In 2005, a study at the University of Virginia attempted to demonstrate how people think differently when they are in possession of a tool. The researchers asked a number of subjects to judge a distance, some while holding a tool in their hand and some without. What they found was that the people with tools consistently estimated the distance as being shorter than the people without.[1]
This study underscores William Mitchell’s observation that our current cyborgian engagement with technology is only the tail end of a process that started when humans first began to, as he says, “extend and harden their hands with simple tools and weapons.”[2] Technology has always been incorporated into our very being. We are tool users. In the same way that we form phenomenological assemblages with architecture, we have also always formed them with our tools. When I instinctively swing a hammer, is it not part of me? As Martin Heidegger intimated[3], it is not as if I think about the various electro-chemical and kinetic processes that are required to manipulate the hammer. I think what I want the hammer to do, and it is done. The same, no doubt, occurs when an old man or invalid requires a cane. When they use that cane, it is as legitimately a part of their experience of locomotion as is their leg. And this is for good reason too. Think what a bad driver you would be if you didn’t form some sort of instrumental assemblage with your car. If you had to think about every little detail of the incredibly complicated act of driving, you would perpetually be a beginner.
When I hold a hammer in my hand I am both more dangerous and more useful. I am not the same person with a hammer in my hand as I am without. I form an assemblage with the hammer, and when I bend over a nail, I also am tied phenomenologically with that nail, and with the purpose of the nail too. The hammer makes me more useful at hitting things, but, like Edward Scissorhands, less effective at wiping the hair from the brow of my loved one.
When I’m in a room I also form an interactive relationship with it. In the room, I exist with, and even ‘through’ the room. Now let’s say that I am standing in this room with a hammer in my hand. Phenomenologically, I have changed. Now let’s say that in my hand is not a hammer but a ‘remote control’. I am another person again, and one with greatly expanded power over the world [although, also, as when I had a hammer in my hand, I am probably less effective at other tasks]. The remote control allows me the power to change things, and to change things far outside of my usual sphere of corporeal influence. I can activate or deactivate a television screen, or a radio. Or I can make a fan, suspended from the ceiling, begin to rotate. Instrumentally, not only is the remote control suddenly a part of me, but so is the part of the building I have control over.
But we have never been just our ‘meat sacks’. As Mitchell declares in ME++, “it is not that we have become post-human in the wireless network era; since Neanderthal early-adopters first picked up sticks and stones, we have never been human.”[4] For a good portion of human history, the experience of being human has involved tools – tricks that we have figured out to extend our natural capacities, including both physical devices and systems.
Despite all of the William Gibson-like talk of our minds expanding outwards with the Internet, leaving our bodies behind, the truth is that our minds have never been confined to solely their own power of cognition and memory resources. They have always had an intimate and reciprocal connection with the things around us. The idea of the isolated mind has only ever been a myth. We have always thought with and through things. Claude Levi-Strauss, the influential 20th century anthropologist, coined the phrase goods for thinking with to refer to objects that were engaged with our cognition.[5] Everything I perceive alters my thinking, even in the most superficial of ways. When I perceive a wall as being white, I think about that wall differently than if I perceived it as being red. There is a constant reciprocal relation between my mind and the physical world. What I perceive of the world is highly influenced by my memory – it is estimated that some 90% of what we perceive is constructed from memory[6] – but my mind would also be very different if the world in which it was contained were different.
From a phenomenological perspective, we have always been connected with both the biotic and abiotic elements of our environment. This includes our architecture and our tools. Thus, as Mitchell says, we have always been cyborgs.
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