10.13125/CH/4315
Digital media and technologies have significantly transformed the ways we relate to the world, in the triple sense of Selbstwelt, Mitwelt, and Umwelt. Think of the quantification of the self, the number of followers and likes on social media, or using Google maps and similar tools to orient ourselves in a city, to find and choose a good restaurant, and so on. One might say that digital media and technologies have actually transformed our interpretation, understanding, and access to the world. Now, if hermeneutics is the philosophy of interpretation, then we might suppose that hermeneutics should pay attention to these transformations. For us, digital hermeneutics is the study of the ways digital media and technologies mediate between humans and the world. It is also the study of the ways digital media and technologies are embedded in non-technological relations between humans and the world – psychological, social, cultural, and so on. 
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2533-1825
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Alberto Romele
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Critical Hermeneutics
Editors' Introduction
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch
4
Articles
2020-10-09
2020-10-09
2020-10-09
2020-10-09
I-XII
1
Alberto Romele
2020/10/09
10.13125/CH/4315
I
2533-1825
1
XII
urn:nbn:it:unica-26361
Editors' Introduction
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/article/download/4315/3891
4
Critical Hermeneutics, 4(1), 2020
Biannual International Journal of Philosophy
http://ojs.unica.it/index.php/ecch/index
ISSN 2533-1825 (on line); DOI 10.13125/CH/4315




                             Editors’ Introduction


          (Digital Hermeneutics and Its Multiple Meanings)



Digital media and technologies have significantly transformed the
ways we relate to the world, in the triple sense of Selbstwelt, Mitwelt,
and Umwelt. Think of the quantification of the self, the number of
followers and likes on social media, or using Google maps and similar
tools to orient ourselves in a city, to find and choose a good
restaurant, and so on. One might say that digital media and
technologies          have     actually      transformed           our   interpretation,
understanding, and access to the world. Now, if hermeneutics is the
philosophy       of    interpretation,           then   we    might      suppose      that
hermeneutics should pay attention to these transformations. For us,
digital hermeneutics is the study of the ways digital media and
technologies mediate between humans and the world. It is also the
study of the ways digital media and technologies are embedded in
non-technological         relations     between         humans     and   the   world     –
psychological, social, cultural, and so on.
      Given the importance we generally attribute to digital media and
technologies, digital hermeneutics should occupy today a preeminent
position     among       hermeneutics            research    and    publications.    Even
remaining within the limits of classic, methodological, and textual
hermeneutics, let us consider the relevance that today’s digital tools
have for the automated or semi-automated treatment of traces,
documents, and so on. Actually, one could say that digital humanities
and related practices like “distant reading” are the continuation of
classic    hermeneutics          by    other        means.    Despite     this,     digital
Editors’ Introduction




hermeneutics            still   has       a    marginal      role.      The   term   “digital
hermeneutics” has emerged in multiple contexts and with different
meanings – for a detailed overview, see Romele, Severo, and Furia
(2020). But digital hermeneutics has not yet become a proper
research program – in Lakatos’ terms –as it deserves to be.
      The goal of this special issue of Critical Hermeneutics is not
overly ambitious. Our intention is to demonstrate the potential of
different approaches and perspectives that have been developed in
the field, in the hope that a better-defined community of interests
and objectives will emerge from this group of texts. In this
introduction, we also want to offer an instrument that might help the
reader      to   orient         herself       with   the     different    dimensions      that
characterize the still-emerging field of digital hermeneutics.


1. From hermeneutics to material hermeneutics. Hermeneutics has
been     classically        understood          as   a     discipline    dealing   with   the
interpretation of cultural productions, and texts in particular. During
the twentieth century, especially via the work of Heidegger and
Gadamer, hermeneutics took an ontological and anthropological
stance. Interpretation was no longer understood as a practice among
many others, but as the principal way humans cope with the world
around them. Thus, hermeneutics became “universal”. However,
hermeneutics continued to be understood in the wake of a textual or
linguistic model. Hermeneutics has constantly privileged language as
the principal mediator between humans and the world. This actually
corresponds to a general tendency of philosophy during the twentieth
century, which was dominated by the so-called “linguistic turn”.
      Several authors started to challenge the centrality attributed to
language. Particularly important in this sense is the contribution of
Don Ihde (1990), who explicitly used the expression “material
hermeneutics”. For him, texts are just one case of hermeneutic


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                                                 Critical Hermeneutics, 4 (2020)




technologies among many others. Hermeneutic technologies are all
those offering a representation of the world (textual, visual, graphic,
and so on) that must be interpreted and correctly understood in order
to access the world. Texts are hermeneutic technologies insofar as
they offer representations of the world (the world of the text) that
must be interpreted through specific techniques (the capacity for
reading, etc.) in order to access the world – be it fictional or not. But
hermeneutic technologies are also thermometers, for instance.
Indeed,   thermometers      represent    an    aspect     of    the     world
(temperature) in the form of numbers (if digital) or numbers on a
scale (if analogic) that must be interpreted to access that part of the
world. And think of how important such a possibility to represent the
world is when access to the world is somehow difficult or impossible.
This is the case of a book about history, but also a thermometer that
controls the internal temperature of a nuclear reactor. Another
example of hermeneutic technology is an airplane’s cockpit; it gives
the pilot a series of information and feedback that allows access to
the world (that is, safely flying and landing), even, for instance, if the
weather conditions are bad.
    Next to hermeneutic technologies, Ihde presents other “human-
technology-world” relations: embodied relations, alterity relations,
and background relations. Postphenomenologists have more recently
introduced other relations, such as cyborg and immersive relations
(Verbeek 2011). Yet, for Ihde, all technologies are somehow
hermeneutic, because in giving access to the world they also
“magnificate” some aspects of it and “reduce” some others – think of
the telescope, which allows a better observation of a portion of the
sky but also excludes some others. Therefore, one can distinguish, in
Ihde’s perspective, between a special and a general hermeneutic
theory of technology. Material hermeneutics is an expansion of classic




                                                                             III
Editors’ Introduction




hermeneutics wondering about the effect technologies have on our
access, relation, interpretation, and understanding of the world.
      This first definition does not exhaust the field. We propose to
distinguish between three different levels or dimensions in material
hermeneutics – here, that is hermeneutics dealing with technology in
general.
      With the goal of distinguishing between iconography and
iconology, Erwing Panofsky (1955) used a curious example: an
acquaintance greeting him by lifting his hat. According to him, there
are three levels of interpretation of this event: (1) a perceptual level,
in which one identifies mere patterns of color, lines, and forms; (2) a
level that consists of one’s realization that the hat lifting represents a
greeting. To understand the meaning of this action, one has to be
familiar with the “more-than-practical world” of customs and cultural
traditions peculiar to a certain civilization; (3) and third, the action of
the gentleman can reveal “all that goes to make up its ‘personality’”
(Panofsky 1955: 27). With the term “personality”, Panofsky wants to
indicate the fact that the gentleman is a man of the twentieth
century, his social and cultural background, the history of his life, and
his present milieu; but the term also refers, more broadly, to a
general manner of viewing and reacting to the world. In the single
action of a person like the acquaintance lifting the hat, one can find
the reflection of an entire worldview.
      Panofsky applied this threefold distinction to a specific kind of
artifact, namely works of art. We want to use this same distinction to
approach other kinds of artifacts, namely technological artifacts: (1)
First, “material hermeneutics” can refer to an empirical analysis of
the multiple ways in which technologies mediate human access to the
world.     This    is   how   the   term   has   been   used   by   Ihde   and
postphenomenologists; (2) Second, “material hermeneutics” can refer
to the study of the social conditions of technology’s production and


IV
                                                         Critical Hermeneutics, 4 (2020)




use. This is the way the expression has been used, for instance, by
Peter Szondi – see in particular Thouard (2013: 109–114)1; (3) in
chapter 6 of Ihde (1990), titled “Cultural Hermeneutics”, Ihde
discusses the notion of “multistability”, which refers to the fact that
technologies essentially depend on their multiple uses, which in turn
depend on different cultural contexts2. Incidentally, this aspect of
Ihde’s philosophy is somehow neglected by most of the current
representatives of postphenomenology.


2. From material hermeneutics to digital hermeneutics. Digital
hermeneutics is a component of material hermeneutics dealing with a
specific kind of technology, namely digital technologies. However,
there is an important caveat. Digital technologies are hermeneutic
technologies, both in the special and in the general sense of the term.
But one must also notice that in digital media and technologies,
writing (and hence, language) has a central role. Indeed, code is a
form of writing, and everything in the digital (sounds, images, texts,
etc.) has been transcoded first. This does not mean to come back to
the older textual hermeneutics. Instead, it means (1) to understand
the specificity of digital writing and, in particular, of software as a



1
  One the one hand, his intention was to defend an empirical approach to texts, ori-
ented by the most rigorous philological methods. On the other, he also wanted to
stress the fact that a text should be understood in the light of its material condi-
tions of productions and fruition. The work of Andrew Feenberg (2017) on the phi-
losophy of technology is a good example of such an approach. Feenberg is interest-
ed both in social determinism (i.e. the ways specific interests orient the technologi-
cal “rationality”) and technological determinism (i.e. the ways technologies orient
the social dynamics of power, exclusion, and so on).
2
   Ihde (1990: 125) offers, among several others, the example of the oval sardine
cans left behind by Australians after entering the New Guinean highlands for the
first time, in the 1930s, in search of gold. These cans were immediately snatched
by the New Guineans as treasured objects, and made into centerpieces of the elab-
orate headwear they wore for special occasions. While in this case a technology has
been newly “absorbed” by the culture in which it found itself, things can also go the
other way around: a technology can contribute to modifying an entire culture or
worldview.



                                                                                      V
Editors’ Introduction




new form of language and writing3; (2) to include it in a broader
perspective       in which digital media            and technologies are              also
interpreted and understood in the light of their matter (cables, energy
consumption, pollution, waste, malfunctions, etc.), as well as of their
social and cultural implications; (3) to clarify the ambiguous notions
of “information” and “data” – digital hermeneutics implies a radical
rethinking of these notions starting not from language or meaning,
but    rather      from      physical    information     understood          as    relative
information (Shannon 1948); one of the ultimate aims of digital
hermeneutics can be seen as the archeology of information.
      In particular, we propose understanding digital hermeneutics as
a threefold analysis of digital artifacts and their means of mediating
between humans and the world. Of course, we are not suggesting
that every research study in digital hermeneutics must include all of
the aforementioned three levels of analysis. We are arguing instead
that all research in the field belongs to one or more of these levels –
which, incidentally, does not exclude the idea that other levels may
be    found.     We     are     also    arguing   that      all   research    in    digital
hermeneutics should keep in mind the existence of these three levels,
as well as the fact that each of these levels can be taken into account
in multiple ways. The complexity of the levels and variations that
characterize       digital     hermeneutics       recalls     the    complexity       that
characterizes classic hermeneutics as well. Such complexity is related
to the different kinds of questions and replies that are associated with
the    vague       definition    of     hermeneutics        as    the   philosophy      of
interpretation: Who interprets (humans, non-humans, etc.)? What
does the interpreter interpret (texts, documents, monuments, the
world as such, etc.)? How and when does the interpreter interpret

3
  From this point of view, digital hermeneutics has a natural ally in the critical code
studies that are emerging in the United States (see Marino 2020). These scholars
analyze the code using the tools of literary criticism. The code is a text that, how-
ever, requires specific tools in order to be studied.



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                                                 Critical Hermeneutics, 4 (2020)




(always, sometimes, through perception, consciousness, techniques
and technologies, etc.)? For instance, digital hermeneutics reveals
that computation itself (i.e. the fundamental concept of digital
technology) is rooted in a certain rhetoric and a certain imagination.
In short, computation is not a neutral tool; it is culturally determined
(Golumbia 2009).
    As mentioned, our intention in this context is to offer a minimal
tool to allow the reader to contend with such complexity. This tool,
we believe, might represent the first step towards the foundation of
digital hermeneutics as a research program:
    (1) First, digital hermeneutics can be seen as a series of
considerations regarding the most immediate and empirical aspects
of digital media and technologies, in particular, but not exclusively,
relating to their ways of mediating between humans and the world.
Similar reflections have been carried out in fields like software studies
and the archeology of media. We might also include works about
digital tools that are used for interpreting and understanding texts.
    In this issue of Critical Hermeneutics, the article Digital Reflective
Judgement: A Kantian Perspective on Software by Luca Possati
belongs to this research perspective. The central thesis is that
software is a form of reflective judgment, namely “digital reflective
judgement”. Software is a new form of reflective judgment that is
based on a specific type of imaginative act that mediates between
physical implementations and mathematical structures. Through a
parallelism between software and the Kantian judgment of taste,
Possati holds that the condition of possibility of software is the
principle of finality, which is shown in the design.
    Julien Longhi’s article (Theorising The Dynamic, Modeling the
Variation, and Equipping Hermeneutics: The Meaning(s) in Question)
can be included in this perspective as well. He analyses the
collections of data. It shows that the process of constitution of these


                                                                             VII
Editors’ Introduction




collections is not neutral at all. In particular, the use of Artificial
Intelligence (AI) questions semioticians, and linguists, about the
possible interpretative processes based on these treatments which
often come from “black boxes”. Longhi develops two interesting lines
of research: hermeneutics of digital corpora, and hermeneutics of
digital tools that allow the analysis of digital corpora.
       (2) Second, digital hermeneutics can be considered as an
ensemble of reflections on the social conditions of the production and
fruition of digital media and technologies and their contents. We
might also include considerations regarding the impact of digital
media and technologies on the social world. This level includes both
descriptive and prescriptive perspectives. From a descriptive point of
view, it might be concerned with the network of human and non-
human actors a specific digital tool is able to constitute or transform.
From a prescriptive point of view, it might deal with the effects of
empowerment and disempowerment digital mediations constantly
bring with them – some of which are merely reiterating social
dynamics, while some others are transforming them. Digital social
research and critical data studies could offer great inspiration for this
perspective.
       In the present issue of Critical Hermeneutics, Renzo Christian
Filinich Orozco and Tamara Jesús Chibey Rivas (QATIPANA: Processes
of Individuation on the Relationship Between Art, Machine and
Natural Systems) follow exactly this line of research. Their article
shows that digital technologies design a new space of human
existence.      This     paper     focuses   more   on   the   way   that   digital
technologies have transformed the nature of knowledge and the
affection felt by being with others (people, things, animals).
        Prospero’s article (Hermeneutics of Distance: Physical and
Symbolic Dimensions in Teaching and Digital Communication) on
physical      and       symbolic     dimensions     in   teaching    and    digital


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                                                  Critical Hermeneutics, 4 (2020)




communication also belongs to this line of research, as well as
Seregni and Toniolo’s (That Dragon, Cancer: Narrative Techniques of
the Gameful Experience) that focuses more on the narrative
techniques and the game experience.
     (3) Third, digital hermeneutics could include insights about the
ways digital media and technologies are always embedded in specific
worldviews, and about how some technologies contribute to frame
these worldviews anew. Let us consider, for instance, the ways digital
media and technologies are used differently in different cultures.
Ihde’s ideas about cultural hermeneutics, which we mentioned
before, have been used, for example, by Blond and Schiølin (2018) to
reflect on the transfer of the South Korean robot Silbot to a Danish
rehabilitation   center.   On   the   capacity   of   digital    media      and
technologies to frame our worldviews anew, in Romele (2020) we
hypothesized the emergence of a “data worldview”. The imaginaries,
expectations, fears, and hopes related to technology are not just in
our head, but are crystallized in discourses, images, and so on. So,
the hermeneutics (classic, in this case) of these cultural productions
may give access to the imaginaries related to these technologies. Let
us consider, for example, the abundant use of suggestive images to
represent artificial intelligence: half human-half robot (female)
bodies, lines of code fluctuating in space, not to mention hundreds of
variations of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam in a human-robot
version. These images do not tell us much about artificial intelligence
as such, but tell about our attempts to cope with it despite its “black-
boxness”.
     There are no articles explicitly devoted to this topic in this issue
of Critical Hermeneutics. Yet it is clear that in all the contributions,
the emergence of new digital technologies is presented as an epochal
turning point that transcends the limits of a single experience. In this
sense, it is perhaps the article by Héctor Valverde Martinez that


                                                                              IX
Editors’ Introduction




comes closest to this dimension of digital hermeneutics. The author
uses Ricoeur’s triple mimesis to describe the activity of the curator of
a museum exhibition. That of the curator is in fact a real
“emplotment” that has reconfiguring effects on the visitor. Digital
technologies in this area, of which the author offers numerous
examples, have radically transformed both the basic conditions and
the results of this mimesis, so much so that the museum experience
of the future will be radically different from what we have known up
to now.


      Digital hermeneutics can be understood as a way in which
scholars, but also students, might approach digital media and
technologies to gain a better understanding of their implications and
effects on us. Let us imagine, for example, a group of students taking
the time to deploy the several material, cognitive, social, and cultural
layers that are implicated in a simple cellphone: from the coltan to
the code, from the number of followers to the EU regulations in terms
of cookies and privacy, from the notion of friendship to the
quantification of the self, and so on. Digital hermeneutics is probably
still less than a rigorous research program, but we believe it has the
potential to become more than a mere group of theories and methods
entertaining simply a “family resemblance”.


                                                        Luca M. Possati
                                                        Alberto Romele




References
Blond, L., and Schiølin, K. (2018). “Lost in translation? Getting to
grips with multistable technology in an apparently stable world”. In


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Postphenomenological    Methodologies:   New     Ways      in    Mediating
Techno-human Relationships, ed. by J. Aagaard, J. K. B. O. Friis, J.
Sorenson, O. Tafdrup, and C. Hasse, 151–168. Lanham: Lexington
Books.
Golumbia, D. (2009). The Cultural Logic of Computation. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Ihde, D. (1990). Technology and the Lifeworld. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Marino, M. C. (2020). Critical Code Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Panofsky. E. (1955). Meaning in the Visual Arts. New York: Anchor
Books.
Romele, A. (2020). Digital Hermeneutics. Philosophical Investigations
in New Media and Technologies. London and New York: Routledge.
Romele, A., Severo, M., and P. Furia. (2020). Digital Hermeneutics:
from Interpreting with Machines to Interpretational Machines. AI &
Society 35: 73–86.
Shannon, C. (1948). A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The
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Thouard, D. (2013). Herméneutique critique: Bollack, Szondi Celan.
Lille: Septentrion.
Verbeek, P. P. (2011). Moralizing Technology: Understanding and
Designing the Morality of Things. Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press.




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Editors’ Introduction




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