Kozel also uses the term. One may further discuss the question whether it is possible to have both flow and intentional action, or if it is

Dancing With Technology 21 the one or the other. But in any case implicit knowledge, know-how, and skill are essential in dance, and dance is not only about doing but also about happening. Moreover, it seems that explicit thinking and intentional action is always linked to embodied, implicit knowledge. If embodied and enactivist approaches are right, then even when we think, this thinking is rooted in embodiment. The explicit thinking is based on implicit bodily movement and know-how. As Polanyi already argued, we know more than we can tell; there is always also “tacit knowledge” (Polanyi 1966), especially in skilled practices. Both kinds of knowledge are present in, and created by, the activity and practice of dance. And conceptually we can make a distinction between different kinds of knowledge, but Kozel suggests that in dance experience both kinds of knowledge are not separated: according to her, dance is as much a style of thinking as it is a style of movement (Kozel 2007, 51). As in other areas of life, there is no duality between body and mind or between experience and thinking; thinking is also a kind of experience (70). One could also say: both thinking and experience are related to movement. And knowing can be verbal but also non-verbal (Parviainen 2002). Furthermore, dance does not just draw on existing (implicit and explicit) knowledge. Through dance, new knowledge emerges. Parviainen (2002) has argued that dance creates new knowledge of the moving body. This is especially so in improvisation. Dancers can imagine, or rather move/create, new possibilities. If Dreyfus is right, then perhaps this is especially true for expert dancers. Expert dancers may be able to improvise in a way that really does something new. But in principle everyone can improvise. Furthermore, as already suggested in the previous pages, dance is not only about bodies or embodiment, or about skill, it is also about movement. Dance does not only illustrate the insights of the more embodied and enactive approach. Dance also reveals movement as movement; it makes us reflect on the importance of movement not only in the arts but also in human lives in general. Let us delve deeper into the history of philosophy of dance to support this point. Movement, Time, Space, and Rhythm In her classic The Phenomenology of Dance (1966), Maxine Sheets-Johnstone defines dance as movement: “Dance is movement, and its opposite, in time and space” (ix). Like Kozel, she takes a phenomenological approach in the sense that she is not so much interested in Merleau-Ponty’s abstract concepts such as body-schema but in “first-person experiential realities of movement and thus experiential truths of kinaesthetic consciousness” (Sheets-Johnstone 2015, xiii). She criticizes philosophers’ focus on vision or on having a body and neglect of kinaesthesis and the lived body. Like Kozel, she wants to understand everyday experience of movement,

22  Dancing With Technology everyday kinetic phenomena (xxii), through the lens of the extraordinary: dance. In practice, that is, in her academic practice, this means that her phenomenological analysis of movement takes the form of a description, in particular description from a first-person point of view: “a description of movement as it is lived through, not as it is or might be dissected in a laboratory, recorded by an observer, rendered in a third-person account, and so on” (xxxiii). She distinguishes between, on the one hand, the immediate encounter with, direct apprehension of, and lived experience of dance (pre-reflective involvement), and, on the other hand, all the knowledge we already have of dance based on what we have seen before and our evaluation of, and reflection on, the dance (prior knowledge and reflective efforts afterwards) (Sheets-Johnstone 1966, 1–2). For her the lived experience is central. A notion of dance is not a dance. And dance is not a force or a combination of objective factors (10). It has to be created and it has to be experienced. It has a wholeness to it. Again we see, after phenomenological analysis, that there are different kinds of experiences and knowledge related to dance as movement. Of course, Johnstone also talks about the body: it is “a spatially present totality” (17) rather than something to have or to reflect on. But for her the lived experience of the body is itself a kinetic phenomenon, one which we do not only find in dance but also in everyday life: it is about “crossing the street, reaching for a pen, creating a dance” (21). Again she distinguishes between the living experience and the reflection. That living experience can be one in which the dancer is not reflecting upon “what her body is doing or what she is doing with her body” (31) and feels one with the dance in an ekstatic way, whereas in reflection she or the audience may construe her body in movement as an object. Again there seem to be different modes of experience in dance, and again pre-reflective awareness is stressed. Interestingly, Sheets-Johnstone argues that this kind of implicit knowledge is necessary for what we may call performative purposes in the context of staged performance: it is necessary to uphold the illusion, which is the illusion of force: The dancer is not conscious of her leg and how long she must keep her leg extended in the air, nor of her arm and how far she must abduct her arm. She cannot reflect upon her body in movement as an object and make it exist apart from the form she is creating, without immediately breaking the spatial unity and temporal continuity of the dance into discrete points and instants. Similarly, the audience is not aware of how long a dancer’s leg is extended, or to what extent her arm is abducted. If the audience reflects upon the dance as it is being presented, it destroys the illusion of force by dividing it into discrete moments and points and ascribing values which are nonexistent within the world of illusion. (Sheets-Johnstone 1966, 36)

Dancing With Technology 23 I add that next to “pre-reflective” this kind of awareness can also be “post-reflective”: keeping Dreyfus in mind, it may be that in instruction there is first reflection but then afterwards in the actual dance, that is, when staged as a dance performance, there is the non-reflective wholeness that Sheets-Johnstone talks about. Of course, there is form in dance, and dancers may also work with form when creating a dance (form abstracted from the everyday, choreography in the sense of notation, for example), but the form does not exist outside the creation and experience of the dance, in which there is sense and feeling, and, of course, movement. In dance there is form-in-the-making (60), which can never be reduced to a description that is abstracted from this performative and lived process. Furthermore, dance does not only happen “in” time and space, as if time and space are a fixed décor for our actions; it also creates its own space (43) and its own time, which are bound to one another. This is imagined space-time. For example, when looking at dancers we may imagine a circle being drawn (94); the circle is created by the movement. And I  add that we can only imagine this since we are ourselves moving and dancing beings, who in our own lives already acquired some implicit knowledge about movement and the creation of space by moving. Past experience is needed; this is what gives us knowledge. Here it is the experience of our body moving. Sheets-Johnstone stresses the implicit character of the dancer’s knowledge: “The dancer implicitly knows that she has completed the circle” (95) because of her past experiences with her body exerting influence. She refers to Merleau-Ponty’s example of the blind man’s cane: The question “How does the dancer know?” is really “How does the dancer implicitly know?” and the answer might be given, “In the same way a blind man ‘sees’ with the tip of his cane”. (Sheets-Johnstone 1966, 97) Force is projected and a space is created, and this is made possible by an implicit knowledge and know-how that the dancer has. To achieve such knowledge, the dancer must “grasp her body in movement as a dynamic form-in-the-making” (112), which means she must not only reflect but also stop reflecting. Reflection can get in the way of achieving implicit knowledge. Again, if the dancer were to suddenly reflect on her movements during the staged performance (or at any other moment for that matter), the flow, the illusion, and the magic of the dance are gone. But also during the learning process, the dancer needs to get to know her moving body and movements and of course the dance as a whole in the dance and by dancing. This is where the implicit knowledge emerges. Furthermore, taking seriously movement and temporality in dance and elsewhere also means that we attend to rhythm. There is theory about

24  Dancing With Technology rhythm, rhythm in music and in dance. We can make descriptions and notations. But for Sheets-Johnstone, rhythm does not exist on its own, but only in the dance (81). It must be danced, lived, and felt. Composing a dance, then, can only be done by living the form that is being created (111). It is in this lived experience that we can experience “the sheer phenomenon of movement” (115). So far, however, we have mainly discussed the knowledge and experience of the individual dancer—phenomenology in the sense of taking a first-person perspective. But knowledge and experience in dance and movement is never entirely individual in several senses. Social Aspect, Audience, and Choreography Dance is also a social activity, in the sense that one creates the dance together and dances together but also in the sense that felt movement is shared with, or resonates with, the audience. Dancers have their own kinaesthetically felt movement and there is the kinetically perceived movement of others. There is a sensus communis of movement (SheetsJohnstone 1966, xxviii). Dance is not only about one’s own movement or body. There is also resonance with others. It is an inherently social practice. We are bodily present to ourselves but also to others, and others are also bodily present to us. What we do, our movements, may or may not resonate with them. Kozel (2007) proposes a second-person phenomenology, which is about sensitivity to another’s body language and expressiveness (Kozel 2007, 57). Influenced by Critchley, she also suggests that exposure to the other can be the basis of ethics, a corporeal ethics. We respond to others (see also Levinas) and create responsive relations with others (70). But taking into account the social aspect may also imply looking at what performance means in capitalist economies or at how people perform their (gender) identity (66). There is always a wider social and cultural context. Furthermore, dance is not only co-dance in the sense of “dancing with others on a stage”. It is also social in the sense that there may be people watching the dance (the audience, spectators, etc.—these visual terms are inadequate since they tend to focus on one sensory faculty and forget the whole body). There is also the third-person perspective. Here the dancer can appear to the spectator in different ways. On the one hand, there is always the possibility that the other objectifies us. As Sartre put it: “at least one of the modalities of the Other’s presence to me is objectness” (Sartre 2015, 252–53). Confronted with the gaze of the other, the dancer realizes that she has a body. I apprehend that “I am seen” (259). In that case, the dancer is no longer one with her body and self; there is no longer flow. Moreover, the choreographer (see later in this section) may also turn the body of the dancer into an instrument. It then becomes what Foster has called “the hired body” (Foster 1997). There can also be

Dancing With Technology 25 objectification of the body by the dancer herself, often at the same time. On the other hand, it is possible that the dance is shared by the spectator as it happens through the spectator’s body. Fraleigh writes: “when I am in sympathy with the dance, my body is vitalized . . . the dancer and the audience  .  .  . share the dance—as body” (Fraleigh 1987, 55). The dance passes between dancer and audience and binds them together: “The dancer and the audience commune through the lived ground of their bodily being” (61). In a sense, if and when this happens, the spectator is no longer a mere “spectator” and also the term “audience” is misleading since they reduce the experience to one sense and miss the aspect of movement. Instead, dancer would be a much better name. Fraleigh argues that when dancer and audience commune, both the dancer and the spectator become dancers: “then the dancer’s dance also becomes my dance” (62). This means that the “spectator” (who, as was said, is never a mere spectator or listener) is also moving and dancing. Literally. We learn to sit still, especially in the West. But this is never entirely successful. There are at least micro-movements and neuroscientists have shown that when we watch dance, this engages our motor system (Bachrach et al. 2015). And there are “inner” movements: emotions. (But we should avoid the dualistic language of “inner” and “outer”—see what follows). The body moves and is moved. The body of the “spectator” dances, or better: both the body of the dancer on stage and the body of the “spectator” dance (on-stage or off-stage). Furthermore, dance is social in the sense that the forms and practices of dance embody cultural knowledge (Thomas 2003). In contrast to text, “dancing constitutes a form of cultural knowledge that is articulated through the ‘bodily endeavours’ of dancing subjects and not through the ‘power of the word’ ” (215). The movements of the dancers are related to how “we”, as a society and as a culture, relate to our body, do things, etc. Moreover, what the dance “is”, that is, how it is done and experienced, is socially constructed (Foster 2011). As dancers, choreographers, and audience members, we bring a lot of social knowledge and interests to the dance studio, the stage, and the theatre. STS scholars know that the design and use of artefacts are a social process, but so are the making and the watching of a dance. Finally and importantly: staged dance as it is practiced in the West is usually also about choreography. The movements and the interactions of the dancers (I prefer “dancers” rather than “bodies”) are directed by someone (the choreographer). Sometimes there is more than one. Often in contemporary dance choreography also involves the dancers themselves, who co-create the dance. And in a broader sense this is always the case: what the dance “is” is not just what the choreographer had in mind or imagined beforehand; it is what the dance becomes through the dancers and the directions of the choreographer. This means the creation of dance is a deeply social activity. Furthermore, choreography, like dance,

26  Dancing With Technology is an art in itself: it is an art to design the movements and interactions of the dancers. In dance improvisation, when there is no set choreography, the role of the choreographer is a different one: instead of directing every movement, she may offer a kind of framework in which the dancers develop their own choreography. And, of course, some dancers choreograph or improvise themselves. But note that even in that case the dance movements and dance patterns will refer to a wider culture of forms of movement, including perhaps the history of dance but also everyday movements, other existing dances, movements that have already been used, etc. Choreography as dance creation, like all art and creation, does not happen ex nihilo. In this sense, not only dance experience (Foster 2011) but also the choreographing of dance is socially constructed. Choreography can also refer to the written notation of the (sequence of) movements and interactions. There are not always written notations. Video can also be used, or the choreographer can use her memory of the dance or of particular movements and show them by dancing them. Sometimes choreography is also called dance composition, since movements and patterns are arranged by the choreographer. But the aim is the performance of the dance, and in order to “compose” the choreographer needs to move, get others to move, and engage in embodied thinking. Choreography can never be a mere symbolic activity, mere representation, or mere thinking “in the head”. Finally, if objects are involved in the performance, the choreographer will also direct their role and position and direct the movements in relation to the objects. This leads us to the next point. Technology Dance is also a technological practice. Usually it is understood only in terms of bodies and movement, and the technological and material side is neglected. But just as one can apply theoretical frameworks from philosophy of technology and STS to any other practice, dance can be studied as involving material artefacts and infrastructures of various kinds. Think about the stage and the lights but also objects used in dance and the clothes of the dancers. Parviainen (2016) has used Latour’s work to suggest that we can talk about an assemblage of humans and nonhumans involved in dance. Dance practices as an art is of course a human activity; but it also always involves non-human elements, and this should not be neglected. I suspect that since dance as an art often displays and literally foregrounds the human body, the technologies that make possible the dance or even the artefacts that are used in the dance move to the background. But this is not always the case. Sometimes dance and choreography explicitly use technologies, especially new digital technologies, in the dance, and this is often done with the aim of stimulating research and

Dancing With Technology 27 reflection on technologies and dance. There is already a relatively long history of using new media and technologies in dance and other performing arts (Dixon 2007). Consider, for instance, work by dance company Troika Ranch, which (among other themes) has explored unions of computers and machines using motion sensing equipment and video projections (Dixon 2007, 256); work on embodied experiences of new media and digital technologies by Sita Popat, which has explored what it means to have a robotic dance partner in dance improvisation (Wallis, Popat, and Mackinney 2010); Susan Broadhurst’s performances with an avatar performer; or more recently Kerry Francksen, who experiments with interactions between “live” and “digital” bodies in what she calls “live-digital dancing” (Francksen 2014). In philosophy of dance, Kozel (2005, 2007) has connected Heidegger’s questioning of technology to questioning technology while “moving in responsive computer systems” (Kozel 2007, 73). She has also argued that technology can be used to create responsive relations with others: “we can regard technologies not as tools, but as filters or membranes for our encounter with others” (70). In what turns out to be a posthumanist view, she sees technologies as part of “flesh” that “makes up us, the world, objects, animals, and thought” (77). Remshardt (2008) has also argued against the “anthropic bias” in performance studies, which ties performance to individual humans and their bodies and agency. Instead, he explores a posthumanist view that responds to digital technologies and how they mediate performance. Thus, moving beyond the obsession with bodies (and hence human dancers), we find not only movement but also technology. This gives us an interesting perspective for thinking about dance and for thinking about technology: dance then becomes a site where we can explore the phenomenology and ethics of human-­ technology relations.

2.2. How We Move With Technology and How Technology Moves Us The previous section reveals dance as an embodied practice, as movement situated in time and space (in a sense even creating time and space), and as thinking, as involving know-how and skill, as a social practice, and as a technological practice. But it also turned out that these features are not unique to dance. While dance displays them, puts the spotlight on them so to speak (see also the last section in this chapter), they are actually features of everyday human life and existence. We are embodied and moving beings, our experience and knowledge is not only a matter of knowing-that but also and especially of knowing-how, and our practices are always both social and technological. Philosophy of dance thus shows us something about how we exist, move, and think as human beings. To philosophers obsessed with symbolic representations and language-based

28  Dancing With Technology practices such as writing, it shows in particular that we are moving and dancing beings and that “even” our writing and thinking, including philosophical thinking, is always anchored in embodied experience, implicit knowledge, and a wider social and technological background that makes possible our thinking, our movements, and our ability to make sense. If this is so, then when, as philosophers of technology, we want to better understand and evaluate contemporary technologies, we better use the dance metaphor in our conceptualizations of technology. Some parts of the picture are already present in contemporary philosophy of technology: we know that our dealings with technology are embodied (I already mentioned Ihde’s work) and we know that technology is always socially embedded or rather that the social includes technology. But what is often missing in existing thinking about technology is the aspect of movement and performance. With the exception of Pickering (1995) and work inspired by him (e.g.,  Penny 2017) that uses the term “performance”, there has been very little attention to movement. So what does it mean to (re-)conceptualize human-technology relations in terms of movement? The mentioned work in philosophy of dance reveals something about how we move in general and thus also how we move with technology. Kozel (2007) already suggests that “the dance or performance studio is a hothouse for understanding wider social engagements with technology” (xiv) and for understanding “how human beings encounter themselves and others through computers” (xv). This is possible since the metaphor is more than a metaphor: there is no clear border between dance and other movement practices in daily life; dance turns out to be “merely” a staged version and imitation (mimesis) of what we are already doing all along. We are already dancers and performers. Some literature in philosophy of dance recognizes this. For example, Kozel refers to Richard Schechner’s anthropological approach, which defines performance broadly to include a continuum of human actions not limited to theatre, dance, or music (Kozel 2007, 68). But in philosophy of technology, much work still needs to be done on the phenomenology of moving with technology. Moreover, taking into account that technology can have agency and perhaps increasingly does so today, we should also explore how technology moves us. Technologies are not mere tools for movement or tools we use in moving; they also shape our movements. They choreograph us. Let me unpack (that is, enact and perform) these claims, with a focus on contemporary digital technologies. In order to do so, let me follow phenomenology’s dictum: to the lifeworld! What does it mean to move with technology? We are used to thinking of some activities with technologies in terms of movement. For example, driving a car or riding a bicycle is a way of moving and uses technology to do so. And we can use a smartphone or a watch when running. This is moving with technology. But, as Merleau-Ponty’s example of the typewriter shows, there is also movement in activities and practices

Dancing With Technology 29 we usually do not conceptualize in terms of movement. When I write this text, I  am sitting on a chair at a desk, typing these words on the keyboard, and, through use of a word processing program that runs on the operating system of my PC, words appear on the computer screen. This activity does not only involve many technologies (including the internet, an entire electricity infrastructure, a house in which the desk is situated, etc.); it also involves various movements and affordances for movement (or not). The chair is a technology that largely immobilizes a part of my body. In the meantime, other parts of my body move: my eyes move, my arm, hands, and fingers move on the keyboard, clicking on icons on the screen (graphical user interface), and so on. These movements are embodied and involve implicit knowledge. It is true that, while using the technologies, I’m not aware of the technologies, as Ihde following Heidegger argued. But this is also true of movement: while using the technology, I’m also not aware of the (micro-) movements I make. I have developed the skill and habit of typing and writing, understood not only as “use” but also as (sequences and patterns of) movement. The choreography of typing was learned in a typing course; the dance of typing became embodied. The choreography of using a word processor I also learned by use, this time without a human choreographer. This is just one of the many examples of choreographed movement with technology in everyday life. The swiping gestures when using a smartphone is another example. Again this is a micro-movement, one that is choreographed by the designer of the smartphone software. Hence “moving with technology” means not only using technology to move, such as transportation technology, it also means “moving while using technology” or rather “using technology by movement”. Movement is necessary for our technological activities and practices. It turns out that there is always a movement and performative aspect to them. Some technologies are technologies not of mobilization but (partial or full) immobilization, such as a chair or a bed. But even a chair or a bed requires and affords specific kinds of movements such as sitting, laying down, getting up, and so on. Technologies such as the computer, the internet, the smartphone, etc., are not transporting us to a sphere of nonmovement; instead they create new kinaesthetic skills, habits, practices, and fields (for the term “kinaesthetic field”, see what follows). The new smartphone user (today: a young child) needs to learn new kinaesthetic skills and habits in order to use the phone. And when we are “online” or in the so-called “virtual” sphere, we remain embodied beings. Consider computer games: gaming is an embodied performance and games provide performative spaces. Gamers are and remain fully embodied when they perform: the gamer should not be reduced to “a pair of eyes” (Behrenshausen 2007, 335). For example, when moving an avatar, the gamer is not immobile but uses her body (not just the eyes but also hands, arms, etc.) and she can have the immersive embodied experience of moving

30  Dancing With Technology as the avatar, co-creating a kind of hybrid reality or mixed reality in which the border between inside and outside the game blurs. There is movement—full stop. In terms of aesthetics: a visual aesthetics is not enough, there is need for a kinaesthethics (353). More generally, the specific way we are embodied includes movement. There is always an outside of text, but there is no outside of movement and performance. We exist, are-in-the-world as kinetic, moving beings. (And as beings that perform for others; this aspect I will elaborate in the next chapter.) For the use of technology, also so-called “digital” technologies, this attention to movement means that our “use” of technology needs to be understood differently: we never only use technologies; we also move with technologies and our use includes movement. So far (post)phenomenology has largely neglected this aspect of technological experience/performance and human-technology relations. We do not only perceive and act mediated by technology, and there is not only embodiment in the sense of a specific relation between humans and technology; we also move and dance mediated by technology. From using a hammer to gaming: the technology user is a dancer. As we move, we respond to others, not only textually and visually but also kinetically. There is kinetic resonance in others (co-dancers/audience). This also applies to our interactions mediated by technology. For example, when we are active on social media, this activity is not only a matter of vision (seeing what others do, being seen); it also includes movement and making others move. This can be taken literally or kinetically. For example, by means of a post consisting of text and image, I may want to influence the clicking behaviour of others. Gaming can also be seen as a social performance, in which gamers move and try to influence the movement of others. Both in social media and in games there are various audiences (see for example Crawford and Rutter 2007 on digital game audiences). But movement in relation to others can also mean: people feeling that they are “being moved” by an image or moving people to think about something. In a non-dualist epistemology and phenomenology we must question the inner/outer distinction. The aim of moving people can also be political mobilization: getting people to move on the street or, more broadly, making people do things in the political realm. In what follows, I will say more about choreographing people in a political context. Making people move is not only a matter of using words. In philosophy it is well known that words can do things and that we can make others do things with words. Think about the work of Austin and Searle, which is all about the performative functions of language. According to Austin (1962) and Searle, words and sentences are active and performative. Performative utterances are “speech-acts”. Searle (1995, 2006) argued that language does not so much represent the world but rather create social reality. But there are much more technologies that can make people do things (see also Coeckelbergh 2017). Here the kinetic aspect of these

Dancing With Technology 31 actions is emphasized. Our (micro-)bodily movements on social media or our movements in games make others move. Language and other technologies move things and move people, and we move things and people by using language and other technologies. (I will also mention this in the chapter on theatre.) As we use technologies, these technologies shape our actions and interactions. But this is not abstract; it always involves bodies in movement. And they are social. Via technology we respond to one another as living and moving beings. Moreover, in contrast to Austin and Searle, we can emphasize the embodied and kinetic aspects of language use: what Austin called speechacts are not disembodied texts; the use of voice is entirely mediated and made possible by the body, and even typing a text (e.g., in social media) is an embodied affair. The social that is created by means of language is also a matter of moving bodies and embodied voice. Social institutions only exist in the interactions of people, and these interactions always have a kinetic aspect. Hence when we use digital technologies it is true that in some sense we “create social reality”, but this reality should not be reified and abstracted: it has movement and bodies in it. To pick up the example again: digital social media interactions are not only a matter of moving data, they are also a matter of moving people. The “dance of agency”, to borrow Pickering’s term, is one that involves non-humans but also humans, and here we can stress that these humans have bodies and that they move, with their body and as a (living) body. There is no “pure” digital or virtual sphere where, in a Platonic vein, one could strive to get rid of the body or bodily movement. Flesh, to refer to one of the terms in dance studies, is everywhere. There are always “analogue” elements. There are material, bodily, and kinetic relations, actions, and networks involved in the “digital” economy. In social media and games, for example, the moving body is present and active. Dances of words and dances of data are connected to dances of moving bodies. Furthermore, as some technologies become more autonomous and gain more agency, they do not only mediate our movements and our dances but also take on the role of dance partner. Think of so-called social robots that move around in the home: they are more than passive tools, they literally also move. They are not only cognitive agents, as many philosophers of technology and scientists tend to conceptualize them; they are also kinetic agents. Their sociality or quasi-sociality is made possible by movement. Think also about bots that move on the internet. Without movement, there is no agency. Therefore, the question regarding artificial agency should be understood not only in terms of their intelligence or cognition but also in terms of their movements. We can then ask not only what machines do and can do in terms of cognitive tasks (e.g., solving cognitive problems, making decisions, etc.) but also what machines can do in terms of movement. The question is not only: how intelligent are they but, also, how do they move?

32  Dancing With Technology For designers and users of “social” robots, this means that the former design, and that the latter interact with, not only the robot-as-object but also the robot as co-performer, co-mover, and co-dancer. Designers may be aware of this to some extent in so far as they understand themselves not only as designers of objects but also as designers of interaction and movement. But as users we do not always think about movement. When we encounter a (quasi)social entity, we simply take it for granted that it moves. And it appears to us as social because it moves—and perhaps because it moves in specific ways, ways we associate with sociality. But in the interaction we do not notice the movement itself, we do not notice the movement as movement. Only when something is wrong with the movement or when there is absence of movement does the movement become present-at-hand (to use a translated Heideggerian term). For example, when the robot suddenly stops moving, we notice its movement aspect. In the case of humans, movement can also come to the foreground in a similar fashion, for example when we play sports and watch our own movements, or when we meet a person who moves differently than we do, such as a person in a wheelchair or someone who uses crutches. In such cases we become aware of our own ways of movement and indeed movement and the moving body itself. It may also happen that when we are in a different country and want to open a door, the key or handle turns the “other” way, that is, the way we are not used to; this renders our usual grasp and movement entirely ineffective and reminds us of how movement is deeply engrained and habitual, embedded in a particular social-geographical context. This also shows again how implicit our knowledge of our moving body is. This application of the dance metaphor also raises the question who choreographs us, our bodies, and our movements. As users dancing and moving with technology, we are choreographed by the designer of the technology and by other humans involved in the development and use of technology, such as people in technology companies and governments that issue regulations for the use of technology. They direct and organize our movements with technology. Usually we are not aware of this, but as users of smartphones, computer programs, etc., we are dancing the dances that the designers and developers of the technology want us to dance. We are doing the gestures that they designed, for example when we use a smartphone. We are doing the movements that they have choreographed, for example when playing a computer game. When using a computer program, we follow the clicking sequences and rhythms they programmed. We even follow daily routines that are encouraged by them, for example getting up and checking our social media. This raises the question to what extent we can still improvise, hack their choreographies, change our routines, or resist. Moreover, to the extent that technology is more than a tool and is itself a force that influences these daily choreographies of what we do

Dancing With Technology 33 with technology, we could also say—influenced by Parviainen and others (see below)—that we do not only move with technology, technology also moves us and choreographs us. Consider the normativity of technology, now understood in terms of movement. The hammer does not only afford a movement; it also “expects” and “demands” a particular movement and posture. I cannot hammer in a nail by wiggling my toes. I have to grasp the hammer in a particular way, do a very specific movement with my arm, perform a particular hand-eye coordination (which is coordinating eye movement with hand movement, thus organized movement), and so on. I “have” to do this in the sense of: for the performance or dance of nailing to be successful, I have to do these and these movements. This “have to” is normative. It is not a categorical imperative. It is a hypothetical, practical, pragmatic one, but normative and imperative nevertheless. If you want to get in the nail, then you have to move like this. The technology gives you an algorithm for movement. A dance algorithm. Algorithms tell you what to do; they are normative in the sense that they prescribe what you should do. And when it comes to a technology that already exists for a long time or when it is a complex digital technology, it is a normativity that cannot necessarily be traced back to a particular individual designer or other humans but that resides in the design of the hammer itself. It has its own choreographic normativity. Sometimes there is a little room for deviation. Consider the door handle, another favourite example in the philosophy of technology literature: if you want to open the door, then you have to walk to it in a particular way, grasp the handle, pull it down (or up, depending on the country and context), and so on. In this case, you can do it slightly differently. For example, you can use your leg and foot to pull down the handle. But the design of the technology strongly pushes for doing it exactly the way most of us do it, that is, the choreography that rests in the very design of the artefact. It gives you the easiest and optimal way to open the door and pass through the door, that is, the easiest and optimal movement. If you want to go through the door quickly, this is going to be the choreography. Unless one changes the design, of course, which would create a different choreography. To design a technological artefact is also always to design and organize movement. The designer is a choreographer, and to the extent that the human designer remains in the background and the artefact gains more agency, one can say that the technology choreographs us. Think also about the classic example of the speed bump in philosophy of technology: the speed bump makes drivers slow down. It shapes our action. But using dance and choreography terms we can conceptualize it also in this way: the speed bump organizes our movement, it choreographs us. Latour (1993) used the theatre metaphor (actant), which has been picked up by Verbeek (2005) and others in contemporary philosophy

34  Dancing With Technology of technology and earlier by those in STS (e.g., Pickering 1995). But if we take a closer look at the metaphor used here, we find that the speed bump is not so much an actant, since that would mean a kind of co-actor. Since the speed bump, as Latour and Verbeek claim, tells us what to do (see the following chapter), a better part of the theatre metaphor would be to say that it is a director. The bump directs the act of driving. But if we want to conceptualize the movement itself, an even more suitable metaphor is provided by choreography: the speed bump is a choreographer. It organizes our movements as drivers. In particular, it directs the movements of our legs, arms, and hands. For example, the driver may slow down by putting less pressure on the accelerator or even by pushing the brake. These are all movements. The choreography metaphor enables us to look at the micro aspects and especially the movement aspect of what technologies make us do. The actant term from Latour is about what technologies do and (to some extent) about what they make us do but not really about how they make us move. It is suitable for highlighting other aspects, perhaps, but not so much for understanding what happens here in terms of technology organizing our movements. Note that movement must be seen in a holistic way. What the speed bump does as choreographer is only part of a wider kinetic whole. There are more moving humans and non-humans involved here. The choreography of the speed bump is a delegated one. There is the human designer, who has designed the speed bump by means of movement and who, together with the authorities that employ the speed bump in order to organize and control the movements of people, choreographs the movements of the cars by means of the speed bump. However, the human designer then disappears from the foreground and moves to the background or goes backstage; perhaps the choreographer is still at work but is no longer visible. The speedbump becomes the (visible) choreographer, directing the movements of the cars and their drivers. But there are also the movements of the people who made the speed bump and the movements of the trucks and equipment that was necessary for this. There are the movements of other cars. There are many dancers and choreographers. There are choreographies of use but also choreographies of making and development and choreographies of control and surveillance. While Latour’s theatre metaphor can capture some of the performances, it fails to show the kinetic aspects of the human-technology relations and misses the choreographer’s role (or in his idiom: the director’s role—see the next chapter). This choreographical re-conceptualization of this stronger shaping role of technology with regard to our movements can also be applied to the use of contemporary digital technologies in order to highlight the latter’s kinetic dimension. Games or virtual worlds obviously choreograph how we move in those worlds. But digital technologies also direct and organize our movements in the so-called “real” world (and gaming is as real

Dancing With Technology 35 as any other activity). Consider again the smartphone. There is the making of the hardware, which involves labour understood as movements. These movements are first choreographed by the engineers who designed the machines and managers involved in the production, but then the machine appears as choreographer on the scene, directing the movements of human workers and their bodies. There is also the making of the software: the designer of the phone and the developers of the apps choreograph the user’s movements by inscribing the choreography into the code of the operating system and the apps (done through the movement of writing). Once the phone and its software are developed, the human designers and developers recede from view and we as users are confronted with the choreographical normativity and hypothetical imperative of (the apps and operating system of) our smartphone. The algorithm of the interface tells us that if we want to use the phone, we have to do particular movements with our fingers and hands, very specific gestures. The code tells us how to move. The algorithm does not just tell the phone what to do; it also choreographs us, directs, and organizes our movements. The code may be authored by one, or typically more, several, humans, but then it takes on its own agency: not as a co-actor or co-dancer but as a director and choreographer. Similar points can be made for the mouse, the keyboard, and all kinds of user interfaces and artefacts in the world of digital technology. It may be a delegated form of c­ horeography—perhaps the real choreographer is the human being, for example the designer—but it is a choreographic role nevertheless. Moreover, as this example shows again, there are many choreographies connected to one kind of technological device. There is not only an artefact or a network of humans and things, there are also particular ways these things and these humans and things are linked, and one way is through movement. There is a kinetic whole, a structure, and process of movement(s). The example of production also shows that next to organizing our micro-movements, such as the gestures to operate a mobile phone, technology can also organize our movements in the sense of choreographing an activity and indeed an entire practice. It can organize our daily life in its kinetic and other aspects. For example, a health app may encourage you to run, perhaps at particular moments, with a particular frequency, rhythm, speed, and so on. Or a hiking app, by monitoring and tracking (and encouraging the sharing of data or transferring them somehow), can also influence your actual movements and walks. A  calendar app choreographs the movements you make in the day: first get out of bed, then move to the shower, go to the breakfast table, walk there, then take this means of transport, move to that room, and so on. But the most invisible, easily overlooked influence happens at the microlevel of bodily movements, for instance when a smartphone shapes not only that we do certain movements (e.g., a navigation app tells me to leave home now and move to the tram stop) but also how we walk in the street, our

36  Dancing With Technology posture, our hand and eye movements, how we move in space, how we interact with others, and so on. Consider people who sit at the kitchen table or in a bar with their smartphones: they sit and interact differently than without the technology because they make different movements. The technology choreographs our movements, our lived spaces, our relationships with others, our lives. The design offers specific affordances and shapes our practices and existence. Another strong way of conceptualizing all these influences is to say that the technology, as choreographer, controls us. Here issues concerning surveillance are very relevant. Drawing on the phenomenology of the body and commenting on tracking and monitoring practices, Tuuri, Parviainen, and Pirhonen (2017) have argued that we are not in control but that technologies control our moving bodies. Devices and other technological artefacts have an effect on how we move around: smart technologies “affect our bodily flow of everyday activities and movements—that is, routines and everyday choreographies we regularly engage in, but whose real contents and embedded meanings we rarely trouble ourselves to become aware” (Tuuri, Parviainen, and Pirhonen 2017, 495). While digital systems cannot understand “the lived-through gestural meanings of the moving body” (496), they measure and model the body and they influence our movements. Think again about the smartphone, which “expects” specific gestures and movements, or biomonitoring devices which are connected to embodied practices (Parviainen 2016). Not only in our private life but also at work, such devices offer the possibility to track yourself and others. For example, employers may want to monitor the health of their employees (61). Other, non-digital and non-smart technologies also organize our movements. Think again about the hammer, which affords (and “expects”) a specific kind of movement of hands, arms, and body. Or constructions on the street such as benches or plantings may be used to choreograph drivers to slow down and give more freedom to pedestrians (Tuuri, Parviainen, and Pirhonen 2017, 202). Think also about the speed bump. But here the emphasis is on control, tracking, and surveillance by digital technologies, which affords a specific way of monitoring, influencing, and controlling movements. Maybe we could say that the digital technologies enable a more “total” form of control and surveillance. “Every move you make” is recorded and becomes part of an economy of data and control (which in turn can and has been conceptualized in choreographical terms—see what follows). However, it would be misleading to say that technology is the only choreographer (just as it is misleading to say that technology is the only actant). Clearly technology is not the only choreographer; humans are also involved in various ways, most prominently as designers and developers but also in other ways. Consider a company that decides to use a monitoring system for controlling its employees. Humans make that decision, not the technology. Moreover, one could say that it involves both

Dancing With Technology 37 humans and things. Tuuri, Parviainen, and Pirhonen have argued that the choreographies of our everyday life are co-constituted (497). This approach, which looks at combinations of humans and non-humans, is also influenced by Latour, who is well known in philosophy of technology. In “Quantified Bodies in the Checking Loop”, Parviainen (2016) explains that in these quantification processes, people, objects, and technologies enter in relations with one another and that human bodies are also connected to technologies: “When digital technologies, action, and materiality intertwine, human bodies do not remain independent entities from technologies. In this assemblage, embodied connections with digital technologies modify physical and lived bodies, forming new kinds of embodied practices” (Parviainen 2016, 62). The term assemblage is used here to conceptualize that technologies shape new bodily practices in ways that involve and connect humans and non-humans. Parviainen says about running apps: Although running with wearables mobilizes a new type of assemblage, it also changes the style of running when runners need to check certain numbers and figures on their wristbands to adjust their running speed. In this relational materialism, actants are managed to make new relationships and form new running routines as embodied practices. (Parviainen 2016, 63) However, it is not necessary to use the term “assemblages” or “actants” to make this point. As I argued, the term actants may not tap into the best available metaphor here. One better employs a dance metaphor here: humans and non-humans co-choreograph. In any case, the point is clear: both humans and non-humans shape how we move. Moreover, in the context of biomonitoring and many other smart technologies, this “microlevel” choreography is also linked to what Parviainen calls the “macrolevel choreography of big data” (Parviainen 2016, abstract). The “microlevel” embodied practice of biomonitoring is connected to, and generates, the circulation of personal data; together this is a feedback system (67). Parviainen writes: Moving bodies, monitoring their health informatics on the screen, can be seen to be involved in a much bigger loop beyond just a simple, personal, and intimate checking loop. This big loop concerns feedback systems that are built from the big data of health informatics and sent back towards customers. (Parviainen 2016, 68) Although the micro-macro distinction is maybe not so helpful here (I propose to simply talk about the movement of humans and the movement

38  Dancing With Technology of things, including data), this choreography-based approach (if necessary at all in combination with theory from STS) thus helps us to craft a new conceptual instrument to analyze and discuss the politics of digital smart technologies. Rather than analyzing, for example, big data in terms of “information” systems and “information” technologies, we can now analyze the more embodied and choreographical aspects of what happens here and reflect on what Parviainen calls “the streams and traces of big data and their connections to the affective microchoreographies of users” (69). As users of smartphones and social media, for example, our human bodily movements (e.g., movements needed to make a “click” or running movements, perhaps one could also include emotions) are connected to movements of data in various ways, which include feedback loops. These choreographies are usually invisible to users, let alone that all (human and non-human) choreographers are known. This presents a problem for the responsible use of these technologies. Parviainen’s approach to data is not entirely new. A  decade earlier, Kozel already wrote on wearable technologies and data choreography, proposing a performative approach to wearables. She argued that “all of our devices invite a set of physical gestures” and already pointed to data choreographies, although at this point she talks about choreographing one’s own data and in a postmodern voice emphasized the playful aspect, rather than control, normativity, and power: Choreographing the flow of data involves being aware of what it is, who receives it, when and in what form, according to which rhythm, and whether of narrative or affective quality. Choreographing my data, whether my movement patterns, my voice, my scribbled thoughts, or my heart rate, is like saying I want to play with my data and yours, to flirt with them and with you. (Kozel 2007, 274) A macro perspective on choreography as proposed by Parviainen and as suggested by Kozel is helpful to bring in questions regarding control and power. But the emphasis on data as the object of choreography sometimes makes it seem as if it is no longer about concrete people and their bodies. It is not only data that are choreographed; the main point is that we and our bodies are choreographed through the technology and its data circulation. A more posthumanist view à la Latour should not obscure this. The point is, as Foucault already knew, that control is enacted upon our bodies (Kozel 2007, 306). The ethical problem concerns the control of people and their bodies; it’s not about data as such. But in spite of his work on the disciplining of bodies, Foucault did not make a choreographic turn and neither did, for instance, Deleuze in his interpretation of Foucault: while he mentions that power-relations move “in a field of forces, marking inflections, resistances, twists and turns, when one

Dancing With Technology 39 changes direction, or retraces one’s steps” (Deleuze 1988, 73), this dance of power relations remains too abstract and I miss the concrete choreography of bodily movement. How can Foucault be re-performed from the perspective of a dance and choreography metaphor? Let me unpack this and look at questions regarding ethics, power, and politics through the lens of dance and choreography. Again it will become clear that the metaphor is more than a metaphor: it makes sense to try to understand actual (changes and transformations of) movement with technology and choreographed by technology.

2.3. Ethical and Political Questions While it is impossible to draw out all the ethical and political implications of the approach that is being developed here, we can explore some routes in this direction. What may happen to our conceptualizations of ethics and politics of technology when we employ the metaphor of dance and choreography? First, we can ask what a dance-, choreography-, and movementoriented approach can do for thinking about ethics and the good life in relation to technology. In ancient and contemporary ethics the question regarding how to live one’s life is usually asked in terms of virtue, that is, in terms of personality, mental attitudes, and habits. Socrates, Aristotle, and many philosophers after them recommended self-reflection and selfcontrol: know yourself and master yourself, interpreted in the cognitive sense and in a dualist way, as control of the mind over body. But the kinetic, or rather “kin-ethic” aspect of the good life is overlooked. What does it mean to know and master yourself in terms of your bodily comportment and movements? What is the good kind of movements and of movement habits? What is the good way of moving about? What does human flourishing mean in terms of movement? Can virtue be related to particular bodily skills that involve movement? What does the wisdom and phronesis of movement mean? Do we attain eudaemonia if we choreograph our life well? What does that mean? And what is the role that technology does and can play in all this? What is good movement? (A modern question would be: what is right movement?) These questions are so new in the philosophical tradition that it is hard to find any direct answer in a classic philosophical text; perhaps this is so since the body and its movements were often not valued as much as reason/logos. A  performative and dance-inspired approach, by contrast, suggests a very different, non-dualist way of formulating the question regarding the good life. It is not a question about what the mind should do as opposed to the body, but what we, as embodied and reflective beings, should do in the sense of how we should move, what we should move, who we should move, how should we choreograph our life and that of others.

40  Dancing With Technology For the ethics of technology, this performative, movement-oriented turn means that we must ask: how should we move with technology, and should technology move us, or rather, how should it move us? Who should we move with technology? By whom or what are we moved? For example, are the ways we move around and move with other people (for example in urban space) by and when using a smartphone or a car good ways of movement? Does it lead to eudaemonia? What is the “good flow of life” (to borrow an expression from the ancient philosopher Zeno) with technology, in terms of movement and rhythm? What kind of dance do we want to create together, and what kind of technologies do we need for this? How should I move, and who or what has the power to move us and organize our movements? And is it acceptable that we are choreographed by a limited number of people located at high tech companies, without our having a chance to participate in the choreography? This question regarding power and control leads us to the next set of questions. Second, we can look at the politics of technology in terms of dance and movement. Who or what choreographs whom? Who has the power to choreograph? In the literature we find support for this kind of direction. I  already mentioned Tuuri, Parviainen, and Pirhonen (2017), who ask the question “Who controls who?” I suggest that this approach gives us a new tool to think about the politics of technology, this time focusing on movement. To develop this thought, we need to connect more directly to political philosophy and social theory. Moving away from the macrolevel theories about power, Michel Foucault already pointed to the micro-mechanisms of power: power that resides (one could add: moves) in social relations, in institutions, and even at the level of how the subject shapes itself. Foucault convincingly showed that power is not only a matter of macrolevel political and economic systems such as capitalism. He argued that power is omnipresent “because it is produced from one moment to the next” (Foucault 1998, 93) and that there are “micro-mechanisms of power” (Foucault 1980, 101), for example in prisons and hospitals. But his focus was on discourse and on the visual aspects of power: the Panopticon, a prison architecture and technology that enables the guards to see the prisoners but not vice versa, is all about who sees whom. Foucault was occupied with the language games of power and used the metaphor of vision for conceptualizing power relations. But we could extend Foucault’s framework from vision to the kinetic aspects of power and politics, to the micro-mechanisms of power conceptualized in terms of movement and dance, to the kinetic conditions of possibility for the exercise of power. And this can then be used for thinking about technology. A good example from the past may be the Taylorist assembly line, which choreographs the movements of the workers and the rhythm and routines of work, and in this way exercises power over them (and enables humans to exercise

Dancing With Technology 41 power over other humans). But the example of the smartphone gestures also shows how there are kinetic micro-mechanisms of power embedded in technological design, directing the movements of my fingers and hands. And the discussion about surveillance and movement shows that surveillance is not only a matter of seeing. For example, we may want to re-conceptualize privacy: instead of “not being seen” or “not being heard” by others (via the technology) it could also mean “not being moved and choreographed” by others via the technology. In light of the question regarding the good life, it may also be worthwhile to develop Foucault’s later work on care of the self in a more kinetic and choreographic direction. Foucault defines technologies of the self as a “matrix of practical reason” which enables individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (Foucault 1988, 18) Here the emphasis is not on the exercise of power by others but in self-constitution, self-transformation, and self-understanding: a “hermeneutics” of the self (19). For that project Foucault mobilizes Stoic ascesis, Epicurean exercises, and early Christian penance, including writing letters to friends and hard sporting activities. I propose to interpret such practices as performances and as involving bodily movement. Think about writing and sport. Epicurean gymnasia (37) and Stoic “mortification of the flesh” (37) show that care of the self also has a kinetic, performative dimension. In order to transform, the self has to be performed. This is clear in contemporary social media, which involves writing and other kinetic performances such as clicking that contribute to constructing the self. Technologies such as paper (consider historical diaries) or digital technologies provide a basis for such work on the self. Social media are literally technologies of the self. The idea that the self has to be performed is also present in another, related direction of inquiry provided by feminist theory: Butler (1988) is famous for her focus on performative acts, albeit her focus is mainly on discourse (see my next chapter which employs the theatre metaphor). But in terms of real bodily movement a very relevant article that looks at what we could call the micro aspects of power and the politics of movement is Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl” (1980). Young comments on the question whether there is a difference in the manner of throwing between men and women (or whether there are “feminine” styles), and, if so, what explains the difference. Commenting on Simone de Beauvoir’s view, she argues that such movements and identity are

42  Dancing With Technology socially and situationally constructed, rather than due to a mysterious female essence (138). Whatever the right answer may be, it is very interesting that Young presents the situatedness she argues for not as related to an abstract kind of identity (e.g., only expressed in philosophical text) but in relation to “the woman’s actual bodily movement and orientation to its surroundings and its world” (139). The paper is concerned with “the basic modalities of feminine body comportment, manner of moving, and relation in space” (139) and how these relate to the social. It raises questions about gender in a way that point to the gendered and socially constructed ways of movement of everyone. How do you and I typically move, and is this movement gendered? How does it relate to expectations and power structures in society? More generally, it raises the question if and how everyone’s movements are socially constructed, what the existential meaning is of our body, and if it is shaped by society. This is a very helpful perspective for developing a politics of technology understood as a politics of movement and choreography. Are our movements choreographed in a gendered way, how do these choreographies relate to societal power structures, and what is the role of technology in this? Of course it is also possible to understand the politics of movement in the sense of “movement with a political aim”, and in particular “choreography with a political aim”. Parviainen (2010) has argued that bodies have always been used as a political tool in activism. She analyzed what she calls “choreographies of resistance” (311). In demonstrations and performances, activists express their political ideas as gestures, postures, or kinaesthetic relations. Think about demonstrations: people use their bodies to march on the streets. But the point is not about symbolic representation, it is also and especially about movement and its impact on the social surroundings. Parviainen rightly sees choreography and dance as part of the social world, not restricted to a particular arts field (312). She defines choreography broadly as referring to “all activities and events in which movement appears as meaningful interactions and relations between various agents” (315). This focus on social choreography (and use of phenomenology) enables her to analyze what she calls the “kinaesthetic field” of protests, which has been neglected by political theorists. She thus takes seriously the “movement” part of “social movements”. Not only speech acts move or touch people; choreographies also do something with us. And for political purposes the choreographies can be carefully constructed or not. Such choreographies, one could interpret her text as claiming, are about both humans and non-humans. It crucially involves technologies, such as tanks, climbing gear, and all kinds of material-social environments. Furthermore, it is interesting that for Parviainen “movement” in social movement means both “inner” and “outer” movement, and so also emotions and not just physical movements. Understood broadly, then, what we could call political choreography is not only about moving

Dancing With Technology 43 people in the sense of moving bodies but also about affecting and touching them (emotionally), exerting emotional influence on them. One could say: it is about motion and emotion. Her use of the term “kinaesthetic fields”, borrowed from Husserl, is a way to contribute to the deconstruction of the inner/outer and experience/movement duality: Instead of focusing on ‘kinaesthetic experiences’ in the body, Husserl suggests that the kinaesthetic system should be analysed as whole, as ‘kinaesthetic fields’. Motion appears to us simultaneously in inner and outer space. Within our capabilities of moving and understanding movement, we are an inherent part of the moving world, moving and being moved. (Parviainen 2010, 319) By using this concept, we can describe at the same time the “political, emotional and social tensions” (321). For example, Parviainen describes how Greenpeace activists and “the Tank Man” each in their own way created their own choreography in response to dominant kinaesthetic fields (construction sites and tanks rolling in the avenue), used the vulnerability of their body for political purposes, and “had effects on witnesses by arousing strong emotions, encapsulating hopes and desires, constructing interests and even defining new agents on the political stage” (326). Another interesting example of choreography in a non-art context is the flash mob, analyzed by Parviainen and Pirhonen (2013). Here, too, the authors show how choreography is used to affect (literally) bodies. They argue that most of our movements are pre-choreographed by the environment, for example the urban environment, which we are a part of. But flash mobs, whether for commercial or political purposes (the authors talk about “kinaesthetic marketing”), disrupt the dominant choreographies and seduce or force passers-by to respond to the moving bodies. This kind of research makes us think again critically about how we move, for example in public spaces, and who controls our movements. It shows again the social aspect of movement and dance. And it makes us reflect again on the influence of technologies, infrastructures, and human-created environments on our kinaesthetic experience and existence.

2.4. Choreography, Philosophy, and Technology The metaphor of dance/choreography works in the context of what we do with technology (and what technology does with us) because choreography is a way of organizing movement, because our everyday lives are made up of movement (among other things), and because technology is not only a tool but also organizes us. Art and philosophical reflection upon art practices such as dance and choreography can help revealing

44  Dancing With Technology this kinetic aspect of technology—and of human lives. In Strange Tools, Alva Noë writes: Technologies organize our lives in ways that make it impossible to conceive of our lives in their absence; they make us what we are. Art, really, is an engagement with the ways our practices, techniques, and technologies organize us, and it is, finally, a way to understand our organization and, inevitably, to reorganize ourselves. The job of art, its true work, is philosophical. (Noë 2015, xiii) Choreographers, Noë writes, show us that dancing is not a special activity; we do it all the time. They show us the dancing aspect of our lives. The choreographer “puts dancing itself on display”; choreography “exhibits the place dancing has, or can have, in our lives” (Noë 2015, 13). While I disagree with Noë’s view that art and dance are not technological practices (xiii) and that technology is merely a precondition and not a contribution to art (Noë 2015, 98)—in my view, the arts are technological practices—his view that art operates at a meta-level just like philosophy does is helpful. We are already dancing—all of us—and technology choreographs us. Dance and choreography as art forms then perform a philosophical function, as they reflect on that dancing and that role of technology in our lives (16). Both choreography and philosophy are what Noë calls “level-2” practices: they display and investigate level-1 organized activities and practices. Dance itself is a way of doing philosophy of the moving body (43). The choreographical approach proposed by Parviainen and Kozel, but also Noë’s focus on organization, are (part of) such level-2 practices: they reveal us as moving and dancing beings and offer what I, influenced by Wittgenstein, have called a relational and holistic approach to what technology is and does (Coeckelbergh 2017). Noë gives the example of door handles, which presuppose the kind of bodies we have and entire ways of living, “a whole cultural and biological stage” (Noë 2015, 22) or what Wittgenstein calls a form of life (see also Coeckelbergh 2017). This approach to thinking about technology, then, implies that new technologies create new practices, new ways of doing things, new ways of life, and new ways of thinking. For example, writing shapes our speaking and thinking—whether as philosophers or artists. And revelations and reflection on how technology choreographs us and indeed choreography itself can indeed “loop back down”, as Noë puts it (Noë 2015, 31), to the activities and practices under investigation and change, reorganize, transform them. In this sense it is true that art and philosophy can change the world. Let us now turn to another set of performative embodied practices (to use a term both Kozel and Parviainen employ), which also teaches us a

Dancing With Technology 45 lot about who or what we are, about what we do with technology, and about what technology does with us: theatre.

Note 1. “Moving Perception and the Logos of Dance: Reflections on Dance, Embodiment, and Technology.” Invited talk delivered at Philosophy Institute, University of Stuttgart, 21 June 2012.

References Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bachrach, Asaf, Yann Fontbonne, Coline Joufflineau, and José Luis Ulloa. 2015. “Audience Entrainment During Live Contemporary Dance Performance: Physiological and Cognitive Measures.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9: 179. Accessed March  5, 2018. www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum. 2015.00179/full. Behrenshausen, Bryan G. 2007. “Toward a (Kin)Aesthetic of Video Gaming: The Case of Dance Dance Revolution.” Games and Culture 2 (4): 335–54. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–31. Coeckelbergh, Mark. 2017. Using Words and Things: Language and Philosophy of Technology. New York: Routledge. Crawford, Garry, and Jason Rutter. 2007. “Playing the Game: Performance in Digital Game Audiences.” In Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World, edited by J. Gray, C. Sandvoss and C. L. Harrington, 271–81. New York: New York University Press. Csíkszentmihályi, Mihaly. 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row. Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. Translated by Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dixon, Steve. 2007. Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theatre, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Dreyfus, Stuart, and Hubert Dreyfus. 1980. A Five-Stage Model of the Mental Activities Involved in Direct Skill Acquisition. Berkeley: University of California Operations Research Centre. www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location %E2%80%83=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA084551. Foster, Susan Leigh. 1997. “Dancing Bodies.” In Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, edited by J. C. Desmond. Durham: Duke University Press. Foster, Susan Leigh. 2011. Choreographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. Translated by Colin Gordon and Leo Marshall. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1988. Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. Edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. Foucault, Michel. 1998. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Penguin Books.

46  Dancing With Technology Fraleigh, Sondra Horton. 1987. Dance and the Lived Body. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Francksen, Kerry. 2014. “Taking Care of Bodies: Tracing Gestures Betwixt and Between Life-Digital Dancing.” Body, Space, Technology Journal 12 (1). Accessed March 3, 2018. http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol13/kerryfrancksen/ home.html. Gallagher, Shaun. 2005. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallagher, Shaun. 2009. “Philosophical Antecedents to Situated Cognition.” In Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, edited by Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede, 35–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. 2010. “Phenomenological Approaches to Self-Consciousness.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato. stanford.edu/entries/self-consciousness-phenomenological/. Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ihde, Don. 2002. Bodies in Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Klemola, Timo. 1991. “Dance and Embodiment.” Ballett International 14 (1): 71–80. Kozel, Susan. 2005. “Revealing Practices.” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 10 (4): 33–44. Kozel, Susan. 2007. Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2005. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. The Birth of Tragedy. In The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs and translated by Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Noë, Alva. 2015. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York: Hill and Wang. Parviainen, Jaana. 2002. “Bodily Knowledge: Epistemological Reflections on Dance.” Dance Research Journal 34 (1): 11–26. Parviainen, Jaana. 2010. “Choreographing Resistances: Spatial-Kinaesthetic Intelligence and Bodily Knowledge as Political Tools in Activist Work.” Mobilities 5 (3): 311–29. Parviainen, Jaana. & Pirhonen, Antti. 2013. Social Movements within Interfaces in Urban Environments: Flash Mobs as Kinaesthetic Marketing and Political Campaigns. Paper in RelCi workshop, 2 - 6 Sep 2013, Cape Town, South Africa. https://www.academia.edu/5506821/Parviainen_J._and_Pirhonen_A._2013._ Social_Movements_within_Interfaces_in_Urban_Environments_Flash_Mobs_ as_Kinaesthetic_Marketing_and_Political_Campaigns._Paper_in_RelCi_ workshop_2_-_6_Sep_2013_Cape_Town_South_Africa Parviainen, Jaana. 2016. “Quantified Bodies in the Checking Loop: Analyzing the Choreographies of Biomonitoring and Generating Big Data.” Human Technology 12 (1), 56–73. Penny, Simon. 2017. Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Dancing With Technology 47 Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, & Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Polanyi, Michael. 1966. The Tacit Dimension. New York: Doubleday & Company. Remshardt, Ralf. 2008. “Beyond Performance Studies: Mediated Performance and the Posthuman.” Culture, Language and Representation 6: 47–64. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2015. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Searle, John R. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press. Searle, John R. 2006. “Social Ontology.” Anthropological Theory 6 (1): 12–29. Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. 2015. The Phenomenology of Dance. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Thomas, Helen. 2003. The Body, Dance and Cultural Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tuuri, Kai, Jaana Parviainen, and Antti Pirhonen. 2017. “Who Controls Who? Embodied Control Within Human-Technology Choreographies.” Interacting with Computers 29 (4): 494–511. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thomson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2005. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Wallis, Mick, Sita Popat, and Joslin MacKinney. 2010. “Embodied Conversations: Performance and the Design of a Robotic Dancing Partner.” Design Studies 31: 99–117. Young, Iris Marion. 1980. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality.” Human Studies 3: 137–56.

3 Acting With Technology How Machines Act and Direct Us

3.1. Introduction In contrast to dance and music, theatre metaphors have already been used for some time in thinking about technology, particularly in STS. Bruno Latour is a prominent name in this area: consider actor-network theory and his work with Madeleine Akrich on the semiotics of human/ non-human assemblies (Akrich and Latour 1992). In contemporary philosophy of technology this work has been picked up by Peter-Paul Verbeek in order to argue that technology also has agency and mediates our actions (Verbeek 2005). Andrew Pickering’s performance-oriented approach (Pickering 1995, 2013) can also be interpreted as referring to theatre, although as noted in the previous chapter his “dance of agency” concept also has affinities with the metaphor of dance, of course. But in the social sciences more broadly the metaphor has a longer history. An important milestone in sociology is Ervin Goffman’s work The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), which uses the metaphor of theatre to understand the social life. In anthropology Victor Turner (1986) and Richard Schechner (e.g., 1985, 1988) are known for addressing theatre, although in contrast to Latour’s use of the theatre metaphor their work is mainly anthropology of performance and theatre. In feminism and gender studies, Judith Butler’s argument about “performative acts” and gender constitution (Butler 1988)—already mentioned in the previous chapter—is well known. And often theatre also relies on language and narrative. Here the work of John Austin (1962) and John Searle (1975) on speech acts was pioneering, next to Searle’s work on the construction of social reality by means of language use (Searle 1995, 2006). For narrative theory, Paul Ricoeur is a landmark name, in particular his work on Time and Narrative (1983; see also already 1980). I will soon review these theories in more detail. Yet, as in the previous chapter, I am not interested in the theories as such, but rather in using them to better understand what we do with technology. And like the previous chapter, my emphasis will be on what technologies do with us. What does it mean to say not only that we act with technology but also

Acting With Technology 49 that technology acts? And are we the directors of our acts and plays, or is technology increasingly directing us? While some of these questions may sound familiar to philosophers of technology, they often use the theatre metaphor without explicit and systematic reflection on the metaphor and its application to technology. This chapter aims to make full use of the metaphor and reveal and discuss further implications for thinking about (the social life with) technology. Moreover, in Verbeek’s use of the metaphor, the social aspect, inherent in the metaphor, often vanishes from the stage. Therefore, instead of jumping to thinking about technology, I propose to start with theory about theatre and theory about the social that uses theatre and performance metaphors. Then I  will discuss what this implies for thinking about technology, responding to work in STS and philosophy of technology, but also going beyond it by means of a more systematic unpacking of the metaphor. This will give us a broader framework, i.e., a broader ­metaphorical-conceptual playing field, than the one provided by Latour and Verbeek. Moreover, their approaches turn out to be limited to one particular kind of application of the metaphor: the idea that technology acts. But we also act with technology and technology can also be a (co-)director and script writer, not only an actor. Moreover, I will argue that both the language-oriented theatre theory and the artefact-oriented theory about technology miss the dimension of the moving body, which is always part of theatre and indeed of social life with technology. To show the hermeneutic value of this approach, I will give examples from the areas of social media and gaming (acting with technology) and robotics and AI (technology acts, not only to shape our actions as co-actors, say, acting alongside humans, but also instead of humans, taking over particular characters and roles), and explore the idea of software as a way of organizing behaviour (technology directs). The theatre metaphor will also point us to the normative dimension of what technology does with us, that is, of living “under” technologies. In order to unpack the theatre metaphor and identify some philosophical issues that could be useful for thinking about technology, let us first take a brief look at what philosophers have said about theatre.

3.2. Philosophy of Theatre and Theatre Theory: A Very Brief Encounter As Stern (2014) shows in his helpful introduction to philosophy of theatre, it is not easy to define theatre. Theatre has a lot in common with other performing arts. Usually there is a place where it happens, there are human performers, and there is an audience; these are all typical “elements” (Stern 2014, 1–2)—although all these are questioned today, for example, when the play happens outside the classic theatre building, when robots “perform”, or when the audience participates in the

50  Acting With Technology performance. The definition may also ignore non-Western forms of theatre. And, for example, puppet theatre or mime is also called theatre. Sometimes theatre is based on text, but not always, as in improvisation theatre (compare: improvised music that does not use a score). What distinguishes theatre in the “narrow sense” (and perhaps: Western sense) from dance and music is the emphasis on the spoken word (8). And like questions in ontology of music (see the next chapter), there is also discussion about the relationship between text and performance: is there something like a theatre work of which the performances are mere instances, or is what counts the performance and is text less important, rendering theatre more “akin to music and dance” (13)? My emphasis in this chapter is on theatre as performance, but in order to develop the metaphorical toolkit we need to go into the specific features of theatre. Two central themes in philosophy of theatre have always been imitation and illusion. This leads us straight into philosophy and in particular into the issue regarding the relation between philosophy and theatre. Traditionally, philosophy has not been very friendly to theatre and the performing arts: it was usually supposed to be neither good nor true. In the Republic, Plato famously argues against most forms of poetry, including most forms of theatre. In Book II he writes that the poets write stories full of “the greatest falsehood” (Plato 1997, 377e) and do not represent the gods as they are (379a). Such poetry, he argues, should not be used in the education of the young and the guardians (385c). Poetry is a kind of imitation and is capable of imitating anything and anyone, including “bad men” and “mad people” (395e–396a). This should be avoided as it does not contribute to shaping the good character of the guardians—or anyone else for that matter. We can infer that theatre, as a form of poetry (for the Greeks poetry was understood as performed), is not to be recommended to guardians of the city. But Plato opposes theatre not only to the good but also to truth. Theatre is only about appearances and illusion. The clearest illustration of this point of view is the famous cave allegory in Book VII. Here Plato uses a theatre and performance metaphor: a kind of puppet theatre, and almost what we now might call cinema. The prisoners in the cave can only see the projected shadows of objects, with a wall functioning as a “screen in front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets” (514b). They believe that the shadows are the truth, whereas the truth is elsewhere, outside the cave where the sun shines. Theatre, then, is only a place for appearances, not for truth. Theatre is about deception and falsehood. In Book X, Plato further argues that poetry is in fact “far removed from the truth” (598b) since it is only an image of an image: the objects we create are already an imitation of nature, and hence theatre—for example the tragic poets—is not more than an imitation of an imitation. It is not serious, it is not true, and therefore it should be banned from the city. Or more precisely, most of it, except the poetry that can contribute

Acting With Technology 51 to the good character of people: “hymns to the gods and eulogies to good people are the only poetry we can admit into our city” (607a). In the last chapter, we will see that Plato’s view of the relation between theatre and philosophy is more complex. Consider for example his very use of the theatre metaphor and indeed the dialogue form of his texts, which is a theatrical device. Nietzsche has already pointed out that Plato condemned tragedy but at the same time, as an (ex-)poet, created Platonic dialogue “hovering somewhere between narrative, lyric poetry and drama” (Nietzsche 1993, 68–69), in other words, the novel. Moreover, several philosophers including Derrida (1995) have commented on the meaning of chora (χώρα) as used in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus: a somewhat mysterious notion sometimes translated as “receptacle”, “space”, “mother”, or “earth”, which plays a role in Plato’s account of the universe as a space between the world of being and the world of becoming and which might be etymologically linked to (the ground or space for) ancient Greek theatre and dance. But generally speaking Plato’s view of poetry and theatre as it emerges from the Republic is rather negative and illustrates how and why many Western philosophers have either completely ignored or rejected theatre and performance. Like Plato, Aristotle also thought that poetry is all about imitation, but he had a more sympathetic view of theatre and taught about the elements of theatre, particularly tragedy. In the Poetics, he argues that tragedy is a mode of imitation (Aristotle 1984, 1447a15) and that this kind of arts imitate in the sense that they represent actions, with agents being either good or bad (1448a1). Tragedy is “the art [of] imitating by means of action on the stage” (1459a15). The action is represented in the plot, which is “the combination of the incidents, or things done in the story”, and character is about the qualities we ascribe to the agents (1450a5–6). Aristotle emphasizes that imitation is something natural (1448b6) and that tragedy began in improvisations (1449a10). But as staged drama, tragedy arouses pity and fear in the spectator. The emotions can be aroused by the spectacle but also “by the very structure and incidents of the play” (1453b1), which according to him is the better way to do it. This pity and fear may lead to the “catharsis of such emotions” (1449b28). What Aristotle means by this catharsis or “purification” of emotions remains unexplained and has always been subject to much discussion. Does it mean “purging” in the sense of getting rid of an emotion? But where do these emotions come from: are they aroused by the theatre or does the spectator have them before going to the theatre? Or does catharsis refer to some kind of religious “purification”? But what does this mean? Getting “clearer” about one’s emotions? (For more discussion, see Stern (2014, 151–55).) But it is clear that Aristotle recommends theatre as a way to deal with our emotions and—if we take into account his views on ethics—possibly also a way to become more virtuous. And, in contrast to Plato, Aristotle thinks that poetry is

52  Acting With Technology philosophical and serious since it is about things that might be and is hence even “of graver import than history” (1451b5–6). Note that Aristotle also wrote about language and its effects, in the Rhetoric and the Poetics. I  will say more about language below, since it is also an important element in (Western) theatre. Seen in the light of the previous chapter, however, the remarkably absent character in these philosophical narratives and treaties about theatre so far is the human body and its movements. It seems as if the actors considered by Plato and Aristotle are disembodied agents, imitating actions and using words but apparently having no fleshy and moving body to do so. The moving body may well be assumed in these dialogues and texts; but it is not staged. Today, performance theory remedies this problem. But the gap between theatre and other forms of performance such as dance and music is still often institutionally maintained: both in theory and in the world of the arts there are separate discourses and stages. Note also that it is not clear at all what “imitation” and “illusion” are and mean in theatre, and whether they amount to deception. For example, whereas Plato thought that theatre imitates the appearances of daily life, Aristotle thought that theatre can also imitate things that do not exist or did not happen (Stern 2014, 34). And as Stern helpfully shows, “illusion” can mean many different things and does not necessarily imply deception. For example, it can mean the illusions of the stage magician, which are meant to deceive people and let them really believe that something did (not) happen (and such illusions happen sometimes in the t­heatre—see also later in this book), but it can also mean the “spell” of the theatre (63), which does not necessarily involve deception: when asked whether they were deceived, spectators would say that they do (did?) not really believe that the events on the stage took place. The character is not really mistaken for the actor and vice versa. But I  used a question mark for “did” since it is unclear if this is also true during the performance when one is immersed in it. It is difficult to tell what the spectator believes (64). On the one hand, there seems to be some deception possible since people sometimes transfer qualities from the character on stage to the actor (61–62), but, on the other hand, the fact that spectators actively engage with the play and seem to give their consent to being part of the illusion suggests “that the spectator is not deceived” (65). There are more views about theatre in the history of philosophy, of course. Many are distrustful of theatre; only few are positive. For example, Nietzsche’s love of tragedy found expression in The Birth of Tragedy. Although he is sometimes said to be anti-theatre, he was one of the only major modern philosophers who took theatre seriously and who disagreed with Plato that theatre is not about truth. Nietzsche had also a more positive view of the body, imagining the origin of the tragic chorus in “those centuries when the Greek body flourished” (Nietzsche 1993, 7). Against Platonism, Christianity, and the romantic German theatre of this

Acting With Technology 53 day, he tried to imagine a music and a theatre that is not longing for a truth behind appearances and that is not romantic but what he calls “Dionysiac” (10). Such a music and theatre would not be opposed to life, art, and the body. In the Dionysian festivals, he imagined, there would have been “an extravagant lack of sexual discipline” and a “mixture of lust and cruelty” (19). The Apollonian narrative order that Aristotle (and below: Ricoeur) describes may well be a feature of staged tragedy of late ancient Greek times and today. Nietzsche suggests that its origin is Dionysian, that is, far more chaotic and bodily and, indeed, far more tragic. He argued that Plato and Aristotle, and later modern theatre and philosophy, forgot this tragic element and also the music that was part of the Dionysian rituals. Song and dance were ignored in favour of plot and character (Stern 2014, 69); if Nietzsche is anti-theatre at all, it is against such a theatre that he argued, not against theatre in general. He also argued that, while theatre is also about illusion, it can also show truth: tragedy teaches us something about life. Tragedy shows the Schopenhauerian truth that life is full of suffering and that in reality we are not individuals but one being. But to protect people from this inconvenient truth, it is clothed in Apollonian illusion (they think it only happens to others). Since it happens in theatre, this truth is bearable (Stern 2014, 69). As in Plato, here views about the theatre are firmly connected to metaphysical views and other philosophical views, and in such a way that shows a clear interest in theatre. There are also philosophers who used theatre metaphors without reflecting too much on the metaphor they were using, such as Hume, who in his Treatise of Human Nature compared the mind to a theatre: “The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance” (Hume 2000, 165). The metaphor continues to play a role in philosophy of mind today. Consider, for example, Dennett’s rejection of the “Cartesian theatre”. But these are not views about theatre and do little to fully use, let alone stretch, the metaphor. This overview of philosophical views of theatre is of course (too) brief. (For a more detailed and comprehensive overview see, for example, Stern 2014.) Nevertheless, there are already a few lessons to learn from this brief encounter with ancient philosophy of theatre for thinking about technology. First, Plato’s rejection of theatre explains why the theatre metaphor has always been met with suspicion by philosophers, and hence why its application in philosophy of technology is not obvious. For example, in discussions about new technology there are a lot of worries about deception and about leaving reality, which turn out to be Platonic worries. In discussions about ethics of robots and ethics of games Plato seems still very much alive. To use the theatre metaphor in describing how we live with technology, then, might be seen as siding with the enemies of good and truth.

54  Acting With Technology Second, Aristotle and Nietzsche suggest that, once we leave our Platonic hesitations behind, there may be a lot to be learned, not only about theatre but also about human life itself. Does life itself also have a dramatic, sometimes tragic structure? Does it also have a plot with events and characters? Philosophers such as Ricoeur and MacIntyre, who, to use Nietzsche’s words, focused on the Apollonian elements of the theatre, suggest that there is a relation between narrative and life. Ricoeur’s narrative theory (Ricoeur 1983), for example, was inspired by Aristotle and uses the concepts of mimesis and plot. It is an important contribution to hermeneutics. But is theory about narrative structure only relevant to texts and theatre or is it also helpful to understand how we live? And what does all this mean for thinking about technology? In the remainder of this chapter I hope to show that, even if we retain some sense of theatre as imitation, it is worth exploring what it means to use theatre as a metaphor for (the social) life, including living with technologies and perhaps being lived by technologies. And, as this brief exploration of ancient views on theatre already shows, using the metaphor of the theatre, that is, crossing the theatre/life border, also helps us to introduce some perennial philosophical questions regarding imitation and representation, truth, etc., into discussions about technology. Let us first consider some theory that uses the metaphor of theatre for understanding the social life, including Ricoeur’s work but also work from sociology, analytic philosophy, and feminism. Then I will extend the metaphorical bridge to thinking about technology.

3.3. The Social as Theatre Can we understand the social life by using the metaphor of theatre? Life in general has often been compared to theatre. Shakespeare famously wrote in As You Like It: All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts Or, in The Merchant of Venice: I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano; A stage where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one. But what does the metaphor deliver for thinking about the social life? Let me first consider two connections between theatre and the social that focus on language—language as narrative structure and language as the

Acting With Technology 55 use of words (with the grammatical structure of declaration)—but do not go all the way to understanding everyday life by means of the theatre metaphor. Then I will turn to work in sociology and gender studies, which makes a closer connection. Ricoeur: From Greek Theatre to Narrative Theory Ricoeur’s narrative theory is influenced by Aristotle (and by Augustine, in particular his interest in temporality), and is thus indirectly indebted to thinking about the theatre. What is narrative? For Ricoeur, narrative is very much linked to the social. In contrast to scientific time, it represents social and public time; it is the time of “being-with-others” (Ricoeur 1980, 188). It is human time. It is also crucial for the making of meaning. What we do when we narrate is that we create a plot: “the intelligible whole that governs a succession of events in any story” (171). By organizing otherwise unrelated events into a plot, we thus create meaning, make sense. Action and events become meaningful through our use of language, including narrative. Our experience is always mediated by narrative and, more generally, by the use of language. But narrative is not the action; it is its imitation. In the first volume of Time and Narrative (1983), Ricoeur uses Aristotle to argue that the plot is the imitation (mimesis) of action (Ricoeur 1983, xi) and that it entails the organization of events in a plot. Developing Aristotle’s writings on tragedy in the Poetics, Ricoeur argues that in narrative there is mimesis in three senses and in the following order: first, a reference to familiar pre-understanding, then poetic composition, and finally a reconfiguration of the pre-­understood order of action (xi). Narrative is thus imitation, but Ricoeur shows that it is also connected to real life and experience in that it refers to our pre-understanding and transforms lived experience and practice. For example, tragedy, that specific form of poetry and theatre Aristotle wrote about, has the capacity to configure characters and events into a meaningful whole (emplotment) and this transforms our understanding. Or, more precisely: there is a chronology of events, but there is also a meaningful a-chronological whole: in the end there is a resolution and we see the narrative as a meaningful whole; we see that the story makes sense. This then helps us to better understand the social world, which closes the hermeneutic circle. Moreover, to act is always to act with others (55). The narrative process is always social. Ricoeur’s view thus supports the idea that there is a link between theatre and everyday life: theatre is also social, and as narrative it has the capacity to reconfigure our lived time and experience. Narrative, then, is not only something that happens in the theatre; it is a crucial part of the public life and meaningful existence. It does not imitate the social in the sense of “representing” or “copying” the social; through mimesis in the Aristotelian and Ricoeurian sense, it actually (re)configures it. This closes the hermeneutic circle.

56  Acting With Technology Thus, while Ricoeur still separates narrative and the social, both are connected since narrative gives meaning to the social life and transforms it. Theatre can be seen as one form narrative takes and as a transformative imitation. Austin and Searle: Speech Acts Another way to connect theatre with the social—again via thinking about language—is to interpret and use Austin and Searle. Here the focus is not on narrative but on the use of words, in particular the performative use of words, although it is also about the structure or grammar of language. If one were to make a link to Aristotle here, it would be the Rhetoric rather than the Poetics. Moreover, in contrast to Ricoeur, here the social world is also made by language, but in a far more direct and simpler, nonhermeneutic way. And important for the purpose of this chapter: their thinking also draws on theatre, albeit implicitly. As Butler has remarked, philosophers like Searle “do have a discourse of ‘acts’ that maintains associative semantic meanings with theories of performance and acting”, although they “rarely think about acting in the theatrical sense” (Butler 1988, 519), that is, they do not explicitly reflect on the theatre metaphor they are using. But we can do better. Austin and Searle developed speech-act theory, which holds that speech acts do not just represent the world but also create social reality. We “do things with words”, as Austin said (Austin 1962), and this includes what Searle called creating “social facts”. According to Searle, we collectively give a certain status to a person or object. For example, we collectively give a function to money (Searle 2006, 17). This happens by means of agreement and declaration: we declare that a particular object or person has a specific status. Now one could interpret this view as involving a theatre/performance metaphor. Declaration can be understood as a performative act, in particular a speech-act that has the grammatical form of a declaration or “status function” (18). The thought experiment Searle stages involves a kind of “original position” (to use a Rawlsian term) in which there is an original performance or ritual, an original speech-act by the collective: a collective declaration that gives a status to an object or person. Afterwards the object (e.g., money) or person then performs that function in society. Thus, according to this interpretation there is a link between theatre and everyday social life in the sense that the latter must be supposed to be shaped by performative use of language, including, first, a kind of original position or one might say a “declaration theatre” in which agreement on a specific function takes the form of the speechact of declaration and, second, performances (by humans and objects) that maintain this function and hence uphold the social institution. Coming from very different traditions, these theories thus make links between, on the one hand, theatre and performance (theatre, text, and

Acting With Technology 57 language use) and, on the other hand, the social. However, in Ricoeur and in Searle there is still a significant gap between both. Yet it is also possible to create more direct bridges between the two and understand and interpret the social as performance and theatre. One could attempt to make full use of the theatre metaphor and harvest more of its hermeneutic power in order to better understand the social. Some of this work has been done in sociology and anthropology, by authors such as Goffman, Turner, and Schechner. Goffman, Turner, and Schechner: Sociological and Anthropological Uses of the Theatre Metaphor In his seminal The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), Erving Goffman interpreted everyday social life as staged performance and (theatre) play. When we appear before others, he argues, we wish to control the impression the other receives. This presenting ourselves and our activities before others is a matter of performance; it is a “dramaturgical” problem (Goffman 1956, 8). Performance and theatre, then, should be studied by sociologists, since performance occurs “everywhere in social life” (8). We present ourselves before others, in a particular “setting” with furniture, decor, and all kinds of other background items (13). Social relationships arise when there are routines. The same part is played to the same audiences on different occasions (8–9). People create an appearance that communicates their social status to others. This appearance or “front” is usually not new but is already given in society; it is already connected to a role. Actors take up established social roles for which “a particular front has already been established for it” (17). People play different roles, as in a professional environment there is a different role to be played than at home. One can invest more in one role or one routine than in others. And when one performs, one hides one’s variable “moods and energies that change from one moment to the next” and rather tries to “give a perfectly homogeneous performance at every appointed time” (36). Some people are better performers than others. Some performers delude their audiences. And in economic services, Goffman observes, often the stress is on performance rather than the quality of the product, since “poor quality can be concealed but not slow service” (28). More generally, he notes that there is a tendency to focus on performance and communication rather than the work-task (43). Thus, Goffman has a descriptive view—he re-describes the social life in terms of theatre—but also a normative view: we focus too much on appearance and performance. The latter is the Platonic dimension of the book. But let us stick to his (re-)description. People are also co-performers, in the sense that there are always other performers at work but also that we often perform together with others. Goffman uses the term “team”: people stage similar or dissimilar

58  Acting With Technology performances “which fit together into a whole”, creating “an emergent team impression” (49). When one member makes a mistake, the person is not punished until the audience is no longer present (55). Team members will be selected if they “can be trusted to perform properly” (56). Audiences are not entirely passive but present their own team-performances (58), even if they are not in face-to-face contact (106). Think about clapping, for example: this is a performance by the audience. Interestingly, while Goffman distinguishes between “our all-too-human selves and our socialized selves” (3) and, as said, at times still suggests a Platonic way of thinking, when it comes to the social life, he does not make a sharp difference between performance and reality. Instead, he seems to adopt a performative view of reality. Giving the example of a wedding party, he writes: To stay in one’s room away from the place where the party is given, or away from where the practitioner attends to his client, is to stay away from where reality is being performed. The world, in truth, is a wedding. (Goffman 1956, 23) That being said, there is what he calls backstage and frontstage. Some things cannot be treated openly (42), some parts of the cooperation that makes possible the performance may be concealed (64), and each team has their secrets (87). And one may need a break from frontstage performance. Backstage, the actor can “take his jacket off, loosen his tie, keep a bottle of liquor handy” (77), etc.; one needs relaxation (82). Behaviour and language may differ considerably. For example, backstage language may include first-naming, informal dress, sloppy posture, shouting, and so on, whereas frontstage behaviour and language will tend to avoid this (78). Backstage one can also change between performances, getting ready for taking on another personal front and role (84). And one can share experiences and secrets. For example, colleagues may not be teammates, but generally “present the same routine to the same kind of audience” and can share some things that they hide for the audiences (102); solidarity can develop. Access to backstage is controlled in order to prevent the audience from seeing it (152). Goffman also notes that there can always be performance disruption: “unmeant gestures, inopportune intrusions, faux pas, and scenes” (134). Performance requires discipline. Luckily, if something goes wrong, the audience may protect the maintenance of a show “by exercising tact or protective practices on behalf of the performers” (149). Again one could say that the audience co-performs. And then last but not least there is the aspect of direction: individuals may attempt to direct the activity of others “by means for example, of enlightenment, persuasion, exchange, manipulation, authority,

Acting With Technology 59 threat, punishment, or coercion” (154). But even if someone “has” formal power, power needs to be performed: “Power of any kind must be clothed in effective means of displaying it, and it will have different effects depending upon how it is dramatized” (154). Even physical coercion, according to Goffman, is often “a means of communication, not merely a means of action” (155). This emphasis on performance does not imply that there are no moral standards, but rather that “qua performers, individuals are concerned not with the moral issue of realizing these standards, but with the amoral issue of engineering a convincing impression that these standards are being realized.  .  .  . As performers we are merchants of morality” and “the very obligation and profitability of appearing always in a steady moral light, of being a socialized character, forces us to be the sort of person who is practiced in the ways of the stage” (162). Thus, we can infer that as social beings, we are busy with putting on a moral appearance, or rather, a moral performance. To conclude, according to Goffman, as social and socialized beings, we are always performing in the sense that we are always playing a role. As Schechner summarizes his view: By means of roles people enacted their personal and social realities on a day-to-day basis. To do this, they deployed socio-theatrical conventions (or “routines”) even as they devised personae (sometimes consciously, mostly without fully being cognizant of what was happening) adapted to particular circumstances. (Schechner 1988, x) And we could add: people also enact and perform morality. In response to Goffman, however, one could point out that there are also differences between theatre and social life. First, while from a social scientist, that is, observatory third-person perspective it may well be true that we all perform, from a first-person perspective we believe that we really are the character, whereas in the theatre the actors (and the audience) know that they are not the character. As Sartre—who was also a playwright and did have to say a lot about theatre as philosopher— argued, “Kean is not Hamlet, and he knows it and knows that we know it” (Sartre 1976, 160); see also Levy 2017). For example, when someone performs as a medical doctor, both the doctor and the patient really believe that she is a doctor. Consider also again the discussion about illusion in theatre: the social life seems not to involve the “spell” of the theatre and no illusion in the sense that the doctor really is the doctor. Nevertheless, one could stress with Goffman that the roles (e.g., doctor and patient) still need to be performed and that it is still a role different from other roles the person might have (e.g., friend, mother, partner, etc.). And perhaps there is some kind of spell in play in the social life. For

60  Acting With Technology example, when patients see the doctor in a very different context, when she is not playing her role (e.g., when they see her in a bar or she posts about her holidays on social media), something of the “spell” connected to the professional performative role and context may be gone. Second, whereas in conventional theatre there is a sharp distinction between actors and audience, in social life we are both actors and audience: audience of the acts of others. Hence social life is perhaps more comparable to participatory and interactive forms of theatre, where the distinction actors/audience is blurred. Note that we are also audience of our own acts, but this is similar to actors in the theatre. This is also true for moral performances: we are not only watched by others, we also watch ourselves, i.e., our own behaviour. In cultural anthropology, there is also work on theatre and performance, although it is often anthropology of theatre, not so much use of the theatre metaphor to understand social and cultural life. For example, Victor Turner’s The Anthropology of Performance (1986) analyzes some situations and rituals in terms of their dramatic character, especially those he characterizes as crises in social interaction. But he does not go as far as Goffman, who sees all social interaction as staged. Richard Schechner, one of the founders of performance studies who was influenced by Goffman and Turner, turned things around: he tried to understand theatre by using anthropological concepts. Rites should be understood performatively, but the performing arts should also be brought “in active relation to social life, ritual, play, games, sports, and other popular entertainments” (Schechner 1988, xi). An excellent example of a meeting point between theatre and ritual are of course the Dionysian rituals/theatre, very important in the (Western) history of theatre and the history of philosophy (see Nietzsche). According to Schechner, such rituals share characteristics with theatre, sports, games, and play. He argues that they share the following qualities: “1) a special ordering of time; 2) a special value attached to objects; 3) non-productivity in terms of goods; 4) rules. Often special places—non-ordinary places—are set aside or constructed to perform these activities in” (Schechner 1988, 8). For example, ritual separates itself from clock time and productive work. Theatre also does this. It also takes place in specific performance spaces. This approach thus gave a new, broader interpretation of theatre. But Schechner, too, focused only on a limited range of (ritualistic) activities, not on the social life as a whole. There is also performance in professional contexts and in all kinds of spaces. Yet even though they did not go as far as Goffman, these authors still contributed to giving performance and theatre a more inclusive meaning. Schechner writes: Theater is only one node on a continuum that reaches from the ritualizations of animals (including humans) through performances in everyday life—greetings, displays of emotion, family scenes, professional

Acting With Technology 61 roles, and so on—through to play, sports, theater, dance, ceremonies, rites, and performances of great magnitude. (Schechner 1988, xvii) This broad interpretation of theatre, which continues its life in contemporary performance studies, makes it easier for us today to use the metaphor of theatre to describe social life. Social life is full of performance and theatre, in the sense that people play roles and enact various characters in different settings and spaces, and even do moral performances. And some performances take the form of ritual. Butler: Performing Our (Gender) Identities Another interesting source for understanding social life through use of the theatre metaphor can be found in feminist and gender studies literature, in particular in Judith Butler’s famous essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” (1988), also from the 1980s. Against naturalist and essentialist accounts of gender, Butler argues that our social identity is always a performed identity. According to her, gender is not something stable or essential but rather is always enacted. It requires the “stylized repetition of acts” (Butler 1988, 519). Identity, including gender identity, is constructed in the sense that is performed. It is “a performative accomplishment” (520). That identity then becomes “a compelling illusion” (520) that is socially sanctioned: those who “fail to do their gender right” are punished (522). Gender is an act; we “do” our gender, and we do so within the context of cultural norms, for example norms that favour heterosexuality (525). Butler thus straightforwardly uses theatre metaphors and explicitly refers to the theatre: “the acts by which gender is constituted bear similarities to performative acts within theatrical contexts” (521). In her case, the metaphor helps her to go beyond the methodological individualism of classic phenomenology. Theatre is social and political. There are already scripts. At the same time, it requires individual actors to actualize and enact the script. Moreover, it requires repeated performance. Interestingly, here Butler quotes Turner: this is a case of ritual social drama. And contra Goffman, she argues that this is not only about outward role playing; through the acting, gender also becomes psychological interiority (528). People believe in (their) gender as if it was an essence. Thus, according to Butler, there is not first an interior gender, which is then expressed in performance. Instead, gender is constituted through the performance, including the psychological illusion of its essence. The gestures and the body express “nothing” (530); one could say that they create something. And if gender is about performance, this conception gives room for improvisation (531). People can try, play, explore. Although there is social pressure, their gender and identity are not fixed.

62  Acting With Technology Butler thus effectively uses performance and theatre metaphors to perform a philosophical operation that moves away from essentialist, expressivist, and individualist accounts of gender and identity. This once again brings theatre and the social life closer together. However, I  wonder if the metaphor has been fully used and developed. Many of the accounts discussed so far focus on language or role play. But where are the body and bodily movement? Butler mentions “bodily gestures” (Butler 1988, 519); the acts through which gender is constituted are corporeal acts and “one does one’s body” (521). This remark is important, since it makes a link between performance and the body, which effectively makes a switch from the body as thing/object to the body as performance. But there are no phenomenological descriptions and there is not much to be found on movement. Generally, in the texts presented so far, the bodily and kinetic aspect is absent from their approaches to theatre. This bodily and kinetic aspect was better represented, of course, in the theory on dance we reviewed and used in the previous chapter. But there is no reason to limit accounts of bodily movement to the area of dance: theatre, too—and hence also the social theatre—is not only a matter of role play but also of bodily movement. Both dance and theatre, considered as practices and performances rather than as texts or other objects, have a kinetic (and indeed role playing) aspect. The social life is a matter of what role we play and what identity we enact, but it is also a matter of how we move. The “front” that Goffman talks about, the appearance we present to others, is not only a matter of discourse; it is also a matter of how we move. With regard to gender, for example, think again about Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl”: social life, including gender understood as social interaction and social identity, is about the words we use, about the roles we play, and about the narrative(s) we play out and constitute with our performances, but it is also about the (micro-)movements we all make. Moreover, what is certainly missing so far is materiality and technology. Goffman mentions the stage and artefacts used on stage such as furniture. But there is no systematic account of the role of technology in the theatre and the social life, let alone a metaphorical bridge to understanding our relation to technology. For this purpose, we turn to some authors in STS and philosophy of technology that have made use of the theatre metaphor to say something about technology, albeit usually without being very upfront and self-reflective about the use of that metaphor.

3.4. Using the Metaphor of Theatre for Thinking About Technology as a Social Practice I just took a detour, since it was not about technology but about theatre, but it was meant to be a productive detour. To think about technology through the metaphor of the theatre is very much in the spirit

Acting With Technology 63 of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, which recommends taking a detour through language, for example, through metaphor. According to Ricoeur, metaphor plays a crucial role in the creation of (new) meaning and helps us to better understand reality. As Kaplan explains, for Ricoeur it is a form of creative discourse that enables us to learn something about reality and in the end transform ourselves and even reveal new possibilities of existence (Kaplan 2003, 48). Indeed, in The Rule of Metaphor Ricoeur argues that metaphor has the power to “redescribe reality” (Ricoeur 2003, 5), similar to poetic discourse (282). This is the power of the hermeneutics of metaphor. Of course it is a challenge to do it well. To metaphorize well, according to Aristotle and Ricoeur, is to perceive the similar in dissimilars. In this kind of semantic innovation and imagination understood as a “seeing as”, as Ricoeur calls it, inspired by Wittgenstein, there is always “a tension between identity and difference”. (Ricoeur 2003, 4) So what does it mean to compare technology to theatre? What are the similarities? What is “seeing technology as theatre”? Or better, in order to move beyond the seeing metaphor: how can we perform (the concept of) technology as theatre? What can be gained by using the metaphor? Technology as Theatre: Separate World Versus Same World In analogy to the metaphysics of the theatre we can have at least two different approaches to technology. First, technology can be seen as belonging to a separate world, just as for Plato, Aristotle, Ricoeur, and indeed for most philosophers, theatre belongs to a separate world. The question is then whether that other world is entirely separate and an illusion, if it is problematic, and if it is a case of deception and is opposed to the truth, as Plato argued, or if there is in fact a closer relation between the two worlds and if there is at least the potential of a productive and ethically beneficial transfer, perhaps even a transformation of meaning and possibilities of existence, as in Aristotle and Ricoeur (and, one could say, in Nietzsche). Consider discussions about the internet, social media, or violent computer games: often the “digital world” or the “virtual” world of games is presented as another, illusory world. That world is then contrasted with the real world: the offline world, the world outside the game. Or a distinction is made between the world of, say, Facebook, and the “real” world. One can also consider discussions about care robots and other socalled social robots: the robots are seen as deceiving their users. Hence gamers and users of robots (and earlier TV audiences) are seen in the role of the prisoners in Plato’s cave. Chained to the technology, they are victims of deception. They live in the world of appearances. The philosopher, in the role of ethicist of technology, then takes upon herself the task to liberate them, or at least to call for a liberation. The illusion created by the technology theatre is here seen as leading to deception, as opposed to the truth.

64  Acting With Technology If one takes a more Aristotelian approach, however, one may also point to potential benefits coming from the world of technology. For example, if gaming can really lead to real violence, then the opposite is also possible: there can be games that lead to benefits in the real world. Perhaps games can make one more virtuous rather than less. And just as the theatre can lead to catharsis, the technologies—through their ­narratives— could also have similar benefits. (And, in a Nietzschean vein, maybe games could reveal the true nature of human life and existence.) There seems no reason in principle why tragedy, which rests on techniques of emplotment and imitation studied by Aristotle and Ricoeur, needs to be confined to the theatre stage. But technology can also be seen as a belonging to the same world, just as theatre belongs to the same (social) world according to Goffman and Butler. This view opens up a different kind of investigation of technology, which sees technology as part of the lifeworld. Rather than crossing the theatre/technology barrier, it is productive and fruitful to instead delete it. If we make this move, we can make full use of the metaphor: we can use all the characteristics described in the previous sections: appearance and illusion, imitation, catharsis, narrative and transformation, role playing, ritual, etc., for understanding social life with technology. More precisely: we can use the theatre metaphor for conceptualizing what we do with technology in a way that puts the use of technology in the context of social and cultural practice (see also Coeckelbergh 2017). Technology then becomes a tool on the social stage (and, as I  will argue, more than a tool). I will argue that this is true for technologies usually seen as “virtual” or “digital”, such as games and social media, but also for other technologies. Both so-called “virtual” life and so-called “real” life involve performances with technologies. Analyzing both from a performative perspective blurs the boundaries and enables us to ask different, non-Platonic questions. What We Do With Technology (in the Social Theatre) We can indeed use technology to create illusions and imitations and to create stories. However, against a Platonic view, we could see this not as setting up an unreal, untrue, and bad world against a real, true, and good one but as a normal part of everyday social play. As Goffman argued, we present ourselves to others and we create appearances as part of our social roles. As Butler argued, we construct and perform our identities. As Ricoeur suggested (but maybe did not sufficiently emphasize), we create narratives in our social lives. Now we can add that technologies are often used as tools for role playing, appearance creations, identity performances, and narrative creations. This includes low tech such as clothes, status objects, and material architectures that set the stage but also high tech such as computers, chat and email programs, social media, gaming,

Acting With Technology 65 and all kinds of so-called “online” activities and environments. These are all performances with technology. Some of these performances can have a ritualistic aspect and happen at specific time and places, for example the ritual of playing a particular game with particular people at a specific time, but often these activities take place throughout everyday life. Whether or not there is some kind of inner core, fixed personality, unique soul, or natural basis (e.g.,  whether or not we agree with Butler that there is nothing to express—consider also Schopenhauerian, Buddhist, and perhaps Foucaultian views), as social beings we perform who we are, we perform the social roles we have, we create narratives about ourselves and others, and we use technologies as tools to do this. As social beings we are actors, and as actors we make use of various technologies (new and old) as tools in and for our acting. A good example of social theatre and social performances with technology is role playing in computer games. In game studies several authors have argued that in and through the gameplay—which is technologically mediated—gamers perform roles and identities. For example, influenced by Butler, Harper (2013) has argued that fighting gameplay in fighter games is a type of identity performativity. Because of Butler’s influence, the model is still discourse, but some have referred directly to theatre metaphors. Fernández-Vara (2009) has argued that the player is a performer (and spectator of her own interactions and those of others). Games can also have large audiences, for example when fighter games are watched by many people. And the social theatre aspect is especially clear in massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), in which the social interaction is all about playing roles. These can be different roles than in “real” life and some players may express themselves in ways they may not feel comfortable doing in “real” life (Cole and Griffiths 2007). But they might also simply have fun playing different roles. However, such computer games are not special when it comes to performing with technology. We play a role and perform our identities in social life in general, and technologies are means and media we use for this. In this sense, both “real” places such as homes or workplaces and so-called “virtual” or “digital” spaces such as games or online social media are multiplayer role playing games, understood as performative practices. Moreover, when as actors we also respond to other actors, we may cooperate or compete with them. We can use technology to communicate, of course, but this communication can also have a performative aspect: it can do something or be intended to have the other person do something. Consider again the performative use of language as theorized by Austin and Searle. Language is a technology, but all technologies can be used to perform and to have others perform, often but not necessarily in combination with language. For example, I can send an email to a co-worker to ask that person to do something. Or the email itself does something, for example, it may declare that person X now has the role A.

66  Acting With Technology Social media can be used to make other people think and do something. Some people try to influence and shape entire meanings and narratives. And within the gameplay of MMORPGs and other games, players may try to have other players (or non-human players that appear human) do things by means of language or other technologies. Note that in the social media theatre there is of course some degree of illusion, but this illusion is not necessarily a form of deception. Of course it is always possible that people use tricks to present themselves in different roles than they have in the social life. But usually there are non-deceptive performances, now mediated by the technology. If there is a “spell” created by the technology, it is a spell that is also there “outside” or “before” the technology: it is the spell of social life, understood as performances. The person using a particular technology, then, does not enter an illusion in the sense of a different world. The “illusion” is part of social life understood as performance and can be mediated by various technologies. The modern social life is “illusion” in so far as it is a kind of Apollonian order, suffused, mediated, and maintained by various technologies and media, and performed on all kinds of stages. The so-called “illusion” is also very real in the sense that when social media users or, for example, gamers enter the stage, they might play a different role and try out a different identity, but they still have their own bodies, identities, and backgrounds, which frame their play and influence the way they will play their role. A better way of speaking, therefore, is not about reality versus illusion but about different yet interconnected stages or performative spaces where one may play different roles. From a performative point of view, these technology-mediated environments are not different realities or “virtual” spaces but simply one of the performative spaces of the social life. Note also that in the social theatre with technology, there is no strict distinction between actors and audience. Consider social media or games. When we post, like, message, etc., or play a multiplayer computer game, we are actors, but we also watch others (and ourselves) at the same time. Actors and audience merge. (Think again of what I said in response to Goffman: this is a characteristic of the social life in general, which is participatory and interactive.) Maybe this setup is similar to Dionysian theatre as Nietzsche imagines it. Nietzsche remarks about the Dionysian that there is no fundamental opposition between audience and chorus (Nietzsche 1993, 41). If in social media audience and actors are mixed and interact, this can also be expressed as: we are chorus and audience at the same time.1 A similar point can be made about massively multiplayer games. Furthermore, while most theories we have reviewed stress the perspective of the actor, there is also the perspective of the script writer and the director. Technology can be used to emplot and configure the life of others, to structure its temporality. Think about the Taylorist conveyer belt,

Acting With Technology 67 which structures the time and work life of the workers, but also about email, which tries to organize our time, or social media such as Facebook, which structures how we script and direct our lives and which tries to structure, narrate, and configure our time (e.g., our day, we “have” to check our notifications) and our life-time (we are presented “important moments” and our life is organized in the form of a timeline). Similarly, games may configure  our time. Here one may well ask to what extent humans still use the technology to script and direct (developers of games, e.g., management of a factory or social media company) and to what extent the technology itself scripts and directs. Of course, humans develop the software and the games. Humans also manage the companies that make profit from social media and games. But then the technology takes on its own life as an organizer of our time and our life. Moreover, sometimes these technologies become co-actors. One could ask: if the email program does something by itself, to what extent is the email itself an actor or performer? The theatre metaphor thus provides a number of concepts to think about what we do with technology, but also about what technology is doing with us. I will discuss this in the next section. This focus on technologies in everyday life (and seeing them not as a separate sphere) is in line with much contemporary philosophy of technology, for example postphenomenology or philosophy of information. Technology is then no longer seen as something separate which may dominate or colonize the lifeworld, but which is interwoven with the lifeworld. For example, Ihde has analyzed human-technology relations in the lifeworld (Ihde 1990) and Floridi has argued that our contemporary use of the internet is neither online nor offline but increasingly “onlife” (see for example Floridi 2015). Moreover, we can learn from the empirical and material turn in philosophy of technology and from empirically oriented STS (a turn which happened in the 1980s and 1990s and was directed against theory that focused only on the symbolic) that many of these technologies perform their function as a tool because of their materiality. This argument can be used to criticize accounts of the theatre and the related theory I surveyed earlier in this chapter: theory by Aristotle, Ricoeur, Goffman, Austin, Searle, etc., tends to be focused on language. Against this, one can stress the material aspect of both theatre and technology. Both theatre and the social life with technology, understood as theatre and performance, are not only about the use of words but also about the use of (material) things. To perform is to speak, but it is also to do things with things. However, as I  have argued previously (e.g.,  Coeckelbergh 2017), in its understandable urge to reject the postmodern obsession with signs and the symbolic, the material turn has unnecessarily neglected language and related technologies such as text and writing. Moreover, postphenomenology (e.g.,  Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2005) has given little attention to the social aspect of our use of technology and to the role of language

68  Acting With Technology in technology use. The theatre metaphor can help to remedy these lacunas, since as I  have shown it can be used to support a social-oriented approach (consider again Goffman and Butler) and since it traditionally has given much attention to language, sometimes also in connection to the social (e.g., Ricoeur). Using the theatre metaphor for thinking about technology in the lifeworld reminds us that our dealings with technology are deeply social and also mediated by language, next to (more material) technologies. What tends to be missing in most thinking about theatre and in most applications of the theatre metaphor to the social life, however, is attention to the moving body. I  already noted this about Plato, Aristotle, Ricoeur, and Searle but also in Goffman, for example, the body seems absent from the stage. Like in the mainstream Western tradition in general, perhaps it is only allowed to manifest itself backstage, when nobody is looking. Keeping in mind the previous chapter, we have to add that theatre is not only about the use of words and the use of all kinds of technologies but also about moving bodies, and we should include this aspect when applying the theatre metaphor. When we use technologies to play our roles, construct or contribute to narratives, etc., we do not leave our body at home. For example, when we engage with others via social media or computer games, we act as embodied beings. If the social-withtechnology can indeed be compared to a theatre, we should not forget the embodied aspect of theatre. Let us turn again to the metaphor itself. When we perform, we perform also bodily and kinetically. Our use of voice, for example, is very much embodied but also our acting in general is about movement. To put it from a director’s perspective: to direct actors is not only to direct them regarding the use of words in the abstract, as it were; it is also to direct about the use of voice and the use of the body and its movements. Theatre directors are also choreographers (and, to some extent, vice versa). To play a role and character as an actor is also to learn the movements and postures that belong to the role and character. To play X is not only to say the things X would say but also to move like X would move. If theatre is imitation at all, it is not only the imitation of abstract actions or roles or the imitation of speech considered as something separate from the body. It is the imitation of life and it is life, which for beings like us always includes bodily movement. Even if we were to adopt an Aristotelian emphasis on logos in our philosophical anthropology (which Ricoeur still seems to borrow), then it must be noted that in the theatre (as a separate space and as the social life) words must be spoken, that narrative must be lived as embodied beings, and (again) that the use of voice can be conceptualized as (involving) bodily movement. When we use the theatre metaphor to understand the use of technologies, then, it is important to use the metaphor in such a way that acknowledges these aspects of embodiment and bodily movement. Technology

Acting With Technology 69 is a tool used by embodied actors whose acting always includes bodily movement. As said in the previous chapter, “even” moving about with an avatar in a “virtual” or game environment includes bodily movement in the sense that gameplay actually requires bodily movement. But also in the sense that the avatar and the game play themselves refer to my embodiment: it presupposes it, otherwise I  would not understand the very concept/practice/performance of avatar, which is a virtual body. I move my eyes, hands, arms, and so on to move the avatar, involving the same brain activity as if I were doing it in “real” life. But when playing I also think and perform as an embodied person. And perhaps we should delete “as if” here: gaming is real life, just as all theatre is real life and is as real as reality can be. I agree with Saltz that theatre is best understood as “a real world event” since spectators engage with real human beings, even if these beings are playing “games of make-believe” (Saltz 2017, 165). The phenomenology of watching theatre is one in which the focus is on “the here-and-now of the performance itself” (174). This is also true for the social life with technology, including computer gaming as a social and performative activity: these are real world events, real games, and real performances. Technology functions as a tool and medium in these acts, events, games, and performances. Note that the example of computer games also raises the question about the relation between performances and games in general. As I have argued, inspired by Wittgenstein, the concept of games can be used in a broader sense and as a metaphor to understand not only the social life but also what we do with technology and especially how technologies are always socially and culturally embedded (Coeckelbergh 2017). Let it suffice to say here that the performances with technology may take the form of social games with specific rules and stages/spaces, for example, the theatre game or a specific computer game. But technology does (more). As I already suggested it is not only a tool used by social actors or a medium that creates a performative space; it is also more than a tool (an acting tool) and a medium in the sense that it may also itself take up the role of actor, director, and script writing, albeit usually together with humans. Let me further use these elements of the metaphor to elaborate the roles of technology. What Technology Does and What It Does With Us (in the Social Theatre) As noted in the introduction, some thinking in philosophy of technology and STS already uses the theatre metaphor, albeit not always in ways that are entirely upfront about this and that make full use of the metaphor. Bruno Latour has used a theatre metaphor to say that not only humans but also non-humans such as texts and technologies can be what he calls “actants” (Akrich and Latour 1992; Latour 1993), that is, non-human

70  Acting With Technology actors. According to Verbeek, who is influenced by Latour, the point is that technology is not just a mere instrument but itself has agency (Verbeek 2005). Akrich and Latour, influenced by a direction in semiotics that uses the theatre metaphor, claim that human actors and nonhuman “actants” have competences and performances. Moreover, material artefacts can have or rather “translate” a script. They give the example of heavy hotel keys: the text “Do not forget to bring the keys back” is translated by the heavy weights attached to the keys, which is meant to encourage people to return the keys. Although here the text metaphor is still dominant (and the linguistic metaphor of translation), the metaphor of the theatre is also present. Latour’s source for the latter is Greimas, who used the concept of “actant” in linguistics, in particular in his semiotics, to describe structural elements in a narrative (Greimas 1983). There are more authors in the social sciences that use the theatre metaphor. But in contrast to Goffman, Greimas, and others, Latour stresses the material aspect. Instead of focusing on discourse, Latour’s view of the social includes material objects and machines. Humans delegate speech to artefacts, and humans let things speak. In other words, the theatre metaphor is extended here to material artefacts as a kind of actor (“actants”), who are themselves performers and help to translate the script. For Latour and thinkers such as Pickering (1995), the social is a stage on which humans and non-humans act and interact. Science, then, is a social enterprise, which is also a matter of storytelling, role playing, and acting. Although Pickering uses “agency” more than “actors” and “actants”, his idiom is often theatrical and, more generally, performative—including, as already noted, dance: there is a “dance of agency” (Pickering 2010). He writes that his main perspective is performative: If you want to understand scientific practice, you should start by thinking about (a) the performance of scientists—what scientists do; (b) the performance of the material world—what things do in the lab; and (c) how those performances are interlaced with one another. (Pickering 2013, 78) Latour himself, by using the terms actor, actant, and script, stays closer to the theatre metaphor rather than performance in general. Verbeek has extended Latour’s theatrical language to what technology “does” in everyday life (Verbeek 2005). But like Pickering he also talks a lot about agency rather than “actors” and “actants” and uses Latour to show how technology mediates “programs of action” (Verbeek 2005, 157). One of his favourite examples is that of the speedbump: the task of the policeman is delegated to the speed bump, an “actant” in which the program of action is inscribed (160). Although Verbeek first uses Latour’s term “actant” and borrows the theatre metaphor of “script”, he then translates (Verbeek’s own words) Latour’s vocabulary to that of the mediation

Acting With Technology 71 of action and of human-world relations (168). This translation is understandable given Verbeek’s main project to do something with Ihde’s postphenomenology. But one implication is that the theatre metaphor is hardly retained, let alone reflected upon. Maybe this happened partly because Ihde’s phenomenology itself is mostly blind to the social aspect of technology and science, focusing on individual human-­ technology relations. Or it happened because engineering-oriented philosophy of technology, embraced by Verbeek and other empirical turn advocates, imported the insensitivity to the social that is often (but not always) to be found in the engineering sciences. In any case, the theatre metaphor gave way to a vocabulary of mediation. If we do explicitly use and reflect on the theatre metaphor, however, and take distance from Latour and Verbeek, then we can ask in what sense, precisely, technologies “act” and which roles they have in social life. This is important in order to refine the analysis of technology and to account for differences between humans and non-humans (something which neither Latour nor Verbeek sufficiently do). The speed bump and the hotel key “act” in the sense that they help to execute the script written by humans. They also perform and make humans perform in specific ways in the sense that they make cars slow down and make people return their key to the hotel. But compared to a human actor, they are different or rather (using the theatre metaphor again rather than the language of ontology) they perform differently or do a different kind of performance. Technological artefacts do not interpret their role, they do not improvise; they “do” things but do so in a rather passive way and have no freedom to do otherwise. If this is the case, then one may well ask if this is simply a different kind of performance or if they can be compared to performers or actors at all. After all, in spite of their “mediating” functions, they are still mainly tools used by humans. The hotel key with the weights is used by the human hotel manager to encourage people to return their keys. The speedbump is used by the police to make sure the cars slow down at a particular point. If they can be compared to actors at all, they are a kind of dead actor, very different from the living, embodied, live-performing human actors on the stage. Thus the metaphor only partly works here. This renders the use of the words “actors” or “actants” problematic if used for non-humans, as Latour and Verbeek do. If one really wants to use them, then one must specify how the kind of “acting” or “performance” done by non-humans significantly differs from human performance. A symmetrical approach such as Latour’s, which talks about actors and actants without making explicit differences in performance (if it is performance), is insensitive to such differences. There are, however, technologies that act in a stronger sense. Not all technologies are like a speed bump. Computers and software, for example, can do things. With regard to computer games, Fernández-Vara (2009), for example, has used theatrical performance as a metaphor in order to

72  Acting With Technology argue that the computer is the performer, based on the code (similar to a dramatic text) and the interaction is then the mise-en-scène. But software does not only execute pre-written scripts. Software can also power characters within games. More generally, technologies can act in the sense that they take over the roles of humans. Robots, artificially intelligent systems, bots on the web, and other more intelligent and autonomous technologies sometimes wholly or partly take over human roles. To the extent that they do so, they can be said to be acting or performing. Given the social connotation of these terms, this is especially applicable to so-called social robots. For example, a robot may take over the role of conversation partner and friend (with a particular character), or the role of nurse. Is this acting? Is this performance? It depends: the robot can be used as a mere “tool” or “machine” for lifting a patient, for example, or it can assume a human shape and/or use a human-like voice interface. In the latter case, there are certainly more similarities with human acting and performance. There is a lot going on in terms of what has been described before in this chapter: imitation, role playing, putting on an appearance. And there is the possibility to use artificial voice, which creates the appearance of a human person/character. The machine then performs a role. It is also performance in the sense of makebelieve. The robot pretends to be your friend. The AI takes up the role of doctor. The smart assistive device imitates the teacher. This then raises the Platonic objections mentioned before, exactly because this interaction with these technologies is so similar to theatre. The Platonic objection presupposes that there is performance going on. The performance metaphor thus seems to make sense. But, we should ask again, what kind of performance? Performance in which sense? Now the performance of a machine, whether a social robot or a character in a game that is produced by software, may not seem to be performance in the full sense, that is, in the sense derived from humans and human theatre. Improvisation, interpretation, and creative and spontaneous performance may be missing. (I will say more about improvisation in the next chapter.) It could be argued that human actors can improvise, whereas machine actors cannot. Moreover, whereas it can meaningfully be said that the designers or companies that use the robot or game character might aim at deception, make-believe, etc., the machine itself does not really play a role, does not really intend to make us believe it is X, does not really act in this sense. Alternatively, one could say: I  accept that the machine is performing and acting, that it fully counts as a performance and act, but the performance and act is not as good as the human, because it, for example, lacks the capacity to improvise and act spontaneously. Or one could say that it is a bad performance. So here we have a non-Platonic objection to this kind of machine: the point then is not that imitation, theatre, deception, etc., are bad per se, but rather (a) that the performance is not performance enough in the sense of “not

Acting With Technology 73 performance in the fullest and richest human sense” or (b) that the performance is not good enough, or that it fails, does not succeed. (See also Coeckelbergh 2018 on magic and technology.) For example, one could argue (a) that a robot nurse does not really “act” or “perform” since, in contrast to the human, it does not have another option to do what it does, it cannot be something or someone else or it cannot take on a different role, and it cannot improvise, its role and performance is fixed, even if it can get better at it by machine learning and/or (b) that the robot nurse fails to fully imitate the role of the human nurse, which is not only about, for example, lifting a patient but also about having a brief chat with the patient. (In addition, it could also be the case that the robot fails to fulfil its function as a tool, for example, that it fails to properly lift the patient. Consider, for example, that most robots still fail to imitate human walking. “Failure” can mean: failure in this particular instance or it can mean it always fails when it attempts to perform X.) Whether or not the robot fails, the formulation of this objection to robots—or rather to a specific robot or robotic application—is made possible by taking the theatre metaphor seriously, and by asking what “performing” and “acting” mean. In addition, this performance-inspired response to the problem also gives some normative guidance or a normative anchor point, namely human performance or successful performance according to another criterion, whereas to say that technology “mediates” does not: it is unclear what good mediation is (it is very abstract). Good or bad performance is rather clear: one can observe it, experience it, and compare it to human performance or to a specific goal. To take another example, which goes beyond the theatre metaphor: if an AI is said to make “music”, then one can either say that it deceives the audience (Platonic objection) or one can discuss the quality of the performance of the AI according to some criterion (and this is not necessarily whether it is good in imitating the human). Furthermore, while it may make sense to say that technology can “act” in the various senses just discussed, to limit the discussion and metaphorical vocabulary to one element (acting and its derivative “actant”) leaves out other aspects of theatre and hence other meanings of social life. This includes material aspects, for example the material infrastructure and stage or the material artefacts used during performance and the scenery. These are also part of the social and can also “mediate” and shape what we do, even if they do not “act” in any sense. In particular, as objects, stages, and infrastructure, they constrain and make possible our performances. For example, internet and mobile communication infrastructure make possible the use of mobile social media apps, understood as social performances. Road infrastructure makes possible the use of cars and shapes entire worlds, that is, entire stages and performances (e.g., it creates “pedestrians” that need to cross streets, it creates cities that are built around roads, etc.). Different media create a different stage: a virtual

74  Acting With Technology world or game is a different stage than a chat program and will require different kinds of performances. Different chat programs will have different performances or performance styles. Different social media platforms require different performances. For example, a post on Facebook is a different performance and game than one on Twitter, potentially involving different roles. (For example, someone might choose to play a “private” role on Facebook and a “professional” role on Twitter, or vice versa.) Often media encourage one role rather than another. Each technology/ medium and each infrastructure creates a different stage, which encourages different roles and acts, perhaps also different styles of acting, and hence is not neutral. To frame this more structural, grammatical role of technology in terms of acting (or agency) does not really work. The theatre stage is the better metaphor. Using theatre as a metaphor thus provides a toolbox of conceptual tools to understand what technology does. Acting is only one metaphorical tool. Moreover, beyond the stage we find more elements of theatre. To discuss technology only in terms of its “acts” leaves out another very important role of technology, which goes far beyond its instrumental or tool-like character: technology can also take on the role of director. Smart algorithms, AI, robots, etc. take up the role of co-actors, but they also direct our lives and sometimes even co-write its script. We do not only use technology to act; we also live and act “under” technology, that is, directed and organized by technology, next to humans who of course also direct us, often through technology. Often the social script is the same, but a new technology organizes and directs how we act out the script. For example, when we use social media or play computer games, we do what we always do as social beings: we connect with others, we communicate, we put on an appearance, we watch others, and so on. But how we say and do all this is influenced by the technology/medium. Technology reorganizes the stage, “interprets” the script, edits the timeframe, gives new rules for our rituals, creates new roles, asks us to play our role in one way rather than another, makes us move in a different way, makes us say things differently, or even makes us say different things and edits the script. Of course we (humans) are still performers, and this gives us some freedom. We perform and we do so according to our plans and ideas. We create our roles and narratives. But the technologies, together with other humans, co-direct how we perform these roles and narratives. How we play is never just up to us as individuals; technologies and other humans have a hand in it. For example, software contains algorithms that are basically ways of humans telling the machine what to do. They start their life as instructions given by humans to the machine. But when used, the software also tells humans what to do, or at least how to do it. For example, a social media program tells me to communicate in so many characters and send small messages rather than write a long email or letter.

Acting With Technology 75 And sometimes technology even tells humans what to do. Technology can be very normative. Software tells us to follow specific steps. It basically gives us an algorithm. And more generally, at a higher or broader level of analysis, technology influences our daily lives to such an extent that it also changes what we do. For example, the technology encourages, in a sense “demands”, that I check my email and other messages every day—preferably many times during the day. Software organizes our behaviour and our day. It does precisely what Ricoeur meant with emplotment, but in this case not in text or theatre, but in real life. Let me unpack this by using another theatre metaphor. To express the organizing role of technology, one can use the director metaphor but also the script metaphor. Sometimes technology does not merely influence how I act, e.g., how I improvise or how I act out a script; sometimes the script itself is written or altered. This can be literal, as in the case when the computer tells me what to do. It tells me what to click on the screen, for example, or how long I should continue running (it can be very normative). Then the algorithm is not just a script for the computer; it is also a script (and prescription) for human performers. But technology can also change and shape the entire social interaction. The narrative changes. For example, email gives me a different script to communicate with a colleague than the script “go to this person’s door and talk to her”. Technology is then a script writer: it can change the script and rewrite narratives. It can create new roles. It organizes and reorganizes a narrative, in the sense of emplotment. It organizes characters and events into a (new) plot. It can be seen as emplotment and reconfiguration in a Ricoeurian sense; Reijers and I have proposed the term “narrative technologies” to capture this role of technology (Coeckelbergh and Reijers 2016). Using the theatre metaphor, one could say that technology writes and directs the narrative of social life; in particular it organizes characters and events into a plot and also shapes the meaning of the narrative as a whole. It configures the temporality and structure of human social life; it configures our lived time. This happens literally and in a specific context, that is, on a specific stage, for example, when our lives are organized within and by an email program or when we perform within and by the scripts of computer game environments, but it also happens to our lives and society as a whole. For example, new transport and communication technologies have created new ways of working and commuting, that is, new ways of configuring daily work and life time. In industry machines have created new roles for workers. All this has led to new narratives, in the sense of specific organizations of our time, specific plots, and—if we follow Ricoeur—in the sense of new meanings that become part of our lives and existence. Technology has influenced the way we make sense of our lives as a whole. We do things in ways directed and organized by the technology, and we make narrative sense of this and of our life, identity,

76  Acting With Technology and existence. Technology influences the content and meaning of “This is what I do”. And: “This is what I am”. “This is how life is”. Through and after the changes brought about by a new technology, we see our lives and ourselves in a new way. There is a process of transformation (but perhaps not necessarily Aristotelian catharsis). For example, modern technology has resulted in a new, modern way of seeing ourselves and the world. And through the use of social media we may see reality in a new light. Influenced by the medium, we may come to see social life as a theatre of profiles and posts. Or, going beyond Ricoeur’s still rather dualist thinking (theatre/text versus real life), we could say: reality itself is already reshaped and reconfigured by the technology. The point is then not that when I’m “on” social media the technology changes and organizes my life, whereas when I’m “off” it does not; rather, the technology reconfigures my life as a whole. It has the potential to (re)organize all my actions, including so-called “offline” actions. It shapes characters and events. It directs and scripts me on all theatrical stages and all performative spaces of the social life, not just “online”. Social media technology has become at least a co-director and co-script writer of our lives. It is not a separate reality or thing. It plays (several) roles in our social lives. To use a linguistic metaphor: it is a point about “grammar”, as I have called it (Coeckelbergh 2017). Technology shapes the structure of the social life. Of course we also use technologies as tools. And we may think that they are mere tools. But the tools are an important part of the social theatre: as stage, as objects used on stage (props) and scenery, but also as co-actors and directors. Technology is not only about specific interactions or a limited set of human-technology relations; it also (re)directs and reorganizes lives, times, and societies and in the end shapes our existence. This (post)hermeneutics can better be described by using theatre metaphors than by, for example, mediation language, and is more sensitive to the linguistic and social dimension of human existence with technology and by technology. More generally, these changes to our social lives cannot be captured by an individualistic framework or can only very partially be described and interpreted with conceptual frameworks that use the theatre metaphor in an unreflective, almost accidental way. By systematically unpacking the metaphor, more meanings could be revealed: more ways in which technology contributes to the creation of meaning and indeed more meanings of technology itself. This expansion and transformation of meaning is, as Ricoeur taught us, the power of metaphor. Metaphor, like narrative, can help us to see things in a different light; it can play an important hermeneutic role. Here I  have attempted to expand the meaning(s) of technology, but this is just one example of what metaphor can do—for philosophers (e.g.,  philosophers of technology) and for all of us. To neglect language, as happens in, for example, postphenomenology and most philosophy of technology after the empirical turn, is also to neglect

Acting With Technology 77 metaphor and its hermeneutic powers. This is an unnecessary, undesirable, and unproductive omission. Furthermore, keeping in mind the lessons from the previous chapter  about technology and the moving body, it turns out that both the theatre theory we reviewed here and the technology theory (and some of the game studies theory) referred to miss out on an important aspect of theatre: embodiment and the moving body. This is better in Ihde’s postphenomenology. But while authors such as Ihde and Verbeek acknowledge the body in our dealings with technology, they tend to focus on embodiment as one particular kind of human-technology relation and miss  out on a more general and important phenomenological aspect of doing things with technology (and what technology does with us): embodiment as connected with movement. As we can learn from the previous chapter, using technology is always a matter of bodily movement. This is so for technologies like a hammer, of course, but it is also true for advanced technologies like computers and smartphones. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the technology often choreographs us. It is a limitation of the theatre metaphor as applied so far that it cannot capture this phenomenology of the moving body with technology (and technology that moves us). We thus have to add to our use of the theatre metaphor in this chapter  that acting also involves the body and bodily movement and that, therefore, if we apply the acting metaphor to what we do with technology, it should also reveal technological action and practices as a bodily affair, not just acting in the abstract. To act with technology involves the use of words but also involves gestures, postures, and other bodily aspects. Using social media or playing games does not happen separate from the body but crucially involves bodily activity and indeed bodily thinking or thinking bodies. (Talking about the body and bodily activity could be seen as still too dualist: acting is “mental” and “bodily” at the same time. The two cannot and should not be separated.) This needs to be added to all theatre metaphors used here, including directing as a metaphor applied to technology: directing involves not only guiding people what to say and how to say it but also how to move. Software used in social media, for example, may influence how we shape our m ­ essage—perhaps even the message itself—but this is not only an influence on the “mental” or cognitive level; it is also an influence on the movements we make and on how we make them. For example, when using a smartphone, the software choreographs my clicking, typing, swiping, eye movements, posture, ways of walking, and so on. Here theatre metaphors used in much of the philosophy of theatre are too limited; the theory focuses too much on language alone. The metaphor needs to be enriched, made more complete. Performance studies and dance studies offer an important metaphorical supplement. Perhaps we could even use some philosophy of theatre which does not neglect the body.2

78  Acting With Technology Finally, taken together all these roles of technology (co-actor, stage, director/choreographer, script writer) point to the normative-grammatical aspects of technology. To express this normative role, next to agency, it makes sense to say that, as Latour and Verbeek have done, technology “does” things, “translates” humans scripts, and plays the role of “actant”. But I have shown that technology also takes up other theatrical roles such as director and script writer. This is perhaps most clear when technology comes in the form of automation technologies such as robots or AI systems, but it also happens—in subtle and often invisible ways—when we use technologies such as social media. Furthermore, the metaphorical exploration and discussion in this chapter revealed that it is not clear in what sense technology “acts” or “performs”. Technology is sometimes an actor in a stronger sense of imitating human acting (e.g., in the form of a humanoid robot or advanced AI), but it is not so clear if this counts as “performance” or “acting” if the model is human performance or human acting. And technology is not just an agent, understood by means of the metaphor of (co-)actor, but also shapes the infrastructures and structures of our lives. It does not only translate action programs written by humans but often gives us a new script. It shapes the stages on which our social lives take place. And it (re)directs and (re-)scripts what we do and how we do it, including our bodily movements. These structural and “grammatical” changes (linguistic metaphor), including their normative aspects, cannot be captured by all too limited uses of the metaphor, as in Latour and Verbeek. This chapter has sketched a richer conceptual-hermeneutic framework, achieved by means of a more complete unpacking of the theatre metaphor (and small, tolerable doses of linguistic metaphors). In Chapter  5 I  will further analyze a specific performance metaphor that has some similarity with theatre performance: stage magic. This will enable me to further develop the discussion about reality (and sincerity?) versus illusion and—sometimes—deception.3 It will also enable me to highlight the perspective of the technology designer or developer (rather than the general user), a perspective that can be helpfully understood by means of the choreography and theatre director metaphor but also the stage magic metaphor. The designer or developer, by shaping the technology, is a choreographer, director, and script writer of our lives, but he or she can also be seen as having the role of a magician who creates illusion and (sometimes) deceives, perhaps putting people under a “spell” and giving them false belief. To further discuss what this means is important with regard to connecting to a wider spectrum of work in contemporary philosophy of technology, which is not only about technology use and experience but also about understanding and evaluating technology design, development, and innovation. In particular, I will show that using the stage magic metaphor can enrich discussions about illusion, deception, and technology design. But first it is time for music.

Acting With Technology 79

Notes 1. Social media can also be Dionysian in other, related ways. McLuhan suggested that there might well be a more integral kind of experience afforded by the new media and technologies, one that is more similar to tribal, pre-modern society than to modern Apollonian theatres. Hence social media and games have both Apollonian and Dionysian aspects, and if we follow Nietzsche and McLuhan, then the latter may point us to a deeper truth about reality, which according to Nietzsche is the illusion of the individual and the music of world harmony. 2. Although much philosophy of theatre neglects the body, there are some exceptions. Sartre seems to have acknowledged the gestures of the actor, for example. And perhaps Nietzsche could be used, too, to further elaborate this bodily aspect of the theatre metaphor. For example, one could use his writings on the Dionysian. Yet it is questionable if that particular metaphor works for today’s social life with media and technologies. The social media choruses, for example, are remarkably behaved, not very Dionysian. There is also a lot of conformism, which Nietzsche would have hated. 3. See also Stern on Nietzsche and masks in his edited volume.

References Akrich, Madeleine, and Bruno Latour. 1992. “A  Summary of a Convenient Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies.” In Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by Wiebe Bijker and John Law, 259–64. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Aristotle. 1984. “Poetics.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle Vol. 2, edited by Jonathan Barnes and translated by Ingram Bywater, 2316–40. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–31. Coeckelbergh, Mark. 2017. Using Words and Things: Language and Philosophy of Technology. New York: Routledge. Coeckelbergh, Mark. 2018. “How to Describe and Evaluate “Deception” Phenomena: Recasting the Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics of ICTs in Terms of Magic and Performance and Taking a Relational and Narrative Turn.” Ethics and Information Technology 20 (2): 71–85. Coeckelbergh, Mark, and Wessel Reijers. 2016. “Narrative Technologies: A Philosophical Investigation of the Narrative Capacities of Technologies by Using Ricoeur’s Narrative Theory.” Human Studies 39 (3): 325–46. Cole, Helena, and Mark D. Griffiths. 2007. “Social Interactions in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Gamers.” Cyber Psychology  & Behaviour 10 (4): 575–83. Derrida, Jacques. 1995. “Khora.” In On the Name, translated by Ian McLeod, 89–127. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Fernández-Vara, C. 2009. “Play’s the Thing: A Framework to Study Videogames as Performance.” DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice, and Theory, September. www.digra.org/ digital-library/publications/plays-the-thing-a-framework-to-study-videogames-asperformance/.

80  Acting With Technology Floridi, Luciano, ed. 2015. The Online Manifesto. Cham: Springer. Goffman, Erving. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh: Social Sciences Research Centre. Greimas, Algirdas Julien. 1983. Structural Semantics: An Attempt at Method. Translated by D. MacDowell, R. Schleifer and A. Velie. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Harper, Todd. 2013. The Culture of Digital Fighting Games: Performance and Practice. New York: Routledge. Hume, David. 2000. A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld: The Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Kaplan, David M. 2003. Ricoeur’s Critical Theory. New York: SUNY Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Levy, Lior. 2017. “The Image and the Act: Sartre on Dramatic Theatre.” In The Philosophy of Theatre, Drama, and Acting, edited by Tom Stern, 89–108. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1993. The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Shaun Whiteside. London: Penguin Books. Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, & Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pickering, Andrew. 2010. “Material Culture and the Dance of Agency.” In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Baudry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pickering, Andrew. 2013. “Being in an Environment: A  Performative Perspective.” Natures Sciences Sociétés 21: 77–83. Plato. 1997. “Republic.” In Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson and translated by G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve, 971– 1223. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Ricoeur, Paul. 1980. “Narrative Time.” Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 169–90. Ricoeur, Paul. 1983. Time and Narrative—Volume 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 2003. The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language. Translated by Robert Czerny. New York: Routledge. Saltz, David Z. 2017. “Plays Are Games, Movies Are Pictures.” In The Philosophy of Theatre, Drama, and Acting, edited by Tom Stern, 165–82. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1976. Sartre on Theatre. Translated by F. Williams. New York: Pantheon Books. Schechner, Richard. 1985. Between Theatre and Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schechner, Richard. 1988. Performance Theory. New York: Routledge. Searle, John. 1975. “A  Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts.” In Language, Mind, and Knowledge, edited by Keith Gunderson, 344–69. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Searle, John. 1995. The Construction of Social Reality. New York: Free Press.

Acting With Technology 81 Searle, John. 2006. “Social Ontology.” Anthropological Theory 6 (1): 12–29. Stern, Tom. 2014. Philosophy and Theatre: An Introduction. New York: Routledge. Turner, Victor. 1986. The Anthropology of Performance. New York: PAJ Publications. Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2005. What Things Do. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Figure 4.1 Tanja Illukka in Human Interface (2012) Source: Photo by Uupi Tirronen. Courtesy of Thomas Freundlich, Choreography and Robot Programming

4 Making Music With Technology How Machines Play and Conduct Us

4.1. Introduction Like dance and theatre, music is another very important performing art that can be used as a metaphor for our lives with technology. Music has all kinds of interesting forms and aspects. For example, it can be considered as a (live) performance, as art, as a social activity or cultural ritual, as business or a product for consumption, as a material and technological practice, as improvisation and skill, as sound, as voice, etc. It can also be understood in a more Platonic way, as a “work of music” existing apart from such performances, practices, and embodied forms: as a music “object” or in the form of numbers and ratios in a kind of mathematical-musical sphere remote from material and social life. Music can also be recorded in the form of digital data and material carriers of these data. I will soon say more about some of these aspects; there are many philosophical issues and discussions in the philosophy of music. There is also much diversity in music, for example there are also many non-Western forms of music, and music is not always clearly distinguishable from other forms of performance (in the history of the West: think again about Dionysian theatre). In this chapter, my emphasis will be on music as a performance (rather than work), as art and play (rather than business), and as a material, social, skilled, embodied, and technological practice, which involves the organization of sound and which may involve improvisation. I will also consider playing from scores and conducting (or being conducted) and contemporary digital technology mediated practices such as recording, mixing, etc., which can also be creative musical play and practices. While the literature I use is often linked to Western forms of music, many of the features discussed here can also be found in other forms of music and seeing music as performance may itself facilitate such broader, more inclusive perspectives. In any case, to understand music as performance leads us into a fascinating area of philosophical inquiry. While I  agree with Godlovitch (1998, 1) that musical performance deserves philosophical attention since it brings up a lot of interesting

84  Making Music With Technology philosophical issues, to understand and discuss music as performance is not my primary aim. My goal is to use this material in order to better understand technology. As in the previous chapters, I will first elaborate on some of the aspects of music, particularly music as performance, using philosophy and theory. This material is used to construct the metaphor or, rather, a set of related metaphors, which are then used to say more about what we do with technology and what technology does with us.

4.2. Some Philosophy of Music: Music as Performance and as Embodied, Skilful, Social, and Technological Practice Let us start with the ontological question: What is music? As with dance and theatre, one can ask if there exists something like “music” or a “musical work” apart from its performances. The Platonic and nominalist views see music as a kind of object and as existing independent of its performances; performances are then instances or executions of the work. Others, at the other end of the spectrum, think that musical works do not exist (Kania 2017). One could try to take a middle position and claim that both the work of music and the performance exist and need one another: for example, one could say that there is something like a work of music, but that it needs to be performed in order to fully count as music. But in so far as the discussion is still framed in terms of the work and its “instances”, it is still Platonic. Maybe the so-called instances are the real thing, whereas abstract representations of these are secondary. What, exactly, is the relation between the two? Typically, modern Western philosophical aesthetics has focused on (formal) ontology of music or of the musical “work”, and has neglected performance. As Godlovitch writes, performance is and was often seen as “instances” of music or of the music work, or the focus is on listening to music, with its embodiment and creation left out of the picture (Godlovitch 1998, 3). But performance need not be seen as necessarily subordinate to the work; performances may help create the work itself (5)—he uses a storytelling metaphor: “a story grows out of its telling” (96)—and probably has helped to create the work in the first place (e.g., through improvisation—see later in this chapter). There is also the discussion of whether music represents or expresses something else (e.g., represents a narrative or express emotions) or if it should be considered in its own right and what this means. And in what way, exactly, does music differ from other “organized sounds” (to use a famous definition, also quoted in Kania 2017) such as a speech or the noise of a machine, given that these sounds are also used in some kinds of music? Moreover, one can also hold a conventionalist definition of music: music is what we, as social groups or societies, call music and treat as music. (This gets us already to the social aspect of music, which is often

Making Music With Technology 85 not even mentioned in most philosophical accounts of music.) There are many aspects and issues. In this book, I focus on performance, and in this chapter, this means: music as performance. This performance can then be represented, formalized, recorded, and so on, which requires further performances (musical, philosophical, and others). For example, if we use the term performance in a broad sense, then even the recording and playing of music can be a performance—I will return to this. But let us start with performance in the common, narrow sense. Within this category of performed music there are at least two possibilities: music as performance can be the performance of a composed work, which is, for example, noted in a score as it is in so-called classical music, or it can be improvised, like in jazz music. Philosophers who have in mind (Western) classical music often assume that there is first a work, written down in the form of a score, which is then performed. But this assumption is problematic: creating music is not only and not necessarily about writing a score. Perhaps all music is or was once improvisational, before it was notated or recorded. If I use the metaphor of musical performance, then, I have to distinguish between improvisation and other forms of doing music. The same is true for dance and theatre: so far, I  have mainly used these metaphors under the assumption that there is a choreography and a script. But in all performing arts, it is also possible to improvise. Since in the previous chapters this aspect has received less attention, in this chapter  I  need to say more about improvisation. Furthermore, music as performance is not only about what musicians do but also about what the audience does. One could even say that all performance is something that happens “between” performers and audience, and that without the audience there is no performance. According to Godlovitch, the musicians are judged by the audience (Godlovitch, 1998, 41–43) and are thus exposed and vulnerable (45). One can also say, as Godlovitch does, that performance is a kind of ritual: not only because it demands continuity but also because—I would add—it is a social activity per se and it structures social time (or is structured social time), subject to social norms. Note, however, that, in contrast to what Godlovitch seems to assume, a performance need not have the particular order of a classical concert hall with “attentive listeners”. Consider an open air rock concert. And not all listeners “judge”. However, such a view, which sees music as a performative, improvisational, and social activity, is not very common. The neglect of improvisation and of the social-cultural aspects signals a larger problem in mainstream philosophy of music: it focuses too much on abstract ontological and psychological issues and neglects (a) the social aspects of music, (b) the embodied and skill-full aspect of music, and (c) the material and technological aspect of music. An interesting question with

86  Making Music With Technology respect to the latter is also the status of the human voice: is it also an instrument, and, if so, how does it differ from “external” musical instruments? Moreover, one can ask if a machine can create music. This also reminds us of a question in the previous chapter: can machines perform at all, and, if so, what kind of performance is that? Let me now unpack some of these aspects and issues. Improvisation Improvisation does not only happen in jazz, blues, rock, folk, and all kinds of contemporary music. Historically, classical music composition involved improvisation, and some have argued that even performing composed music involves improvisation since the score needs to be interpreted (Gould and Keaton 2000). But jazz improvisation is a good example for learning what improvisation means. Young and Matheson (2000) have argued that in jazz there are also guidelines and instructions, hence that there is a work, but that the guidelines are more tacit. Kania (2011) stresses that jazz performances are not so much about a work (being performed) but more about live performance. In so far as this is the case, it renders jazz more a performing art than classical music. However, here we are not so much interested in the ontology of jazz (or in distinguishing it from other types of music) but rather in understanding improvisation. What is improvisation? While there is discussion about how much improvisation is actually going on in jazz (Peters 2009, 78–79), it is clear that jazz involves some spontaneity and freedom, leading to something new. But to do this, one has to have a lot of background knowledge, in particular tacit knowledge: know-how and know-that. There are already standards, chord progressions, and all kinds of structural elements. One has to know the genre. And one has to know how to play the instrument(s). One needs skills to interact with the instrument. Peters stresses the know-that necessary for improvisation and puts it in the more cognitive-psychological and ontological terms of memory and “the work” rather than elements of the performance, but it is clear that the freedom and spontaneity of improvisation requires some kind of background of knowledge: Improvisation requires a powerful memory: memory of the parameters of the instrument, of the body, of available technology, the parameters of a work’s structure and one’s place within it at any time, the parameters of an idiom, a genre and its history, its possibilities. (Peters 2009, 82) Hence improvisation is never radically free; it is always based on something— structure, perhaps—that is already there. There is old and new, difference and sameness.

Making Music With Technology 87 But in this discussion there are at least two aspects that receive too little attention: the social aspect of music and the embodied skill of the performer’s know-how. The “memory” is linked to others and to a social-cultural background, and it is also embodied. Improvising is also about communicating with and responding to others. And it presupposes skilled and embodied engagement with the material instruments involved—whether it is a classical music instrument such as a violin, electric guitar, or computer (program). Peters’s vocabulary of memory and “parameters” does little to foreground the social dimension and the embodied, skilful engagement with materiality. Social Performance is social in the sense that one plays (be)for(e) others and (sometimes) before an audience. As noted, musical performance is always connected to listening. Performance can be defined as an activity that is performed for an audience, or it can be defined as an activity in which the audience participates as listeners, or it can even be defined as something musicians and listeners do together; perhaps listeners have more agency that one thinks. (Usually only the agency of musicians is considered.) In any case, there is an entire domain of aesthetics that focuses on what listeners do (or what happens to them) and this is important to understand what performance—understood as a social activity—is. But performance is also social in the sense that one plays with others and that one always plays within a wider social and cultural context. What Godlovitch, who focuses on solo performances, misses, is that in many (other) cases the “first” audience or listener is always one’s fellow musicians, the co-players. This becomes clear once we return to the topic of improvisation. Fesmire (2003), who uses the metaphor of jazz improvisation for describing a Deweyan art of ethics, acknowledges that there needs to be novelty and that there should not be a blueprint for action (Fesmire 2003, 95), but, like Peters, he does not think that improvisation is absolute freedom, arbitrariness, or “discontinuous drifting”; instead it is rather organized (94). Yet unlike Peters (and in fact unlike most philosophers), he stresses the social aspect of improvisation and music. He describes jazz improvisation (and related genres such as blues) as a group affair: A jazz musician  .  .  . takes up the attitude of others by catching a cadence from the group’s signals while anticipating the group’s response to her own signals. Drawing on the resources of tradition, memory, and long exercise, she plays into the past tone to discover the possibilities for future tones in the way moral imagination enables us to see the old in terms of the possible. (Fesmire 2003, 94)

88  Making Music With Technology Thus, like Peters, Fesmire thinks the novelty is somehow created by looping through the past. Memory is important. But that is always a social memory. There is a tradition, “one does not experiment in a vacuum” (96). By pointing to group interaction and tradition, Fesmire adds that social element. He writes that “beauty in improvisation emerges as members revel in supporting others, not when they jockey for a solo” (94). It is about listening and responding to others, about picking up cues from others, not only playing oneself. It is like a conversation (95). The jazz musician is responsible to others and to the historical tradition. One has to improvise on something (96), and this something refers to musical structures and to a social situation and a social tradition. Beyond improvisation, one could say that music at large is very much a social and cultural phenomenon. Its performances do not take place in a vacuum but involve social interactions and a social-cultural context. This is often neglected by philosophers. As Alan Merriam already remarked in his The Anthropology of Music (1964), music is “often treated as an object in itself without reference to the cultural matrix out of which it is produced” (Merriam 1964, vii–viii). But music exists in a social context: the ways music is performed and perceived depends on places, times, other people, and the historical and cultural context (North and Hargreaves 2008, 1). If one draws on the sociological tradition, it can be studied as social behaviour or as a social phenomenon or “social fact”, to use a Durkheimian term. For example, it has been analyzed as a symbolic fact (Molino 1990). It has a social history and there are music institutions. There are music rituals. Music has a politics. Music is important in the construction of the personal and the social life. It has many social effects (DeNora 2000). For example, in Music in Everyday Life, DeNora provides ethnographic studies of music in order to show how music gets into action “so as to organize subjects in real time” (DeNora 2000, 8). She argues that music organizes and structures us. It shapes our experience; for example, it redefines the temporal situation. Interestingly, she notes that it also has effects on the body and embodied action. Not only music making but also listening draws on previous experiences and is always social in terms of the background that shapes it. Feld, an ethnomusicologist, speaks of “interpretive moves” (Feld 1984, 8) that place musical objects and events in a meaningful social space (14). Listening to music, understood as organized and performed sound, is an active process that relies on all kinds of background knowledge. Social conventions play a role in this, although they do not fix meaning (10). The meaning is socially constructed in the sense that shared experience and attitudes enter into the interpretive process (11) but emerges more in the moment. Language, in the form of speech or writing, also helps us to make sense of music. This shows again the social dimension of music, if not its social nature. And as an anthropologist, Feld is of course sufficiently sensitive to cultural differences in music playing and

Making Music With Technology 89 music experience (this can support a postmodern celebration of differences but it can also support a cosmopolitan project, see Feld 2012). However, like many more cultural and social theories about music, Feld talks about music in terms of the symbolic: the listener is framed as a “symbolic consumer” (15). Music expresses a “symbolic order” (16). While he acknowledges the role of feelings, there is very little attention to the bodily and material aspects of music. In order not to forget the body and materiality, let us turn to skill. Skill and Embodiment Fesmire already suggested that embodied skill plays a role in music improvisation when mentioning the “long exercise” element. But embodied skill is also needed for music in general. Music, understood as play and performance, requires knowledge and memory in the sense of knowingthat but also knowing-how, which involves tacit or implicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge is important in creativity in general (Mahrenholz 2011) and also performance, including music. This becomes clear once we look at “musical gestures” (Funk and Coeckelbergh 2013). Here this term refers to a particular kind of bodily movement: the “micro” bodily movements needed to play a musical instrument. One can also understand musical gestures or even movement in a more metaphorical way, referring to the meaning of some part of the music, for example, but also these gestures and movements need to be produced by means of micro bodily engagement with the material instrument, which is always a movement in a very concrete, kinetic sense. Gestures—in music but also in other performing arts and in life in general—are a form of movement, intentional and meaningful movement (Funk and Coeckelbergh 2013, 115–16). And these gestures require knowledge, especially tacit knowledge. Instead of only Platonic a priori and propositional knowledge and theory, playing and performing music requires at least embodied tacit knowledge as well or, in other words, skill. Performing music is a skilled activity. The musician knows more than she can tell, to paraphrase Polanyi. She can perform meaningful bodily movements, without explaining—perhaps without being able to explain—in words (119). Musicians exercise in order to learn to make these gestures and bodily movements, to learn the required skill. The exercises themselves consist in bodily movements. However, use of the word “bodily” should not be read in a dualist way. Learning a skill is neither “merely bodily” nor “merely something that happens ‘in’ the mind” (as if any of this would be possible). Both playing music and listening to music are—like all activities—to be understood in a non-Cartesian way. Music as performance is a matter of what cognitive scientists call “embodied cognition” and, if we care about trying to move beyond dualism, we should add that it is also a matter of the knowing body.

90  Making Music With Technology Indeed, in musicology the paradigm of “embodied music cognition” (Leman 2007) attends to the topic of gestures (e.g., Godøy and Leman 2010) and stresses the role of the body in both listening and musicmaking. Leman argues that people who play music or listen to music engage in “in a corporeal way rather than a cerebral way”, seeking direct involvement rather than awareness and description—let alone symbolic narration or meta-experience. Music—and, I would add, music as performance—involves an “embodied intentionality” and “behaviour ­ resonances that we cannot resist” (Leman 2007, 18). (He also notes that technology mediates these experiences—see below.) Leman uses the term “gestures” in an effort to seek a non-linguistic way of describing music, one that focuses on “body movement” (19). Gestures can be made during a music performance or they can accompany listening to music or indeed conducting music; they can be seen as “corporeal articulations” (22) that capture moving sonic forms and can range from tapping along with a finger to forms of conducting. Gestures are not accidental or unimportant with regard to music; there may well be a very close relation between sound and movement (which is interesting also in view of the earlier chapter’s consideration of dance and choreography). Godøy and Leman (2010) claim that music is “a combination of sound and movement” and they use the term “gestures” to express the meaningful combination of sound and movement (ix): not all body movements are gestures; there needs to be expression of meaning (5). Shifting away attention from abstract notation, they articulate an embodiment paradigm according to which we experience and understand the world through body movement, and music is part of that (ix). Caruso, Coorevitz, Nijs, and Leman (2016) also focus on gestures in their description of the artistic process and music performance. For them, musical performance is about embodied interactions. Like Leman, they see the interpretation of a musical work as a process of enactment, which is deliberative but also involves sensorimotor schemes, which is why years of training are required (404–5). The authors also show that one can take a third-person or a first-person perspective on performance: for example, one can monitor body movement (by means of measuring/sensor technologies), but one can also start from the lived experience of the performer. This can give researchers access to the intentions behind the gestures rather than just seeing patterns. One could add that this shows again how performance and gesture, mind and body, inside and outside are intimately connected—if such terms still make sense at all. Indeed, as Godøy and Leman remark, an advantage of the term “gesture” is that it “bypasses” the Cartesian body-mind dualism (2010, 13) since it kind of bridges “bodily” movement and “mental” meaning. An obvious link to other theory here is the embodied cognition approach in cognitive science, which is also used by Leman and others. For example, Clayton and Leante (2013) link theory from cognitive science to thinking

Making Music With Technology 91 about music performance, which also includes studying gestures in performance. They argue that music is produced in bodies or through action of bodies but is also embodied in the sense that we experience and make sense of music through bodily experience and the metaphors that are based on this. They show connections between music-theoretical concepts and embodied image schemas such as balance (191). And Crossley (2015) has described interplay between body techniques and “music worlds” such as networks and places, thereby connecting to sociology. How we use our bodies (for music) is also a social matter: it is socially learned, for example, it is learned in networks (473). Drawing on Wittgenstein’s anti-Cartesian view, Crossley says that understanding is a public phenomenon (482) and that there are implicit agreements in “form of life”, which Crossley interprets as social conventions (483). Body techniques in music are thus linked to social conventions, and again it must be stressed that this kind of knowledge is implicit. This is relevant to an understanding of performance as making music but also of listening to music (performance). Focusing on the voice is also an excellent way to discuss embodiment and music and is an interesting topic in itself for philosophy of music and thinking about technology that deserves more attention. Voice is often used in music, but what is it? Is it part of the body? Is it an instrument? Or both? Does it express the soul or persona, as the ancients might have said? What is the relation to speech and language? To emotions? Can speech or song be framed in terms of gestures? What kind of knowledge is “voice knowledge”? Interestingly, Godlovitch includes voice in the category of music instruments (Godlovitch 1998, 16). Below I will briefly return to the question concerning voice. This section shows again how important (bodily) movement is in performances, including in art forms that are usually not associated with bodily movement. This is true for music playing but also for listening to music. Finally, music is a technological practice. Music as Technological Practice, the Question of Voice, and the Question Whether Machines Can Be Musicians Playing a musical instrument is not only a social practice, since, embedded in a wider social-cultural whole, it is also a technological practice. Creating, performing, editing, recording, and mixing music involves all kinds of technological artefacts, such as an electric guitar, a computer, a microphone, an amplifier, wires, software, and technological infrastructure such as electricity and a studio. Musical performance is a material practice. But also listening to music today is often mediated by all kinds of material technologies. Leman notes that today access to music “proceeds via digital technology” in music production and music consumption

92  Making Music With Technology (Leman 2007, 22). And, as van Elferen says about digital music, in terms of mediation: not only do we hear this music through the digital media of keyboards, samplers and MIDI—and we might download it in mp3 format via P2P networks—we also interact with it with the help of digital agents such as iPods, Internet radio and club turntables. (van Elferen 2009, 121) Today we interact mainly with music via smartphones, tablets, and similar smart devices. Van Elferen also uses the theatre metaphor: she sees these technologies as “actors”. As I argued in the previous chapter, this use of the metaphor misses out on some other metaphorical tools theatre (studies) offers. But, to be sure, there is mediation by digital media, although these digital media are also material; material technologies play an important role in our creation, perception, and interaction with digital music— and other music—and digital music is very much part of daily practices. These musical practices are material and cultural at the same time. Indeed, musical practice and performance rely on material artefacts, but these artefacts are embedded in what Funk and I—inspired by ­Wittgenstein—have called a “form of life” (Coeckelbergh and Funk 2018). This becomes especially clear if we look at the issue at the level of the actual musical performance: the playing is linked to styles and technique, which in turn are connected to wider socially and culturally shared “games” and “grammars” (Coeckelbergh and Funk 2018). For example, the electric guitar is connected to rock subcultures. When the rock musician starts playing, there is already a material artefact (the electric guitar) but also an entire culture that makes possible and structures the playing. The latter is not independent of the former. With the invention of the electric guitar, an entire new subculture emerged. The same can be said about computer technology and techno music. Another way to bring together the material and the cultural is to take a network approach, which enables an analysis of both humans and nonhumans. Latour could again be a source of inspiration here. An example of a network approach can be found in Godlovitch (1998), who sees performance, at least in its idealized form, as “a complex network of relations linking together musicians, musical activities, works, listeners, and performance communities”, which describes a “total performance environment” (1) or “ecology of performance” (3). This definition includes humans and non-humans: human musicians, but also things like works. But “works” is rather abstract. There are material artefacts such as scores (like paper) and recordings (like digital MP3 format on a smartphone). One could also include (more) material artefacts in the definition: musical instruments and equipment such as amplifiers and speakers, for example, may be part of the ecology of performance.

Making Music With Technology 93 Moreover, the body and embodiment are once again an important aspect of this playing and performance. Playing a musical instrument well requires technique. The way one plays a music instrument can also be seen as a habitus in Bourdieu’s sense, that is, it is embodied social knowledge (Bourdieu 1990); it is an embodied kind of understanding, similar to the way a person walks (Sterne 2003, 375). The body understands how to play the guitar; it is not just something mental. Given the skill/technique character and the social character of performance, musical performance has also been compared to a craft. Godlovitch has argued that performance “belongs squarely within the craft tradition as a professional practice governed by inherently conservative standards of manual skill and expertise” and is linked to a “performance practice community”, with rules and obligations similar to those of the Guild tradition (Godlovitch 1998, 1). “Performance communities” are groups unified under an instrument and a body of technique (61). For example, becoming a violinist means becoming a member of “a unified club of skilled specialists”, which has its own schools, standard repertoire, standardization, rankings, masterclass circuits, and so one—there is a “scene” (76). Skill acquisition and training is seen as very important (4). One has to know how to use one’s body (often including the hands) and one has to know the instrument (55). It takes time to get acquainted and intimate with one’s instrument. It takes effort to gain mastery. Note that what counts as a musical “instrument” may change. Sterne (2003, 7) gives the historical example of the turntable which was turned from a playback technology into a musical instrument. Another, contemporary example: today’s DAW (digital audio workstation) is software that enables recording and creating music. It hence can be seen as a music instrument. Recording technology also raises issues about the status of performed music versus recorded music and, more generally, new digital technologies versus older technologies. Godlovitch (1998, 2) has argued that, by means of its ritualistic aspects alone, music performance has resisted the challenges brought on by the new technologies. Now, Godlovitch sees electronic sound-making technology as opposed to such crafts practices and as involving less skill or even no skill, whereas I think we can also understand such electronic or digital music practices, including recording, mixing, editing, etc., in terms of crafts and as linked to practitioner ­communities—new ones, perhaps, since based on relatively new technologies but craft communities nevertheless. For example, creating music using a DAW definitely requires the development of skill, and what a DJ does counts as a music performance and is also based on skill. These activities do not involve the direct contact with, for example, the material strings of a string instrument like a guitar, but they involve “direct control” (53) of sound and direct contact with all kinds of material equipment and skill to use it in a creative way. And in contrast to what Godlovitch

94  Making Music With Technology thinks (101), computers and DAW software are musical instruments if they are used for making music. Of course, as in classical music and other types of music, some people are better musicians and/or better performers than others and are more skilled and more creative. Some are virtuosi (77); many others are not. Making sound with digital technologies is easy; making good music (and good quality sound) requires skill and talent. Using digital instruments also requires the learning of skills within communities, regardless whether such communities sustain themselves via digital communication (online) or not (offline). For example, if I want to learn how to use a DAW in order to create music, or when I want to learn to play an electric guitar, then I can watch online videos that teach this, videos that work very much according to the master-apprentice model. Thus, for musicians and listeners, the choice to make in terms of medium and technology is not between craft or not, as Godlovitch suggests, but rather to choose between different kinds of craft practices: traditional ones and more recent ones. I do not claim that using a digital instrument is the same as using a traditional one; different kinds of instruments afford different kinds of music and creativity, and perhaps it is true that some instruments enable or encourage a more “remote”, less engaged playing than others. This deserves further discussion, as many other information technologies and digital media do. But there is not necessarily less skill involved. Moreover, in contrast to Godlovitch I see working with digital technologies (in music and elsewhere) not as entirely different from, or necessarily opposed to, performance; instead, the new practices that come with the new digital technologies, such as mixing and digital recording, can also take on a performative character. And these practices and performances do involve “physically immediate artmaking” (5), albeit with different instruments (computers and computer software, for example). Compare the guitar and computer software: in both cases there is mediation by an instrument, and in both cases there is physical and embodied action and agency on the part of the musician(s). While I agree that it is problematic to say that machines can perform— this needs further discussion—and while I do not claim that the musicmaking and performances in the narrow sense are the same (there may be different skills involved, and perhaps more or less manual skill), when we consider humans performing with machines there is no reason to a priori deny that what these humans do counts as performance. To create and play music is also performance, understood in a broader sense developed here. Godlovitch is wrong to reject digital ways of music making as being non-physical and as involving only manifestations of information. His view represents only one way of looking at such technologies and not the most useful and adequate one when it comes to understanding (music as) performance. Moreover, the technology itself should not be taken as given, socially speaking. As we can learn from STS scholarship, for example Pinch and

Making Music With Technology 95 Bijker (1984) and Oudshoorn and Pinch (2003), technologies and their users (and other relevant social groups) mutually shape one another. Music instruments have to be understood as linked to particular groups (e.g., electric guitar to rock musicians) and the design and development of the instruments is shaped by these groups and vice versa. Not only music at large but also musical instruments are social phenomena and socially constructed artefacts. For example, Pinch and Trocco (2004) have analyzed the design of early Moog synthesizers, showing that music instruments as artefacts should not be seen in isolation from their use(ers) and design(ers). There are all kinds of social groups and communities involved in music making and music listening. Also in this sense music and music technologies are deeply social. Finally, most of the theory reviewed here assumes that we are in control and in charge when we play music. But technology can also gain more agency of its own in the creation and playing of music. It can compose music works, it can play instruments, and it can make decisions for us concerning music, for example, what we will listen to next. For example, Godlovitch asks if human intentional agency is necessary in performance, given that there are already computers that compose music. He also imagines that machines could learn to develop their own performance style, after analyzing interpretations by human players (Godlovitch 1998, 6). This leads him to emphasize what he thinks listeners appreciate in human performers: rigour, skill, and creativity (7). Not rule following, but craft and skill are something we appreciate and something humans are good at (137). We want the music to be the result of real effort, inner states, and stories; in other words, persons. Performers, according to Godlovitch, better be mortal, dependent, fallible human beings (140). We are the kind of beings for which something is at stake. Godlovitch writes: “In every human performance, something is at stake, something matters for all involved. The machine recital is . . . indifferent, without risk, failure, success, or creation” (144). What is communicated through the performance, then, is not so much a work, but a person. Whether or not Godlovitch is right about this, his (personalist) view makes us wonder if machines can have skill and if machines can be creative. Connecting work in computational creativity to discussions in aesthetics and philosophy of art, I  have argued that answering such a question requires us to get clearer about the process, product, and agency involved in creativity (Coeckelbergh 2017b). For example, is an internal state necessary for creativity, is a work of art creative (and a work of art at all) if we simply agree on it, and do we exclude artificial agency a priori from our definitions of creativity? Furthermore, this discussion also raises once more the question whether—and if so, in what sense—machines can “perform” at all, and if simulation is a problem (Godlovitch 1998, 126–27) or not—not only in case of new music instruments but also in new technologies in general. In that respect, it is also interesting to ask

96  Making Music With Technology again if machines have a “voice”. They can simulate the human voice and can “speak” when they take the form of personal digital assistants or “friends”. But is it voice and is it speaking? In the history of thinking, voice is often related to soul or persona, which machines are not supposed to have. But if we agree that such machines do not have voices, then what exactly is the ontological status of “machine voices”? Conducting/Being Conducted Sometimes music involves conducting. It typically happens in performances of (Western) classical music. It is the art of directing a musical performance,1 usually one involving many players, like an orchestra and/ or choir. This includes interpreting the score, cueing to indicate when a performer or several performers should start playing and setting the tempo. Conducting is done by talking to the musicians beforehand (verbal instructions) and by giving cues during the rehearsals and during the performance. Often the right hand indicates the beat and the left hand gives other cues, such as those pertaining to volume and articulation. Tempo can be measured (by instruments such as a metronome and a computer) and can be seen as “objective”, but it can also be understood as emergent or in need of interpretation/performance by the conductor and the orchestra. To play music while being conducted, then, is to respond to the interpretation and cues of the conductor, as well as to respond to the playing of others. In other types of Western music such as jazz, blues, and rock music, there is usually no formal conductor and not much conducting going on, but this does not mean that there is no coordination, direction, or organizing at all: players give cues to one another, and sometimes there is one person conducting, albeit in a more informal style, while playing and without many big gestures. For example, one may make eye contact with one of the other musicians or make a small nod of the head to one or more of them. Conducting is about organizing temporality and about organizing other people—which is a matter of communication, verbal and non-verbal. Let me now use these aspects and dimensions of music performance as metaphors to say something about the use, experience, and development of technologies.

4.3. Playing and Improvising (With) Technology and Being Conducted by Technology Technology as Performance Like music, technology can be considered in a way that abstracts from concrete performances with technology, from concrete artefacts, and

Making Music With Technology 97 from social-technological practices and contexts. Technology can take the form of a concept—for example Heidegger’s “modern technology” or the concept of a “universal Turing machine”. It can be considered as code, information, system, and so on. Concrete, material technologies are then instances of these abstract concepts. But technology can also be considered in its use and understood as performance (Coeckelbergh 2017a). It can be seen as something that embodied people do in concrete material and social contexts. The latter non-Platonic approach enables us to highlight a number of features technology shares with musical performances. I will first apply the metaphor of music performance to what we do with technology: how we play, improvise, and conduct others with technology. Then I will argue that there is also a sense in which technology plays and indeed plays us and conducts us. Playing (With) Technology: Improvisation, the Social, Skill and Embodiment, and the Network of Humans and Nonhumans If we use the metaphor of performing and “playing” technology, we can describe two kinds of performances with technology. In one type of performance, one closely follows the “score” of the technology when using the technology. One does what the designer and company that developed the technology intended one to do with the technology, or at least one interprets what the designer and company intended. Due to such interpretation every performance will be slightly different, just as it is in classical music. There is interpretation. But one follows the score or—to use a theatrical metaphor again—the script. To design a technology is then to “compose” the technology, the writing of a “score” dictating how the technology should be used. This is not always done explicitly; it is often embedded in the design itself. There may be a user’s manual, which is an explicit means of instruction, but what is meant here with “score” also refers to the intended function of the designer, in which contexts the technology is meant to be used, which gestures should be used, and so on. In another type of performance, however, which is far less common, the user draws on the structure, patterns, and “tradition” of the technology to improvise. One uses the technology not exactly as the designer or company intended. Adapting to the situation and picking up cues from others, one creates a new use. As remarked, this use is still linked to the “tradition” and is based on structures and patterns of use that are already given. For example, using old tires to build a boat refers to the tradition of making boats, and when the boat is used there are already “scores” given for that use. But one is no longer bound to a “score”, or at least one is no longer bound to the original/old score, whether it is the boat building “score” or the use of tires for cars “score”. Using a computer metaphor (and originally: wood chopping metaphor),

98  Making Music With Technology one can also call this kind of improvised use “hacking” the technology. Moreover, design of technology, understood as composition, can then be understood as originally involving improvisation—just as composing new music, even if it leads to a score and a “finished” piece in the end, involves in the beginning performance and improvisation. The advantage of the improvisation metaphor is that, based on a rich understanding of improvisation, we can not only point to the skill involved in using and developing technology (see below) but also stress that even such improvisations with technology always draw on previous patterns of use. These patterns are part of a “tradition” of a particular technology. Thus, the metaphor of jazz improvisation is a good metaphor for the more “creative” social life with technology: in the unusual case when we don’t follow the score, there are still patterns such as “chord progressions” and “standards” we use. We play things “over it”, “on top of it”. And as with particular styles of music, there is a particular tradition and cultural context. In my book Using Words and Things (2017a), I have called these patterns and culture(s) “games” and “form of life”: the meaning of technology can only be understood as part of a social and cultural whole. This leads us to the social aspect of performing with technology. When we perform with technology, there is often an audience involved. For example, the writer using a word processor has an audience in mind. The writing is performed (be)for(e) that audience. Another, less literal example: the car driver performs in traffic, that is, before an audience of others, potentially also the police. The audience does not need to be present at the time of performance: there can be “recordings” in the sense of the driver’s memory of traffic situations and the memory in a navigation device, but there is a performance (be)for(e) others. Using technology is a social practice. Sometimes the audience is present, as in a performance with power point or a social media performance, when there are real time responses and delayed responses, and where one’s performances (postings, likes, etc.) are recorded by the software. Like performing music, performing with technology is always a matter of social interaction, very similar to what Fesmire says about improvisation: it is about responding to others, playing into the tune of a conversation (linguistic and communicative metaphor), and indeed it is about playing jazz together. In social media, for example, one only plays well (is good at playing the game, to use another metaphor) if one picks up and plays in “rhythm” and “tune” with respect to the performances of others. A solo is possible but only if it is embedded in the larger whole and flow of the ongoing performance(s), and if it is “granted” by others. The performance of posting something on Twitter, for example, is only successful and indeed really performative if the person who tweets is able to pick up the tune and rhythm of a particular conversation—on Twitter and in society at large. Performing also means listening and responding to others. As in jazz or blues

Making Music With Technology 99 improvisation, there needs to be a balance between giving room to others and going for a solo, and a continuous “listening” to others needs to be practiced. The same may be true for more socially complex multiplayer computer games. But performances with technology are also social in the “deeper” or more structural (one might also say: transcendental) sense mentioned before: there are already patterns, there is already a “grammar” of use (Coeckelbergh 2017a). To say it with a Wittgensteinian term: there is no private music and there is no private technology. Again, one can use the music metaphor: as with jazz improvisation or any other music, at the moment when one starts performing, there is already a tradition of use and there are standards and patterns of use. One’s performance is always a response to that tradition and at the same time constitutes and continues the tradition. Blues, if it is to be more than a historical tradition, needs to be performed time and time again. Similarly, what it means to drive a car relies on how people have used cars in the past and is constituted and continued every time someone drives a car. The use of a car, then, is not just individual but also social and cultural in the sense that one is and becomes part of a community of drivers, that is, people that use cars for driving. Of course one can improvise a bit, and, for example, use the car for sleeping instead of driving, but even this improvisation refers to the standard use and the tradition of car driving and home building (and even the “normal” car is and was already a “mobile home” in the sense of a semi-private space where one could feel at home). Moreover, such improvisation creates their own new kind of practice and (sub)culture, for example, the subculture of camper vans, which is not only about technology but is also connected to lifestyles. If the rock guitar gave rise to rock culture or if digital technology gave rise to techno music, this is not exceptional: every technology creates its own culture or contributes to the shaping of a (larger) culture. For example, social media technologies like Facebook or Twitter or popular multiplayer computer games shape their own cultures and are in turn embedded in styles and cultures that sustain the performances with these media and that are in turn supported and constituted by the concrete performances. For example, fantasy narratives in games refer to fantasy narratives in the wider culture within which that game is embedded, and ways of interacting, cooperating, and discussing within the game may not fundamentally differ from, and in any case refer to and respond to, ways of interacting, cooperating, and discussing in the so-called “real” world. Moreover, performing with technologies, also so-called digital technologies, is not necessarily easy, skill-less, or disembodied. As is stressed in the postphenomenological tradition (Ihde), use of technologies always involves the body. And to use technologies well one has to get skilled at using them. Performing with technologies requires technique. Like playing the guitar, performing and “playing” (with) a smartphone requires

100  Making Music With Technology that one learns and embodies specific gestures, that one finds one’s way “with the instrument”, i.e., “in” the interface and “in” the software, so that one knows how to handle the phone while walking, that one knows what to do when the phone does not respond, and so on. It is only by neglecting and abstracting from concrete performances with technology that one can speak about “technology” in general or that one can make a claim such as “everything is information”. The use of technology, understood as performance (here musical performance), always involves intimate material-bodily couplings that can be expressed by the terms “skill” and “technique”. Finally, the previous discussion shows that when one considers the case of playing musical instruments as a technological practice, what we do with technologies and the metaphor we use to describe this (musical performance) merge. Use of the performance metaphor changes into discussing actual instances of music performance. We can understand playing musical instruments as a technological performance and we can understand technological performance by means of the metaphor of playing musical instruments. In both cases (or perhaps one should say: in this case) we can apply all the previous features, and, keeping in mind the overview in the previous section, we can stress the materiality and the social construction of technological artefacts used in performances with technology. Even so-called digital technologies are not “virtual” or removed from the concrete materiality and embodiment in its use and performance, and the artefacts used in performances should not be seen as given or as merely technical but as linked to social processes. Moreover, the performance metaphor can be used in a way that stresses the human/technology couplings, as with the use of the notion of skill, or it can be used in the spirit of Latour and others to talk about a network of human and non-human elements of the performative space (or performative environment or performance ecology)—or perhaps one should say: human and non-human performers. This leads us to the following questions: Who performs with technology? What if technology also performs? Keeping in mind Godlovitch’s question: Is it necessary that there is human intentional agency for it to count as a performance? And in what sense can technology play us and conduct us? Technology as Performer in Our Lives With Technology I already mentioned that technology can be more than just an instrument for music: it gains more agency and can also play and create music. But it was doubtful if it can also perform or at least if it can perform in the way(s) humans perform. Now, what does it mean to use this as a metaphor for our lives with technology more generally? Clearly all kinds of technologies have agency or can have agency in our lives: think

Making Music With Technology 101 about the bots on the internet or the intelligent machines in our homes. In STS and in postphenomenology, this is often conceptualized in terms of “actants” or “mediators”. This is partly helpful since it highlights the non-­instrumental role of technology but may also be misleading or at least sketch an incomplete picture, since—at least as part of a Latourian or mediation theory framework and using performative metaphors unreflectively—it is not sensitive enough to the differences between ­ humans and non-humans. If we take the metaphor of musical performance, however, we can have this discussion. Consider again Godlovitch’s view that human performers can properly be called performers since they perform not only the music but at the same time always their own humanity and person. Whether or not we agree with this particular (personalist) answer, we can ask the same question for performances by technology in general, not only in music. For example, if a bot were to perform my social media profile for me after my death, then what would be the difference between the “performance” of that bot and my (past) performances with the technology as a living person? An answer à la Godlovitch would stress my vulnerability as a living person and the fact that, when I am engaged in social interaction via the technology, something is at stake for me, whereas in the case of the bot it does not have human vulnerability and nothing is at stake for it, since it is not a person. Hence the latter would not count as a performance at all. The bot can pick up patterns and learn from it, and it can follow this as a rule to make new postings, but these imitations of me will not be the same as me performing me on social media. According to his personalist view, the reason why it is not the same is that performance is not only about performing a specific content (a piece of music, something that I say on social media) but is also always about performing me as a person. The bot necessarily fails at this, since—on this view—what I am as a person cannot be captured by what the algorithm can learn from my previous posts. One could also say that the algorithm can communicate something but it cannot communicate somebody. The fallibility and the mortality—indeed the embodiment—are not there. Furthermore, because of the lack of (human) embodiment, one could ask if the bot does have “skill” or is as skilled as I am when using social media. It can have the “skill” to compose and send postings, make likes, etc., if such actions are  abstracted from embodied performance. It can have the “skill” to use the program, if use is reduced to a non-performative abstraction. But if skill is necessarily related to embodiment and if use is about performance, then one could say that this is not really “skill” in the human sense of the word, since human skill is always related to the human bodymind (non-dualistic view). This is another reason to conclude that the bot cannot really perform (me). Whatever the right answer to this question may be, and as in the case of theatre, the (musical) performance metaphor enables us to discuss

102  Making Music With Technology questions regarding technological agency from a different angle, and in particular it enables us to ask new and interesting questions about differences between human and non-human agency. What Technology Does With Us: Technology as Composer of Our Lives and as Playing and Conducting Us We learned from sociological and anthropological approaches that music has an effect on our (social) lives: it shapes our experience and the temporal structure of what we do, and it shapes our identities and our lives as a whole. Hence composers and creators of music (to extend the metaphor beyond classical music, which tends to dominate philosophical accounts of music) are not only composers and creators of something called “a work of music”. As composers and creators of performances, they (co-) shape musical performances but also our experiences, our identities, and our performances in and of our lives. If we use this as a metaphor for what technology does to our lives, then, we can say that technologies do not only do what they are supposed to do (have a specific function, are a means to a particular end) but also compose our lives, in the sense that they co-shape our experiences, shape the temporal structure of our lives, and compose our identities and the meanings we give to our lives. This can be expressed by using a metaphor from text and theatre, as in the previous chapter  and in the work on narrative technologies I did with Wessel Reijers, but the musical performance metaphor gives us some extra metaphors that further unpack the temporality and movement aspects. Consider the metaphor of tempo, for example: many people feel that modern technology has created a higher tempo of life. Or the metaphor of harmony, which was already used in the discussion about the meaning of a narrative: Does technology manage to create a harmonious daily life? And what kind of style does the technology give to the music of our life and identity? For example, use of social media for work purposes might be said to increase the tempo of work or use of a particular computer game might give style and identity to the life of its users. They use the game to construct their identity, but at the same time the game constructs and uses them. If we must use another metaphor from classical music, we can also say that technology conducts our lives. Even if it does not always tell us what to do, it tells us when to do things and how to do them, it directs the tempo of our lives, co-interprets the tradition, and organizes us. There may be a “score”; there is already a way of life given in our social lives and social environments. But technology shapes how we perform. For example, the smartphone “gestures” that and when we have to look at our messages and social media “interprets” how we communicate interpersonally and its corresponding rules and traditions. Games may also shape so-called “real-life” performances of their gamers.

Making Music With Technology 103 In all these cases it is not just technology that composes and conducts; humans always have a hand in it too. We are of course also the composers and conductors of our lives, and others are also players and cocomposers and co-conductors. In social media and games, for example, other human beings also influence us and the way we lead our lives. But to the extent that technologies take on the same role, the metaphor can also be applied to them. Like the technologies used for music, they are not neutral tools; they co-create the music. Not only music technologies but also all technologies co-compose and co-create the performances of our daily lives. They co-shape its tempos, harmonies, and styles. They co-create the ways we live and deal with one another. Using the metaphor of music as performance and its related metaphors, we thus have a larger conceptual/semantic toolbox available to understand what technology does to us. In the next chapter I will further discuss the issues of simulation and deception in and through the design of new technologies by drawing on the metaphor of stage magic.

Note 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conducting

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104  Making Music With Technology Fesmire, Steven. 2003. John Dewey and Moral Imagination: Pragmatism in Ethics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Funk, Michael, and Mark Coeckelbergh. 2013. “Is Gesture Knowledge? A Philosophical Approach to the Epistemology of Musical Gestures.” In Moving Imagination. Explorations of Gesture and Inner Movement, edited by H. De Preester, 113–31. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Godlovitch, Stan. 1998. Musical Performance: A Philosophical Study. London: Routledge. Godøy, Rolf, and Marc Leman, eds. 2010. Musical Gestures: Sound, Movement, and Meaning. New York: Routledge. Gould, Carol, and Kenneth Keaton. 2000. “The Essential Role of Improvisation in Musical Performance.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (2): 143–48. Kania, Andrew. 2011. “All Play and No Work: An Ontology of Jazz.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69 (4): 391–403. Kania, Andrew. 2017. “The Philosophy of Music.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/music/. Leman, Marc. 2007. Embodied Music Cognition and Mediation Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Mahrenholz, Simone. 2011. Kreativität: Eine Philosophische Analyse. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Merriam, Alan P. 1964. The Anthropology of Music. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Molino, Jean. 1990. “Musical Fact and the Semiology of Music.” Music Analysis 9 (2): 113–55. North, Adrian, and David Hargreaves. 2008. The Social and Applied Psychology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oudshoorn, Nelly, and Trevor Pinch, eds. 2003. How Users Matter: The Co-Construction of Users and Technology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Peters, Gary. 2009. The Philosophy of Improvisation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pinch, Trevor J., and Wiebe E. Bijker. 1984. “The Social Construction of Facts and Artefacts: Or How the Sociology of Science and the Sociology of Technology Might Benefit Each Other.” Social Studies of Science 14 (3): 399–441. Pinch, Trevor J., and Frank Trocco. 2004. Analog Days: The Invention and Impact of the Moog Synthesizer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. “Bourdieu, Technique, and Technology.” Cultural Studies 17 (3/4): 367–89. van Elferen, Isabella. 2009. “And Machine Created Music: Cybergothic Music and the Phantom Voices of the Technological Uncanny.” In Digital Material: Tracing New Media in Everyday Life and Technology, edited by Marianne van den Boomen, Sybille Lammes, Ann-Sophie Lehmann and Joost Rae, 121–32. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Young, James O., and Carl Matheson. 2000. “The Metaphysics of Jazz.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (2): 125–34.

5 The Magic of Technology How Machines Create and Manage Our Illusions

5.1. Introduction The British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (Clarke 1973, 21). Clarke meant that many technologies that now appear impossible may be possible in the future, considering that current technologies would be incomprehensible to people from the past—or indeed to anyone who is ignorant of its workings. “Magic” then means “something I cannot understand” and Clarke uses the term to encourage us to transcend the limits of our imagination about the future. But there are also other ways in which the phrase can be understood. For example, Gell (1994) has argued that technology enchants, and I have argued that current advanced technologies cater to our desire for the wondrous, mysterious, and magic, thus continuing the tradition of Romantic thinking and practices (Coeckelbergh 2017). Moreover, one could make comparisons between magic practices of the past and today’s scientific practices, or point to historical links between magic and the emergence of modern science (e.g., alchemy and chemistry). One could compare the design and use of contemporary technologies to stage magic, interpreted as a performative practice. This is what I will do in this chapter. Again my purpose is not to theorize stage magic itself but to use it as a metaphor to understand technology in a performative way and to explore what can be gained thereby for thinking about technology. In terms of technologies, the focus will be on contemporary information and communication technologies, particularly machines such as robots and smart assistive devices. First, I will need to say more about stage magic. What kind of practice and experience is it for the stage magician and for the audience? How can it be understood epistemologically? What happens when someone watches a stage magic show? For example, what does it mean to say that there is a “suspension of disbelief”? And are there potential ethical problems? I make a link to the social life. Do we create illusions for each other? Do we deceive each other? In what way(s)? What happens

106  The Magic of Technology in such a case? Is role playing a form of deception, or not? Is deception always problematic? If not, when is it problematic? I then explore how the design and use of technology, understood as performative practices, can be compared with stage magic. What happens when technology creates illusions and is that necessarily ethically problematic? Do we deceive ourselves or are we deceived? Who deceives whom? And is technology a mere means that is used by designers and users to create illusions, or does it also take on a more autonomous role? In what sense can technology itself act like a stage magician? Are we still in control of the show, and, if not, (why) is that always bad? I will show that the metaphor can be applied but also has its limits, and that the epistemic and ethical problems get more complex as we move from the Platonic puppet theatre interpretation of stage magic (and indeed from the Platonic interpretation of puppet theatre) to a more complex situation in which it is no longer so clear if we are deceived or if we do not want to be deceived and if there is still something like appearance versus reality. It turns out that stage magic is already more complex than expected—it is a performance involving real emotions and two experiential realities—and that, in social life, role playing and the stage blend with what is usually understood as non-performative: personal identity (see also Chapter 3 on theatre). Our performances shape us as much as we control the performance. Moreover, the ethics of illusion in the social life is also not so clear as in (a simple interpretation of) a stage magic show. I will show that in our lives with technology the ethical and epistemological lines are blurred. It is not so clear if we are deceived and who is deceiving whom (and who animates whom). And, whereas at first sight virtual reality, virtual worlds, films, robot pets, etc. are part of a Platonic theatre, on closer inspection the line between stage and non-stage, between performance and non-performance, is blurred. Technological experiences and practices are real, embodied, and social-performative. Moreover, technology is not a mere means used by the designer-magician; technology itself takes on the role of magician and co-shapes the show. We are no longer in full control, as magicians or as spectators. But can we be in full control at all? Have we ever been in full control? And do we always want to be in control? Thus, I will show that the Platonic model breaks down—already when we take a closer look at stage magic or puppet theatre itself—and that the Platonic and modern (design) interpretation of the stage magic metaphor has its limitations for understanding our living with technology once we take a more performance-centred approach. In terms of technologies, I will focus especially on the magic of contemporary information and communication technologies, thus further developing previous work on magic and technologies (Coeckelbergh 2017, 2018). Consider, for instance, the magic of social robots or smart assistive devices such as Alexa. I will argue that these technologies do not only

The Magic of Technology 107 tend to escape our understanding and exceed our expectations and imagination, as Clarke already suggested—think, for example, about artificial intelligence and in particular machine learning applications, which act as magical devices that exceed our understanding. The technologies also play a key role in our contemporary performative experiences and practices and arguably even run much of the (social) show. Perhaps they even co-define what illusion and deception are, what we mean by these terms (and the same for honesty). Perhaps they also shape our epistemological and ethical thinking. (This thought already takes us to the next chapter on philosophical performances and how technology shapes those performances.) In the course of the chapter I will continue to critically engage with the Platonic metaphor (see Chapter 3 on theatre). I will also refer to Flusser’s thinking about design, which uses theatre and dance metaphors, and respond to Tognazzini’s seminal work on stage magic and design of ICTs.

5.2. From Stage Magic to the Ethics of Technology: Platonic Epistemology and Ethics Against Technology That Make Us the Victims of Magic Stage magic is a performance art that entertains people by using tricks and illusions. So, deception and illusion are not a side effect but are the main aim. What is happing in stage magic seems remarkably close to what Plato described using a theatrical metaphor. The audience members in stage magic are like Plato’s prisoners or indeed Plato’s theatre audience: while the magician knows what is really happening, knows the truth, the audience members only see appearances. At least during the performance, they live in illusion. They do not see reality. Thus, there is a clear separation between the world of reality and the world of illusion and between the theatre stage and the non-stage, real world. Yet we must already note a significant difference between Plato’s normative evaluation of this situation and that of audiences in stage magic: for Plato, people should be liberated from the world of appearances and ascend to the truth. The philosopher can and should help with this escape plan. This is the attitude of the Platonic philosopher and the modern scientist; it is also the attitude of audience members in stage magic in so far as they want to know what is going on. But at the same time audiences of stage magic like to be deceived since it entertains them. As Plato already said in Book III of the Republic (Plato 1997), what deceives also enchants, it casts a spell (413c). And audience members love to be enchanted. They want the spell. During the time of the performance, they don’t want to know what is really going on. This would spoil the illusion. They want illusion. Moreover, usually they also know that what they see is an illusion. They know that they are being deceived. They are not Plato’s ignorant prisoners, nor do they fully know the truth. They know

108  The Magic of Technology that there is a reality that is different from the appearances they see, even if they don’t know what this reality is. Thus, on the one hand there is the stage, where there is deception, on the other hand there is reality: the reality of the magician, who knows what she is doing and what is going on (which is not known to the audience) and the reality the audience lives (in) outside of the theatre, which is assumed to be known to the audience and which is assumed to be a nonperformative reality. There is a reality that can be known independently or objectively, and there can be trickery and deceit in social life, but it is not supposed to be like that. You’re not supposed to act. You’re supposed to be authentic, be yourself, etc. And you’re not supposed to let yourself be deceived by others. In the Republic, Plato demands that guardians are put to the test: they are asked to perform tasks that are likely to make them be deceived, and those who do not let themselves be deceived and who recollect the truth are selected, they are the best guardians (413b-d). The others are “victims of magic” (413b) and should not rule the city. This takes us to the ethics of stage magic, at least an ethics within this (post-)Platonic model: in contrast to the real world outside magic, on the stage of the magician it is allowed if not mandatory to deceive and to create illusion. The clear epistemological divide between appearances and reality is also a divide between two kinds of ethical spaces: in stage magic deception is allowed, in real life it is not. In real life, to be ethical includes not deceiving people. Magicians, or anyone else for that matter, should not deceive, should render people the victims of magic. The ethical magician confirms this divide: while on the stage she will do everything to support illusion and perhaps even refer to supernatural magic if that helps, in general—I mean: outside the theatre, not on stage—she does not claim that what she does is supernatural. She claims that she is a skilled magician whose profession is to create illusions. She tricks and deceives on the stage, but if she is ethical she does not deceive at a meta-level, she does not deceive in the sense of making people believe that she really has supernatural powers. If she is ethical, she frames her act as a stage magic performance. In other words, it is framed as theatre, in the sense that it is claimed that what happens is not real. Audiences understand that. After all, that is what they want. They want to see something extraordinary, they want to be taken out of the real world. In the real world they might be critical. They might have a scientific attitude or long for philosophical truth. But for the duration of the show they are willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of entertainment. A  Platonic-Socratic questioner or modern scientist would spoil the fun. The world of appearances and the world of reality have to be kept separated and the one should not pollute the other. In the real world, it is forbidden to deceive. On the magician’s stage, it is a categorical imperative. The audience should be wondering and be amazed but should not really embark on an inquiry to find out how it works. They should enjoy the show! For this purpose, it

The Magic of Technology 109 is part of the magician’s ethic to not reveal her tricks. This would spoil the fun and cross the illusion/reality divide, cross the border between the world of appearances and the real world, between performance and non-­ performance. The ethics of stage magic, and Platonic ethics in general, demands that this border is protected and maintained. It is not difficult to see a parallel between what happens in stage magic and what happens in and with contemporary information and communication technologies. Of course, on stage technologies have always been used to deceive. Magicians use technological artefacts, often simple ones such as a handkerchief and sometimes more complex ones. In the 18th and 19th century automata were used to deceive audiences. For example, in the mid-19th century, the French clockmaker and stage magic pioneer Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin performed with automata that appeared to be alive. But today it seems that technologically supported deception and illusion have left the stage and are to be found everywhere and are available for everyone. Consider virtual reality technology and computer games, designed to deceive you into experiencing that you are in a different world, social robots that appear to be alive, and digital assistants such as Alexa or Google Assistant that trick users into thinking that the former have a personality. More generally, computers, smartphones, and the internet take you to different worlds (or so it is often interpreted). And earlier, film, radio, and television already performed their magic on audiences. We are put under a spell, and we love it. Like in stage magic, these illusions are not side effects but are often the very aim of the technology. These technologies and media are designed to deceive and to create illusion. And usually we like it. In the 1990s, software designer Tognazzini (1993) argued that the design of humancomputer interfaces can learn from the principles of magic. Similarly, Marshall, Benford, and Pridmore (2010) argue that creating illusion is needed to entertain and engage users (567) and that users also may want to deceive each other. Thus, designers are a kind of magician but with a stage that is everywhere. As Vilém Flusser reminds us, the term “design” is often related to cunning and deception (and techne as ars even to “sleight of hand”), and etymologically a “machine” (Greek: mechos) is a device designed to trap and deceive: The word occurs in contexts associated with cunning and deceit. A designer is a cunning plotter laying his traps. Falling into the same category are other vary significant words: in particular, mechanics and machine. The Greek mechos means a device designed to deceive—i.e. a trap—and the Trojan Horse is one example of this. Ulysses is called polymechanikos, which schoolchildren translate as ‘the crafty one’. The word mechos itself derives from the ancient MAGH, which we recognize in the German Macht and mögen, the English ‘might’ and ‘may’. Consequently, a machine is a device designed to deceive; a

110  The Magic of Technology lever, for instance, cheats gravity, and ‘mechanics’ is the trick of fooling heavy bodies. (Flusser 1999, 17) According to Flusser, the modern bourgeois distinction between the world of arts and the world of technology is bridged by design, but this is only possible because both are already connected (Flusser 1999, 18). He thus links technology to the art of deception. It is a way to deceive nature (19) and each other. Contemporary devices such as social robots and assistive devices, then, we could conclude, are new ways to trick and deceive. Designers and the people they work for, it seems, want to deceive us, also in the sense of exercising power over us. (See later in this chapter.) Seen from the point of view of a Platonic ethics, this magic by means of technologies is fine if it happens on stage and if it is clear that it is illusion. But it is seen as very problematic if and in so far it crosses the border between virtual and real, between appearances and truth—in other words: if it makes victims of magic. Whereas stage magic (and film) were confined to the theatre, it seems that new technologies and media bring deception into the everyday life, that is, into the real world. This goes against the (Platonic) ethics of stage magic, since it is no longer clear where the stage ends and real life starts. The stage is everywhere, appearances and reality mix. Consider, for example, augmented reality, which deliberately tries to mix up appearance and reality. Within a (post-)Platonic framework, this is deception and is strictly forbidden. It is the greatest sin. Indeed, several criticisms of contemporary information and communication technologies have understandably been formulated in terms of deception and illusion. For example, robot ethicists have warned about the danger of deception by robots. Users are tricked into believing that robots are companions or carers, but they are not (Sparrow and Sparrow 2006, 148). And while in the theatre deception is unproblematic, like when a puppeteer does her show, it is problematic when children are deceived with robot nannies (Sharkey and Sharkey 2010). According to Turkle, robots are designed to make us “fool ourselves” (Turkle 2011, 20). We believe that there is meaning, love, and emotion, but there is none of this. There is only illusion and performances: performances of love (138) and emotion (286). Perhaps the same could be said about devices such as Alexa. There is a performance of personality, but this is a dangerous deception: there is no such thing. The device does not have a personality, does not have a soul, does not have a mind, etc. Ethically speaking, then, designers should avoid such deceptions and illusions. Or at least they should be honest about what the device does. Similar to the stage magician who is honest about her act in the sense that she makes clear that it is an act, designers should make clear to users that the device creates an illusion. Tognazzini therefore proposes an ethics

The Magic of Technology 111 of honesty. We can interpret this ethics as one that aims at maintaining or restoring the borders between appearances and reality, between stage and non-stage, between performance and non-performance. Tognazzini writes about the computer: The magician is not supernatural; the character he plays is. The computer is not capable of human intelligence and warmth; the character we create is. People will not end up feeling deceived and used when they discover, as they must ultimately, that the computer is nothing but a very fast idiot. (Tognazzini 1993, 361) Similarly, one could demand that designers be honest about social robots and assistive devices and perhaps design them in such a way that it is clear to users that their intelligence, personality, mind, emotions, friendship, love, etc., are an illusion, that they are not real, that they are nothing but machines. More generally, one could demand that technologies do not cross the border to the real world and, if they produce illusions and trick us, at least make clear that they are producing illusions. To the extent that they fail to do this, they deceive us and we become victims of magic. One could argue, like Turkle, that new technologies and media distract us from real love, real friendship, and indeed (in the vein of Sparrow and Sparrow) from reality as it is. Or one could argue, like Tognazzini, for an ethics of honesty. Designers should be honest about what they and their technological artefacts do and create. Users could demand from designers: If with your robot or smart device you’re making a Trojan Horse that is designed to invade the privacy of our homes in order to capture data for commercial purposes, then say it clearly and make clear in the design of the technology that you’re doing a trick, that you’re giving us the pleasure of magic in return for our data. Don’t pretend to do something supernatural, like creating a robot that is “alive” or that is “conscious”, or that is a “friend”. Be honest that you want to entertain and create illusion, but that it is a mere illusion, that the robot is a machine. Be honest that what you’re doing is a kind of (puppet) theatre, stage magic. Perhaps you are not obliged to “reveal your tricks”, that is, explain how everything works. One could argue that in commercial contexts, like in magician communities, secrets have to be guarded. One could question this and argue that this should not be absolute and that consumers have the right to be better informed. But whatever the outcome of that discussion, the ethical and legal demand towards designers and their companies, governments, and organizations is: you are obliged to reveal that you are tricking us (e.g.,  by selling our data obtained by means of a Trojan Horse interface). However, things are not that clear, not at all.

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5.3. From the Platonic Theatre to Real Performances With and by Technology The previous section assumed a relatively simple and Platonic model of stage magic, according to which there is appearance (on the part of the spectator, who is deceived) and reality (on the part of the magician, who knows what is real). But as in stage magic, things are not what they seem at first sight. The so-called “appearance” on the side of the spectator is more real than thus far assumed. The spectator really experiences that, for example, a person disappears or a table levitates. The spectator feels real emotions and really perceives the “illusions”. So why call it “appearance”? It seems more appropriate to speak of two realities. Tognazzini, albeit still using the Platonic language of appearance, writes: Actually, there are two simultaneous acts performed in magic: the one the magician actually does—the magician’s reality—and the one the spectators perceive—the spectators’ reality: The magician’s reality consists of all the sleights of hand and manipulation of gimmicked devices that make up the prosaic reality of magic. The spectators’ reality, given a sufficiently competent magician, is entirely different: an alternate reality in which the normal laws of nature are repeatedly defied, a reality where the magician, as well as his or her tricks, appear supernatural. (Tognazzini 1993, 357) As Tognazzini argues, time and timing are important in creating these different realities: the magician does something at a time 1, which then has effects at a time 2. The two realities correspond to two different temporal points. There is the time of the magician and the time of the spectator. The magician uses time in order to create the illusion. The spectator might think that the trick happens at time 2, whereas it has already happened at time 1, for example (Tognazzini 1993, 359). Like the metaphor of music, this temporal dimension of magic shows us that performance is a process: acts take place in space but also in time, and this time dimension is very important for the performance to work. Moreover, the spectator should not be assumed to be entirely passive, epistemologically speaking. In line with insights from contemporary cognitive science (enactivism) and philosophy of mind, we must submit that perception is something we actively do, rather than that it just happens to us (Noë 2005). It can thus be said that the spectator actively co-constructs the performance— co-performs, as it were. Hence one could even speak of two acts or two performances, one by the spectator and one by the magician. One performs in order to create a spectator reality; the other performs the role of spectator and co-constructs the spectator reality. Moreover, the perception by the spectators does not happen in a purely symbolic or ethereal

The Magic of Technology 113 world of appearances but is rather a matter of embodied perception and performance. Without the real presence and work of real people and their very real bodies (and hence their embodied knowledge of how it is to be situated in space, etc.), the magic does not work. Finally, stage magic is a social performance, in which both the magician and the spectator play a role. The magician is not more “authentic” than the spectators, or vice versa. Both find themselves in a social setting in which the mask and the person cannot easily be disentangled. (And Flusser even suggests that there is no “I” behind the mask (1999, 106).) This means that we have to question the Platonic interpretation of Plato’s own metaphor; we can offer an alternative, non-Platonic account of what happens in the cave and, more generally, a non-Platonic account of philosophy. In Plato’s cave, the prisoners are chained, but all the same they are part of the performance and their perception is more active than assumed: they co-construct the so-called appearances. Without them, theatre or stage magic does not work. There is always co-performance. And what they experience and know may well differ from what the philosopher experiences and knows, but it is also a reality. It may then still be argued that the prisoners should be released on the grounds, for example, that they have a limited and incomplete view since there are more realities, and that they should also be helped to find their way to see another reality. It may even be argued that the philosopher’s reality outside of the cave is more meaningful and valuable than the reality inside. And one could examine how the artefact-mediated reality of the prisoners differs from that of the non-mediated reality outside. But in this non-Platonic view, the reality and experience of the prisoners’ experience can and should no longer be dismissed as amounting to “mere appearance”. The prisoners are also living and experiencing a reality. This reality is also a social reality. In contrast to Plato, we must emphasize that the prisoners are not mute puppets but can talk and can talk with one another. They are not atomistic minds. They communicate. They think and, together, actively make and construct their reality. Furthermore, the prisoners also have bodies. They are not disembodied perceivers. And just as the philosopher plays the role of liberator, the prisoners also play the role of prisoner. Moreover, the philosopher’s experience is also not one of “pure mind” but requires embodied performance. The ascent to the truth requires walking up. It is not an ascent towards pure spirit; body and mind remain connected and (inter)fused. A magician uses her body, as do philosophers. Finally, philosophy is also a technological practice. Like the magician, the philosopher needs techniques and skill. The magician knows reality, or rather: knows her reality. But that reality is also constructed and is learned by means of skilful engagement with things and technologies. To become a magician it is not enough to know in theory or to recollect an a priori truth, as Plato argued. One has to acquire know-how and make knowledge. Similarly, the philosopher also

114  The Magic of Technology needs to learn by doing, in practice. I will say more about philosophy as a performative practice in the next chapter. For now it suffices to conclude that, once we take a performative turn, things get more complicated and the Platonic model breaks down. This also happens when we reinterpret contemporary experience of technologies and media in this light. It might be tempting to dismiss “online” experience and “game” experience as less real, as “virtual” reality as opposed to “real” reality. But this Platonic approach fails once we consider technological experiences as performances and as embodied practices. So-called “online experience” does not take place in a different world but is also a kind of reality, and one that is actively constructed by means of embodied performance by the user. When I use the internet to work, communicate, or game (e.g., on a computer or on a smartphone) I  do not enter a different, “virtual” world, if that implies a world of “appearances” as opposed to “reality”. When I  interact with a robot, I  do not enter a world of “illusion” as opposed to “reality”. Instead, there is one world or one reality, or, as I suggested in the previous paragraphs, different worlds and different realities—all of which, however, are equally real. Online and offline worlds may be different, but there is not hierarchy in terms of how real they are. And even if one were to hesitate in saying that there is one reality or one world, in any case the realities and worlds overlap and merge. For example, my role, personality, appearance, and indeed performances on online social media are not totally different from my other roles, personality, appearances, and performances, and there is mutual influence. The same can be said for games and virtual worlds, even if there the differences might be larger. Furthermore, like stage magic, technological practices such as social media use and virtual worlds are also deeply social performances. Epistemologically and practically, both parties are required: the user-spectator and the designer-magician. But in contemporary digital experience and practice, the line between user-spectator and designer-magician blurs as users get more active in terms of providing content and adapting the stage and the tricks provided by the designers. Contemporary social media and games cross the line between spectators and magicians. When we use a social medium like Facebook or Twitter, we are co-magicians; without users, the magic of the medium would not work. We are not just tricked; we are not just victims of magic. We also trick ourselves, contribute to the spell. Sometimes designers do not even intend a trick but the users trick themselves. For example, some owners of Roomba vacuum cleaners—not designed to create a social illusion—develop social emotions towards their machine: they feel gratitude or treat it as their baby (Scheutz 2011). Users are then both magicians and spectators. Furthermore, these technologies and practices are also social performances in the sense that, like in stage magic, both users and designers play roles. And users play roles and communicate among themselves. Even if they are

The Magic of Technology 115 alone with their phone or in front of their computer screen, users interact with one another, for example, when they use social media or play MMORPGs. It is a social and communicative setting. And this is what the theatre has always been. In origin it might have even been a lot more social; if we follow Nietzsche’s (post)Romantic imagination, the Greek theatre was more like having a party (and possibly orgy) than going to a modern Western theatre or a modern cinema, in which technologies and architectures maintain the divide between a Platonic passive spectator and active performer. Plato’s metaphor is closer to modern Western theatre or cinema (and indeed puppet theatre) than it is to the Greek tragedy he criticized. The latter seems a better metaphor for describing what we do on and with “the internet” or “digital” technologies. The reality or different realities of contemporary technological experience is or are social realities. They are not different from social reality at large or from other social realities. Furthermore, like people at a party, users of “online” services and participants in “virtual” worlds and “computer” games do not leave their body at home when they engage in their technological practice. Their actions (e.g., clicks), thinking, and perceptions involve the body and are made possible by their embodied experience. Not only do the designers perform; the users are also performers, and this is always an active, social, and embodied performance. Thus, both what users do and what designers do are technology-­mediated performances. Not only the designer has machines and tricks; users, too, employ technologies and techniques to do something with whatever the designer offers. They are not like Plato’s passive spectators chained to their chairs. They co-perform rather than passively consume “the internet”, social media, etc. Their experience is designed, but in their use they co-design the experience. They are co-magicians. The metaphor of stage magic, or rather the simple interpretation of stage magic, breaks down. And so does Plato’s theatrical metaphor, that is, the Platonic view and version of theatre. A performance-oriented approach enables us to revise the Platonic interpretation and construction of theatre and magic, and it thereby offers us not only a critique of how he uses his theatre and magic metaphors but also an alternative way of understanding what goes on in and with contemporary information and communication technologies. Let me give another example to further show the implications of this performative turn for thinking about contemporary technologies and to return to the ethical question: social robotics. According to the Platonic interpretation, what happens when social robots such as companion robots, care robots, or nanny robots are used is that users are deceived, are given an illusion. They are taken to a world of appearances. This is done by the designer-magician (and we could add: those who employ the robot such as parents, care workers, managers, etc.—the partners in crime), who tricks the users into thinking that this robot is alive, is a real

116  The Magic of Technology companion, has emotions, and so on. If it is a good designer-magician, the illusion works. The users are entertained and the robot performs its function (e.g., monitoring an ill user). This model supposes that the designer is the performer who knows reality, whereas the user is a passive recipient of whatever the designer cooks up and that the user lives in a different world, a world of illusion. Only the designer knows that the robot is really just a machine, that is, a device for tricking. (The same can be said for the parents, the care workers, and so on.) This then raises the ethical worry that the designer and those who employ the robot deceive the user and are not honest about what they are doing. The children, elderly people, and so on, are seen as the victims of magic. They are imprisoned in appearances. According to the non-Platonic, performative interpretation of what happens here, however, there are different realities: the reality of the user and that of the designer, and the reality of the user cannot be dismissed by calling it “appearance”. In and during the performance, there is a lot of reality. The user has real emotions and real experience. The robot really seems alive, for example. Or the robot really seems to care. In practice, robotics researchers are not such good magicians (yet). The illusion may last very briefly or may not be complete. But there are sufficient “magical” effects. And sometimes very little is needed to create a spell. This is so because, again, the users are not passive perceivers but active coconstructors and co-performers of the reality. Yet regardless how skilled the magician-designer and his accomplices are and however successful the performance is, my point is that the experience of the user is real. It does not belong to a different world of appearances, a virtual world. It belongs to the same world we all live in, or at least it is one of the worlds—all of which are equally real. Furthermore, this response is still formulated in terms of a discussion about “reality” and “realities”, but once we move beyond a Platonic and metaphysical approach towards a performative approach, different questions can be asked. It becomes clear that what happens here is not adequately described by the Platonic metaphor, which suggests that reality can be known independently of users’ (inter)subjectivity and which assumes passivity on the part of the users. Instead, the users are active, as performers and as perceivers. The human-robot interaction and the experience of the robot are actively constructed and co-performed by the users. The designer is not the only one who performs. The designer is not in complete control of the “appearance” or “illusion”. The users coperform their real experience of the robot and their real practical engagement with the robot. This also involves them as embodied and social beings. They perceive the robot on the basis of their own embodied and social-emotional experience, e.g.,  they can interpret the robot as being “sad” because they know how it is to be sad and they have experience seeing other people being sad. They also communicate with one another

The Magic of Technology 117 about the robot (directly) or indirectly find themselves in a social context in which things are said about the robot (e.g., in the room they are, discussions in society, ideas about robots in their culture, etc.), which also co-constructs their experience and performance. What the robot “is” or how it “appears”, then, is not only the result of the designer-magician. Rather, the robot and its magic effects emerge in social-performative processes, which include the performances of the designer but also the performances of advertising people, business people, scientists, all kinds of users, people who comment on the robot on social media, etc. This creates very real performative experiences and practices of and with the robot. Questions can then be asked about knowledge, communication, sociality, and values in these performative experiences and practices rather than discussing what is real. Adopting this approach does not mean that robot ethicists should stop asking ethical questions, but rather that they have to reframe their arguments and concerns. For example, it may well be ethically problematic to use robot nannies that monitor and entertain young children. But instead of arguing in general and Platonically that it is bad because it deceives children, gives them a world of illusion, etc., one has to be more precise about why exactly the reality (not the “appearance” or “illusion”) experienced and co-performed by the child is not good for the child—why and when that particular kind of experience and that kind of performance are bad. For example, one may argue that it creates, at that point in time and in that context, a social reality and social-interactive patterns that do not prepare the child for a different, more complex social context at a different and later time, when the child goes to school and has to perform and deal with other people (its peers) rather than with a robot, (the use of) which is not successful (enough) in constructing and performing such a human to human social interaction. Or one may argue that it creates social-emotional interactions and performances which are not as good and not as rich as can be provided when the child interacts and co-performs with its parents rather than the robot, perhaps leading to a poor emotional interaction and performance of the child and problems in the child-parents relation. I don’t know if this is the case. Such arguments would need further support. It is also likely that things are not as simple as that. Perhaps some (kinds of) interactions with a robot are absolutely fine and beneficial to the child in some ways. Maybe some performances help the child develop. Maybe this also depends on how the performances of the child with the robot are connected to other performances, e.g., of the parents, peers, etc. In addition, one can also ask questions about how designers of robots shape these performances and how they frame their role. I don’t know the answer to these questions. My point is that such questions about the right kind of interactions and the right kind of performances (and the role of the designer in shaping these performances), rather than a general accusation of deception, lead us to a more precise

118  The Magic of Technology and arguably more interesting discussion about robot ethics and, more generally, about the ethics of technology. To conclude, using the metaphor of stage magic has helped me to conceptualize technological experience and practice in terms of performance, which contributes to developing a novel way of thinking about technology. We can now ask different questions about technology: about what kind of experience and knowledge is involved when we use technology and about what good technology is and should do. Unpacking and critically discussing the stage magic metaphor has helped me to move the discussion from a simpler and Platonic way of thinking about technological experience and practice to one which makes things more complex but also more interesting and useful, as it forces us to think harder about what exactly goes on when we humans, as active, embodied, social, and skilled beings, perform with technology. To end this section, let me reflect more on the ethical, social, and political aspects of technological performances. In this context I will also ask, as in other chapters, what it would mean to say that technologies, instead of, or alongside, humans, move, organize, direct, and play (with) us—i.e., become the master-magicians.

5.4. Who (or What) Deceives Whom? More Ethical, Social, and Political Questions Metaphors help us by means of similarities but also by means of differences. In this way we learn more about the phenomenon we wanted to understand. In this case, the metaphor of stage magic helped us to see more clearly what a performative approach to contemporary technologies means. There were similarities but also differences, especially when the limitations of the Platonic framing of the metaphor became clear. And, interestingly, using a metaphor always goes both ways: as we learn more about our object of study (technological experience and practice), we also learn something about the metaphor itself (stage magic) and possibly change our view of it. In this case, it turns out that we usually have a too simple and too Platonic view of what is going on in stage magic. It turned out, for example, that a simple interpretation of stage magic almost entirely left out the social aspect. The simple model included spectators, which suggests a social setting. But what does it mean to really conceptualize performances, including stage magic and (other) technological practices, as intrinsically social? And what does this imply for technology? What role does technology play in these social performances? I  already made some suggestions about these issues in the previous sections, but it is helpful to consider some other elements that further support the performative-oriented view that is being developed here. More can also be said about the ethical and especially the political implications. My ethical discussion started with the charge of deception

The Magic of Technology 119 and then I questioned this way of formulating the problem, which led to a more performance-oriented approach. This section continues to challenge the Platonic approach and changes the initial question from “Is it really deception?” to “Who deceives whom?” This is an ethical and social but also a political question. Social In the previous chapters, the theatre metaphor was especially helpful to elaborate the social aspect, and this is also the case here. I already mentioned role playing: whereas in the simple, Platonic model there is a strict conceptual distinction (and spatial separation) between stage and nonstage, between performance and non-performance, between the magician’s theatre and the non-theatre of normal social life, if we take into account insights from Goffman, then the normal social life is also all about role playing and, more generally, is already performative. And if all social life is performative, then the distinction between stage and nonstage cannot be maintained. Next to role playing one can also use other elements from the theatre to support this point. Flusser, who also uses dance and theatre metaphors, writes about masks (Flusser 1999, 105). According to him, there are masks rather than persons and masks instead of an “I” that is supposed to be behind the mask. “Mask” is an interesting metaphor as it refers to social role playing and to trickery and deceit but also to technology, since it is an artefact—one that is designed. And technological artefacts are always more than tools. As Flusser suggests (106), the mask is not just an outcome of social relations; it also creates these social relations. One could say that the mask is the outcome of social performances and at the same time creates and makes possible social performances. This metaphor thus leads us to consider the more-than-instrumental social-performative role of technology itself: as we will also see later in this chapter, the mask is not only a metaphor for social roles but also for technology, which co-creates the performance. But let me start with the insight that performance is everywhere, that the mask is everywhere. For thinking about technology, to say that “the mask is everywhere” means that if technology can be compared to stage magic at all, its performative dimension is not something that is present only in specific contexts. Instead, technology is always already embedded in a socialperformative whole. There is not only the specific performance of “trickery” and “illusion” by the designer; performance is a dimension of the everyday life, and technologies are part of that. There are already all kinds of “machinations” and tricks in social life; technology is used all over the place to socially perform. Of course there are new “social” technologies. For example, social robots are used in social performances and social media such as Facebook provide a theatre stage for performance of

120  The Magic of Technology the self (a self which is only created and emerges in and by performance). But older technologies such as phones but also clothes or rooms with tables and chairs that are not called social are also technologies for social performances. They play a role in the performance of relationships, in eating performances, work performances, and so on. They enable people to play their roles and create their masks in everyday social life. The social magic and trickery also goes on in social life in general, and technologies often mediate these performances. Consider for example the clothes of the physician, the table in the family home, or the phones of the lovers: these artefacts are used by the doctor, parents, and lovers to play their roles and support their social masks and help to construct their social personas. The white coat of the physician contributes to the spell of the doctor’s role. The table magically gathers the family and confirms its roles and social bonds. And the phones of the lovers enable them to shape their mask and personas in the relationship. Design of technology has always been “tricky” in the sense that it has always had social effects and has intervened in social-performative settings. In this sense, design was never only about artefacts; it has always been a social enterprise. In the information age it is also literally about non-things, as Flusser argued (1999, 86), in the sense that there might be a more immaterial aspect to the new technologies. But my point here is that technologies and technological design are especially about people and what they do with and to one another. Design is a social affair that takes place in social settings. And, as I already suggested and will argue next, in these settings not only designers but also users are performative agents. Politics: Power A more social angle also invites the question: if and in so far as technology and design are about deception at all (I have questioned this in the previous sections), then who deceives whom? In a simple model it is the designer-magician who deceives the users. But things are not that simple. First, and as I argued previously, it is not clear that what goes on is really deception. Taken to the social dimension this means asking: Is playing a role deception? If my doctor plays the role of doctor, she is not deceiving me. Yet she is performing her role. And I am performing my role as patient. Similarly, the designer also plays her role in the technoperformative theatre. There is no need to speak of deception. Or at least usually there is no need for that. Of course there can be performances that are deceptive (for example, the doctor turns out to be a fake doctor, the app gives us the illusion that it only records when we press a button but is actually all the time recording what we say), but the comparison is then not between, on the one hand, a performative situation which is supposed to be deceptive by definition and, on the other hand, a non-­performative situation which is supposed to be non-deceptive by

The Magic of Technology 121 definition. Instead, there is one performative space (or many performative spaces, if you like) in which deception can happen or not. But “deception” is then not defined in a way that links it performance as such. Second, designers are not the only ones who shape the technology; designers are usually a part of companies and related to other actors. These act as co-magicians or as organizers of the stage magic by means of technology. For example, who is the designer of “Facebook”? There are many people involved. This means that responsibility for the “magic” and “tricks” is difficult to ascribe. Moreover, and as suggested previously, it is also difficult to call for the revealing of the magician’s secrets: while computer scientists and engineers might be happy to be open about their technology, when they work for a company, they are asked not to reveal their tricks. This raises ethical questions: is it really ok that the tricks are not revealed at all? If an AI is deciding about my job application, don’t I have the right to know how it works? An ethics of honesty seems to require transparency. But what if, for example, in the case of some machine learning applications, no one can explain how it reached its decision? Is the technology in this case the magician, and what happens to an ethics of honesty then? (See also the next section.) More generally, the question “who deceives whom” raises the question of power. To act as a magician is always a way of exercising power over people. Exercise of power is not necessarily bad. As Foucault (1980) has argued, there is power everywhere in social life. This does not always mean that there are performances of coercion and punishment. But there are micro-mechanisms of power. Little tricks, like disciplining tricks in the prison and the hospital. In schools. In companies. In bureaucracies like universities. These tricks often include the use of technologies; think of the magic of the panopticon, which means that prisoners can be observed without their knowing that they are being observed. Some of the tricks are secret; they are not revealed to everyone. There are secrets everywhere in social life, secrets and machinery to exercise power over others, as in bureaucracies. Third, acknowledging that there is trickery and power everywhere in social life, in all social relations, also implies that we cannot just assume the simple model of one-sided exercise of power by one person or authority. Instead, there is the possibility of resistance and, more importantly, there are many magicians who exercise power. We all exercise power in social relations. We all perform. We all wear masks. And perhaps we all manipulate and deceive, sometimes and to some extent. Of course, some actors (persons, organizations, companies, etc.) have more power than others, including more power to deceive. For thinking about technology, in particular contemporary ICTs, this means that we all contribute to the show, as “spectators” but also as “magicians” who exercise power over each other. Users are not only victims of magic but, if there is deception at all, they also deceive each other,

122  The Magic of Technology for example on social media. The model of the all-powerful, potentially evil designer breaks down. Our complaints against, and fascinations with, the trickery and magic of the new technologies should not only be directed at the designers and their companies. Companies like Facebook or Google might trick and perhaps deceive us, in some ways (such a claim would have to be specified, if one makes such an accusation), and such companies have a lot more power than individual users, but we are co-performers and, if there is deception, then we are also deceiving ourselves and we are deceiving each other. We are Google. We are part of the show. Both designers and users perform and, potentially, deceive. As users of ICTs, we are part of a social-performative environment created and mediated by technology and its designers (and companies). And, as in any social-performative trickery and magic going on, we often perform by means of technologies and often in order to exercise power over others (intentionally or not). We all perform and, in this way, exercise some power and magic. Sometimes we trick others. As Flusser suggested, machines are etymologically connected to Macht, the German word for power (Flusser 1999, 17). Using machines, designers have the power (capacity) to perform and have the power to have others perform (act) in a specific way. But not only designers: users also exercise that power. As co-performers and sometimes counter-performers (e.g., performances of resistance), users may not have as much power as designers and their companies. But they are not powerless. The question regarding technology, then, if understood as a socialperformative one, is also always a political question. Who has the power to shape the performance of others? Who has the power to define their role, mask, and identity? As Flusser says, if society is about masks and if as social beings we always design masks for others (106), the design of masks is a political matter (105). Who has more power than others? And who shapes the power structures? Technology and Its Agency As is known in contemporary philosophy of technology, however, one could also consider non-human agents that have power and exercise power: technologies and media also have some agency and power themselves. There is also a politics of technologies. Machines also have Macht (power). Shifting to a performative approach, we can now re-conceptualize this general point as follows: technologies and media are not only instruments used by the many magicians involved (designers, but also users, managers, etc.); to some extent they are also magicians themselves as they play a major, more-than-instrumental role in creating and managing our trickeries and (self-)illusions and in shaping our performances and our masks. For example, if we use Facebook, then the way we perform towards others is not independent of the medium. The medium is not a

The Magic of Technology 123 mere means for such performances but also shapes what we do into a particular kind of performance, for example one that is directed at getting “likes” from people within this medium. There is not only direct influence on a particular performance; often the influence is more like directing and organizing the magic, setting the stage for the magic but also shaping the magic. Facebook does not tell its users what to write in a post. But it shapes and structures the environment of our social media performances. It influences what kind of posts are written and the way they are written, in a way that seeks maximum effect by including a personal photo, for example. And more deeply: the medium influences the structure of how we live and experience our lives, for example when it encourages its users to live-in-order-to-post or to experience an event as a potential Facebook post. Perhaps this is the most dangerous or, in any case, the most deep and pervasive consequence of these media. It is the ultimate trick, the ultimate magic that those who try to monetize our technological experience can dream of: to enchant not only on the stage of the application but also on the stage of life—or on all kinds of stages of life. To make us see and live through the medium. Of course, getting social approval has always been part of the social life. But using the tricks of the medium, this goal itself is shaped in a particular way and is arguably amplified (in order to make money). Thus, the medium is not a neutral means. The magic and indeed the magician are shaped by the instruments used. Furthermore, the technologies and media also have effects that are not intended by the designer-magician or the usermagician. Fake news, for example, was and is not intended by most social media companies and its developers. But its emergence in its current form cannot be disconnected from the medium and its development as a social-technological performative whole. The users are not in control but neither is a company like Google or Facebook. Design is often associated with intention, as Flusser remarks. But here the design act is only one intervention within a wider social-performative field, a field of magic and power. Often we—users and designers—like the effects, even if they are not intended. We want the illusions; we want the magic. But sometimes we don’t like the effects. And, generally, we might have the feeling not only that we don’t know what is going on (as in the case of contemporary social media or artificial intelligence sometimes) but also that we lack agency and power. To what extent are we still in control of the show? We (users, designers, companies, etc.) wanted to use these instruments to create magic, to create illusions, to trick, to exercise power, to control our lives, to manipulate others, to make money, and so on, but what has happened is that we now feel that our technologies have begun to control us, to trick us, to give and manage our illusions. To use the simple version of the metaphor: instead of being the master-magician, as designer or as user, we risk becoming members of the audience. This feeling is especially

124  The Magic of Technology pertinent in the case of more autonomous and intelligent technologies such as robots and artificial intelligence, but when we use various social media we may also get this feeling. It seems that we have become puppets in the hands of the machine-magician. However, to state the (political) problem in this way assumes again a simplicity and a dualism that is both unnecessary and inaccurate. The simple version of the metaphor does not get it right. People still design and use technologies. Humans are still co-magicians. They did not lose all the power. They can influence what kind of trickery happens. And it is not true that, as it is sometimes said, “resistance is futile”. Everyone exercises power and everyone can exercise power. Not only designers but also users have agency and power as co-magicians, over the technology and the tricks. That being said, it is best to be aware that some people and some technologies have more performative power than others, and that there are non-intended effects. It is also important to critically reflect on this and perhaps take action: performances of protest and performances of resistance, for example. Developing counter-technologies, countertricks. Hacking as a performance. Once we take a performative turn, we can frame issues concerning robotics, artificial intelligence, smart algorithms, data sciences, etc., as a performative issue and hence as a social problem. In particular, with contemporary ICTs we find ourselves in a social space where there are (in line with Latour’s thinking) actors and actants. But, as I have argued in the theatre chapter, technologies are not just quasi-actors. They also direct and organize. They “do” things in so far as they sometimes have direct agency and take over tasks from humans but also in the sense that they have social and other effects that go beyond their instrumental role. Consider, for example, an algorithm that buys and sells. When performances are done by machines, this raises its own ethical problems, for example, since responsibility is difficult to ascribe (see Coeckelbergh 2015 but also Flusser 1999, 67). But there are also less obvious socialperformative effects: even if they lack full autonomous agency, technologies and media also organize and shape how we do things, how humans do things. They shape how we perform. They shape the performative stage. We act and we decide, but we do so within a program (Flusser 1999, 93; see also Latour again). Taking up the theatre metaphor again one could say that they direct or, like Latour, one could use the metaphor of script. Our magic and trickery are also scripted, just like the magic of the stage magician. And in both cases the technology co-writes that script, has intended and unintended effects. Such effects are difficult to detect, describe, and interpret, and more work is needed to do so; I just gave some examples of potential claims about social media. The point here is not to make specific claims and arguments about the technologies but to construe a performance-oriented conceptual framework that uses metaphors from the performative arts.

The Magic of Technology 125 This framework includes an evaluative element, especially when it is formulated as addressing a political problem or an ethical problem. Let us now return to the question regarding the ethics of technology and ask again what kind of ethics we need, given the performative approach outlined in the previous sections. What does it mean to formulate an ethics of technology as an ethics of performance? I will not formulate a general performance-oriented ethics of technology here but will focus instead on virtue ethics and in particular the virtue of honesty, which seems highly relevant in the context of discussions about the magic, deception, and illusion of contemporary technologies. (In my concluding chapter I say more about a general performance-oriented ethics of technology.) An Ethics of Honesty? Yes, Please, But a Performative One Tognazzini asked for an ethics of honesty. One could frame this request as part of a virtue ethics, perhaps even a more general virtue ethics of technology (consider, for example, Vallor’s work). However, there is a problem with the way it is formulated and it is not clear what honesty means with regard to ICTs. Honesty is of course an important virtue; this cannot and should not be doubted. But if we adopt a performative approach, the ethical demand for honesty and indeed the virtue itself needs to be reformulated. Instead of defining honesty in terms of reality versus appearance, a performative virtue ethics calls for honest performance. It abandons the stage/non-stage distinction and instead tries to make a distinction between honest performances and dishonest performances. This distinction then applies everywhere, that is, it applies in so-called “virtual” worlds and others, in so-called “online” environments and others. Then it is no longer possible to oppose ICTs for being all about illusion as opposed to the real world. Instead, one needs to be more precise about which performance is dishonest and why exactly that performance is dishonest, ultimately: what honesty means with regard to that performance and that practice. Moreover, it might be that some ICT environments and applications such as contemporary social media stimulate dishonest performances. That might be part of its intended or unintended effects. But within a performative approach one can no longer claim that these media are a stage of magic, trickery, and illusion as opposed to the rest of “real” life, which is not supposed to be about magic and illusion. Instead, the discussion should be about which technologies and machinery encourage more trickery and dishonesty, about the performative-ethical effects of the different media and technologies—here: the effects on honesty. Contemporary social media are just one of the machineries used in the social life and are not a priori more tricky than others; their effects have to be studied and compared to other (e.g., older) technologies and media. Moreover, in the light of the previous discussion it is nonsense to discuss these technologies and media on their own, as if they are unconnected to

126  The Magic of Technology humans and their performances. It is also not right to frame designers as the only magicians and users as innocent and helpless victims of magic. In their performative acts and practices, users co-create the magic and the illusions, potentially co-trick others and exercise power in relation to them. Using a performative approach, we find ourselves in a complex field of social relations and forces, the messy social world of everyday life. In that social world, technologies sometimes play the role of the magician’s tool, and sometimes they are even co-magicians or co-write the script of the show. But their role is always connected to humans, and their effects cannot be adequately described and evaluated independent from the human-technological performances and performative settings they are part of. Furthermore, to demand honesty is good and necessary, but a more complete social-performative analysis is needed to figure out what counts as dishonest and why with regard to specific performances, practices, and their contexts, i.e., it is necessary to investigate how the (dis)honesty is created in a performative field of humans and technologies/media. This cannot be done from an unsituated, distant, and theoretical point view alone, like, for example when a philosopher defines a list of virtues or calls for respecting a virtue without taking into account what goes on socially and performatively. Virtue, in my view, is not a thing or an essence (as a kind of starting point, as it were) but is always performed and is the result of social performances, is the outcome rather than the starting point. Virtue needs to be performed. Honesty needs to be performed. We need to move towards a social-performative virtue ethics, which sees virtue as the outcome of technologically mediated and socialperformative processes and practices in power-pervaded performative fields. Note that here the focus is on the virtue of honesty, but the same could be said about other virtues and indeed about other ethical values and goods. For example, and keeping in mind Turkle’s worries, one could say that values and goods such as love and friendship are of course very important but are in practice dependent on, and the outcome of, performances. Love and friendship are not really love and friendship if they are not performed and experienced, sometimes with the help of technologies and media which co-shape the performance and experience. A performative ethics places ethics right in the middle of our daily human performances: performances with others and performances with and through technologies and media. A non-performative ethics is a dead ethics, one that may please the Platonic philosopher’s mind but is impotent and irrelevant to human lives. In the concluding chapter I will say more about a performative-oriented ethics of technology. But let us first turn to the last performative practice that will be discussed in this book: philosophy. In the next chapter we will see how, in spite of Plato’s purification efforts to separate philosophy

The Magic of Technology 127 from the theatre and its magic, “even” philosophers need to be situated in performative fields and their practices need to be seen as performative.

References Clarke, Arthur C. 1973. Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. New York: Harper & Row. Coeckelbergh, Mark. 2015. Money Machines. Farnham: Ashgate. Coeckelbergh, Mark. 2017. New Romantic Cyborgs. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Coeckelbergh, Mark. 2018. “How to Describe and Evaluate ‘deception’ Phenomena: Recasting the Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics of ICTs in Terms of Magic and Performance and Taking a Relational and Narrative Turn.” Ethics and Information Technology 20 (2): 71–85. Flusser, Vilém. 1999. Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design. London: Reaction Books. Foucault, Michel, and Colin Gordon. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. New York: Pantheon Books. Gell, Al. 1994. “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology.” In Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, edited by J. Coote. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Marshall, Joe, Steve Benford, and Tony Pridmore. 2010. “Deception and Magic in Collaborative Interaction.” In CHI 2010: Performance, Stagecraft, and Magic, ACM (Conference Paper), Atlanta, GA, USA, April  10–15. Accessed March 26, 2019, from dmrussell.net/CHI2010/docs/p567.pdf. Noë, Alva. 2005. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Plato. 1997. “Republic.” In Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson and translated by G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve, 971– 1223. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Scheutz, Matthias. 2011. “The Inherent Dangers of Unidirectional Emotional Bonds Between Humans and Social Robots.” In Robot Ethics: The Ethical and Social Implications of Robotics, edited by P. Lin, G. Bekey and K. Abney, 205–22. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Sharkey, Noel, and Amanda Sharkey. 2010. “The Crying Shape of Robot Nannies: An Ethical Appraisal.” Interaction Studies 11 (2): 161–90. Sparrow, Robert, and Linda Sparrow. 2006. “In the Hands of Machines? The Future of Aged Care.” Minds and Machines 16 (2): 141–61. Tognazzini, Bruce. 1993. “Principles, Techniques, and Ethics of Stage Magic and Their Application to Human Interface Design.” In INTERCHI’93, ACM (Conference Paper), 355–62. Accessed February 4, 2017. from http://dl.acm. org/citation.cfm?id=169284. Turkle, Sherry. 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books.

6 Thinking With Technology How Machines Stage Our Thinking

6.1. Introduction The previous chapters were based on metaphors from a range of performing arts practices. But as this book is concerned with thinking about technology, we should not forget a performative practice that is very close to philosophers of technology, so close that they don’t usually see it as such: philosophy, and, more generally, thinking. This move may surprise some readers, since most people tend to make strict distinctions between thinking and doing, and between academic pursuits and the arts. Thinking is supposed to be something “cognitive” or “mental” that has nothing to do with performance, which is usually seen as being about “the body”. The first is seen as something that can be done privately; the second is by definition something public. Often thinking and also philosophy and science are also seen as “serious” endeavours, whereas the arts—especially the performing arts—are seen as forms of entertainment. And, even if the arts are taken seriously, artistic “practices” and academic “thinking” are seen as very distinct activities. But contemporary science, philosophy, and the arts are questioning and crossing these borders all the time. Cognitive science shows that thinking is embodied, philosophy has taken a keen interest in the body, the idea of private language and thought has been questioned at least since Wittgenstein, some philosophers reach out to the arts and some artists stage philosophy, there are many practices that merge art and science, and interdisciplinary fields such as performance studies and, as we will see, even the emerging transdisciplinary area “performance philosophy”, bring together performing arts and philosophy. Unfortunately, philosophy of technology has not yet benefitted much from these border crossings, mergers, and this hybridity. As mentioned earlier, there has been some work on body and embodiment (e.g., Ihde) and some people in STS such as Pickering have used the term performance. But both in their topics and their methods, philosophers of technology have generally continued in a non-transdisciplinary way and ignored the performing arts as a topic and as a potential source of inspiration.

Thinking With Technology 129 This book has been closing this gap by using metaphors from the performing arts for thinking about technology, in particular philosophy of technology. But now the next, ultimate step is to turn to the terms thinking and philosophy themselves. It may be relatively easy to see performance in daily embodied technological practices such as opening a door and using a phone—the previous chapters include exercises that show how this can be done. But in what sense is thinking and philosophy itself performative? And how can this help us complete the project of this book: to take (or complete) a performative turn in philosophy of technology by using metaphors from the performing arts? This chapter discusses what it means to understand philosophy as performance and then explores the implications for thinking about technology. On the way, I continue my critical engagement with Plato, a central figure in discussions about the relations between philosophy and theatre (see, for example, Puchner 2010). Some of the dualisms just mentioned can be credited to his deep and continuing influence on Western thinking. I also use contemporary literature from the emerging field of performance philosophy. As stated, this field is usually neglected in philosophy of technology. Rare exceptions are Parviainen (used in Chapter 2) and D’Arcy; the latter refers to theatre when gesturing towards a “pragmatic performance approach” to the politics of technology, which enables him to discuss the issue of visibility and technology (D’Arcy 2017). However, in this chapter my source of metaphor is not only situated in what is usually considered performing arts, but I also explore the idea of philosophy as performance. First, I  elaborate the idea of philosophy as performance, which as in the previous chapters delivers a number of metaphorical elements—­ rhetoric, participation, rhythm, and so on—that help me to construct the metaphor of philosophy as performance. Then, I discuss what this metaphor implies for understanding technology. I end with a discussion of the role of the philosopher (of technology) in relation to other practices, for example (other) technological practices.

6.2. Philosophy as Performance Plato on Rhetoric I already noted in Chapter 3 that most Western philosophy from Plato onwards has not been very positive about theatre, and perhaps this is true for Western thinking about the performing arts in general. Let me say more on Plato’s view of rhetoric in order to further confirm but also nuance the view that Plato was against performance. This will get us started in bridging the gap between performance and philosophy. Next to Plato’s comments on poetry and theatre, we may also consider his view on rhetoric: rhetoric (or sophistry) was opposed to philosophy.

130  Thinking With Technology According to Plato, rhetoric is used for deception rather than for discovering the truth. Socrates was killed because he was accused of being a sophist, of misleading the youth. Rhetoric was thus seen as very negative, and this interpretation of rhetoric has been very influential in the history of ideas. As Griswold (2016) rightly remarks, the term still has a negative connotation today. In Plato’s dialogues Protagoras and Gorgias, we find a strong opposition between rhetoric and philosophy. Let me focus on Gorgias (Plato 1997a) here. Gorgias is a teacher of oratory, the art of speaking or rhetoric. According to Socrates, the rhetorician does not give us true knowledge. There is only the appearance of knowledge; there is only pretending: Oratory doesn’t need to have any knowledge of the state of their subject matters; it only needs to have discovered some device to produce persuasion in order to make itself appear to those who don’t have knowledge that it knows more than those who actually do have it. (459b-c) One could also call it opinion, “being convinced without knowing” (454e). Compare this with another Platonic dialogue: Ion (Plato 1997b). Here the view is that those reciting poetry do not really know what they are talking about. Ion, a rhapsode or professional reciter of the poetry of Homer, speaks not from knowledge (532c) but from inspiration: it is a divine gift (534c). Socrates argues that Ion is not in his right mind when he recites these poems at festivals and celebrations (535d). And the Gorgias continues that rhetoric aims at pleasure (in the audience and in the speaker) instead of good. It aims at producing “gratification and pleasure” (262c). It is a means to do what you want. A trick to gain pleasure and power. The pursuit of pleasure, power and glory is contrasted with the life of philosophy (Griswold 2016). As usual, Plato, via Socrates, argues against the life of pleasure, defending the virtue of self-control and discipline. The Gorgias distinguishes not only between the appearance of knowledge and real knowledge but also between “seeming to be good” and “being good” (527b). And rhetoric is, once again, put on the side of appearances. The Phaedrus (Plato 1997c), however, is more positive about rhetoric. First, it is said that speech is much better than writing. This is the famous argument against writing (274–76), which is also sometimes referred to in philosophy of technology (for example by Stiegler). By means of a story, Plato warns that writing can “introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it” (275a). He argues that writing only produces a dream image (277d) and defends “the living, breathing discourse of the man who knows, of which the written one can be fairly called an image” (276a). This argument could be used for a defence of performance, understood as a living, breathing practice. Philosophical thinking, in this

Thinking With Technology 131 view, only contains (or recollects) true knowledge if it is spoken. This is still a refreshing and challenging thought today, given that philosophy is often equated with philosophy texts and writing(s), also by academics. Second, the dialogue remains critical of rhetoric but opens up the possibility that there is a kind of rhetoric that is based on philosophy or that is at least beneficial to philosophy. At first it seems that Socrates condemns rhetoric again for being about resemblances of the truth, about disguise. It is compared to calling a horse a donkey (260b). But then there is a change of view, or at least a different view is taken seriously. Socrates asks: “But could it be, my friend, that we have mocked the art of speaking more rudely than it deserves?” (260d) Rhetoric is needed to convince people: “even someone who knows the truth couldn’t produce conviction without [the art of speaking]” (260d). Truth still needs to be communicated. Thus, according to this view, once we have true knowledge, obtained by non-rhetorical means, we can use rhetoric to spread the word. Moreover, now it is said that rhetoric is not entirely opposed to knowledge: the art of speaking needs “a grasp of the truth” (260e). Whereas first the thought was that rhetoricians need no knowledge of the truth about the “just or good” (272d), now Socrates becomes a lot more positive about the relation between rhetoric and knowledge: if one practices rhetoric, one must know the truth regarding that about which one is speaking, know the soul, and know which speech is appropriate to which kind of soul (277b-c). He also says that if one writes speeches, poetry, etc. with knowledge of the truth and if one is able to defend what one writes but argues that the writing is of little worth, then one is a philosopher, a lover of wisdom (278c-d). Thus, the difference between poets and philosophers is not that the one makes uses of rhetoric, writing, etc., whereas the other does not, but rather that the philosopher knows and pursues the truth and can defend his claims, whereas the poet and rhetorician does not and cannot. Moreover, apparently Socrates thinks that philosophers are able to reflect on, and argue about, the medium they use, since if they really love wisdom, they have to question the medium of writing. (This claim is often overlooked in interpretations, but it is obviously of interest to philosophers, including philosophers of technology and media.) To conclude, the view articulated in Phaedrus (rather than Gorgias) suggests that philosophy and performance are not necessarily opposed. Philosophy is linked to the living, breathing performance of speaking, and if one knows the truth, rhetorical performances can help to communicate the truth. Moreover, we should not forget that even if the Platonic dialogues come to us in written form, the dialogues themselves contain a rhetorical aspect (and elements of poetry and myth, as Griswold rightly notes) and are written in the form of drama. They are fictional dramas that stage various characters (fictional or not) for the sake of philosophy.

132  Thinking With Technology Paradoxically, Plato’s own critique of drama, poetry, and rhetoric took the form of a performance, with Socrates as the main character/actor. He used his skills as a playwright to try to move beyond theatre. Yet it took most of Western history to further purify philosophy of its dramatic, performative dimension. Oral traditions were strong. Only millennia after the invention of writing, we live in a predominantly textcentred culture. But that culture seems here to stay. For example, in spite of McLuhan’s prediction that with new technologies and media we are moving to a more oral culture (again), most interfaces of our digital technologies are text-based. Only relatively recently has the tide turned against what can be characterized as an obsession with the medium of text and the technology of writing. There is a growing interest in performance. But in what way is philosophy performative? What is the relation between the two? And what does that mean for philosophy, in particular for philosophy of technology? Performance and Philosophy Today, a new and interesting research area, “performance philosophy”, aims to research and strengthen the links between performance and philosophy (e.g., Cull and Lagaay 2014). Roughly speaking, this can be done by starting from performance, for example by emphasizing the philosophical value of theatre or by bringing philosophy into theatre practice or by starting from philosophy, emphasizing the performative dimension of philosophy and perhaps even rethinking the very term “philosophy”. But wherever one starts, the point is to bring the two together, to bridge the gap. A good example of starting from philosophy is Andrew Bowie’s argument: if philosophy, especially metaphysics, is about sense making and about making sense of making sense (he follows A.W. Moore here), then making and arguing for propositional claims may not always the best way to do that (Bowie 2015, 51). Against what he sees as analytic philosophy’s focus on abstract issues and its simplification of a complex world, and abandoning the idea that we can take a neutral stance, Bowie connects another, continental tradition in philosophy, phenomenology, that sees art as essential to philosophy (53). This opens up ways to consider various sense-making practices in which meaning is embedded. Discursive means are then only one means to reveal these meanings. Performing arts are other means. But Bowie also makes a stronger claim: he sees philosophy itself as performance when he asks us to think about “the performativity of philosophy” (54). First, he broadens the definition of what is “philosophical”: The contentious point here is that in this view anything can be ‘philosophical’, if it makes the kind of sense that enables us or compels us

Thinking With Technology 133 to orient and conduct our lives in new ways. By making new sense or making sense where there was none, any cultural practice may do what we ask of philosophy in this respect. (Bowie 2015, 54) But Bowie’s focus is not on “any” cultural practice but on art. Using Heideggerian language, Bowie argues that art can also unconceal the truth and disclose the world. Inspired by Heidegger and Dewey, he arrives at the idea that practices that are not cognitively oriented can also achieve the philosophical task. Then he claims that performance can do this and can help us to take a more participative approach to (making sense of) making sense. One way of revealing the “horizon of sense” is by actually participating in it (55). We need not only discursive rationality but also ritual, for example ritual in an artistic performance. Performance and other arts are then not only optional, which may be added to philosophy as we know it (a discursive practice). If “performance can open up philosophical space which discursive philosophical approaches cannot” (Bowie 2015, 55), then philosophy itself, broadly understood under influence of the tradition of phenomenology, needs performance, includes performance, and indeed is also performance. For example, the performance of rhythm in music, dance, and theatre can be world disclosing, since rhythm is not only something that happens in the arts but is a crucial element of human lives (56). More generally, performance also means participation in the world. It thus helps us to question and replace the epistemological model and its subject/object problem. In (classic) epistemology, the problem is how the subject can (re)connect to the object, how the gap between the two can be bridged. How can we know? But in performance, subject and object are already connected; the split is overcome. Our connection to the world is no longer a huge (modern) problem. Inhabiting the world and participating in the world (through performance for example) always “involves the possibility of freeing oneself from distorted relationships to one’s world”; important is not what we know but participation in sense-making practices (57). In other words, the question then is no longer “How can we know?” but rather “How can we participate?” Bowie’s argument is part of a larger, relatively recent effort to bring together philosophy and performance, which involves a redefinition of both terms and which counters what it understands as an anti-­performance bias in the history of philosophy (Cull and Lagaay 2014, ix). Laura Cull, coming from the side of theatre and performance studies, has argued for understanding performance as philosophy. Instead of doing philosophy of performance (philosophy applied to performance) or using performance to illustrate philosophy, she proposes to do performance philosophy. The idea is that performance itself can provide philosophical insight, that it does “its own kind of philosophical work”

134  Thinking With Technology (Cull 2014, 24), that “performance thinks” (Cull 2018). This approach contributes to expanding the definition of what counts as philosophy (Cull 2014, 24–25) and questions disciplinary divisions. Performance itself “philosophizes” (25). It is a new (and arguably old) way of doing philosophy. What the idea that performance “thinks” means does not become very clear in her chapter, which is more introductory (Bowie provides more specific, Heideggerian arguments why). But interestingly, and in accordance with the central claim of performance philosophy itself, Cull argues that the philosophical power of performance has to be shown (30), that is, in and through performance. She suggests that the future of philosophy may lie in “feeling how music means or movement speaks in new ways as a performative expansion of the meaning of philosophy itself” (33). Yet at other places she sees performance still as non-philosophical (31), which seems to maintain the separation of both fields—even if there might be a productive interaction and agonism between them. By contrast, inspired by Nietzsche, Arno Böhler—situated in a philosophy department but also based in the arts—has argued for a “philosophy on stage” (Böhler 2014) that intimately connects to artistic practices: he affirms philosophy as a bodily and situated practice and argues that philosophy is and should be performed. In what way? He starts from a metaphysics and philosophy of mind that stresses that minds are embodied and situated in space. Bodily existence is prior to thinking (Böhler 2014, 175); mind is always linked to matter (176) and one has to be in space in order to be related to it (177). This view about mind implies that philosophy, too, is always linked to embodiment, is situated. It is not only a discursive but also a bodily practice (188). Against the philosophical tradition, Böhler argues that philosophy needs to be staged (187) and that an artistic way of doing philosophy means to recognize the pre-individual (188), i.e., the bodily and the immanent, including one’s own physis (189) and embodiment. Philosophers also breathe and digest (192). Scepticism is only possible on a material basis, and the meaning of an idea does not exist “independently of the spatial context of its expression”: instead, ideas occur within a “dramatic space” (191). Plato recognized this when he staged philosophy in a dramatic way. Böhler argues for a “philosophy on stage” which inverts Plato but at the same time recollects and reanimates this tradition of doing philosophy in a dramatic way (192) by bringing people from philosophy and art together to stage ideas: a transdisciplinary effort to perform philosophy. To conclude, philosophy is already performative and should become (more) performative. This goes way beyond seeing the theatre as a place for thought (as for example Jean-Luc Nancy has argued) or beyond understanding performance as a philosophically interesting but fundamentally different kind of practice; instead, philosophy itself is recast as performance.

Thinking With Technology 135 Böhler argues that ideas need to be staged. But in a number of senses this has always happened, even if it did not take the form Plato chose and even if philosophers are usually not aware of it. Martin Puchner has proposed a dramatic understanding of Plato (Plato as a playwright) and has argued that this has influenced modern theatre—even that it is Platonic. Moreover, philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche did a form of dramatic philosophy (Puchner 2010). Like Böhler, he assumes a distinction between non-dramatic and dramatic philosophy. But can such a strict distinction be maintained? Starting from a broad definition of performance and philosophy (e.g., as proposed by Bowie or Cull) one could also see philosophy as fundamentally performative and rewrite the history of philosophy in general as a “drama of ideas” (to use Puchner’s term): a drama of characters, ideas, arguments, interpretations, and so on, which as a metanarrative (or metanarratives) has a temporal structure, plot, and rhythm. This also makes sense of Noë’s claim that “Philosophy is the choreography of ideas and concepts and beliefs” (Noë 2015, 17). Whether we use the metaphor of drama or that of choreography, the history (or histories) of philosophy itself are performative—even if those performances often took place in the medium of writing and text. I say “often”, since, those histories are not entirely abstract and are not only represented in writing and text (e.g.,  books): they depend on embodied and situated human beings, beings called “philosophers”. Philosophers speak and spoke, that is, they use(d) their voice. They breathe. They even digest, as Böhler remarks. Having and using one’s voice means: to be embodied and to perform as a lived body. It also means to perform a persona. This is also what philosophers do when they speak. With Plato, we could stress the value of embodied, social, and indeed performed dialogue for philosophy. Today, discussing and talking is still an important part of philosophical practice. Against Plato, however, we can also understand writing as a kind of performance. Writing, too, is embodied and social. When I write on this computer, for example, I am not a disembodied mind, but I am engaging with the text and through the technology of writing as an embodied, living, and social being. Writing is a form of embodied and social performance. Reading, too, needs to be performed. Perhaps text itself is performance, as Kornhaber argues: if every text is changed in the moment of its enactment, then every text is a performance (Kornhaber 2015, 31). Technologies and Media Ironically, philosophers question almost everything but usually do not question their own medium. This is true even for many people calling themselves philosophers of technology. I already said that philosophers write. I am writing now. This is an important technology and medium for philosophers. As Kornhaber remarks, philosophers became attached

136  Thinking With Technology to this technology (Kornhaber 2015, 30). But writing is only one kind of technology and medium. Philosophers can and do also perform with (other) technologies and media. These are sometimes but not necessarily related to writing and text: for example, in academia, philosophers use images, power point presentations, and so on. Philosophers also use computers and related technologies and media. And if we follow Cull, Bowie, and Böhler, they could and should also use technologies from performance practices and indeed other artistic practices. But whatever the medium philosophers (should) choose, the point is that philosophy is not only an embodied, social, and performative but also a technologically mediated practice. And this is so because philosophy is a performative practice and because all performances can be technologically mediated and are often technologically mediated, also when they do not put technology or media in the foreground or in the centre of attention. Moreover, to see philosophy as performance is also to recognize that it is always situated, including spatially situated. Performance is always an “earthly”, immanent practice and depends on whatever the “stage” is, and so is philosophy and hence also philosophy of technology, even if it talks about non-earthly or very abstract things. Philosophy is done somewhere. It takes place somewhere. It is performed on a stage, for example the stage of academia, the stage of a specific philosophical sub-discipline, or even the stage of discussions about a specific topic. And we may add: the ideas are not entirely independent of their embodied and situated performative generation and expression. (I will return to this thought later in this chapter.) Moreover, keeping in mind the aim and approach of this book, we can ask: Could rhetoric and philosophy themselves, if understood as performative practices, be used as metaphors to better understand our experience and use of technologies and media?

6.3. Implications for Thinking About Technology The Rhetoric of Technology Starting from my reading of some of Plato’s dialogues, we can apply the metaphors of rhetoric and philosophy to technology: technology is then not only a “thing” or “tool” but also a means to persuade. Now is that always bad, or can it also be a means to the truth and the good life? Keeping in mind the two positions concerning rhetoric we found in Plato, there are the following two positions concerning technology and its relation to persuasion. One position is closer to Gorgias: technology is necessarily on the side of persuasion and falsity. So-called “persuasive technologies”, which aim to change the attitudes or behaviours of its users, are often seen as such: they mislead the user. Misleading can be done through words but also

Thinking With Technology 137 through other means. Consider also the metaphor of stage magic: things are not what they seem, and the appearance is created by words but also by performing with things. To give an example in an economic context: we think we make a free choice when we choose a particular food at the checkout, and in a moral and metaphysical sense we do, perhaps, but the food has been placed there in a particular way and location in order to influence our behaviour (e.g., to make us buy a piece of chocolate); our choice architecture has been changed, we have been “nudged” (Thaler and Sunstein 2008). This can be seen as misleading and manipulation, as tricking people. Technologies can indeed be devices of persuasion, understood as manipulation. For example, robots can influence behaviour of children by means of peer pressure, as a recent article shows (Vollmer et al. 2018). They can be called “persuasive” in the sense of “misleading”, “appearance”, “false”, “tricky”, and so on. Now, according to this position, this is always bad. Technology is then on the side of appearance, trickery, and deceit. But another position (Phaedrus) is that persuasion is not necessarily bad: there are different kinds of persuasion, some of which can lead to the good life. Technology can contribute to this; it can include devices for such “good persuasion”. In the latter case, technology is part of the technai and arts available to us to find the true and the good, to find wisdom, to achieve the good life. It is thus part of the technai or devices available to philosophy and philosophers, to the love and lovers of wisdom. Writing may be such a technology, and a technology Plato used in spite of his warnings against writing and in favour of speech. Thus, based on this position, one can imagine that designers of technology try to design for “good persuasion”. Then they are like the rhetorician who knows the truth, has the knowledge and wisdom, but wants to communicate this knowledge and does so by influencing through rhetoric— here: (persuasive) technologies. Such designers, then, play the role of the good magicians. They mislead for the sake of good, to give people a better life, for example make them healthier. Moreover, in order to persuade and mislead, the designer needs to have some real knowledge, for example about human psychology (Socrates would say: about the soul). Like in the Phaedrus, apparently knowledge and persuasion are not that opposed. But technology, understood by means of the metaphors of rhetoric and philosophy, is also more than a mere means: it also has persuasive and epistemological and ethical effects that no one intended. As designers or users, we are not in (full) control of our effects. Designers and their companies may “speak” and try to “persuade” by means of their technologies in order to achieve some effects, but they may fail. There may be no effect or the effect is different than expected. For example, a speed bump in a residential area intended to reduce speed may achieve that goal, but at the same time lead to frustrated drivers accelerating aggressively and

138  Thinking With Technology loudly after the speed bump. And as users we may be encouraged to trick and persuade ourselves by using a technology (e.g.,  a health app), but once we understand how it works we may trick the device instead of the other way around. And maybe the metaphor can be turned around: the orator or oratorphilosopher was also never in full control of the effects of his arts. Performances are always risky; there is no guarantee of success. As embodied and vulnerable human beings, orators and philosophers depend on their voice, for instance. Their voice may fail them. And they don’t know the effects of their use of voice and use of words. Maybe people are persuaded, maybe not. Maybe pleasure and power are the result, maybe not. Maybe truth and wisdom are achieved, maybe not. Persuasion and ­wisdom-seeking, including wisdom-seeking by means of using the persuasive arts and other technai, have always been risky businesses. The outcome has always been uncertain. Consider Socrates’s rhetoric against rhetoric: the effect of his words against rhetoric was not that we all became wise and that he was praised for that; the short-term effect was that he was accused of sophism and killed, and the long-term effect was not wisdom but Western academic philosophy. (Or: how to move from breathing to non-breathing.) Very unintended effects indeed. Thus, technologies can be persuasive in these various senses. And as machines become more social, intelligent, and autonomous, their “rhetoric” and persuasive effects may increase. They can shape our attitudes and behaviours. Think about the robot again: the robot has influence because through its more autonomous and intelligent appearance (homanoid) and behaviour (appears like a social peer) it manages to enter our social world. In that sense, there is a “rhetoric” of technologies. There may even be a sense in which machines shape our thinking: in the sense of changing our opinion (e.g., political tweets sent by a bot that try to influence how we vote) but also in the sense of co-creating the stage, the arguments, etc. on which and with which we perform our thinking. Maybe technology is sometimes a bit like Plato the ­philosopher-playwright: the one who writes the dialogues and sets the stage for our thinking. For example, computing has given us metaphors by which we understand ourselves. We have started to think of the brain as a computer. And perhaps social media like Facebook and Twitter are already influencing how we think about others (also offline) and how we behave (offline) towards others. Maybe the way we talk and write and interact with others offline comes to be shaped by these media. To the extent that this happens, there is indeed a “rhetoric”—and one could add: a “grammar”—of technology (Coeckelbergh 2017), which refers to less visible, structural influence. Technology shapes our lives and thinking in tricky, persuasive ways, ways that are not always visible to us. And ways that can be good or bad. Let me say more about the grammar of technology.

Thinking With Technology 139 The Participation, Embodiment, Rhythm, Situatedness, and Immanence of Technology Use and Users So far, I used the “rhetoric” metaphor to say something about technologies. But this is still a metaphor based on the use of (natural) language; there are also other types of performance such as music and dance. Based on my discussion of performance philosophy, let’s now explore what can be done with philosophy-as-performance: what happens to our conception of technology and its use when we use elements like rhythm, participation (Bowie), embodiment, and spatial situatedness (Böhler) as metaphors for (thinking about) technology? Let me start with participation. We could see technology as an instrument that mediates our participation in the world, understood as an active, performative relation to things and to others. But it is not just a neutral means; it shapes how we participate in the world. When we want to explain why, we have to rely again on the metaphors provided by the performing arts, as elaborated in the previous chapters. For example, we could say that technology shapes the rhythm of our lives. It may well speed up things. It may speed us up. But rhythm is not only about speed: it is also about when we do what. For example, as I suggested in the chapter on music, our devices and apps also shape what we do when. They co-write our score (if we use the metaphor of classical music) and they co-shape our improvisations (if we use the metaphor of jazz or blues). For example, a social media app “attempts” and “intends” to shape my time in such a way that I regularly check for messages. It tries to orchestrate, direct, and choreograph in time. It tries to orchestrate, direct, and choreograph my time. I also suspect that technology influences how we tackle problems. Not only literally, in the sense that many people now use apps and YouTube videos to repair something, for instance, but also, as I will argue in what follows, that it influences how we think about the problem and how we think to solve it. Postphenomenology acknowledged the embodied nature of technology use and its user, but only partly and somewhat misleadingly conceptualized this embodiment since it did not sufficiently take into account the performative and temporal dimension of our engagements with technology. Like most philosophers, in epistemology, aesthetics, and elsewhere, perhaps Ihde was too much under the spell of the metaphor of looking at a painting or other art object. The “mediation” of technology is too much imagined as an “in between” that is situated between an immobile perceiver and an external world. Even if in Verbeek (2005) the material artefact “acts” in between that perceiver and world, the user does not seem to act or at least her acting and that performance is not conceptualized; the theatre metaphor is only applied to the medium, the technology. Verbeek tries to think the relation between subject and object non-dualistically by saying that object and subject mutually constitute

140  Thinking With Technology one another (Verbeek 2005, 129). The “things” shape the subject. But in this description of the human-world relation that human subject is still too much assumed to be an immobile perceiver, watching the world. The metaphor remains that of the museum spectator. Even if, in Ihde, technology is said to be “embodied”, that embodiment is imagined with the help of a metaphor derived from looking at artworks: I  “see” the technology or not. This is also how Heidegger imagined the famous hammer user in Being and Time: the technology is visible (when I don’t use it but look at it) or not (when I use it). But what is happening when I wear glasses, for example, is that I perceive through glasses as I participate in the world and as I perform, and it is in that performative-perceptive and ­performative-active process that the technology (glasses) co-shapes my perception and subjectivity understood as embodied participation and embodied and situated performance. For example, when I  hike I  wear glasses, and these glasses do not mediate my looking at the world as an immobile perceiver but shape my active perceptual relation to the world (I am not a passive screen that receives images of nature from outside, I co-construct what I see) and shape the walking I perform as an embodied and moving human being. Both my embodiment as a human being in general and the embodied relation I have to the technology (as identified by Heidegger and Ihde) are better understood with the metaphor of performance than the metaphor of looking at a painting. If technology mediates and shapes, then it does so within a performative relation. (And indeed looking at a painting itself should be understood as a performative act.) In general, we can try to replace the epistemology of seeing, which is so popular among philosophers since Plato, by a more performative and participatory way of framing experiencing and knowing. For philosophy of technology, this performative turn implies, metaphorically speaking, that we have to mobilize the user, so to speak kick him on the stage. This is also a social stage, as I will soon argue. But let me first further clarify again the shift in approach by replying to D’Arcy. A participatory and performative approach to the relation between humans and technology (and between humans and the world) in use and experience goes beyond the question concerning visibility (D’Arcy 2017), since understanding performance with technology is then no longer a question about how we relate to an external object, understood in a quasi-aesthetical, detached way (D’Arcy refers to Foucault’s metaphor of painting); instead, the moment we use technology we are already related and we are actively relating and participating in the world. The technology user is a performer in the senses explained. Technology intervenes, perhaps “acts” as Latour and Verbeek claim, but this is always an intervention in that active performative and participatory relation. It is also a temporal matter: rather than with a static painting metaphor (I look at technology, which is visible or not—see D’Arcy but also Heidegger and Ihde again), use and experience of technology should be understood

Thinking With Technology 141 performatively as something that happens in time and that is part of what goes on as we actively participate in the world. Technology shapes this active and temporal relation to the world. If we need a pragmatic performance approach, as D’Arcy argues, then we need to take into account this temporal dimension of the performance metaphor. Furthermore, the performance metaphor can help us to add a social dimension to technological experience and use. If the user and experiencer (of technology and via technology) is a performer, then instead of focusing on the individual I-world relation as in Ihde and Verbeek, we put the user on the social stage. The epistemological relation is replaced by a performative and participatory one not only in the sense of an active and involved relation to the world but also in the sense of an active and involved relation to others, which is also always already there. We always already participate in the world, and this is also a social world and a social participation. Technology also mediates that relation and that participation. Taking a non-modern approach, one could even say that the concept of performance enables us to bring the two together: on stage and like in so-called “real life” (the theatre is also real) there is not on the one hand a physical world and on the other hand a social world; as we perform and participate in the world, we relate to that world in a way that is at the same time physical-embodied and social-performative, and technology shapes those active, embodied, and social performances. Consider again social media and games: these uses of technology and these technological practices are not isolated activities; they are different forms of performing and participating in the world as embodied and social beings. Finally, if it is true that our thinking depends on this relation and participation, indeed on our active, embodied, and social use-performances and experience-performances, and if technologies such as machines intervene and participate in these performances in a more-than-instrumental way, then this also means again that technologies such as machines may choreograph, direct, and stage our thinking. (Consider also again Chapter 2 on the dance metaphor.) But this “thinking” should be adequately understood. Performing with technology is never merely “cognitive” or a matter of abstract “perception” or isolated “thinking”: before and when one uses technology, one is already embodied and situated on an immanent plane. Users are not disembodied “subjects”; they breathe and digest. They are also situated in space. Thus, users of internet and participants in virtual worlds always remain embodied and situated. There is always a stage. And on that stage machines can be more than neutral means: as “co-performers” but also as “directors”, “choreographers”, “magicians”, etc., they shape our performances, our acts, our lived bodies, and even the stage itself. They are part of, and at the same time also shape, the plane of immanence and the performances we stage. Not only our acts but also the physical and social world in which we find ourselves and

142  Thinking With Technology “on” which we act and perform is shaped by the technologies and media we use and experience. In other words, the “world of social media” is not a separate world; there is one social media world and, in a sense, we always already found ourselves in a world of social media. We are, and always have been, performers in a social media theatre—a theatre with different stages perhaps, but a theatre nevertheless and a theatre without an outside. The social theatre is real.

6.4. Two Roles and Choreographies for Philosophers (of Technology) Thinking about philosophy as performance also delivers a metaphor for asking and answering the question what the task of philosophers and philosophy is. This question can now be framed as: what role(s) can and should philosophers play, specifically what role(s) in relation to other practices and wider society. I  see at least two roles or characters, corresponding to two different plays and choreographies: a Socratic interruptive one and a non-Socratic participative one. My purpose here is not so much to defend the second and argue against the first but rather to articulate the two roles/characters and their corresponding choreographies. (In other words, here I perform an essay and inquiry rather than a fight, competition, court case, etc.) The first role is the one who interrupts, the often welcome but also sometimes annoying person who stops the conversations and asks questions, the one who is at that moment and in that role alienated from the communicative and social practice. The spoilsport, the one who takes part in conversations at the symposium but then breaks its spell, the one who interrupts people on the market. This is the Platonic/Socratic model: the philosopher knows the truth or at least tries to “help” others to find the “truth” while these others are unthinkingly going on with their business and live in the world of appearances. The philosopher takes the role of the liberator and saviour. Or the role of the midwife, but then a Socratic one: the midwife who knows better what is going on than the woman who gives birth. The corresponding choreography is one in which the movements of a group of dancers are stopped or interrupted when an additional dancer enters the stage. The interrupting dancer goes in “dialogue” with them by imitating the movements the other dancers were making to show them (mirror) what they were doing and by making different moves. In this way, the dancer-interrupter helps the other dancers to create a different, better choreography. Perhaps the “dialogue” goes on until they all move in the same direction. The Socratic choreography is one of moves and counter-moves, until all dancers move closer to the truth, together. Alternatively, one could also imagine the interrupter to be a choreographer who enters the stage and stops the dance altogether, asks questions, and

Thinking With Technology 143 teaches a different dance. Afterwards, the interrupter is thanked. Or there is a different result: everyone thinks that the interrupter is such an annoying spoilsport that they act to expel him from the stage. Playing this kind of role as a philosopher can be very revealing and useful to people from practices outside philosophy. It provides a mirror to people. Mirroring is important, in all embodied performative practices, including philosophy. Both the arts and philosophy can play this Socratic role. For example, Noë has argued that both art and philosophy are preoccupied with the ways we organize ourselves and with “the possibility of reorganizing ourselves” (Noë 2015, xiii). If this is true, then the Socratic philosopher can show how we organize ourselves (metaphors: holding up a mirror, mirroring in dance) and can make us aware that we could do it differently. Furthermore, Socratic philosophy provides midwifery services, helps us with recollection, because maybe we already know the truth but we don’t know yet that we know it. Noë uses the metaphor of choreography: Choreography is philosophy. What the choreographer does, if this analysis is right, is find a way of bringing into the open, to use an image from Heidegger, something that is concealed, hidden, implicit, or left in the background, namely, the place of dancing in our lives, or our place in the activity, the self-organized complex that is dancing. . . . Gaining knowledge is recollecting, Plato said. And what this statement means, here, is that it is not a matter of gather new data; it’s a matter of seeing how the data you already have—your own experiences, observations, beliefs, etc.—hang together. Plato puts our thinking, asking, arguing—the fact that we are lost in the complexity of our own activities of thinking—on display. (Noë 2015, 16) The Socratic philosopher helps those who are lost to find the way. She knows her way around. She has sorted things out. She knows where we should be heading. When philosophers take this role, they can be incredibly useful to others, to non-philosophers. But the Socratic mirroring and midwifery role is not only revealing and helpful; it is also a very critical and confrontational one. As said, this can be annoying. It annoys because we don’t always want to hear the truth. But it also annoys since it stops conversations and movements that are already going on. It breaks the flow of the performance. And it annoys since it is the act of the one who always knows better and who takes a superior and outsider position. Some more metaphors: the Socratic philosopher plays the role of the master-organizer, the CEO or consultant who is paid to reorganize the company, the director who listens but already knows the outcome (an outcome that she has in mind and desires), the authoritarian choreographer, or the magician who is

144  Thinking With Technology totally in control. There is a hierarchical divide between the initially ignorant insiders who live in illusion and the all-knowing Socratic outsider who helps them to find or recollect the truth, to act and move in the right way—that is, out of the cave, out of the stage, and out of the theatre. A very different role, which I  articulate influenced by Dewey’s pragmatism but now given a performative twist, is to be one of the actors on stage from the beginning. The philosopher is part of the practice and tries to change the practice from within. Here criticism is still possible, but the philosopher does not interrupt and is part of the conversation. She sees herself as equal to the others. Nobody knows the (full) truth. All are searching for the truth together. This truth is not to be found in a different world; it has to be an immanent rather than a transcendent truth. The play never ends, because there is no ultimate truth or because the actors will never find the full truth. In the corresponding choreography, there is no outsider entering the stage. All are insiders and all are outsiders. There is dialogue among the dancers-participants but not a Socratic one. Nobody knows what the  dance will become or should become, because the dance is not a priori given and cannot be remembered or recollected. The dancers create the dance together by dancing. The dance is never finished. There is no perfect dance, or if there is one, nobody knows what it is. There is trial and error. There is improvisation. There is no ultimate truth; there is only experience and performance, which lead to practical wisdom, that is, wisdom rooted in experience and performative practice. This non-Platonic, non-Socratic approach questions the borders between cave and non-cave, stage and non-stage, philosophy and nonphilosophy, philosophy and performance, philosophy and art, and academia and art. It does not question philosophy and the value of philosophy, but questions the Socratic definition of philosophy’s role and asks if it is a practice that should be kept separate from other practices. It moves towards a transdisciplinary understanding of philosophy, understood as a performative quest for wisdom. In philosophy of technology, like elsewhere in philosophy, often the first role is taken up or indeed is expected: the philosopher is seen as the Socratic expert who knows. For example, she is expected to know the ethics of (a particular) technology and tells those who develop, use, and decide about technology what that ethics is, or at least helps them to find that ethics (and in order to play that midwife role she already knows where the people should be heading). She shows how we do things with technology now and opens up the possibility of reorganizing it, perhaps also opens up the possibility of different technologies and corresponding ways of doing. This is a critical and constructive role, which is sometimes appreciated and sometimes experienced as annoying, for example by researchers who develop new technologies. For example, a philosopher of technology may be asked as an expert in ethics of artificial intelligence

Thinking With Technology 145 and is expected to play the role of knowing the ethical way(s) of dealing with, and developing, this technology. Note that this role—whatever its merits or problems may be—is not played very well by many philosophers or is not played at all, since many do not enter those other stages and remain within academia. The latter philosophers, under the spell of (academic) language and the technology of writing, imagine that writing texts is sufficient as an interrupting Socratic intervention to change things. But it is not. Usually the (other) actors and the dancers at other stages don’t see the text. If it enters a stage at all, it only enters a small stage elsewhere: the academic stage or even just a small corner of academia. There is also little embodied performance except writing, and little actual interruption in the practices. One should ask if texts are necessarily the best tools for the Socratic philosopher. Are they very performative tools? Asking this is especially important in philosophy of technology, which is specialized in thinking about tools. But also more generally, philosophers do not sufficiently think about their own technologies and media, or indeed about their role and the stage on which they play and want to play. But there is also another role possible for philosophers of technology: a more participatory one and one that avoids what could be perceived as Socratic arrogance. Here the philosopher of technology does not claim that she knows the truth about technology and about what should be done. She does not so much enter the stage as an “expert”, if that means she already knows the truth. Instead, she participates in ongoing conversations. She works with, and participates in, the movements that are already going on, in her own field but also in other fields. In academia but also outside academia. Everywhere people discuss about technology, think about technology, and indeed perform technology. She participates in these conversations in ways that do not so much confront but rather try to contribute and learn from what is already there. She is part of the flow, rather than an interrupter. She is a co-dancer. Initially she is less critical, perhaps, if “critical” is understood in the Socratic sense, but also considerably less annoying. Or rather, the critical work is done together. Instead of Socratic questioning, which in a sense is not real questioning since Socrates already knows the answers, here a real dialogue can take place and real questions can be asked. Including critical questions. But they are asked both ways; it is a common project. A conversation among equals. Potential interruption of flow or pause is a common act and is organized together. Both philosophers and non-philosophers have knowledge, based on their experience and their performances, and are recognized for this. Together a play or dance is created, that is, together the actors and dancers try to understand technology and try to find out what should be done. Without the illusion of a final play that ends the play (an Endspiel which Socrates always wins) or without the illusion that it is possible to create a perfect dance, philosophers and non-philosophers

146  Thinking With Technology talk and try out responses and movements to technology. For example, philosophers and developers of artificial intelligence could sit together and think together about the future of AI, without supposing that the philosopher (or the developer, for that matter) knows beforehand where they will end up. However, next to the philosopher and other humans, we should not forget another performer (e.g., actor or dancer): technology. Technology is also on stage. New technology can be an interrupter that asks for a response or it can be incorporated in the dance. It can be a tool, as most people think. It can be an actor, as Latour and Verbeek have argued. But it can also be a director and a choreographer. And this applies not only to performative life and practice in general, but also to philosophy and philosophy of technology. When we think about technology, technology does not only confront us as an object (e.g., an object of study) but also as a co-actor, co-dancer, co-performer. It invites us to think. It influences our thinking. It “demands” things from us. It “responds” to our performances. For example, an autonomous and intelligent humanoid robot may challenge our beliefs about the moral status of things or our belief that humans are by definition the most intelligent entities around. Technology is a very performative tool, or at least it has the potential to be very performative. Perhaps the new technologies that are coming to us will provide such enormous challenges to our societies and cultures that a purely Socratic role will be rightly seen as neither sufficient nor acceptable: maybe there will be the insight that the only way we can cope with these challenges is by dancing, acting, playing, and doing magic together in order to understand and evaluate what is going on—without knowing the outcome. Maybe this “together” means: together with others but also together with technology, as co-performer and co-director—in a sense also: cothinker. The point here is not that machines “think” if that means “think like humans”. It is not about the capacities of machines. It is about how our human thinking, understood as performance, is shaped by the technologies we use. Let me end the chapter by saying more about this.

6.5. Technology Thinks What does it mean to say that technology “thinks” or “co-thinks”, or that it “shapes our thinking”? This is not so clear yet. One way to understand this is to start from contemporary cognitive science’s insight that concepts are always related to our embodiment and then enter technology into the picture. Consider for example the work of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991), Lakoff and Johnson (1980), and more recently work on the role of the sensory-motor system in conceptual knowledge: for example, our ability to imagine the concept grasping

Thinking With Technology 147 makes use of the same neural substrate as performing grasping (Gallese and Lakoff 2005). If thinking is an embodied performance and depends on embodiment, then if technology is involved in our embodied performances and connected to our embodied experience and practices, it seems plausible that technology also shapes our thinking. For example, many metaphors we use when we think seem to be based on technologically mediated embodied performances: consider for example “hammering down a point”. In this sense, technology shapes our thinking. Another way to understand the idea that technology “thinks” is to further draw on metaphors from the performing arts. Throughout this book I already used metaphors such as “acting”, “directing”, and “choreographing”. These metaphors could now help again to further develop the thought that technology is not a mere instrument but shapes what we do and what and how we think. I already made some suggestions earlier in the chapter: let me now say more by using and responding to Alva Noë’s Strange Tools. It is clear that technology shapes how we do things and how we live; this is a central idea in philosophy of technology, which emphasizes the more-than-instrumental role of technology and the various ways in which being human has always been entangled with technology. We are technological beings and humans are technological. Nöe, coming from outside philosophy of technology, puts it in terms of organization: Our mode of being—how our lives are organized—is constituted in part by the technology. Take away the technology and you are left not with us, but with, at most, something like distant cousins of ourselves. (Noë 2015, 23) Technology thus organizes and changes our lives; this is clear, especially today, when new information and communication technologies have so much influence. But in what sense does technology also change our thinking? Perhaps it is easier to understand this if we look at historical examples. Noë gives the example of arithmetical notation, which has made us think arithmetically (26), and claims that language has made it possible for us to imagine things that are far away in space and time (27). But for making his general point, he uses a metaphor from the performing arts: dance. He argues that technology shapes our thinking, because thinking is, like dancing, an organized activity and technologies shape our organized activities or are themselves patterns of organization (27). The role of technology is then indeed more than that of a mere instrument, in the sense that it shapes the patters of organization. And if organization is given “before” we perform (one could also use language as a metaphor and say that there is already a “grammar” (Coeckelbergh 2017)),

148  Thinking With Technology technology also contributes to the condition that we are not in full control of how we organize ourselves. Noë makes a comparison with language: We are lost in schemes of organization of which we are not the author and about which we command no clear understanding. It is the same with writing and language. (Noë 2015, 200) It is the same with writing and language because they are also technologies, and we never fully author and control what technologies do to us and how they shape and shaped our world. They co-choreograph our lives (see also Chapter  2) and they set the stage for our performances. Similarly, one could say that technologies choreograph our thinking and shape the patterns that are already there before we think. Again a performance metaphor (dance) helps us to reflect on technology. Like in the previous chapters, this was done by going “outside” philosophy of technology, by moving to the performing arts and back to philosophy of technology. For philosophy of technology, which is also a thinking, this link between technology and thinking means again that one should be very aware of the media and technologies one uses. These technologies and media do not only organize our lives, they also shape how we—as philosophers of technology—think about technologies and media. But in what sense could it be said that technologies also “choreograph” and “organize” our thinking? I have used these metaphors, but what they imply exactly is still unclear. Maybe a contemporary example of how a technology changes our thinking would help. We could ask, for instance, how social media or artificial intelligence changes our thinking. I have made some suggestions about social media throughout this book. But there is a methodological problem. While it is easy to see how for example arithmetic and arithmetic technologies have changed our thinking in the past, it is a lot harder to understand how contemporary media and technologies shape our thinking, since it means that we have to think about them as and while they shape and change our thinking. We have to perform our thinking while at the same time that very thinking performance is shaped and pre-organized by the technologies and media we think about. On the one hand, it seems that we have to acknowledge that we can never really step outside of that performative flow; on the other hand, we have to allow for the possibility to research that flow and perhaps direct it. We have to make sense of, and allow for the possibility of, being choreographers and dancers at the same time. How is this possible? Luckily using a metaphor from art (visual and performing arts) provides a solution: taking inspiration from Noë, we could say that technologies such as writing can disrupt the performative process, or rather, that they offer additional performances that put the first performances

Thinking With Technology 149 on display. Using technologies such as writing, we can show our thinking performances. Both thinking and writing are performances. However, the first is not “primary” and the second “secondary”. Thinking about thinking (e.g., by means of writing) is not a meta-performance. Both performances are taking place on the same plane of immanence. There is no hierarchy. The one is not “above” or “on top” of the other. Both are and remain performative processes. There is no outside to performance. Thinking-by-writing is not an outside; it is also a performance. (This is why I think Noë’s language of “levels” (29) is not so appropriate.) Hence in this way it is possible to think about technologies while they actually shape our thinking, for example to think about how computers, word processing software, and social media are shaping our thinking (as we use them). When we do so, we are engaged in two performances. How is that possible? The technology of writing seems to do the trick. Philosophy (and hence also philosophy of technology) it is a particular kind of performance, which often uses writing (40) as a “strange tool” in Noë’s sense, as a technology to look at other performances. Suddenly our daily dealings with technology become “strange”. We take distance in this sense. However, this taking distance and this thinking remain a (technologically mediated) performance itself, and, in that sense, there is no distance. Our own thinking as philosophers of technology about technological performances is also itself performative and is also shaped by technologies and media. And this is not a problem, thanks to the technology of writing. Luckily it is possible to dance and choreograph at the same time, and luckily a technology such as writing helps to make that possible. Philosophy of technology, then, can be understood as a kind of performance, which reveals other technologically mediated performances— including philosophy of technology itself—as technologically mediated, reveals that these are mediated and how they are mediated. It offers the possibility to look at our technological performances while we are dancing them, for example by means of writing technologies, which estrange our other performances. And, in this book, with the help of metaphors from the performing arts, philosophy of technology also reveals all technological performances as performances. To use a Hegelian twist, here philosophy of technology “becomes aware of itself” as performance. First, the project of this book seemed to be only about technology: it moved beyond the focus on “the artefact” or “object” to a more holistic, less dualistic, and more process-oriented understanding of technology and its relation to humans, one which can helpfully be described by using the metaphors from the performing arts. But then, in and through its performances, it also applied the performative turn to itself, to philosophy of technology. Yet in contrast to Hegel, it is not a move to spirit. It is a non-Hegelian move to performance, which goes beyond the spirit-matter or mind-body dualisms of modern philosophy.

150  Thinking With Technology A performative move is also a move towards a more social understanding of technology: we always perform before others. There is an audience. But there is no clear border between stage and non-stage. We are co-actors, co-dancers, audience members, directors, choreographers, and so on. We have to take into account the moves of others and are influenced and shaped by them. Sometimes this can be experienced as liberating and good, sometimes as limiting and problematic. Performance metaphors help us to place technology within a social world, that is, a world of roles, norms, and power. For philosophy, taking a performative turn then also means that it has to reflect on its own social nature. For example, it means realizing that philosophy, understood as performance, cannot take place outside social relations or outside power relations. It can also mean realizing that the power of philosophical performances is limited and that there are always other actors to whom we have to respond. We might want a voice. We might have a voice. But we have to talk and compete with others who also want and have a voice. And we have to compete with technologies. Technologies also have performative power in a social context. In a sense, technologies also “speak”. They scream for attention. They dominate the stage. There is a sense in which they also “intervene”, shape the discourse, and run the show. Philosophers also find themselves on that stage. They might be outperformed by some technologies. The AI or the robot becomes more interesting than the philosopher. But there is not only competition; philosophy as a social enterprise also means that there is the possibility of doing philosophy as a cooperative project, both within philosophy and between philosophy and other disciplines and non-academic practices. Consider again the more participative role articulated before. And it is a performance not only against but also with technology, in the sense that, as a philosopher of technology, one also learns about and from the technology and collaborates with those who develop it. Thus, as social performers, philosophers of technology unavoidably will enter the social world, including its opportunities for competition and cooperation. Whether or not a Socratic role is assumed, any intervention and performance will be a social one, which touches and takes place in the fabric of roles, norms, relationships, and power—inside philosophy and outside philosophy, inside academia and outside academia. Philosophers of technology, like other philosophers, can neither escape the social nor is it desirable that they do so. Philosophers, like all human beings, are condemned to perform. Or one might say, more positively: they have received the gift of being able to engage in lived, social performance. To stop such performing means to die. And like all of us, philosophers of technology have to perform with and against technologies. That includes: with and against writing, which choreographs and organizes our thinking and exercises power over us. Plato’s complaint is still relevant today,

Thinking With Technology 151 also for philosophers of technology. What media do we want to use? What do they want from us? And what is our performative response?

References Böhler, Arno. 2014. “Staging Philosophy: Toward a Performance of Immanent Expression.” In Encounters in Performance Philosophy, edited by Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay, 171–96. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bowie, Andrew. 2015. “The ‘Philosophy of Performance’ and the Performance of Philosophy.” Performance Philosophy 1: 51–58. Coeckelbergh, Mark. 2017. Using Words and Things: Language and Philosophy of Technology. New York: Routledge. Cull, Laura. 2014. “Performance Philosophy: Staging a New Field.” In Encounters in Performance Philosophy, edited by Laura Cull and Alice Lagaay, 15–38. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cull, Laura. 2018. “Thinking Performance.” Blog, Palgrave Macmillan. Accessed August  22. www.palgrave.com/gp/campaigns/thinking-performance/maoi learca-blog. Cull, Laura, and Alice Lagaay, eds. 2014. Encounters in Performance Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. D’Arcy, Geraint. 2017. “Visibility Brings with It Responsibility: Using a Pragmatic Performance Approach to Explore a Political Philosophy of Technology.” Performance Philosophy 3: 178–98. Gallese, Vittorio, and George Lakoff. 2005. “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-Motor System in Conceptual Knowledge.” Cognitive Neuropsychology 22 (3): 455–79. Griswold, Charles L. 2016. “Plato on Rhetoric and Poetry.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed August  20, 2018. from https://plato.stanford. edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/. Kornhaber, David. 2015. “Every Text is Performance: A Pre-History of Performance Philosophy.” Performance Philosophy 1: 24–35. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Noë, Alva. 2015. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York: Hill and Wang. Plato. 1997a. “Gorgias.” In Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson and translated by G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve, 791– 869. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Plato. 1997b. “Ion.” In Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson and translated by G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve, 937–49. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Plato. 1997c. “Phaedrus.” In Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson and translated by G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve, 506– 56. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Puchner, Martin. 2010. The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theatre and Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven: Yale University Press.

152  Thinking With Technology Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2005. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Vollmer, Anna-Lisa, Robin Read, Dries Trippas, and Tony Belpaeme. 2018. “Children Conform, Adults Resist: A Robot Group Induced Peer Pressure on Normative Social Conformity.” Science Robotics 3 (21). doi:10.1126/scirobot ics.aat7111.

7 Conclusion

7.1. Summary of Results: Towards a PerformanceOriented (Post)Phenomenology and Critical Theory of Technology Using metaphors from the performing arts, I have moved from a rather static, asocial (not anti-social), and Platonic phenomenology and ethics of technology to one in which use and users of technology are revealed as not only embodied but also moving, social, temporal, situated, immanent, narrative, and, indeed, performing. This gives us a more holistic, active, and process-oriented view of human-technology relations. We deal not just with technologies in a way that uses and perceives them as external things (artefacts), which is often understood by means of the metaphor of looking at a work of art; instead we engage in technoperformances. The metaphors also enabled me to raise and re-conceptualize some normative issues concerning technology, including ethical and political ones. Furthermore, the metaphors helped me to reformulate an understanding of technology as more than a tool: I have argued that technology is not just an instrument we use in the performances of our (social) lives and also not merely a co-actor; it can also take the role of co-choreographer, co-director, co-playwright, co-conductor, and co-magician, perhaps even co-thinker. Thinking about new information and communication technologies as “agents” of their own, then, should not only be understood in the sense of what they do and what they do by themselves, instead of human (technology as co-performer, co-actor, co-dancer, co-musician—think about robots and AI, for instance). Technologies such as smartphones, social media, and computer games are also agents in the sense that they shape our performances and ultimately the entire performative field and its grammars: technologies co-write and direct how we move, act, sound, and play out our lives, including how we move, interact, sound, and play together. Technologies do not only act but also set the stage for these acts, and maybe even for our thinking. These roles of technology are no longer only about what things do in the sense of a mediation

154  Conclusion between an individual perceiver and the world (as in Ihde); they concern technology in what Heidegger called its “ontological” roles and in what we, after a performative turn and going beyond Heidegger’s visual art metaphors, must understand in more processual and social-performative terms. Technologies mediate our performance, but they also shape and create the conditions of possibility for our performances—with “our” understood in a social sense, relevant to various levels of sociality. In this sense, then, we do not only perform with technology; technology also performs with us. This is not the case so much because we are its mere instruments, but because we are co-actors and co-directors in plays and choreographies that are not only written by us, humans. In response to this condition, an ethics and politics of technology can be about regaining some more agency, of becoming stronger directors and choreographers of our lives, as opposed to letting technologies or their designers do that. But beyond competition, ethical and political questions can also ask which choreographies, plays, music, and shows we want to create together with technology and who and/or what should be allowed to participate in this co-creation and co-design. Whether or not one wants to go all the way towards a posthumanist view in which there is a symmetry between humans and non-humans (I have not argued for this; I actually believe humans are the main performers and are still the only performers in a strict sense since only humans are embodied, situated, immanent, etc., in an existential sense related to their specific way of embodiment), I have shown that using and reflecting on performance art metaphors enables precise, interesting, and rich conceptualizations of the various roles of technology, the users of technology, the designers of technology, and philosophers and others who think about technology, and that some of these roles of technology question the idea that human users are in full control of their performances and its grammars and scripts. The philosophical performances of this book revealed aspects of technological experience and practice, such as movement, rhythm, and magic, that deserve more attention in contemporary discourse about technology and offer a performance-oriented vocabulary to conceptualize the way technology shapes us—indeed how technology moves us. Furthermore, these performances also touch thinking about technology. I have argued that what may be called “a performative turn in philosophy of technology” also has implications for thinking about what it means to do philosophy, including philosophy of technology. Ultimately such reflections may lead to different, perhaps transdisciplinary ways of doing philosophy, as argued for by performance philosophy advocates. This is not only about philosophers collaborating with (performance) artists, if that means philosophers staying entirely within their traditional roles. It can also imply changing and reinterpreting one’s role. It is, more fundamentally, a question about how to do philosophy—­sometimes misleadingly and non-performatively framed as being about what philosophy

Conclusion 155 “is”. From the reflections presented here one could conclude that philosophy as the love of wisdom is something that is performed and, like all love, has to be performed in order to be complete. Consequently, it is not sufficient to “be” a philosopher of technology (if that makes sense at all); one has to “do” philosophy of technology. Thinking about technology is a performance. Not only on the theatre and dance stages in so-called cultural institutions, or in the lecture halls and other stages of academic life, but everywhere and publicly where there is experience of technology and where there are performances with technology. Against Plato and with, for example, Dewey, one could argue that it is only on the basis of this experience and these performances can we develop wisdom (understood as know-how) about technology and how to live with it. Living well with technology, the good life with technology, is an art, a performative art. And an art can only be learned by doing. Philosophers of technology, understood in the broad sense as lovers of wisdom concerning technology, can only acquire their beloved and desired wisdom by doing, by performing. This need not be limited to one kind of performance. Experience of, and performance with, all kinds of media and technologies can help and is perhaps even necessary. Writing is only one technology and text is only one medium. It cannot and should not be the only source for developing wisdom and indeed for metaphors used for thinking about technology. For contemporary theory of technology such as (post)phenomenology and critical theory of technology, these results and conclusions can be seen and performed as criticisms, but also as constructive input for further development of theory in these fields. If some dimensions of technology use and experience are missing in existing accounts, then one could try to add them and revise one’s framework. For example, postphenomenology could frame its users and perceivers in more performative terms and could understand the mediations of technology as a shaping of technological performances. This would enable the theory to address more social aspects and to integrate temporal elements such as movement, rhythm, and narrative, all of which now seem to be missing. Another example is critical theory: while in general of course this direction in thinking about technology is sufficiently aware of social aspects of technology use and design, it could integrate performative-sociological concepts such as role and choreography in its account of what happens when we use technology. In particular, it could benefit from a more elaborate account of the use and hacking of technology as embodied-performative, moving, and narrative. If users can resist and regain agency at all (say, within a capitalist system and in the face of very powerful technologies and actors such as multinational corporations), they can only do so as embodied human beings that move and are moved, act and are acted upon, playing and being played, creating illusions and being deceived, and so on. The metaphor of performance can thus help to say more about

156  Conclusion how it is to use and hack technologies in the lifeworld, about the experience side of the “reason and experience” Feenberg believes is involved in technology. Secondary instrumentalization requires performances, including collective performances. There are already plays, scripts, and choreographies linked to technologies, all of which contain power relations. The critical task is then to rewrite, revise, play, and perform different political choreographies of technology (choreographies of resistance or acts of consensus-making, for example), all of which probably and perhaps desirably involve improvisation. Like all performance, political performance is never fully scripted and determined; it is also a matter of rehearsing and trying things out. And neither the success nor the performative power of a performance is ever guaranteed. As vulnerable human beings in complex social-natural environments, we have to perform in the face of risk and uncertainty.

7.2. Finale/Last Movement: Thinking and Ethics of Technology as Improvised Performances Writing and publishing a book is itself a performative act (or series of performative acts) mediated and shaped by technologies. It is a technoperformance, an intervention in a performative field. A risky intervention. It aims to do something and to have others do something. Here the aim was to help to move thinking in philosophy of technology into a more performance-oriented direction, to contribute to a “performative turn”. (And note that this use of the language of “turn” is itself only meaningful and made possible by our embodied, performative existence. We understand what turning means because we know-how to turn our body. Philosophers also have bodies and have experience and know-how of their bodies. Without that, they could not think and they could not use metaphors. Books are not written by disembodied minds; the writing of a book is always an embodied performance.) Asking and arguing for a turn as a philosopher, then, is comparable to taking the role of the choreographer who helps others turn in a particular direction (by using hands) or asks others to turn into a particular direction (using the performative power of the word). Or, to put it in more Socratic terms: the philosopher is then one who lets others understand that they want or need to turn into a particular direction. One could also call this Socratic intervention a kinesitherapy or kinésithérapie (the French word for physiotherapy, see also the term kinesitherapie used in Belgium): a therapeutic intervention that helps people move differently, a re-education of the philosophical motor apparatus (French: l’appareil locomoteur; Dutch: bewegingsapparaat) using specific techniques. If thinking is understood as performance, then we could say that the philosopher performs the writing of a text as a specific technique in order to help the thinking of people move differently, thus attempting a

Conclusion 157 re-education of the thinking apparatus. This book can thus be seen as a tool used in a therapeutic intervention that aims at a performative turn and that aims to move philosophy of technology and the all-too-immobile human subjects, users, and experiencers it presupposes in its theories. Moreover, stressing the normative dimension of this kinesitherapy and moving from this general intervention in thinking about technology to a specific ethics of technology, one could say that the Socratic philosopher tries to have people move differently with technology—and perhaps also tries to have technology move people in different ways. Moving towards the good life with technology then requires specific Socratic, kinesitherapeutic practical interventions in how people move, act, play, and make magic with technology. It is about trying to make people understand, by means of words, writing but potentially also by showing, performing in different ways, that they can and need to move, act, etc. differently with technology. Alongside philosophers, artists can do that, too. By using technology in a very different way than intended, for example, they may open up different kine-aesthethic (kinaesthethic) and kine-technological possibilities, different ways of moving with technology (and indeed of moving together). Philosophers and artists who take up this kine-Socratic role can help us to find (or re-discover and re-collect, as it were) different ways of moving, including different ways of moving together and different ways of moving with technology. However, in the previous chapter  I  have also pointed to a different, non-Socratic role philosophers could take. The Platonic/Socratic model presupposes that the philosopher, as master kinetherapist or master kinésist, perfectly knows what the good way of moving is. Or at least it presupposes that the people she treats can in principle know and re-find, recollect, indeed, re-animate, re-enact, and re-dance, the good way of moving. But what if the philosopher does not really know the good way of moving, acting, etc.? And what if nobody knows, in the sense that there is no perfect or “original” and “authentic” way of moving that is given to us or that we can recollect and reanimate? What if there is no master choreography and no master choreographer who knows in advance the perfect dance? If this is the case, mastery in choreography and kinesitherapy means something else, something more relational and perhaps something more communal and collective. It means that we all have to find out together, by means of trial and error, what the best way of moving is, including how to best move with technology and how to best have technology move us. Maybe the level of mastery can be reached but only on the basis of that common experience, together. When it comes to dealing with new technologies, it seems that we find ourselves in a situation that requires the latter kind of move. Although many claim to be a Socratic therapist (consider the many popular books about the future of technologies such as the internet of things, social media, blockchain, robotics, and AI), nobody really knows where the

158  Conclusion technology is moving and nobody knows the best way to move forward. The philosopher can perhaps propose a reorganization of our thinking, can attempt to choreograph thinking about technology, just as I  have tried in this book using the usual technique and tools (although here, too, one may question the Socratic attitude and indeed whether the medium and technologies used, language and writing, are adequate or sufficient). But when it comes to the more practical challenge of how to move, act, and play with technology in a way that leads to the good life, when it comes to acquiring wisdom and know-how concerning the design and use of technologies, the philosopher seems to have no choice but to leave the Socratic position. She finds herself on the same plane as everyone else. She may use writing as a technique to take distance from daily uses and experiences of technology, which helps to reflect on them, but true wisdom in these matters can only be based on these uses and experiences and, in the end, can only be performed in and by these uses and experiences. Hence the metaphor also has to change: we move from the metaphor of the master choreographer and master kinesitherapist to that of participants in a choreography that is continuously in the making and that is a communal or collective, in any case more radically social matter. Philosophical interventions by means of the use of words and writing can help this common improvised performance aimed at trying to find out how to move together. But if they help at all, it is not because the philosopher knows the perfect movement, knows the ultimate ethical truth, but because the philosopher has achieved some mastery in particular techniques and technologies to take distance, which helps others to see what they are doing (how they are moving) and figure out (by means of improvisation) what they could be doing (how they could be moving). However, (a) it has to be stressed again that this mirroring and distancing exercise (or performance) has to happen without the philosopher having pre-knowledge of what the best way of moving is, that such knowledge can only be acquired through experience with technology (which in principle everyone can acquire), and that the taking distance remains itself a performance, usually mediated by technologies. Furthermore, (b) this taking distance can also be done by artists, who can also master specific techniques and media—different from those used by the philosopher—in order to hold up a mirror and open up different choreographic-ethical possibilities. Yet, (c) seeing is not enough, the mirror metaphor does not get it right. What is learned by reading or by looking at art (and at ourselves), even if based on experience, is not yet full knowledge. An ethics can never be just applied theory. Everyone needs to try out the movements, achieve know-how and wisdom. Every person and every society have to find their way of moving and their way of moving together, including their way of moving with technology. An ethics, understood in a practical and performative sense, is not only and not mainly a matter of theory but rather a matter of trying out, of improvisation. Finding

Conclusion 159 out the good life, including the good life with technology, is a matter of performance and improvisation. It is about finding a good tune together, about finding a good way of moving together. It is about trying things out and about performatively responding to one another while performing. Maybe what philosophers and artists do, using their specific techniques and technologies, can help. But these are also a kind of improvisation. And even if they are sometimes presented as individual insights, they are based on common experiences and indeed common performances (inperformances and co-performances). If they are relevant at all, they are parasitic on, and responsive to, the movements of others and on common choreographies. Or one could say: philosophical performances (concerning ethics or other matters of wisdom) do not really stand outside the performative whole but are part of the whole of performances and choreographies that are going on and that try to move towards wisdom and the good life in the way of improvisation. More generally, thinking is always both performative and social, and as such thinking is one of the performances that is going on and participates in (other) performances. In these common performances, philosophers, artists, designers, etc. are co-dancers, co-actors, co-musicians, and co-magicians. Their gestures and performances respond to, contribute to, and co-constitute the moving whole. Thinking performances participate in an ecology of performances—a moving, kinetic ecology. Finally, as performance and improvisation, thinking is always a transient matter or, rather: a transient process. The technologies and media of writing, text, and books create the magical illusion that thinking can be captured and stored. We are under the spell of writing. Of course, like all performances, thinking can be “recorded” in the form of text. But the text is not the thinking. The recording is not the music. The video is not the dance. When it comes to books, for example, the reader encountering the text has to perform her own thinking based on the text, has to think, dance, and live the text, performatively respond to it. In the best case, she can do something with it in her thinking and in other performances. But a tool is dead and meaningless if it is not used. Life is movement, and human life and thinking are performances. The best thing that can happen to a text, therefore, is that it helps to move a few things; not in the “mind” of the “reader”, but in the thinking and in other movements of the performers that we all are: performers moving with technology and moved by technology.

Index

actant 10, 33 – 4, 36 – 7, 69 – 71, 73, 78, 101, 124 acting 5, 9, 17, 49, 56, 61, 65, 68 – 74, 77 – 8, 139, 146 – 7, 157; with technology 9, 48 – 78 actor 10, 12, 34, 49, 52, 57 – 61, 65 – 72, 74, 76 – 8, 92, 121, 124, 132, 144 – 6, 150, 153 – 5, 159 aesthetics 2 – 5, 17, 30, 84, 87, 95, 139 agency iii, 1 – 2, 5, 12, 27 – 8, 31, 33, 35, 48, 70, 74, 87, 94 – 5, 100, 102, 122 – 4, 154 – 5 Akrich, Madeleine 3, 48, 69 – 70 Alexa 12, 106, 109 – 10 algorithms 33, 35, 74 – 5, 101, 124 anthropology 48, 57, 60, 68, 88 Apollonian 53 – 4, 66, 66n1 appearance 4, 50, 52 – 3, 57, 59, 62 – 4, 72, 74, 106 – 17, 125, 130, 137 – 8, 142 Aristotle 10, 39, 51 – 6, 63 – 4, 67 – 8; Poetics 51 – 2, 55 – 6; Rhetoric 52, 56 artificial intelligence (AI) iii, 1, 5, 11, 49, 72 – 4, 78, 107, 121, 123 – 4, 144, 146, 148, 150, 153, 157 assemblage 26, 37 audience 22, 24 – 5, 30, 49, 57 – 60, 63, 65 – 6, 73, 85, 87, 98, 105, 107 – 9, 123, 130, 150 Austin, John 5, 10, 30 – 1, 48, 56, 65, 67 backstage (vs. frontstage) 34, 58, 68 body 15 – 26, 29, 31, 36, 39, 42 – 3, 52 – 3, 61 – 2, 68 – 9, 77, 77n2, 86, 88, 89 – 91, 93, 97, 101, 113, 115, 128, 135, 149, 156; moving 10, 15 – 19, 21 – 5, 29, 31 – 2, 36, 44, 49, 52, 68, 77; techniques 91, 93

Böhler, Arno 6, 12, 134 – 6, 139 books 135, 156 – 7, 159 bot 101, 138 Bowie, Andrew 6, 12, 132 – 4, 136, 139 Butler, Judith 5, 10, 41, 48, 56, 61 – 2, 64 – 5, 68 Cartesian 16, 19, 53, 89 – 90 child 29, 110, 116 – 17, 137 choreography 6, 8 – 10, 13, 15, 20, 23 – 6, 29, 33 – 5, 37 – 40, 42 – 4, 78, 85, 90, 135, 142 – 4, 155, 157 – 8; political 10, 42 – 3, 154, 156 Clarke, Arthur C. 105, 107 composing 9, 24, 98 computer 27 – 9, 64, 71 – 2, 75, 77, 87, 91 – 2, 94 – 7, 109, 111, 114 – 15, 121, 135 – 6, 138, 149; animation 12; games 7, 10 – 11, 29, 32, 63, 65 – 6, 68 – 9, 71, 74 – 5, 99, 102, 109, 115, 153; software 71, 75, 94 conducting 9, 83, 90, 96, 102 creation 10, 23, 25 – 6, 63 – 4, 76, 84, 92, 95; co-creation 154 Cull, Laura 6, 12, 132 – 6 dance iii, 1, 5 – 10, 15, 18 – 33, 39 – 40, 42 – 4, 50 – 3, 61 – 2, 70, 77, 84, 90, 133, 139, 143 – 7, 149, 155, 157, 159; dancing with technology 146; metaphor 5, 10, 15, 28, 32, 37, 39, 43, 48, 83, 85, 107, 119, 141, 148; as technological practice 44 DAW software 93 – 4 deception iii, 1 – 2, 12, 50, 52 – 3, 63, 66, 72, 78, 103, 106 – 10, 117 – 22, 125, 130 declaration 55 – 6

Index  161 Deleuze, Gilles 38 – 9 design 1 – 2, 7, 11 – 12, 25 – 6, 32 – 3, 36, 41, 78, 95, 97 – 8, 103, 105 – 7, 109 – 11, 120; co-design 115 designer 11 – 12, 29, 32 – 6, 72, 78, 95, 97, 106, 109 – 11, 114 – 17, 119 – 20; as choreographer 33, 35; as stage magician 2, 106, 109 – 11, 114 – 17 digital technologies 2, 8, 26 – 8, 30 – 1, 34, 36 – 7, 41, 93 – 4, 99 – 100, 115, 132 Dionysian 20, 53, 60, 66, 66n1, 77n2, 83 directing 9, 26, 34 – 5, 41, 49, 77, 96, 123, 147 director 34, 49, 66, 68 – 9, 76, 78, 141, 143, 150; technology as 10 – 12, 49, 74 – 6, 78, 146, 153 – 4 drama 3 – 4, 7, 9, 51, 54, 57, 61, 131 – 2, 135; of ideas 135; see also theatre Dreyfus, Hubert 11, 18, 20 – 1, 23 embodiment 10, 12, 15, 18 – 19, 21, 30, 68 – 9, 77, 84, 89 – 91, 93, 97, 100 – 1, 128, 134, 139 – 40, 146 – 7, 154 emotions 25, 38, 42 – 3, 51, 84, 91, 106, 111 – 12, 114, 116 emplotment 55, 64, 75 ethics 2 – 3, 11 – 12, 24, 27, 39, 51, 53, 87, 108, 126, 144, 158 – 9; of honesty 12, 110 – 11, 121; of illusion 106; of performance 125 – 6; Platonic 53, 109 – 10; of technology 1 – 2, 10, 12 – 13, 39 – 40, 107, 118, 125 – 6, 144, 153 – 4, 156 – 7; virtue 39, 125 – 6 experience iii, 1 – 3, 5 – 8, 10 – 13, 15 – 17, 19 – 30, 43, 55, 58, 66n1, 73, 78, 88 – 91, 96, 102, 105 – 7, 112 – 18, 123, 126, 136, 140 – 5, 147, 150, 154 – 9 Facebook 63, 67, 74, 99, 114, 119, 121 – 3, 138 Fesmire, Steven 87 – 9, 98 first-person 21 – 2, 24, 59, 90 Flusser, Vilém 12, 107, 109 – 10, 113, 119 – 20, 122 – 4 Foucault, Michel 7, 10, 38 – 41, 65, 121, 140 Fraleigh, Sondra 7, 19 – 20, 25

Gallagher, Shaun 16 – 17, 20 games 8, 30 – 1, 34, 40, 53, 60, 64 – 9, 72, 77, 92, 98 – 9, 102 – 3, 114, 141; computer games 7, 10 – 11, 29, 63 – 9, 71, 74, 99, 109, 115, 153; gameplay 65 – 6, 69; massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) 65 – 6 gender 5, 10, 24, 42, 48, 55, 61 – 2 Godlovitch, Stan 83 – 5, 87, 91 – 5, 100 – 1 Goffman, Erving 5, 10, 48, 57 – 62, 64, 66 – 8, 70, 119 good life 10, 13 – 14, 39, 41, 136 – 7, 155, 157 – 9 Google 109, 122 – 3 Greimas, Algirdas Julien 70 Hegelian 149 Heidegger, Martin 4, 17, 27, 29, 32, 97, 133, 140, 143, 154 honesty 12, 107, 111, 121, 125 – 6 Ihde, Don 3 – 4, 10, 18, 28 – 9, 67, 71, 77, 99, 128, 139, 140 – 1, 154 illusion 2, 9, 11 – 12, 22 – 3, 50, 52 – 3, 59, 61, 63 – 4, 66, 66n1, 78, 105 – 12, 114 – 17, 119 – 20, 122 – 3, 125 – 6, 144 – 5, 155, 159; ethics of 106 imitation 28, 50 – 2, 54 – 6, 64, 68, 72, 101 improvisation 7, 11, 20 – 1, 26 – 7, 50 – 1, 61, 72, 83 – 9, 97 – 9, 139, 144, 156, 158 – 9 instruments 11, 87, 94 – 6, 122 – 3, 154; musical instruments 18, 86, 91 – 2, 94 – 6, 100 Internet, the 29, 31, 63, 67, 73, 92, 101, 109, 114 – 15, 141, 157 kinaesthetic 21, 29, 42 – 3 kinesitherapy 13, 156 – 7 kinetic iii, 1, 10, 22, 30 – 1, 34 – 5, 39 – 41, 44, 62, 89, 159 know-how 19 – 21, 23, 27, 86 – 7, 113, 155 – 6, 158 knowledge iii, 1, 3 – 6, 8, 11 – 12, 15 – 25, 27 – 9, 32, 68, 77, 86 – 9, 91, 93, 113, 117 – 18, 130 – 1, 137, 139, 143, 145 – 6, 148, 158; propositional vs. tacit 20, 89 Kozel, Susan 15, 19 – 21, 24, 27 – 8, 38, 44

162 Index language 4, 5, 11, 24 – 5, 27, 30 – 1, 40, 48, 52, 54 – 8, 62 – 3, 65 – 8, 70 – 1, 76 – 7, 88, 91, 112, 128, 133, 139, 145, 147 – 9, 156, 158; as technology 31 Latour, Bruno 3 – 5, 10 – 11, 26, 33 – 4, 37 – 8, 48 – 9, 69 – 71, 78, 92, 100 – 1, 124, 140, 146 linguistic 70, 76, 78, 90, 98

83 – 103, 112, 133 – 4, 139, 154, 159; classical 7, 85 – 7, 94, 96 – 7, 102, 139; composition 86, 95, 102; digital 83, 92 – 4; instruments 18, 86 – 7, 89, 91 – 5, 100; recording 83, 85, 91, 93 – 4, 159; rock 85, 86, 92, 95 – 6, 99; score 18, 50, 85 – 6, 96 – 8, 102, 139; as technological practice 85 – 6, 91 – 5, 100

machines iii, 1 – 3, 7 – 9, 27, 31, 75, 86, 94 – 6, 101, 111, 115, 122, 124, 146; as actors 70, 141; as choreographers 35, 141; as conductors 11; as magicians 105, 122, 141; as staging our thinking 13, 128, 138, 141 magic iii, 1, 5, 9, 11 – 12, 23, 73, 105 – 17, 120 – 7, 146, 154, 157; stage magic 1, 6 – 7, 9, 11, 78, 103, 105 – 15, 118 – 19, 121, 125, 137; victims of 107 – 8, 110 – 11, 114, 116, 121, 126 magician 2, 11 – 13, 78, 106 – 9, 111 – 24, 126, 137, 141, 143, 153, 159; stage magician 11, 52, 105 – 8, 110 – 16, 121, 124 mask 78n3, 113, 119 – 22 mechos 109 media 2, 9, 13, 27, 65 – 6, 73 – 4, 99, 109 – 11, 114, 122 – 6, 131 – 2, 135 – 6, 138, 142, 145, 148 – 9, 151, 153, 155, 158 – 9; digital 31, 92, 94; social 8, 10 – 11, 30 – 2, 38, 41, 49, 60, 63 – 8, 73 – 4, 76 – 8, 98 – 9, 101 – 3, 114 – 15, 117, 119, 122 – 5, 138 – 9, 141 – 2, 148 – 9, 157 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 15 – 21, 23, 28 metaphor iii, 1 – 13, 15 – 18, 28, 32 – 4, 37, 39 – 41, 43, 48 – 51, 53 – 7, 60 – 5, 67 – 78, 83 – 5, 87, 91 – 2, 96 – 103, 105 – 7, 112, 115, 118 – 19, 123 – 4, 128 – 9, 135 – 43, 147 – 50, 153 – 6, 158; more than a metaphor 12, 28, 39 mirror(ing) 42 – 3, 158 movement iii, 1 – 4, 10, 15 – 43, 52, 62, 68 – 9, 77 – 8, 89 – 91, 102, 134, 142 – 3, 145 – 6, 154 – 6, 158 – 9 moving body 10, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 31 – 2, 36, 44, 49, 52, 68, 77 music iii, 1, 5 – 7, 9, 11, 18, 24, 28, 48, 50, 52 – 3, 66n1, 73, 78,

narrative iii, 1, 9, 13, 38, 48, 51 – 6, 62, 64 – 6, 66, 68, 70, 74 – 6, 84, 99, 102, 135, 153, 155 Nietzsche, Friedrich 10, 20, 51 – 4, 60, 63 – 4, 66, 66n1, 77n2, 78n3, 115, 134 – 5 Noë, Alva 5 – 6, 10, 13, 17, 44, 112, 134, 143, 147 – 9 normative 1 – 2, 11 – 3, 33, 49, 57, 73, 75, 78, 107, 153, 157 normativities 10 organization 44, 55, 75, 83, 111, 121, 147, 148, 158 other 24, 27, 30 – 2, 55, 58, 65 – 6, 87 – 8, 96, 98, 107 – 8, 122 – 4, 138, 142, 150, 156 participation 12, 129, 133, 139 – 41 Parviainen, Jaana x, 10, 19, 21, 26, 33, 36 – 8, 40, 42 – 4, 129 Penny, Simon 5, 17, 28 perception 3 – 5, 15, 17, 19, 53, 92, 112 – 13, 115, 140 performance iii, 1 – 2, 4 – 14, 15 – 19, 22 – 4, 26 – 30, 33 – 4, 41 – 2, 48, 50, 52, 56 – 62, 64 – 7, 69 – 74, 78, 83 – 103, 106 – 26, 128 – 36, 138 – 50, 153 – 9; co-performance 112 – 13, 122, 159; human (vs. machines) 27, 71 – 3, 78, 95, 101, 124, 146; as a metaphor 1, 5 – 6, 8, 10 – 13, 16, 49 – 50, 56, 72, 78, 97, 100 – 3, 124, 140 – 1, 148 – 50, 155; moral 59 – 61; philosophy 6, 9, 12, 128 – 9, 132 – 6, 139, 154; philosophy as 6, 9, 12, 129, 132 – 6, 139, 142, 144, 149 – 50, 154 – 9; risky 138; social 30, 65 – 6, 73, 87 – 8, 93, 98, 113 – 14, 119, 126, 135, 141, 150, 153 – 5; theory 8, 56 performative 2, 4 – 5, 9, 12 – 14, 17, 19, 22 – 3, 29 – 30, 38 – 9, 41, 44, 56, 58, 60 – 1, 64 – 6, 69 – 70, 76, 85, 94,

Index  163 98, 100 – 1, 105 – 8, 114, 116 – 22, 124 – 9, 132, 134 – 6, 139 – 41, 143 – 6, 148 – 51, 154 – 6, 158 – 9; act 5, 41, 48, 126, 140, 156; turn 1 – 2, 4 – 5, 13, 40, 56, 61, 114 – 15, 124, 129, 140, 149 – 50, 154, 156 – 7 performative field 126 – 7, 153, 156 performing arts iii, 1 – 2, 5 – 9, 13, 27, 49 – 50, 60, 85, 89, 128 – 9, 132, 139, 147 – 9, 153 persona 59, 91, 96, 120, 135 phenomenology iii, 1 – 3, 5, 13, 15, 19, 24, 27 – 8, 30, 36, 42, 61, 69, 71, 77, 132 – 3, 153, 155; of dance 15, 19, 21 philosopher 1 – 4, 6, 9, 13, 15, 18, 21, 27 – 8, 31, 39 – 40, 44, 49, 51 – 4, 56, 59, 63, 76, 85, 87 – 8, 107, 113, 126 – 9, 131, 134 – 40, 142 – 6, 148 – 51, 154 – 9; as performer 6, 9, 13, 113, 126 – 7, 134 – 40, 155 – 9; role of 13, 63, 113, 129, 142 – 5, 149 – 50, 154 – 9 philosophy iii, 1, 3 – 7, 9 – 10, 12 – 13, 17, 30, 40, 43 – 4, 49 – 54, 60, 67, 77, 83 – 5, 91, 95, 112 – 14, 126, 128 – 39, 142 – 4, 146, 149 – 50, 154 – 5; of dance 10, 15, 18, 21, 27 – 8; of technology iii, 1 – 7, 9 – 13, 18, 21, 28, 33, 37, 48 – 9, 53, 62, 67, 69, 71, 76, 78, 122, 128 – 9, 132, 140, 144 – 9, 154 – 7 physis 134 Pickering, Andrew 5, 10, 17, 28, 31, 34, 48, 70, 128 picture 4, 28, 84, 101, 146 Plato 1, 3, 6 – 7, 12 – 13, 50 – 3, 63, 68, 107 – 8, 113, 115, 126, 129 – 30, 132, 134 – 8, 140, 143, 150, 155; cave metaphor 4, 50, 63, 113, 115 – 16, 144; Gorgias 130 – 1, 136; Ion 130; Phaedrus 130 – 1, 137; Protagoras 130; Republic 50 – 1, 107 – 8; Timaeus 51 Platonic 12, 31, 51, 53 – 4, 57 – 8, 72 – 3, 83 – 4, 89, 106 – 10, 112 – 16, 118 – 19, 126, 130 – 1, 135, 142, 153, 157; vs. non-Platonic 12, 64, 72, 97, 113, 116, 144 play 2, 9 – 13, 18 – 19, 32, 38, 49, 51 – 2, 54, 57, 59 – 62, 64 – 6, 69, 74, 77, 83, 85 – 100, 115, 118, 142, 144 – 6, 153 – 8; role play 10 – 12, 39, 51, 53, 57, 59 – 66, 68, 70, 72,

74, 76, 78, 88 – 9, 92, 106 – 7, 111, 113 – 14, 118 – 20, 122, 126, 137, 142 – 5 politics 1 – 3, 10 – 11, 38 – 42, 88, 122, 129, 154 postphenomenology 3 – 4, 18, 67, 71, 76 – 7, 101, 155 power iii, 1 – 3, 7 – 8, 10, 12, 17, 25, 38 – 42, 57, 59, 63, 72, 76 – 7, 86, 98, 108, 110, 121 – 4, 126, 130, 134, 136, 138, 150, 155 – 6 puppet 12, 50, 106, 110 – 11, 113, 115, 124 resistance 38, 42, 121 – 2, 124, 156 rhetoric 11 – 12, 129 – 32, 136 – 9 rhythm 10 – 12, 23 – 4, 32, 35, 38, 40, 98, 129, 133, 135, 139, 154 – 5 Ricoeur, Paul 11, 48, 53 – 7, 63 – 4, 67 – 8, 75 – 6 ritual 56, 60 – 1, 64 – 5, 74, 83, 85, 88, 133; Dionysian 20, 53, 60 robots iii, 1 – 3, 8, 32, 49, 53, 63, 72 – 4, 78, 105 – 6, 109 – 11, 115, 117, 119, 124, 137; as co-dancer 32, 153; as co-mover 32; as co-performer 32, 153 Schechner, Richard 10, 28, 48, 57, 59 – 61 script 2, 10, 11 – 12, 49, 61, 66 – 7, 69 – 72, 74 – 6, 78, 85, 97, 124, 126, 154, 156 Searle, John 10, 30 – 1, 48, 56 – 7, 65, 67 – 8 Shakespeare, William 54 Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine 15, 21 – 4 situatedness 10, 12, 42, 139 skill 7, 11, 18, 20 – 1, 27, 29, 39, 83, 85 – 7, 89, 93 – 5, 98 – 101, 108, 113, 116, 118, 132 smart devices iii, 1, 92, 111 smartphone 10, 28 – 9, 32, 35 – 6, 38, 40 – 1, 77, 92, 99, 102, 109, 114, 153 social: interaction 10, 62, 65, 75, 88, 98, 101, 117; life 2, 5, 48 – 9, 54, 56 – 62, 64 – 9, 71, 73, 75 – 6, 77n2, 83, 88, 98, 105 – 6, 108, 119 – 21, 123, 125; media 8, 10 – 11, 30 – 2, 38, 41, 49, 60, 63 – 8, 73 – 4, 76 – 8, 98 – 9, 101 – 3, 114, 117, 119, 122 – 5, 138 – 9, 141 – 2, 148 – 9, 153, 157

164 Index Socrates 39, 130 – 2, 137 – 8, 145 Socratic 13, 108, 142 – 6, 150, 156 – 8 space 10, 15 – 17, 19, 21, 23, 27, 29, 36, 40, 42 – 3, 51, 60 – 1, 65 – 6, 68 – 9, 76, 88, 99 – 100, 108, 112 – 13, 121, 124, 133 – 4, 141, 147 spectators 24, 52, 69, 106, 112 – 15, 118, 121 speech act 5, 30, 42, 48, 56 stage 2, 12 – 13, 22 – 6, 28, 34, 43 – 4, 49, 51 – 4, 56 – 60, 62, 64, 66, 68 – 71, 73 – 6, 78, 106 – 11, 114, 119, 123 – 5, 128, 131, 134 – 6, 138, 140 – 6, 148, 150, 153, 155 stage magic iii, 1, 6 – 7, 11, 52, 78, 103, 105 – 15, 118 – 19, 121, 124 – 5, 137

119, 124, 139; social 11, 62, 64 – 6, 69, 76, 142 third-person 22, 24, 59, 90 time 6, 10, 12, 15 – 17, 19 – 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 33, 40, 43 – 4, 48, 54 – 5, 57, 60, 65, 67, 75 – 6, 85, 88, 98, 112, 139, 147 Tognazzini, Bruce 12, 107, 109 – 12, 125 transdisciplinary 13, 128, 134, 144, 154 trickery 11, 108, 119 – 22, 124 – 5, 137 Trojan Horse 109, 111 truth 3, 13 – 14, 50, 52 – 4, 58, 63, 66n1, 107 – 8, 110, 113, 130 – 1, 133, 136 – 8, 142 – 5, 158 Turner, Victor 10, 48, 57, 60 – 1 Twitter 74, 98 – 9, 114, 138

technologies of the self 41 technology: acting with 9, 49; as actor 12, 49, 67, 74, 76, 78, 92, 124, 146, 153; as choreographer 8, 10, 34 – 6, 78, 146, 153 – 4; as composer 102; creating illusion with 155; dancing with 15 – 45; as magician 11 – 12, 106, 118, 122, 153; making music with 83 – 103; normative role of 78; as organizer 9, 67, 121; persuasive 12, 136 – 8; rhetoric of 136 – 8; as script writer 49, 66, 75 – 6, 78; thinks 146 – 51 technoperformances iii, 2, 13, 153, 156 temporal iii, 1, 3, 6, 10 – 11, 13, 19, 22 – 3, 55, 66, 75, 88, 96, 102, 112, 135, 139 – 41, 153, 155 theatre iii, 1 – 3, 5 – 7, 9; ancient Greek 7, 51, 55, 115; as metaphor 3, 10, 17, 33 – 4, 41, 48 – 9, 51, 53, 55 – 7, 60 – 2, 64 – 5, 67 – 71, 73, 75 – 8, 92,

Verbeek, Peter-Paul 3 – 4, 10, 18, 33 – 4, 48 – 9, 67, 70 – 1, 77 – 8, 139 – 41, 146 virtual 10, 29, 31, 34, 63 – 6, 69, 73, 100, 106, 109 – 10, 114 – 16; vs. reality 63 – 4, 100, 110, 114 – 16; worlds 10, 34, 106, 114 – 15, 125, 141 virtue 39, 125 – 6, 130 vision iii, 1, 5, 21, 30, 40 voice 15, 31, 38, 68, 72, 83, 86, 91, 96, 135, 138, 150 wisdom 39, 41, 131, 137 – 8, 144, 155, 158 – 9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 8, 44, 63, 69, 91 – 2, 99, 128 writing 7, 9, 13, 28 – 9, 35, 41, 44, 55, 67, 69, 77n2, 85, 88, 97 – 8, 130 – 2, 135 – 7, 145, 148 – 50, 155 – 9 Young, Iris 41 – 2, 62