Far from representing a facile sentimentality on the relationship between humans and the world(s) we inhabit, Introna's question serves as an inquiry into the ethical dimensions of our interactions within complex socio-technical systems. Introna proposes a movement towards an “ethos beyond ethics” through which to reconsider our role as designers and agents of change by cultivating a practice of mindful dwelling.
In a memorial address delivered in 1955 at the celebration of the 175th birthday of German composer Conradin Kreutzer, Martin Heidegger described a kind of thinking which drives the technologically saturated and mediated way of being and acting of our age—a calculative thinking:
"[Calculative thinking’s] peculiarity consists in the fact that whenever we plan, research, and organize, we always reckon with conditions that are given. We take them into account with the calculated intention of their serving specific purposes. Thus we can count on definite results. This calculation is the mark of all thinking that plans and investigates. Such thinking remains calculation even if it neither works with numbers nor uses an adding machine or computer. Calculative thinking computes. It computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in everything that is."
As Introna explains, this calculative logic of our way of being—which today dominates our “entanglements” with the things surrounding us—enframes everything that enters it—humans and non-human alike—as mere objects, on standby as “things-for-the-purposes-of” the very networks of entanglement which comprise our “co-constitutive condition for our ongoing becoming of what we [and the things surrounding us] are.”
Herein, Introna finds an irony at the centre of any anthropocentric ethics (of things). In our encounter with things we presume some framework of values—with the human being as the defining measure of these values—that serves in determining moral significance. As Heidegger notes in the essay 'The Question Concerning Technology', however, “by the assessment of something as a value what is valued is admitted only as an object for man’s estimation”; through calculative valuing, Introna continues, “we also become ‘objects’ in programmes and scripts, at the disposal of a higher logic (capital, state, community, environment, etc.). In the network, others and our objects ‘objectify’ us.”
A human-centred ethics, in other words, would fail to open a space for any ethical encounter with things since in our sociomaterial networks all things—humans and non-human—end up “circulating as objects, enframed as ‘standing reserve’.” Things are levelled out to be equally valuable or valueless in a “nihilistic network in which [quoting Nietzsche] ‘the highest values devaluate themselves’.”
On this basis, Introna proposes that we refrain from extending our moral considerations and valuations to other things. Instead, Introna proposes that, following Heidegger, we admit that “what a thing is in its Being is not exhausted by its being an object, particularly when objectivity takes the form of value.” We must withdraw from the ethics (of valuing things) towards a clearing beyond ethics:
"We must admit that any attempt at humanistic moral ordering – be it egocentric, anthropocentric, biocentric or even ecocentric – will fail. Any ethics based on us will eventually turn everything into our image, pure will to power."
Rather than establishing value systems in our own image, Introna proposes that “the absolute otherness of every other should be the only moral imperative.” This points to an ethics of things that is “beyond the self-identical-ness of human beings” which seeks as its ground not a system for comparison, but a recognition of “the impossibility of any comparison.” The abandonment of that representational and calculative thinking by which human beings “level” the things that we encounter in our worlds Introna connects to the Heideggerian concept of Gelassenheit—a way of being that lets beings be, opening the possibility for the entry into the ethos of letting be.
While Introna’s ethos of Gelassenheit won’t be expanded upon here, it is worth noting that Introna might be read as suggesting a moral imperative—a responsibility—of designers to “read the the multiplicity of references implied (and covered over) in their designs, follow them through as much as is possible.” Designers, in other words, should adopt a mindset of receptivity and openness to the multiple layers of meaning embedded within their designs. Designers should become carefully aware of the various associations, connotations, and implications—cultural, historical, ecological, or ethical dimensions that are intertwined with the design—that may be present in a design but not immediately obvious or consciously considered otherwise. Designers should delve deeper into the complexities of their designs, tracing the threads of meaning and implication to uncover hidden connections and relationships.
This approach involves an ethos of dwelling whereby (the being of) beings may be encountered, cultivated and cared for—a willingness to engage with ambiguity, uncertainty, and complexity, rather than seeking to control or dominate the design process. As Introna concludes:
"To live a life of letting-be is to live in the continued shadow of doubt, without hope for certainty. Clearly we must make very difficult choices on an everyday basis. However, what makes these choices real decisions – real responsibility – is that no thing is excluded from the start, by default as it were. It is in the shadow of this infinite responsibility that we must work out, instance by instance, again and again, how we ought to live, with all others."
Read Lucas D. Introna's 'Ethics and the Speaking of Things' here.
Works also mentioned:
Heidegger, M., 1969. Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and Row.
Heidegger, M., 1977. The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays, trans. and with an Introduction by William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row.
Nietzsche, F., 1967. The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House.