the phenomenology of obedience

What do I study you ask?

What do I write about you ask?

What motivates my research you ask?

What frames my questions you ask?

What initiates the search you ask?

I seek to understand the phenomenology of obedience within technopolitical social orders.

'What in the hell is that?' you ask.

It's many things. Owing to the focus on phenomenology, I'm concerned with action, where it happens and how it happens--the lived event.

Why obedience you ask?

That's the focal point of what I'm studying. Granted how we interpret action is an orthogonal grab bag of valences, values, salience, and outcome. That's how anyone invests meaning in a rather amorphous and unresolved set of behaviors. Any interpreter sets the boundaries and implies the outcomes as a process of turning toward the phenomenon under study. I merely question the assumption that free will drives our human behavior.

The mechanistic, biomechanical discourse is becoming ascendant in understanding human behavior as brain-dependent. That flushes out the ghost in the machine. The machine is being used to describe the projection, the ghost, that was once human nature.

Those who are apologists for free will still find space for human intuition invested in temporality. Owing to our reflexivity we are unstuck, so to speak, from the mere machinery of action, but we're not completely untethered from it. It functions as a yang of determination to our ying of agency. That's the tension underlying any interpretation. These apologists, finding their free will in the space of afterthought and forethought intentionally cannot look to the present, the now, and to do so is to try to parse the brute data of activity into the categories: reflex, tendency, and agency. So even the apologists haven't denounced the mechanistic determination of human behavior; they've merely added some slack in the tether between action and substance. That is where I enter.

I too see the notion of human action as this combination of behavior and the lag time of retrospection being put into future action. That's the messy dialectic that underlies our own struggle with our humanity and the researcher's struggle for understanding. Obedience is my watch word. I see us both in our machine and in our reflection upon the machine as being fed by a tendency to short circuit this reflexivity in a constant buzz of gadget-obsessed, information aware, metaknowledge hopping activity.

The phenomenology of obedience is transparent. You see the glass as half full. I see it as half empty--same thing. My hopping off point is that I don't see us heading in a positive direction but one toward which our brains, our culture, and our activity coalesce around an ever tightening loop of interactivity with dramatized information management. Having the world at our fingertips is posed as a triumph of the western idyl of citizen as both consumer and free agent in a free society. Instead, having the world at our fingertips deadens our perception to our surroundings, adjusts our attention, and refocuses our recursive behaviors.

Our obedience occurs first to the interface. Then it's a matter of understanding how that interface is defined, described, and determined, which challenges our freedom of thinking. We're beginning to mistake judgment for selecting from a set of pre-defined options. We're beginning to mistake thinking for search. It's our mistake that we can modify the interface cosmetically that gives us freedom, but it's the same thing, only in a new configuration. We mistake having the world at our fingertips with the world. In order to journey we search. In order to understand we search. In order to reach out to others we search. In order to make a community we interface with each other as information. A status update is a phatic datum of being thereness, that isn't really thereness.

We mistake our obedience to an interface as free will, our own doing if only because we're flooded with options for exploring, customizing, and returning to it. Our obedience is never registered as such because we never recognize our cage; it's fictional in that our activity makes it. But as long as I return to the computer, check the same sites, return to e-mail throughout the day, double check a few forums then I've merely milled about my cage. If the cage accepts some input and, importantly, provides some output, we return.