LANGUAGE, KNOWLEDGE, AND THE
INFORMATION GE-STELL
Information
technology is able to help us become more
human if we make joint
efforts to
investigate
its presuppositions in all their
complexity. This historical reflection
in its philosophical dimensions is the
task of hermeneutic
phenomenology.
Let me now try to illuminate this topic,
reflecting on the
potentialities
of human logos.
According
to Heidegger, modern technology is
two-sided: as a techne it
partakes of poesis and brings
something forth into
unconcealment,
but
at the same time it crystallizes into the
instrumental structure of the Ge-stell.
(2) Instrumentality is good, provided it
does
not degenerate
into a totalitarian or one-sided view.
From this perspective, the
development
of information technology at the end of
modernity is the creation of an information
Ge-stell. Whereas, on the one hand,
we bring
forth linguistically
mediated knowledge in a new shape, on the
other, we transform language
into
a mere instrument.
Yet
even when this happens, as I have argued
in the previous section, the
process
of interpretation is needed for the
constitution of meaning. In fact,
written
as well as spoken logos never
comes to an end, can never be
definitively
fixed once and for all. It conceals itself
in its re-presentations.
Modern
subjectivity does not pay attention to
this concealment while
transforming
the event of information, its weakness or
dependence on interpretation,
into an information and/or knowledge establishment.
In this way
it gives up its ethical responsibility,
hoping to rest on a strong or
fixed
structure (Capurro, 1996).
Nevertheless
the information Ge-stell is an
opportunity for modernity to
recuperate
in one of its characteristic formations
the hidden dimension of
language.
The information Ge-stell can
become a voice within the
polyphonic
nature of human logos — if and
only if it is interrelated to
the
whole range of its hidden potentialities.
If it is not, then we will
have
no more than an information society. The
key issue in today's knowledge
society is our relation to what we do not
know in and through what we
believe
we know. To do this in a digital
environment is one of the major
challenges
of today's networked environment, where
the partiality of knowledge is
the strength of a decentralized,
non-totalitarian and opaque structure
we call the Internet. What we get is not a
fully enlightened or
transparent
society, but an opaque one, where the
perspectives are continuously
undermined
by chaos and creativity (Vattimo, 1989;
Capurro, 1995).
NOTES
1.
Robert S. Cohen & Marx W. Wartofsky,
'Editorial Preface', in
Mitcham
& Huning, eds., 1986, pp. v-vi.
Paraphrasing from p. vi.
2.
Heidegger, 1967, 'Die Frage nach der
Technik,' pp. 5-36.
3. The origin of this paper goes back to
the International Conference
'Phenomenology and Technology' held at the
Philosophy and Technology
Studies Center, Polytechnic University
(New York), October 2-4, 1986,
which was organized by Wolfgang
Schirmacher and Carl Mitcham. After
thirteen years, obviously, things have
changed and I have done some
further works, too. My book Hermeneutik
der Fachinformation
was published in 1986, and since then I
have written some articles on
this subject, as well as another book, Leben im
Informationszeitalter
(1995). Some of these articles as well as
a list of publications, can
be found in my homepage.
The
present text is an enriched version of the
original one. I have added
some later insights without changing basic
ideas, which I still think
are valuable and can also be of help when
reflecting, for instance,
about the nature of communicating and
searching for information in the
Internet.
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Last
Update: January 16, 2022