The Extended Self: Architecture, Memes and Minds

摘要

This is both a fascinating and a frustrating book. It ranges freely across a broad intellectual landscape and is rich with philosophical references. For me, the real fascination came from the discussion of architecture as a category of technology, which may at first seem like a reductive move but in fact turns out to be quite the opposite. The trick is to redefine technology in the broadest possible terms, including everything fashioned by human beings in adapting the environment to support a satisfying life. The next step is to include the wider social, cultural and political implications of those complex networks of what Bruno Latour calls 'human and non-human actors', and finally to consider the development of technology within the tongue duree of evolutionary history. In the latter case it turns out that adaptation works in two directions: as well as transforming our surroundings technologies also transform ourselves. Thus it is possible to state-as Abel does-by quoting the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler: 'The [technical] prosthesis is not a mere extension of the human body; it is the constitution of this body qua "human".