“Every technical device must be trusted to be used, to be, in Heidigger’s term, ready to hand.” - Gallope, Michael
Bernard Steigler, who used the word technics to refer to philosophies of technology, argued that we trust technics as consciousness prosthetics, as workable instruments whose “history we did not live” (Gallope).
“It is this duality of a technical constitution and a necessary trust or faith in the unknowable past that determines consciousness as extended outside itself, where memory is deposited in technical objects, where consciousness is outside itself” (Gallope; 2006, 7).
Our trust in the technologies we use comes from their congruity with our own body - our trust in their suitability for our hands. Pre-industrial commodities relied on the producer’s hand marking the goods to be sold – by signiture or by style. But the indsutrial revolution saw the producer’s signiture becoming dislocated from the commodities produced. In order for us to trust and purchase commodities we rely on this hand-mark, and so techniques of re-instating the hand have been employed:
- the re-instatement of ‘hand-made’ aesthetics (made-by-hand).
- the creation of ‘ergonomic’ products (made-for-hand)
