The Tool as an Extension of the Body: The Technological Illusion

GARCÍA, ESTEBAN ANDRÉS

Outis

Society for Phenomenology and Media. National University, California

Lugar: La Jolla, California; Año: 2004 vol. 2 p. 49 - 60

The phenomenology of the lived body -particularly in the works of M. Merleau-Ponty- revitalized the old Aristotelian doctrine of the tool as an extension of the body´s potentialities (in Freud´s terms: man is a kind of god by means of his technical prosthesis). Leroi-Gourhan´s paleoanthropology showed that technical evolution, from the first cutters and axes to "intelligent" machines, can be conceived as a progressive exteriorization of bodily movements, motive power, and behavioural programs. Nevertheless, we know that in the modern age, by means of a particular inversion, the conception and research of the human body has relied on the model of one of its particular "extensions", the machine. The tool has provided, as Heidegger observed, the categories with which we think of physis in general, that which has not been constructed, including the body. The inversion even purports more tangible aspects: if the tool and the machine arose as extensions of bodily capacities, the body of the industrial worker in on the contrary, according to Marx, the "living appendix of the machine". Our contemporary technological world, which we find already constituted and whose vertiginous development goes on according to projects beyond our will and understanding, shows these illusions and ambiguities: the advantages of extending the possibilities of our bodies organizes at the same time new ways of alienation and control.