Abstract
The early decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed various attempts by cultural critics to move beyond the Two Cultures divide posited by C.P. Snow in 1959, developing modes of critique that seek to bridge the gap between humans and the technology we use. This has resulted in relational interpretations of literature and technology that emphasise the interpenetrative nature of the reading experience, and the complex implications of conceiving of literature and technology as a system. Amazon's Kindle™ ebook reader provides an exceptional use case to ground this conversation, occupying a position somewhere between traditional reading device and techno-corporate publishing mechanism. Analyses of the Kindle™ often fail to take into account useful twentieth-century approaches to the philosophy of technology that offer purchase over the problem domain, however. Work by John Dewey (1859–1952) and Donald Ihde (1934–2024) suggest ways to conceive of the Kindle™ and similar devices as objects embedded in our experience of the world, mediated by technological systems and infrastructure but ultimately contributing to our experience of the world in much the same way as previous modes of publishing.
Amazon's Kindle™ ebook reader is advertised as more than just a book, but ‘a free personal library you can take anywhere’ (Amazon.com Inc.). The device offers a massive archive of books, seamlessly integrated into digital payment systems, available not only as a physical hardware device but through the browser on the World Wide Web and as an app for installation on mobile devices. When viewed through the lens of literature and culture as system, the Kindle™ is more than its material instantiation in light-weight hardware (now water resistant so it can be read in the bath), proprietary .azw file format, its ‘social reading’ functionality (Barnett 2014), or its vast enabling infrastructure. 1 Its faux ink screen and enormous archive implicates the device in wider technologies and imaginaries of reading: from vellum to dime store paperbacks, from Plato's critique of writing to Jorge Luis Borges´ ‘La biblioteca de Babel’, from publishing pipelines to Application Programming Interfaces (API) and massive computational language models such as Chat-GPT. The full intellectual resources available to literary and media studies, digital humanities (DH), and the philosophy of technology are needed to make sense of it.
It would, of course, be folly to suggest the Kindle™ is a straight-forward handheld computer. As Simon Rowberry has demonstrated in a detailed history of the device, it was designed with intentionally limited functionality, trading the usual characteristics of contemporary computing for simplicity and portability, and remains an important component of Amazon Inc. founder Jeff Bezos’ enormous technology empire, contributing to his net worth of approximately USD$115b (Rowberry 2022). The emergence of Amazon Inc. from the sale of physical books in the first phase of internet expansion in the 1990s further complicates these associations. The device stands as a useful symbol of the intersection of technology and culture implicit in C.P. Snow's ‘two cultures’ divide (1959). Its commercial success and market dominance makes it the poster child for both technological boosterism, and critiques of digital culture that claim electronic literature represents the nadir of Western civilization (Birkerts 1995; Striphas 2010).
Indeed, the Kindle™ exemplifies the kind of intellectual problems Interdisciplinary Science Reviews exists to explore. It is highly engineered and yet resistant to social scientific or humanistic interpretation. As Katherine Hayles has suggested, if we interpret the device in only one dimension – with a simple assertion that it is merely a ‘book’ perhaps being the most dangerous – we misunderstand not only its nature as a socio-technical artefact, but its relationship to human experience (2021, 77–80). This is important in the context of literature and culture as system, which needs interpretative strategies that can help us explore not only technical, infrastructural, business, and design aspects of devices such as the Kindle™ but their philosophical implications. Ultimately, after understanding functional characteristics, we need to be able to generate human meaning from our understanding of the Kindle™ alongside economic, technical, psychological, and sociological insights. This article uses perspectives from the philosophy of technology to that end, contributing to conversations about electronic reading devices distributed across book history (Bode 2012), DH (Hayles and Pressman 2013), Critical Infrastructure Studies (CIS) (Barnett 2014, 2019), new media studies (Nakamura 2013; Thylstrup 2019), platform studies (Larson 2022; Rowberry 2022), and human computer interaction (HCI) (Drucker 2011, 2020).
Interpretation of the Kindle™ is involved enough that it could act as a reference point for discussion about literature and culture as system for years to come, perspectives shifting as our relationship to digital technology (and literature) changes. My aim is to bridge the ‘contrasting communities’ (Drucker 2011, 12) that have explored the device, not to claim that any single approach can do justice to the complexity of the interpretative domain. An overview of the philosophy of technology will need to be set aside in the interests of space but is gestured to in the discussion to follow. Suffice to say that it is a vast and well-established field with roots deep in the history of the humanities, that can help us understand the Kindle™'s phenomenological as well as functional nature, grounding understanding in its material reality and business context and moving from there to insights about the human predicament. This might seem a lot of weight to place on a plastic consumer device but therein lies the challenge: if we are willing to undertake this kind of work with an illuminated medieval manuscript, we cannot resile from doing so with devices that deliver a broadly similar human experience.
American pragmatism
Much of the reticence about undertaking such work stems from approaches to the philosophy of technology influenced by the later writing of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), which have led to an assumption that technology ‘enframes’ human experience, distancing us from a deeper appreciation of the world rather than being intrinsic to our experience of the world (1949). This leads, in turn, to an assumption that technology has nothing to tell us about human experience and merely blinds us from the true nature of reality: technology becomes a barrier to phenomenological understanding rather than an essential component of it. The perspective has been heavily critiqued by philosophers of technology, and social scientists such as Bruno Latour and Woolgar (1979), but remains deeply engrained in the humanities. As Andrew Feenberg has noted, over-reliance on Heidegger has resulted in negative attitudes to technology across the core humanities disciplines, leaving ‘no room for a better technological future’ (2014, 364). This is complicated by the natural disconnect between the default philosophical positions of scientists and engineers (generally leaning towards rationalism and positivism) and cultural commentators (often influenced by critical theory and the broader legacy of postmodernism); the two perspectives are inherently antagonistic towards each other and middle paths between them have failed to gain popular appeal. Much of the work cited above in relation to the Kindle™ adopts just such a middle path but stops short of engaging with philosophy as an intellectual tradition.
American Pragmatism is useful in this regard. The tradition has been described as a ‘growing third alternative’ (Legg and Hookway 2021) capable of squaring the circle between rationalist and humanistic perspectives on the world. It is generally agreed to have been initiated in the United States in the 1870s, in the work of Charles Sanders Pierce and William James, their purpose being to question the post-Cartesian emphasis on realism and idealism in favour of a thoroughgoing exploration of human experience conceived as a mediation between material reality and cognition. John J. Stuhr (2000, 3–7) claims American Pragmatism is characterised by (1) the rejection of central post-Cartesian dichotomies such as mind/body, reason/will, experience/nature; (2) belief in fallibilism, or that ‘fallibility is an irreducible dimension of the human condition: empirical belief can never be certain, exact, absolute, final’ (3); (3) pluralism in the interpretation of human values and ontological experience; (4) radical empiricism as both an epistemological commitment and philosophical method; (5) the continuity of philosophy and science, including the importance of experimental enquiry; (6) the assessment of theoretical conclusions based on their success in solving the problem at hand (instrumentalism); and (7) the centrality of community and the social to philosophical purpose and method.
John Dewey (1859–1952) was central to the elaboration of American Pragmatism, notably in his definition of a Philosophical Starting Point (PSP) that rendered mind-body dualism moot by positioning it as a functional interpretative method rather than a foundational (onto-epistemological) condition of human experience. As David Hildebrand notes, for Dewey ‘[t]he PSP implies that inquiry, not metaphysics, is methodologically primary for philosophy’ (2003, 74). The vast traditions of realism and idealism constructed following Descartes mistook means for ends, interpreting dualism as a foundational feature of human experience rather than a scientific or intellectual tool for understanding and manipulating the world. In Dewey's philosophy human experience is always prior to this false dualism, and amenable to experimental exploration. In Experience and Nature (1929) he claimed that the (false) dualism between mind and nature resulted from the union of Cartesian dualism with Ancient Greek and Christian conceptions of self and nature that offered a rich field ‘with which to blend, and one which afforded its otherwise empty formalism concrete meaning and substance’ (252). The result was a Western philosophical tradition dominated by faulty thinking ranging: from the materialism of Hobbes, the apparatus of soul, pineal glands, animal spirits of Descartes, to interactionism, pre-established harmony, occasionalism, parallelism, pan-psychic idealism, epiphenomenalism, and the elan vital – a portentous array (252).
Dewey's resistance to Cartesian dualism found expression in his philosophy of ‘evolutionary naturalism’, or the notion that humans are not separate from nature but entangled with it. In 1929 he went so far as to suggest that ‘body–mind simply designates what actually takes place when a living body is implicated in situations of discourse, communication and participation’ in the context of its natural environment (285). This had obvious implications for his interpretation of technology. People use tools (in the broad sense described above, and the narrow sense of railways and other accoutrements of the industrial revolution) to mediate their relationship with nature. More than this, ‘[t]ools are the expression of the man/environment interaction; by their way means and consequences of action are adapted to each other’ (Dewey cited in Hickman 2001, 46). This interpretation of technology was melioristic as much as ‘pragmatic’: rather than alienating humans from nature, technology was the primary medium through which humans interacted with (evolved within) nature. 2 The attitude is often criticized as narrowly instrumentalist, implying a utopian faith in technology to improve the conditions of humanity, but it is more accurately viewed as anti-Cartesian and enabling of social constructivism. Indeed, Dewey lamented the simplistic association of American Pragmatism with baser tendencies of American capitalism, noting that his approach did ‘not aim to glorify the energy and the love of action which the new conditions of American life exaggerated [or] the excessive mercantilism of American life’ (1925, 11).
Postphenomenology
The work of philosopher of technology Donald Ihde (1934–2024) offers more help in the resolution of these intellectual tensions. Ihde identifies with the American Pragmatist tradition but was trained in phenomenology at Vanderbilt University under the theologian Paul Tillich. He has long advocated for the practice of ‘experimental phenomenology’, conceived as an ‘investigative science’ focused on the analysis of technology (initially medical imaging devices) (2012, 4). Describing his intellectual development in 2012 Ihde noted his early fascination with the work of Edmund Husserl but claimed that Husserl never properly avoided ‘vestigial Cartesianism … in which an ego comes in contact with objects’ (2012, 121). Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty did somewhat better in that regard but remain trapped by Heidegger's enframing of technology. In Ihde's estimation phenomenology has most value when used as an investigative science (critically evaluating discrete human experiences based on sophisticated interpretative frameworks), but interpretation risks being obscured by the process of indoctrination necessary to make full use of said framework. Ihde understands how its critics might view phenomenology as ‘bad and unworthy’ of both philosophy and psychology but claims that ‘the question is not really whether phenomenology examines experience, but how it does, and with what method and result’ (2012, 9).
In Ihde's estimation phenomenology is a new mode of analysis that is capable of evolution. Noting that Edmund Husserl and John Dewey were both born in 1859 and developed two of the most penetrating philosophical methods of the modern era, Ihde proposes connecting them in a formulation of ‘pragmatism + phenomenology = postphenomenology’ (2012, 179). His interest in American Pragmatism and the work of Dewey developed later than phenomenology, but he has been clear he is interested in producing ‘some kind of hybrid of phenomenology and pragmatism that could be equally robust in description and yet sensitive to normative or reformist developments’ (2012, 118). His union of the two methods presents a compelling way to rethink the technology of literature and culture in its multivalent socio-technical and humanistic aspects: I am suggesting that if Dewey was right that there is no difference in logical principle between the method of science and the method in technology, and if technological practices are understood broadly enough to incorporate science, then a pragmatically enriched phenomenology, a postphenomenology, might be, like Husserl's origins of geometry, a further development in phenomenology itself (2012, 128).
Postphenomenology has been used to explore myriad tools and systems (Aargaard et al. 2018; Friis and Crease 2015; Miller and Shew 2020; Olsen, Selinger, and Riis 2008; Rosenberger and Verbeek 2015), using a set of conceptual approaches instigated and often adapted from Ihde since his book Technics and Praxis: A Philosophy of Technology (1978) and his influential Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth (1990). Ihde used his emerging framework to explore ‘The Existential Import of Computer Technology’ in Technics and Praxis, noting ‘something of a very primitive “dialogue” … in which the human user “reads” from the machine and responds to what is read…’ (1978, 55) and the strange tendency of the machines to transform users’ relationship to reality through a process of ‘amplification-reduction’ (56) common to all technologies (the classic example being microscopes and telescopes). Given the rudimentary nature of computing technology in 1978, his insight that the amplification-reduction transformation enabled by computers was dependent on a language that decomposes facts about the world into bits, enabling a process of ‘world reflection’ based around interpenetration of human and computer (63), was prescient. 3 Startlingly, Ihde closed his analysis by noting that ‘[t]echnologies, in fact, today rather thoroughly texture our world as a new analogue to “Nature” as that which is experienced. But as an analogue with “Nature” technology may or may not be hostile’ (63).
This was in keeping with Ihde's articulation of different phenomenological ‘relations’ that can be used to explain the relationship(s) of humans to technology. In the same 1978 chapter he defined the ‘background’ relation, where computing systems fall out of conscious awareness but continue to exert an influence. ‘Computers are background in the same sense as the heating equipment is with respect to providing heat – we neither see them nor note their explicit workings. But we do, as with the heating system, experience their results’ (59). They also reflected the ‘hermeneutic’ relation (the classic example being a thermometer), in that they present data that changes our perception of the world but requires interpretation. These ‘relations’ are the core of Ihde's postphenomenological method, providing a framework by which the entanglement of humans and technologies can be explored and empirically tested. The relations could be conceived in ontological terms – as a finite range of ways in which our relationship to technology enables our experience of being-in-the-world – but are better viewed pragmatically, as an empirically verifiable baseline that can evolve following formal investigation.
The full range of Ihde's postphenomenological relations was outlined in Technology and the Lifeworld:
Embodied relation: the technology coheres so closely to bodily experience that it falls out of conscious experience but profoundly (co)shapes our perception of the world. For example eye glasses. Alterity relation: the technology remains ‘alien’ to our bodies and perception, remaining Other and acting on our experience of the world in relational ways. For example industrial robots. Hermeneutic relation: the technology represents aspects of the world, such as a thermometer representing temperature, and needs to be interpreted (or misinterpreted) in order to alter our perception. Background relations: the technology sits in the background but shapes our experience. For example, computing and heating systems.
The relations are not mutually exclusive to one another, largely due to ‘multistability’ (Ihde cited in Riis 2015) or the tendency of technology to be perceived (and as a result used or deployed) differently depending on time, culture, or context. Ihde uses the Necker Cube as a metaphor for this tendency, because of the way the cubes are perceived differently depending on our cognitive orientation to them. The canonical computing example of multistability is the ability of a Universal Turing Machine (UTM) to mimic any Turing Machine (TM) and, in more practical terms, for the technology to be experienced as a Raspberry Pi, iPhone or Kindle™ (Haigh and Priestley 2019).
Postphenomenology of the Kindle™
It is sensible to begin analysis of the Kindle™ using this key concept of multistability. 4 Ihde explored digital multistability in ‘Multistability and Cyberspace’ (2012), noting the difference between ‘on-the-screen space’ (text on the screen) and ‘through-the-screen space’ (dimensional spatiality ‘beyond’ the screen) (146–147). In most displays changes between these two states is activated by high resolution graphics, allowing users to shift from reading text on a word processor to playing video games, but the Kindle™ e-ink display is intentionally designed to reduce that effect. Amazon have reduced the multistable affordances of digital screen technology to replicate the experience of reading a physical book, reducing backlight to ease eye strain, and eliminating potential distractions. The key point, of course, is that the designers actively sought to reduce the multistability of the screen to increase its potential for existential enjoyment, shifting the experience of multistability from the digital page back to the whole object. Sitting on a desk, the device used in the production of this article prompts perceptual transitions between something approximating a traditional (non-digital) book and something quite different and more expansive. The device is old in technological terms (a model D01100, 4th Generation, 2GB, WiFi, 6 inch 167-PPI e-ink display, released in 2011) and only in partial service due to poor usability, but when it is hidden in its tattered faux leather cover it can be mistaken for an analogue book easily enough, as if it contained well-thumbed pages and scrappy annotations.
The device's embodied relations go somewhat deeper than that if we are reading it in the context of literature and culture as system, of course. Once opened with a page loaded, the text in its ‘on-the-screen space’ presents a perceptual world so recognizable that the materiality of the hardware and the digital nature of the paper and font fade away (for this reader at least) in the presence of the overwhelming shadow of imaginative creativity. 5 This can induce strange effects with texts capable of supporting complex layers of critical interpretation. We might take the Iliad and the Odyssey as archetypal examples: reading them through the literary-technical prism of the Kindle™ offers a good example of the kind of multistable experience reading literature and technology as system can engender. It was only in the twentieth century, after all, that it became generally accepted that ‘behind our surviving manuscripts lurks a long-standing, textless oral tradition’ (Foley 2007, 2). Rather than being a single author the likelihood is that Homer was ‘a cognate kind of legendary figure’ (7) and the Homeric epics represent an ‘ages-old inventory of originally textless’ (4) stories common to all known cultures. The stories that we now know as the Iliad and the Odyssey were only stabilised in textual form in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE. Read on a Kindle™, those conceptual complications (the associations with deep time and linguistic complexity) are embodied in almost precisely the same way as with a physical book, except with the added recognition (for readers cognizant of the kind of philosophical reading being presented here) that the infinitely malleable bits on the screen and imbrication with Amazon's archive are in many ways better aligned to the ontological reality of the Greek stories than (for example) a poorly translated nineteenth-century copy that claims to represent the canonical version. The Iliad and the Odyssey initially existed in the ether; the stories arguably have more phenomenological (if not critical, depending on the edition) authenticity delivered through an eBook reader than cast in the textual equivalent of amber between the covers of a physical book.
Such an obviously provocative argument has its weaknesses, but it demonstrates the potential to read literature and technology as system via postphenomenology. Interpreting the Kindle™ as Necker Cube allows for structured and potentially testable analysis of our phenomenological relationship to digital reading devices of all kinds, including emerging technologies that support narrative delivery such as video games and virtual reality (VR). It would be intriguing, for example, to see the results of a survey of the estimated 1,123.2 m people who will own an eBook reader in 2027 (Statista 2022), asking them to report on aspects of their phenomenological relationship to their device and the texts they read on it. They could be asked if they tend to notice the device while reading it, if their critical engagement with the story is altered by the digital format, if they remain conscious of the vast library available in the background. As with Ihde's example of reading glasses fading from consciousness but profoundly altering our perception, eBook devices appear to have the capacity to render their materiality invisible to the user – creativity and authorial power overpower technology – but large-scale statistical analysis would allow us to move from speculation to falsifiable knowledge. Such an approach is challenging but could help place the interpretation of literature and culture as system on firm ground. It could also contribute to the development of future digital story-telling products in the long run, informing applied computing and product development (Smithies, Atkinson, and Hall 2022).
Any global survey of eBook readers would ideally be informed by a robust theory of literature and technology as system, of course, perhaps grounded in some of the theoretical approaches discussed above. Perspectives from both social science and the humanities would undoubtedly be important, but the goal of the data analysis would presumably be to enhance our understanding of the human experience of reading on an eBook, rather than (say) how to maximise marketing opportunities, increase the time spent on the device, or even reduce potential harms. That in turn presupposes the need for an understanding of how the supporting infrastructure of literature and culture informs the production of human meaning – no simple task. In the case of the Kindle™ this would need to include the experience of alterity relations as well as embodied relations, where the technology remains alien to our bodies and perception. In the context of the Iliad, for example, an alterity relation might be generated from dissonance between the digital screen and an Arnoldian assumption that the story represents ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’ (Arnold 1869, viii), suggesting a need for it to be delivered via leather-bound covers. Absence of awareness about the scholarly debate regarding the Homeric Question might be enough to prompt this change in perception, suggesting something of the complexity and necessarily egoistic nature of the problem. On a larger canvas, of course, such an interpretation points to the challenges of interpreting literature and technology as system. The difference between an eBook reader prompting an embodied or alterity relation is as dependent upon the meaning of the text for the reader as the physical design of the device and its enabling infrastructure. Critical reception of the text continues to precede and mediate our experience of the technology, in a somewhat startling vindication of older theories of literary-critical interpretation. It would be interesting to know, for example, if the tendency of the Kindle™ to prompt alterity relations can be understood in terms of reader-response theory. 6
We all know how a flow state can be interrupted by technological dependencies, in a way analogue texts are less subject to. 7 In the case of the Kindle™ that would be most glaringly apparent when the experience of an embodied relation (curling up in front of the fire with the Iliad story) is transformed into an alterity relation by the battery running out, but this bathetic transformation might be mediated by what Ihde would refer to as a hermeneutic relation – recognition that the battery indicator is getting perilously low. Indeed, it is impossible to retain an embodied relation to the Kindle™ at the same time as a hermeneutic relation: as soon as a hermeneutic relation surfaces any embodied relation recedes and an alterity relation begins. Hermeneutic relations are central to the experience of reading on the Kindle™ for this reason. They provide information about the ‘weather conditions’ of the literary-cultural system, allowing and sometimes forcing us to attend to maintenance of the battery state or hard drive, or add and remove books from the device's library. In some sense we can view these hermeneutic product features as ‘dials and levers’ that provide a panel of options to control the device, allowing us to configure our experience of literature and culture as system. In literary terms we could perhaps even interpret them as Brechtian ‘alienation levers’ that toggle our perception between alterity and embodied relations. 8 If we are willing to step this far into a phenomenological reading of literature and culture as system, an intriguing world – at the intersection of technology, design, and critical theory – emerges.
There is a more salient point for this issue of ISR, beyond an admittedly pedestrian interpretation of a consumer device, however. Regardless of our orientation to the Kindle™ at any point in time, our use of the device presupposes a constant ‘background’ relation with literature and culture as system that is more profoundly representative of contemporary technological experience than curling up with a good book. We sense this system in various ways, perhaps most powerfully through the World Wide Web interface to Amazon's vast inventory of consumer goods. 9 Analysis of this background infrastructure offers something of a denouement to analysis of the Kindle™, dampening the potential for grandiose new directions in literary-critical theory. The infrastructure is of such a scale and technical complexity that it is best described through the history of business and computing, alienating the analysis above from cosy humanistic theories of philosophy or literary critical analysis. Recourse to theories of computing networks, hyper-rationalism, power, and surveillance capitalism are important, but at its core this infrastructure is profoundly material and designed for the straight-forward maximisation of profit: aesthetics and human meaning seem quaint in comparison.
Philosophy of technology can help us here too, reconciling technical, business, and aesthetic aspects of the digital reading experience. The Kindle™ is, of course, a variation of the now ubiquitous system of handheld computer (designed according to the systems architecture defined by John von Neumann in 1945), enabled by content stored in a database (defined in relational form by E. F. Codd in 1970), delivered over a global communications network (based on technologies defined by Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn in 1974), and published on the World Wide Web (designed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989). Analysis needs to acknowledge this vast enabling historico-technological system rather than obfuscating it with humanistic or social scientific theory. In doing so we gain more of a sense of how entangled everyday users of computing systems are in a global infrastructure of astonishing material and conceptual richness. Multistability can be discerned in many aspects of the system, including in our experience of devices such as the Kindle™, but it is usually subsumed within complex background relations that ‘radiate’ functionality outside our conscious awareness, in the same manner as Ihde's heating system.
Our access points to this background infrastructure are significant in themselves, and like a Necker Cube, look different from different perspectives. Reading a book on a Kindle™ not only entangles the user with the historical conceptual and architectural models outlined above, and the sometimes-confounding business and data management practices of one of the world's largest companies, but elements peculiar to your household. In my case that would include a German FRITZ!Box 7530 AX router supplied by the United Kingdom's Zen Internet Service Provider (ISP), a B Corp business that aims to ‘positively impact all stakeholders – workers, communities, customers, and our planet’ (Anonymous 2023). Once outside, data flows over aluminium cable, laid when copper cabling was in short supply, to a junction box overflowing with connections and often attended by workers connecting new customers and unhelpfully disconnecting existing ones to make room. From that point the connection is fibre optic, flowing over Open Reach 10 infrastructure to Amazon's nearest Content Delivery Network (CDN) edge server node (or the one judged most effective by Amazon's CDN routing algorithms) to access the WWW content and return it to the Kindle™. These quotidian material and business aspects of digital literature and culture are not only significant in terms of Big Tech, digital capitalism, and the surveillance economy (aspects with reasonable equivalents in previous eras), but as a vast background relation that users are entangled with in the construction of meaning whenever they use the device.
Closing the gap
Postphenomenology might seem to be too far outside the mainstream of humanities research to be useful for analysis of literature and culture as system, let alone specific use cases such as the Kindle™, but there are important synergies (Seigfried 1996, 4). In 1996 Charlene Seigfried noted that prominent STS researchers such as Donna Haraway and philosophers such as Dewey share an account of objectivity that rejects the false duality of post-Enlightenment epistemology but remain ‘leery of a radical constructivism conjugated with semiology and narratology’. Haraway's support for ‘an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects…and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world, one that can be partially shared’ is in tune with the pragmatist tradition (Haraway cited in Seigfried 1996, 179). Haraway (1988) strikes a tone that reads strongly of Dewey in Experience and Nature: a world-of the kind sketched in this essay require a deceptively simple maneuver within inherited Western analytical traditions, a maneuver begun in dialectics but stopping short of the needed revisions. Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource, never finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique agency and his authorship. (592)
The tradition that Haraway initiated is integral to contemporary explorations of technology and culture, notably buttressed by the work of Katherine Hayles, whose explorations of literature, culture, and technology are similarly rooted in a desire to rethink the epistemological nature of complex systems (Hayles 2012). In How We Became Posthuman (1999) she rejected the separation of materiality and information in the mid-century cybernetics movement led by Norbert Wiener (12), in favour of the ongoing ‘deconstruction of the liberal humanist subject’ (4). More recently, Hayles has used research into plants to develop a theory of ‘nonconscious cognition’ that works across plants, animals, humans, and machines and can account for the behaviour of basic and advanced organisms as well as complex systems such as high frequency trading (HFT) algorithms. Placing quotations by Hayles and Dewey side by side suggests something of their similarities in approach: …whatever one's position on the anthropocentrically laden word ‘intelligence,’ plants interpret a wide range of information about their environments and respond to challenges in remarkably nuanced and complex ways. (Hayles 2017a, 2017b, 20) A plant needs water, carbon dioxide; upon occasion it needs to bear seeds. The need is neither an immaterial psychic force superimposed upon matter, nor is it merely a notional or conceptual distinction, introduced by thought after comparison of two different states of the organism, one of emptiness and one of repletion. (Dewey 1929, 253) Cognition is a process that interprets information within contexts that connect it with meaning. (Hayles 2017a, 2017b, 22) The distinction between physical, psycho-physical, and mental is thus one of levels of increasing complexity and intimacy of interaction among natural events. The idea that matter, life and mind represent separate kinds of Being is a doctrine that springs, as so many philosophic errors have sprung, from a substantiation of eventual functions. (Dewey 1929, 261)
Geoffrey Bowker's notion of Knowledge Infrastructure (KI), coined in the 1990s to present a more nuanced explanation for the development of post-enlightenment scientific and intellectual infrastructure, resonates with the pragmatist tradition in similar ways (Bowker 2017). Bowker was influenced by the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) approach to Science and Technology Studies (STS) that emerged from a workshop in the Netherlands in 1984 (Bijker 2015; Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1987) and the subsequent development of Infrastructure Studies (Star 1995; Star and Ruhleder 1996). Revealingly, his description of KI is at once socio-technical and cognitive, providing the epistemological foundations of the contemporary knowledge economy and continually evolving ‘new socioeconomic forms’, ‘new cognitive divisions of labor’, and ‘new forms of knowledge expression in tune with this adaptation’ (391). Bowker defines knowledge infrastructure ‘as the network of institutions, people, buildings, and information resources which enable us to turn observation and contemplation of the world into a standardized set of knowledge objects: [in the contemporary scholarly sense] journal articles and monographs’ (391). He is particularly interested in the radical changes to twentieth-century KI associated with climate change science, but his perspectives allow us to re-imagine the enabling infrastructure of literature and culture too. Of most interest to an interpretation of literature and culture as system is his acceptance of a convergence between infrastructure and meaning in KI, implying a suspension of the usual boundaries between subjective and objective knowledge. In many ways, and in tune with attempts to reduce the estrangement of subject and object in contemporary STS, KI acknowledges the entanglement of individuals and communities with the technical artefacts and infrastructure we use to understand ourselves and the world.
The contemporary researcher, in this articulation, works within a vast infrastructural mechanism, engaged in what Andrew Pickering memorably termed a ‘mangle of practice’ (1995). Paul Edwards claims that the notion of KI implies ‘parallels with other infrastructures, such as those of communication, transport, and energy distribution. Yet this is no mere analogy or metaphor. It is a precise, literal description of the sociotechnical supports that invariably undergird facts and well-accepted theories’ (2010, 19). Applying similar perspectives to the technology of literature and culture entangles Kindle™ readers in a vast planetary system comprising myriad wires, boxes, and undersea cables, billions of lines of code, energy-hungry data centres and bitcoin farms, not to mention socially inflected issues such as toxic masculinity and labour disputes, cyberwarfare and teen suicide. Concepts such as infrastructural globalism (referring to the connection of international computing networks to global capitalism and geopolitical power) (Edwards 2010, 23–25), data exhaust (the data resulting from everyday activity on the internet, often used for marketing purposes but also useful for socio-cultural analysis and policy development) (Edwards 2017, 38), and the Great Acceleration (Steffen et al. 2015, 1–18) (the sense that the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed a quantifiable increase in information flow that will at least transform society, and might entail existential risk in the form of radical technological convergence and an eventual ‘singularity’ (Farman 2012) enter the orbit of literary-cultural criticism).
Edwards suggests the only way to interpret large technical systems (LTS) of this kind is to engage in ‘infrastructural inversion’, building understanding from the bottom up to ensure adequate connections are made between analytical insights and the material and epistemological reality of the infrastructure in question (2010, 20–23). This is in keeping with historian of technology Thomas Hughes’ definition of LTS, which used the history of electrification in western society to demonstrate the dangers of interpreting technologies in isolation. His case study of the transference of Thomas Edison's electrical system from New York to Berlin and London demonstrated the fallacy of focusing too closely on Edison's iconic light bulb at the expense of the enabling system of DC current and cabling, not to mention ‘inventors, entrepreneurs, organizers of enterprises, and financiers’ (1993, 14). In a later work (1998) Hughes described ‘four monumental projects that changed the world’ in different ways: the SAGE air defence system (the first such system to use computers); the Atlas missile system (so complex it prompted the development of systems engineering), the Boston Central Artery/Tunnel Project (a monumentally complex exercise in civil engineering); and the Internet (in its evolution from military-industrial experiment to global digital infrastructure).
Conclusion
The philosophy of technology has traditionally found favour among scientists and engineers, for its pragmatic approach to analysis and engagement with scientific rationalism and computational logic, but it has a lot to contribute to the humanistic critique of devices such as the Kindle™ too. Parallels between postphenomenology and recent work in book history, digital humanities, new media studies, infrastructure studies, and platform studies suggest we are reaching a point in our confrontation with technology that C.P. Snow's two cultures are softening in their epistemological and ontological antagonism, and conceptual bridges are appearing that can unite us in not only our analysis of digital devices but the subsequent development of policies and regulations to adequately monitor and control them. The Kindle™ is but one device in a vast technological terrain, but it neatly encapsulates the complex of problems that engineers and humanists are grappling with. Not only a straight-forward consumer product (although we must remember it is that as well), the Kindle™ interacts with and contributes to a global computational landscape of vast proportions at the same time as it disseminates millennia of human culture and thought. Developing modes of analysis worthy of that load may well hold value for other aspects of daily life too.
