Phenomenotechnical Togetherness

Drawing on the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard, this book introduces the concept of ‘phenomenotechnical togetherness’—a theory of how humans and technologies, having become separate following their coevolution in prehistorical time, are now intrinsically co-becoming in a collaborative process of shaping reality.

Today humanness and technicity are indissolubly linked, such that all human relations with the world are essentially technical. Moving beyond traditional media studies that treat tools as external to the user, this book introduces the concept of ‘phenomenotechnical togetherness’: a theory of how humans and technologies—having become separate following their coevolution in prehistorical time—are now shaping reality in a collaborative process. Central to this theory is the rehabilitation of Gaston Bachelard as a vital media theorist for the twenty-first century. While often marginalized as a philosopher of the poetic imagination, Bachelard provides the crucial concept of phenomenotechnics: the mode in which technical experimentation extends the reach of perception into domains that humans cannot directly access. By reinterpreting Bachelard’s work, we see how phenomenotechnics is at the core of this entanglement, and how it expands beyond science to encompass poetic creation and what Bachelard calls the ‘material imagination’. Bachelard can thus be seen as a process philosopher of media whose central contribution situates phenomenotechnical mediation as the very motor of ‘worldly sensibility’. The legacy of human–technology coevolution, phenomenological togetherness furnishes an important counterpoint to current views that position AI as an external threat to humanity. From this standpoint, human living is intrinsically technical and at the same time technological processes are permeated with humanness. Technology is not something external that simply acts upon us but rather is integral to how we now perceive reality itself, instant by instant.

Chapter 1: What is Phenomenotechnical Togetherness? Chapter 2: Bachelard as Media Theorist Chapter 3: Recent Media Theory, Phenomenotechnically Contextualized

• By (author) Mark B. N. Hansen