(Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy) Mark Coeckelbergh - Moved by Machines - Performance Metaphors and Philosophy of Technology-Routledge (2019)

This unique and innovative book changes the very framework for doing
philosophy of technology by introducing and developing a performance-

based method of analysis. It is a moving investigation of how machines
move, how this movement shapes our understanding of their social
position and status, and how we, in turn, are moved by our technology.
—David J. Gunkel, Northern Illinois University, USA
Moved by Machines
Given the rapid development of new technologies such as smart devices,

robots, and artificial intelligence and their impact on the lives of people and
on society, it is important and urgent to construct conceptual frameworks that
help us to understand and evaluate them. Benefitting from tendencies towards
a performative turn in the humanities and social sciences, drawing on thinking
about the performing arts, and responding to gaps in contemporary artefact-
oriented philosophy of technology, this book moves thinking about technology
forward by using performance as a metaphor to understand and evaluate what
we do with technology and what technology does with us.
Focusing on the themes of knowledge/experience, agency, and power, and
discussing some pertinent ethical issues such as deception, the narrative of the
book moves through a number of performance practices: dance, theatre, music,
stage magic, and (perhaps surprisingly) philosophy. These are used as sources
for metaphors to think about technology—in particular contemporary devices
and machines—and as interfaces to bring in various theories that are not usually
employed in philosophy of technology. The result is a sequence of gestures
and movements towards a performance-oriented conceptual framework for a
thinking about technology which, liberated from the static, vision-centred, and
dualistic metaphors offered by traditional philosophy, can do more justice to the
phenomenology of our daily embodied, social, kinetic, temporal, and narrative
performances with technology, our technoperformances.
This book will appeal to scholars of philosophy of technology and performance
studies who are interested in re-conceptualizing the roles and impact of modern
technology.
Mark Coeckelbergh is full Professor of Philosophy (Philosophy of Media

and Technology) at the University of Vienna. Previously he was Professor
of Technology and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University, UK, and
President of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. He is also involved in
policy advice as member of the High Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence
of the European Commission and the Austrian Council on Robotics and
Artificial Intelligence that advises the Austrian Federal Transport, Innovation,
and Technology administration. A prolific writer and passionate researcher, he is
the author of numerous articles and ten monographs, including Growing Moral
Relations (2012), Human Being @ Risk (2013), Environmental Skill (2015),
Money Machines (2015), New Romantic Cyborgs (2017), and Using Words and
Things (Routledge, 2017).
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Moved by Machines
Performance Metaphors and Philosophy of Technology
Mark Coeckelbergh
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Routledge-Studies-in-Contemporary-Philosophy/book-series/SE0720
Moved by Machines
Performance Metaphors and
Philosophy of Technology
Mark Coeckelbergh
First published 2019
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Mark Coeckelbergh to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-24557-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-28313-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
For Lotte
Contents
Acknowledgementsx
1 Introduction 1
2 Dancing With Technology: How Machines Move

and Choreograph Us 15
3 Acting With Technology: How Machines Act

and Direct Us 48
4 Making Music With Technology: How Machines

Play and Conduct Us 83
5 The Magic of Technology: How Machines Create

and Manage Our Illusions 105
6 Thinking With Technology: How Machines Stage

Our Thinking 128
7 Conclusion 153
Index160
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the editor from Routledge, Andrew Weckenmann,

for supporting this book project, and the anonymous reviewers for their
interesting comments. I would also like to thank Zachary Storms for
organizational assistance, Lena Starkl for supporting me with literature
search, and the students from my performance and technology seminar
for the nice discussions we had during class.
Let me also take the opportunity to mention at least some of the people
and places that are directly or indirectly part of the history of my thinking
about performance and technology, which started in the UK in Leicester
and London and continues here in Vienna: Thomas Freundlich in Hel-
sinki, Kerry Francksen in Leicester, Alexander Gerner in Lisbon, Alva
Noë in Berkeley, Oliver Schürer in Vienna, Jaana Parviainen in Tampere,
Guida Mauricio in Brussels, and Sabine Rüter in Munich. It was (and is!)
great to meet and discuss with these wonderful persons from the worlds
of academia, dance, and theatre. And last but not least, I am grateful to
my daughter Lotte, who brings dance into my everyday life.
Figure 0.1 Tanja Illukka and Thomas Freundlich in Human Interface (2012)
Source: Photo by Uupi Tirronen. Courtesy of Thomas Freundlich, Choreography and
Robot Programming
1 Introduction
1.1. What This Book Is About

Given the rapid development of new technologies such as smart devices,
robots, and artificial intelligence, and their impact on the lives of people
and on society, it is important and urgent to construct conceptual frame-
works that help us to understand and evaluate them. What is the knowl-
edge and experience involved in the interactive use and design of digital
devices, how can we grasp the phenomenon that our new machines are
not just tools but take on more agency and become more “social”, and
what are the normative implications of these changes in terms of the eth-
ics and politics of technology? Philosophers of technology can help to ask
and address these questions.
Benefitting from a performative turn in the humanities and social sci-
ences, drawing on thinking about the performing arts, and responding
to gaps in contemporary artefact-oriented philosophy of technology, this
book moves thinking about technology forward by using performance as
a metaphor to understand and evaluate what we do with technology and
what technology does with us. Focusing on the themes of knowledge/
experience, agency, and power, engaging with Plato, and discussing some
pertinent ethical issues such as deception, the narrative of the book moves
through a number of performance practices: dance, theatre, music, stage
magic, and (perhaps surprisingly) philosophy. These are used as sources
for metaphors to think about technology—in particular contemporary
devices and machines—and as interfaces to bring in various theories and
insights from and about these fields that are not usually employed in
philosophy of technology.
The result of this trajectory through metaphors and theories is a
sequence of gestures and movements towards a performance-oriented
conceptual framework for thinking about technology which, liberated
from the static, vision-centric, and dualistic metaphors offered by tradi-
tional philosophy, can do more justice to the phenomenology of our daily
embodied, social, kinetic, temporal, and narrative performances with
2 Introduction
technology, our technoperformances. This approach—one could call it
a performance-oriented phenomenology which includes building blocks
for a performative epistemology, aesthetics, ethics, and politics—enables
us to asks the crucial performance-shaped questions such as: How do
we move, how are we moved, and how should we move and be moved?
And who moves what or whom? Who should be allowed to move what
or whom? What or who organizes, scripts, and directs our movements?
How are our illusions created? With regard to contemporary technolo-
gies that get more autonomous and intelligent this means asking: What
happens in terms of experience, agency, and power when our machines
direct, play, choreograph, deceive, and write us—when we no longer
move them or move with them, as we do with tools and older machines,
but when they move us? What does this mean for the role of the designer-
magician? And what can and should be our performative-philosophical
response?
In the end we will see that performance and its related concepts are
more than a metaphor: it makes sense to say that we perform with tech-
nology and that technology choreographs, directs, conducts, and deceives
us on the many stages of contemporary social life. It even organizes and
shapes the theatre of our thinking.
1.2. What This Book Does and What It Responds

to: Philosophy of Technology and
the Performative Turn
This book is not about performance as such nor is it about technology
used in the performing arts. It is about technology and about how to
think about technology, including how to do philosophy of technology.
It is concerned with all kinds of technologies, but its focus is on new
and emerging information and communication technologies (ICTs) and,
in particular, on new smart and more autonomous digital technologies
such as robots and artificially intelligent devices that are experienced and
designed to be more than things. How can we understand that experience
and design, and how can we conceptualize their normative effects?
Philosophers of technology and scholars in science and technology
studies (STS), media studies, and related fields have been asking such
questions for a while now, and during the past decade there have been
interesting and fruitful discussions on the specific qualities and effects
of more autonomous and intelligent devices, such as their moral stand-
ing or the issue of deception. These discussions are now entering public
debates on technology. Yet what is often missing from these discussions,
especially in ethics of technology, is a more explicit, elaborate, and criti-
cal reflection on the metaphors underpinning the arguments and views,
including the epistemological, metaphysical, and aesthetic assumptions
Introduction 3
related to these metaphors. Metaphors are part of the philosopher’s tool-
box, but they should also be scrutinized. Otherwise the discussions risk
becoming dogmatic. For example, postphenomenology (Verbeek 2005)
has occasionally borrowed theatre metaphors from Latour in order to
suggest, for example, the “scripting” of our behaviour by technology,
but it has not critically reflected on these metaphors, let alone fully used
their potential. And arguably neither has Latour, who has drawn exten-
sively on drama metaphors (e.g., in Akrich and Latour 1992, in actor-
network theory, and later in, for example, Latour 1993) without really
discussing his use of these tools. Moreover, contemporary philosophy
of technology after the empirical turn has been very object-oriented: the
focus was and is on technological artefacts. For example, postphenom-
enology has been concerned with how things mediate our perception and
action (Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2005). Critical theory of technology (nota-
bly Feenberg 1999, 2010), influenced by STS, has also been focused on
material artefacts. STS, too, following Latour, has been concerned with
things, with “non-humans”, This turn to things has delivered many fruit-
ful insights into the phenomenology and hermeneutics of technology and
human-technology relations. But it has also obscured or neglected some
aspects of what humans do and how they do it—with technology. In
particular, postphenomenology has not sufficiently conceptualized the
social and temporal dimension of technological use and technological
experience (and indeed of human existence) (Coeckelbergh 2017). The
focus has been mainly on individual human-technology relations and, as
will become clear by the end of this book, use and users of technologies
have been modelled in a rather static way, ignoring movement. Finally,
while in the mentioned research fields there has been sufficient discus-
sion about the ethics of ICTs, for example the ethics of machines such as
robots, there has been far less work on technology and politics, including
technology and power—partly because a lack of a more comprehensive
and appealing phenomenology of the social, including use as a social
phenomenon.
One way to start addressing these lacunas is to question and tinker
with the metaphors we use to think about knowledge and experience—
with regard to technology and more generally. A dominant metaphor
that powers traditional discussions in philosophical epistemology, meta-
physics, aesthetics, philosophy of science, etc., and which still exerts its
influence on thinking about technology, is that of looking at a work of
art, for example in the context of a museum. Many philosophers tend to
argue about knowledge and experience in a way that focuses on what
and how we see, what and how we perceive, and in doing so place them-
selves and the “ordinary” people they talk about in the role of detached
observers that look at something: an object, a problem, the truth, a fact,
and indeed a technological artefact. Think about Plato’s allegory of the
4 Introduction
cave, which is all about seeing reality or not, or about discussions in
the history of modern philosophy which discussed whether knowledge
is based on what we see through the senses or what we see via reason.
Today some philosophers are still wondering how “mind” and “world”
are connected, after first having separated them by means of the meta-
phor of an observing mind looking at an external world—thus neglect-
ing more performative, embodied, and participative models of mind and
knowing. More generally, philosophers tend to discuss how to see things
in the right way; their own activities (thinking, arguing, etc.) are framed
by means of a visual metaphor.
In philosophy of technology the metaphor has also been put to work.
For example, Heidegger wrote in Being and Time (1996) about tools that
are present or that withdraw when we use them. The latter phrase goes
some way towards a different, use-oriented view and implies movement
but retains the visual metaphor and is still a view: Heidegger’s epistemol-
ogy and metaphysics of Being is all about seeing, appearing, and reveal-
ing. Consider also his “The Age of the World Picture” (1977): Heidegger
questions the modern world picture and the modern project of represen-
tation, but the alternative he sympathizes with—the Greek apprehending
he tries to uncover—is also a visual affair: an unconcealment. Heidegger’s
view is part of a Western tradition in which physics, metaphysics, and
epistemology are all about getting the picture right.
Most contemporary philosophers of technology do not fare better.
They talk about the appearance of the machine versus what the machine
really is, about the existence of objects independent of human percep-
tion, or about “multistability” and things that stand in between an “I”
and “world” and shape our perception (Ihde 1990). In all these cases,
the underlying metaphor is looking at the world (e.g., a picture) from a
distance with both the subject/observer and the object/world being rather
static, immobile. The dominant metaphor remains looking at a work of
art. We stand back and observe. The metaphor belongs to a detached
and visual aesthetics, ignoring the idea of a more active and participative
relation to the world.
This is not to say that there is no potential in contemporary thinking
about technology for a more performative view. Postphenomenology’s
initial interest to conceptualize the use of technology (Ihde) or its use of
Latour’s drama-based language (Verbeek) could in principle have led to a
more performance-oriented approach. But this has not happened; the vis-
ual metaphor has been dominant and mediation, a central concept in post-
phenomenology, is imagined as a visual in-between. If a metaphor of the
arts is borrowed at all, it is still, like in Heidegger, one from the visual arts.
But what happens if we change the metaphor?
In the 20th century, philosophy and the social sciences have started to
develop elements of what has been called a “performative turn”, elements
Introduction 5
which are still further developed today. For example, in philosophy of
language, Austin (1962) introduced the idea that sentences do not only
say something about the world but are also sometimes performative: so-
called speech acts also “do” something. Butler (1988) argued that gender
identity is constituted through performative acts. In philosophy of mind,
epistemology, and cognitive science, the insight emerged that perception
is a more active matter than previously thought. This suggested that the
metaphor of vision is limited when it comes to understanding how we
know and experience. Today there are efforts to move towards different
ways of thinking, using different metaphors. For example, Noë (2004)
argued that perceiving is way of acting. In thinking about art, Penny
(2017) has recently argued that a non-dualistic, enactive, and embodied
cognition approach helps to reveal the performative dimensions of art
practices, arguing for a performative aesthetics. And in the social sci-
ences, Goffman (1956) understood the social life as a kind of theatre
(see Chapter 3). Apart from Latour and especially Pickering (1995), who
has developed an interesting performative conception of technological
agency in scientific practice, not much of this performative turn work
has been used in philosophy of technology and STS. And neither Latour
nor Pickering did so in a systematic and critical way that fully, directly,
and openly engages with, articulates, and analyzes the metaphors from
the performing arts they use. Moreover, in line with STS’s origins in
social studies of science, Pickering focused on performances in science.
But here I am more interested in our everyday living with technology.
This book explores what happens to thinking about technology if we
use the metaphor of performance. What happens if we use the metaphor
of performance, in particular in the sense of “the performing arts” such
as dance, theatre, music, and magic, for thinking about technology?
What kind of phenomenology and critical theory might emerge from
this work? How can experience and use of technology be conceptual-
ized with the help of these metaphors? And given philosophy of tech-
nology’s insights about the non-instrumental roles of technology and
the current emphasis on intelligent automation technologies in robotics
and artificial intelligence: how can this metaphor help us to think not
only about what we do with technology but also what technology does
with us?
Metaphors, however, are not just given. We cannot just look at them,
as if they were off the shelf devices or tools ready to use. Rather, they need
to be articulated, crafted, worked out, used, and, indeed, performed. It
is not clear, for example, what dance is or what theatre is, what kind of
experience and knowledge is involved, what it means to dance, choreo-
graph, act, or direct, etc. We need to clarify and work out what all this is
about. If we want to “apply” the metaphors, this work needs to be done
first. (“First” is a bit misleading since, as we will experience, there is no
6 Introduction
clear border between working out a metaphor and “applying” it, since
any application always feeds back into the metaphor itself.) For this pur-
pose, this book engages with philosophical and interdisciplinary work on
the performing arts in at least three ways.
First, this exercise includes theories about dance, theatre, music, and
stage magic. There is a growing body of theory and philosophy about the
performing arts, for example in performance studies and dance studies.
Philosophers of technology should not neglect this body of knowledge,
especially since some of it reflects on (performing) arts and technology.
This is an interesting project in itself. However, my main purpose in this
book is not so much to learn from or comment on what these scholars
say about performance, process, temporality, or even about technology
but rather to further develop my applications of the performance meta-
phor to thinking about technology by bringing in philosophy and theory
about specific fields in the performing arts. This is in no way meant to
reduce the performing arts or theory about these arts to a resource for
metaphors or to what is said in this book; obviously there is much more
going on in these fields and much more can be said about performance in
all its diversity. But my focus is on a specific type of knowledge transfer
and conceptual operation that aims to help philosophers of technology
to move on.
Second, the book also engages with an emerging field called perfor-
mance philosophy, which offers research on the relationship between
performance and philosophy (for example work by Laura Cull, Andrew
Bowie, or Arno Böhler) and suggests not only that philosophy can help
to understand performance but also that we can interpret and practice
philosophy as performance. Again, there is much more to be said about
this interesting field and in general philosophers can learn more from it
than is reflected in this book. But here I focus on my own project rather
than trying to do justice to all its insights: I use some claims from the
field to support my point that philosophy of technology itself can also be
conceptualized as performance.
Third, the book moves in a direction that is sympathetic to process
thinking in metaphysics and epistemology and more generally to work
in philosophy and the social sciences that takes seriously the temporal
dimension of human experience and practice (for example in STS work
by Wajcman on technology and time). There is also engagement with
some of Plato’s dialogues, especially in the chapters on theatre, stage
magic, and philosophy. And with regard to contemporary philosophy,
I benefit from Noë’s use of the choreography metaphor. Philosophers of
technology could benefit from engaging more with these rich philosophi-
cal traditions and promising directions of thinking. However, the empha-
sis in this book is not on discussing what other philosophers have said
but rather on going directly to the performing arts (and theory about
Introduction 7
the performing arts) and working out what using these arts as meta-
phors implies for thinking about the development, use, and experience
of technology.
This limitation to the performing arts, and in particular the perform-
ing arts of dance, drama, music, and stage magic, also gives the book
more focus, since the term “performance” can mean many things. The
meanings of this term range from what happens in performing arts
(performance as an act in theatre, for example) to action in general,
capability (competence, potential, as in the German word Vermögen),
achievement (success or output, as in “this machines performs well”),
and even power (German: Macht)—consider, for example, McKenzie’s
Perform or Else (2001) and my references to Foucault in this book.
I focus on the meaning of performance in the context of performing arts,
although the other aspects and meanings of the term performance will
remain relevant, for example when I will discuss skill or design. Fur-
thermore, beyond the arts (in a narrow sense) there are other interesting
performative practices to learn from. For example, Gunkel (2018) has
argued that computer games are a medium for doing philosophy: we
can learn from it to explore questions about the nature of reality, for
example. This is also true for philosophy of technology, and sometimes
I will use material from game studies. One could also learn from studies
of sport as a performative practice. However, my focus here is mainly
on the performing arts.
It is also a limitation of this book that its metaphors are mainly and
implicitly based on Western forms of performance. Clearly there are
many non-Western forms of dance, theatre, music, and so on, many of
which do not share all the features of, for example, Western “drama” or
“contemporary dance”. There is a body of work on non-Western perfor-
mances that could be used to further elaborate the project proposed in
this book. For example, Okagbue (2007) has written insightfully about
performances in Africa and today many Western choreographers and
theorists are interested in Japanese theatre and dance forms—ancient and
more modern (see for example Fraleigh 2010 on Butoh). And even within
Western performing arts there is a lot of diversity. More work is needed
in this direction. This book already provides some room for this, firstly,
by its choice of the central concept “performance”, which is already a
more inclusive term than for instance “drama” or “theatre” (the former
has a modern Western ring to it, the latter is linked to its ancient Greek,
including Aristotelian, roots), and, secondly, by being critical about
mainstream Western thinking about performance. The reader will meet
criticism of Plato’s view of performance and see that my text lacks the
modern Western obsession with writing-based art forms such as modern
drama and classical music, for example, by including improvisation—
which also has its place in the Western tradition, for example in jazz and
8 Introduction
blues music—and by stressing embodied performance. Moreover, and
keeping in mind that this book is not mainly about the arts but about
technology: I have recently argued for a Wittgenstein-inspired view of
technology which places technology firmly within social-cultural wholes
such as games and a form of life (Coeckelbergh 2017). Examining and
using metaphors from performance in non-Western cultures in order to
think about technology would fit within that broader project. This limi-
tation, therefore, is not at all a limitation in principle.
A further constraint I already mentioned: while the book is about
technology in general, I will focus on ICTs and especially on contempo-
rary smart and increasingly more autonomous technologies. Frequently
the word “machines” is used for such intelligent and autonomous
technologies. This is somewhat problematic since it suggests that these
technologies always and only come in the form of visible and separate
artefacts such as robots, for example, whereas there are also less visible
or invisible technologies, including technological infrastructures and
distributed and networked systems. It is also not clear where the line
is between machines and non-machines. For example, how intelligent
and autonomous does the machine need to be? Robots are machines,
but some call a wheel or a lever already a machine. And is software
in itself a kind of machine? Nevertheless, “machines” is a useful term
to evoke the meaning of intelligent and autonomous technologies and
the related idea and concern that these technologies increasingly do
something with us rather than the other way around. Hence, I shall use
“machines” in the main title and chapter titles, rather than “technol-
ogy” or “technologies”.
1.3. Method and Structure of the Book

In order to grasp and develop what it means to use performance as a
metaphor for understanding technology, the book’s chapters follow the
following method or procedure. In each chapter, a different performing
arts field is chosen—not as a topic of study as such but as a source of
metaphor and of related performance theory that helps us to create a
metaphorical bridge to the use and development of technologies. For
example, in the next chapter I will start from (theory about) dance and
choreography. What kind of experience, knowledge, and practice is this?
Then the metaphor and theory are applied to (a) what we do with tech-
nology and (b) what technology does with us. For example, it is asked
what it means to “dance” with technology and what happens if tech-
nology itself becomes a “choreographer” of our lives. In the course of
each chapter, I give concrete examples of ICTs that include contemporary
intelligent and autonomous digital technologies, for example in the area
of robotics or social media. I will also discuss the potential ethical and
political applications. For example, if technologies such as social media
choreograph us, what does this mean for the power others and technol-
ogy exercise over us?
Introduction 9
This is the structure of the book:
Table 1.1 Overview of the Chapters
Metaphor/Practices Metaphors/Practices
(General) (More Detail)
Chapter 2 Dancing With Dance Dancing

Technology: How Machines Choreography
Move and Choreograph Us
Chapter 3 Acting With Drama/Theatre Acting
Technology: How Machines Script Writing and
Act and Direct Us Directing
Chapter 4 Making Music With Music Making Music
Technology: How Machines Composing and
Play and Conduct Us Conducting
Chapter 5 The Magic of Stage Magic Doing Stage Magic
Technology: How Machines Scripting and Stage
Create and Manage Our Setting
Illusions
Chapter 6 Thinking With Philosophy as Doing Philosophy
Technology: How Machines Performance Organizing Thinking
Stage Our Thinking
As is clear from this table, I distinguish between performing (e.g., danc-

ing or acting or playing music) and shaping the performance of others
(e.g., choreography or directing or conducting). I will need this distinction
in order to show that and how technology is not only a tool we use in
our daily lives (what we do with technology) but also assumes the role of
shaper and organizer of the structure, grammar, and narrative of these lives
and indeed what and who we are (what technology does with us).
Moreover, while I take my main inspiration from the performing arts
as they are usually defined (e.g., theatre, dance, and music), this exercise
moves towards a broader understanding of the term “performing arts”
when its meaning is extended to philosophy. As we can learn from per-
formance philosophy, philosophy itself can be conceptualized in terms
of performance. In Chapter 6 I will further reflect on this. I will add that
philosophy is not only an embodied-performance but also a technologi-
cal practice and apply the idea to thinking about philosophy of technol-
ogy, which can also be understood as performative and as being itself
shaped by technologies and media. As often in philosophy and science,
study object and study subject touch and overlap. But instead of hid-
ing or forbidding this, as in modern science and philosophy, we can be
upfront about it and do something with this insight for thinking about
what philosophers of technology can and should do. For example, this
approach enables us to ask: What kind of performances can and should
philosophers of technology engage in? Only writing and talking or also
other kinds of performance? Is it enough to write a book and develop a
10 Introduction
vocabulary and a way of speaking, as I do in and with this book, or are
other kinds of performance desirable or necessary?
At the end of the book, in chapters 6 and 7, I will further reflect on
these issues. Let me now give a more detailed overview of the chapters:
After this introductory chapter (Chapter 1), which explains the exist-
ing gaps and why it is necessary to think in a more systematic way about
how we can use performance metaphors in thinking about technology,
I turn to the first metaphor. Chapter 2 uses the metaphor of dance to
describe how what we do with technology always includes the moving
body. Based on dance studies and philosophy of dance literature, I first
give an overview of different aspects of dance: embodied experience, bod-
ily movement, and, related to that, situatedness in (and creation of one’s
own) time and space and rhythm, social interaction and different per-
spectives, and technological mediation. Then I discuss what this means
for understanding our daily use of technology, now understood in terms
of movement: as users of technology we are embodied, moving, social,
and technological beings. We move with technology. I show that this
is also true for so-called “virtual” technological practices such as com-
puter games and virtual worlds. I argue that contemporary philosophy
of technology (including Ihde) has taken into account embodiment but
has not sufficiently conceptualized movement, temporality, and the social
aspects of technology use. I also explore what it means if technology
becomes a co-dancer and even a choreographer of our movements, shap-
ing and organizing our movements, for example as users of smartphones
and social media. Influenced by Parviainen and Noë and in response to
thinking about the good life and technology, I suggest an ethics and poli-
tics of technology that asks questions about the kinetic normativities in
our technological culture, with respect to the good life and to power. An
extension of Foucault is proposed, which includes political choreography
and micro-movements as mechanisms of power.
In Chapter 3 I do the same exercise with the theatre metaphor. In this
case the metaphor is already implicitly used in philosophy of technol-
ogy, for example in Latour. But a more upfront and systematic reflection
on the use of the theatre metaphor, using philosophy (Plato, Aristotle,
Nietzsche, Hume, Austin, Searle) but also sociological work (Goffman,
Turner, Schechner) and gender studies (Butler), reveals further aspects of
the metaphor which can be employed to frame what we do with technol-
ogy, in particular the social dimension of use, which in turn concerns role
playing and also includes more bodily and kinetic aspects. I argue that
technology is not only and not so much a co-actor (Latour uses the term
‘actant’) but more like a director (together with humans: co-director) of
our plays. Latour’s script metaphor is also useful here. I also mention
Pickering’s work, although it is not clear if the metaphor comes from the
theatrical or the technological sphere. I argue that the theatre metaphor
cannot only be used to talk about what things do (Latour, Verbeek)—and
Introduction 11
here it must be asked in what sense, precisely, things can “act”—but
also to conceptualize technological practices as intrinsically social prac-
tices, in which for example the concept of role is also important. I give
the example of social media as theatre and also point to role playing in
computer games. And again, it turns out that the performance metaphor
helps us to attend to the many normative aspects of our dealings with
technology. Given the importance of script in the current literature, the
chapter also includes work on the use of language, including rhetoric and
narrative: who or what writes the script of the social theatre? Engaging
with Ricoeur and drawing on my own recent work with Reijers, I explore
the idea that technology is not only our director but the (co-)writer of our
narratives: the playwright of the narratives of our daily lives and the nar-
ratives of our societies. This tells a richer story of the human-technology
relation and its normative, social, and temporal aspects than Latour’s use
of the act and script metaphor.
Chapter 4 turns to a performance practice that is neglected in contem-
porary philosophy of technology: music. We can use the metaphor to
reveal the experience and use of technology as embodied, skilful, social,
and technologically mediated. Here the emphasis is on the development
of skill and improvisation—also in relation to new ICTS used to record
and create music. Dreyfus’s work is used as is literature that bridges
music and technological practices. But the chapter not only helps us to
understand our interactions with technology in more material, embodied,
and skill-oriented terms; it also raises the question if we are playing our
instruments or if the instruments are playing us. This question becomes
especially relevant when artificial intelligence gets better and when, in
general, smart technologies are involved in so many of our activities. Are
our behaviour and routines composed and conducted by humans (our-
selves or others) or by machines, or by both? What or who shapes the
rhythm of our lives? Does technology speed us up and determine when
we do what we do? Do we have some freedom to improvise? What kind
of ethics and politics can work with these kinds of questions? I suggest a
kind of posthumanist view but one that acknowledges the difference and
significant role of the human.
The question of control and the role of the human are also discussed
in Chapter 5, which takes stage magic as a point of departure. Like in
the other chapters, first a better understanding of the practice is achieved
by reading literature that comments on this field. Then the metaphor
is applied to the design and use of technologies. Designers turn out to
be a kind of stage magician that creates illusions for us. Or rather: the
designers and we co-create our illusions through use. The metaphor also
helpfully brings in the aspect of timing again—something very important
in stage magic. We deceive, deceive ourselves, and are deceived by means
of technology. Technologies are tools for trickery and magic. But what if
technology becomes more intelligent: does it become the main magician?
12 Introduction
These observations raise many normative but also metaphysical ques-
tions. Is the design of illusions through technology a kind of deception,
and, if so, is it necessarily bad? Who are the master designers of our
illusions? There are ethical, social, and political questions, including the
question of power. What happens if we give more power to technology
and if we accept the magical worlds it creates? Or is there only one world?
Is technology the magician or are we willing or unwilling co-magicians?
Inspired by Tognazzini and further developing my recent work on this
subject, I reflect on the ethics and metaphysics of technological practices
as magic practices. The chapter will also include the metaphor of anima-
tion and puppet theatre (and of course one could also think of computer
animation), a metaphor that is also very relevant for our dealings with
technology. Who or what is animated by whom?
With the help of the performance metaphor, I move from Plato’s
puppet theatre (and the Platonic interpretation of that theatre) and its
corresponding dualistic epistemology and ethics which often informs
discussions about technology, to a non-Platonic, performance-oriented
conceptualization of theatre and magic, a non-Platonic metaphysics,
and hence a non-Platonic view of technology use and experience. I also
suggest again that a posthumanist acknowledgement of the agency of
technology (as actor, director, magician, etc.) does not rule out nor even
require that humans play the role of co-magician. This can refer to the
designer but also the user: without the user, the magic does not work.
I also point to less visible, less intended, and more “grammatical” effects.
Technology not only does things or tells us what to do; it also shapes
how we do things and organizes our performances. Technology scripts
and sets the stage. In the course of the chapter I will give the example of
assistive devices such as Alexa and comment on Flusser’s thinking about
design. I end with a non-Platonic, performative ethics of honesty that is
social and situated.
Chapter 6 then moves to philosophy itself, and in particular philoso-
phy of technology. If we take the performance metaphor seriously, which
throughout the chapters leads to the insight that it is more than a meta-
phor, that the borders are porous or even that the doors of the theatre
are wide open, then what does this mean for our understanding of what
we do when we “do” philosophy? What does it mean to understand
philosophy itself as performance? Influenced by recent literature in the
field of performance philosophy (e.g., Cull, Bowie, Böhler) and continu-
ing my engagement with Plato (this time his views on rhetoric), I use
performance philosophy’s more embodied and performative conception
of philosophy as a metaphor for understanding technology: I stress par-
ticipation, embodiment, rhythm, situatedness and immanence of technol-
ogy, and its use and users. I also continue my discussion of deception:
based on my reading of some of Plato’s dialogues on rhetoric, I comment
on persuasion and persuasive technologies, distinguishing between two
Introduction 13
different views. I also argue that philosophers should critically question
their own media and technologies, as Plato did when he questioned writ-
ing, and consider the idea of philosophy as a transdisciplinary practice,
for example collaborating with, or even merging with, the arts. Moreover,
I reflect on the role(s) of the philosopher (I distinguish between Socratic
and non-Socratic choreography) and on the question if and in what sense
technologies, and in particular machines, shape our thinking. Inspired by
Noë, I ask how it is possible that we can reflect on that question from
a distance, given that that reflection is mediated by technologies. And
what happens if philosophy of technology, through a performative turn,
becomes aware not only of its own performativity and social nature but
also of its being technologically mediated? What is philosophy of tech-
nology’s performative response?
In the last chapter, Chapter 7, I present my conclusion. Since I’m
not a stage magician, I’m happy to reveal this conclusion beforehand:
I will conclude that the book provides some elements of a framework
for thinking about technology—one could call it a performance-oriented
phenomenology and ethics of technology—that takes its inspiration from
the metaphors offered by the performing arts. This yields a number of
insights that could not have been achieved without a performative turn.
Taken together, they present use(rs) and experience of technology as
embodied, moving, social, temporal, situated, narrative, and so on. The
metaphors help us to (re)conceptualize some important normative prob-
lems related to technology, and gives us tools to (re)formulate what hap-
pens if technology shapes our lives in ways that go beyond functioning
as a mere tool. These insights are critical of, but may also contribute to,
postphenomenological and critical theories of technology.
In these senses, throughout the book the metaphor becomes metamor-
phosis. First, performance will turn out to be not just a metaphor but also
a concept that makes sense of phenomena. We will see that the examples
often slide into instantiations or phenomena of performance rather than
(applications of) metaphors of performance. I believe that that is not a
problem but an interesting result of the performative research and writ-
ing process. Second, the entire exercise of this book is transformative to
the extent that it results in a transformation of theory about technology,
which takes on the form of (elements for) a theory of technoperformance.
Finally, perhaps the most transformative move comes towards the end,
in Chapter 6: the results also include the insight that as philosophers, and
as philosophers of technology, we are also performers—with technology.
The play with metaphors thus ends with the promise of metamorphosis
in and of the role of philosophers of technology themselves. I formulate
again two different roles for philosophers, connected to different ways of
how to reach the good life: one is Socratic kinesitherapy understood as
a re-education of how to best move, based on a recollection of the truth
(that is, a pre-existing truth); the other is participative and improvised
14 Introduction
finding out how to move together when no such pre-existing truth is
given. I argue that both thinking in general and searching for the good
life with technology in particular can be understood as improvised per-
formance. The implications of this performative intervention still remain
to be seen or, rather, to be performed.
Now let the show begin.
References
Akrich, Madeleine, and Bruno Latour. 1992. “A Summary of a Convenient
Vocabulary for the Semiotics of Human and Nonhuman Assemblies.” In Shap-
ing Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, edited by
Wiebe Bijker and John Law, 259–64. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Butler, Judith. 1988. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in
Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–31.
Coeckelbergh, Mark. 2017. Using Words and Things: Language and Philosophy
of Technology. London: Routledge.
Feenberg, Andrew. 1999. Questioning Technology. London: Routledge.
Feenberg, Andrew. 2010. Between Reason and Experience. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Fraleigh, Sondra. 2010. Butoh: Metamorphic Dance and Global Alchemy. Cham-
paign: University of Illinois Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1956. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Edinburgh:
Social Sciences Research Centre.
Gunkel, David J. 2018. Gaming the System: Deconstructing Video Games, Game
Studies, and Virtual Worlds. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977. “The Age of the World Picture.” In The Question Con-
cerning Technology and Other Essays, translated by William Lovitt, 115–54.
New York: Harper Torchbooks.
Heidegger, Martin. 1996. Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit. Trans-
lated by J. Stambaugh. Albany, NY: State University of New York.
Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by C. Porter.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McKenzie, Jon. 2001. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Okagbue, Osita. 2007. African Theatres and Performances. London: Routledge.
Penny, Simon. 2017. Making Sense: Computing, Cognition, Art and Embodi-
ment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pickering, Andrew. 1995. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, & Science. Chi-
cago: The University of Chicago Press.
Verbeek, Peter-Paul. 2005. What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technol-
ogy, Agency, and Design. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
2 Dancing With Technology
How Machines Move and
Choreograph Us
2.1. Phenomenology of Dance and the Moving Body

If we want to use the metaphors of dance and choreography for thinking
about our daily dealings with technology, we need to know more about
these experiences and practices. What kind of experience is dance experi-
ence and what kind of knowledge is involved in dance? Although, and in
contrast to many other art practices, dance has not been studied by many
philosophers, there is a small but interesting field, philosophy of dance.
Much of this work is concerned with the phenomenology of dance, the
moving body, and choreography, and usually connects with the philo-
sophical tradition of phenomenology. Let me summarize and comment
on some of these texts and their philosophical sources, using Kozel and
Sheets-Johnstone as reference points. This will reveal different aspects of
dance (indicated in bold). The emphasis will be on the embodiment and
movement of performance. This will form the background for the next
sections in which I will use the metaphor of dance and choreography to
say more about how we move with, and are moved by, technology.
Body and Embodiment

Most texts in this field focus, perhaps naturally, on phenomenology of
the (moving) body and embodiment. For example, in Closer (2007) Susan
Kozel has connected live performance with philosophical phenomenol-
ogy, in particular Merleau-Ponty. She sees phenomenology as a way to
integrate “intellect with sensory experience” (2), to show that the body is
the basis of knowledge and experience, and to give a voice to “the lived
experience of dancing bodies moving in space and time” (32), and in this
way also to breathe life into phenomenology (48), bridging theory and
practice. Let us look in more detail at Merleau-Ponty in order to elabo-
rate the aspect of embodiment.
In Phenomenology of Perception (2005), Merleau-Ponty argued that
subjectivity is bound up with the body: we enter the world through our
bodies (Merleau-Ponty 2005, 475), we experience the world through
our bodies (239). We may sometimes experience our body as an object,
but we also exist as a body. We do not only have our body, but we
also are our body. He writes: “The body is the vehicle of being in the
world” (94). This also has implications for knowledge: knowledge of the
body and knowledge more generally speaking. Merleau-Ponty argues
that we know our body by living it, not by reflection. He stresses lived
experience:
Thus experience of one’s body runs counter to the reflective proce-

dure which detaches subject and object from each other, and which
gives us only the thought about the body, or the body as an idea, and
not the experience of the body or the body in reality.
(231)
I know my body via the world and at the same time my body is also
the medium of my knowing of the world: my body is “the pivot of the
world” (94), “we are in the world through our body” and perceive the
world through our body (239). Or as Klemola has summarized it: “it
is our body, the lived and conscious body that opens the world to us.
It is simultaneously both the means and the center of our existence”
(Klemola 1991, 72). In Cartesian thinking, Merleau-Ponty argues, this
kind of knowledge has been downplayed and the medium of ideas and
rational authorship has been emphasized. It has focused on objective and
detached knowledge of the body. But underneath that knowledge we can
discover another kind of knowledge: we can “relearn to feel our body”
and in this way rediscover our body and indeed our self, our “natural
self” (Merleau-Ponty 2005, 239). As Gallagher and Zahavi put it:
We do not first become aware of the body and subsequently use it

to engage with the world. We experience the world bodily, and the
body is revealed to us in our exploration of the world. Primarily, the
body attains self-awareness in action.
(Gallagher and Zahavi 2010, Section 4)
Merleau-Ponty also writes about the body in movement. Considering

the spatiality of one’s body, he argues that I know where my limbs are
through a “body image” or body schema. (Merleau-Ponty 2005, 113)
Without thinking about it, I know where my limbs are. I also know the
spatiality of my body. This is a starting point, the background for my
experiences of phenomena and of my performances. He uses the meta-
phor of the theatre:
Bodily space can be distinguished from external space and envelop

its parts instead of spreading them out, because it is the darkness
needed in the theatre to show up the performance, the background
Dancing With Technology 17
of somnolence or reserve of vague power against which the gesture
and its aim stand out, the zone of not being in front of which precise
beings, figures, and points can come to light.
(Merleau-Ponty 2005, 115)
Then Merleau-Ponty turns to action and movement: he considers the

body in movement, how it inhabits space (117), and how we perform
with our body. He argues that we do not need representational knowl-
edge and he criticizes intellectualism. In line with Husserl and Heidegger,
he sees knowledge as bound up with our being in the world, but stresses
the bodily aspect of this being in the world and links intentionality not so
much with thinking but with motility, which he defines as “basic inten-
tionality” (158). He writes: “Consciousness is in the first place not a
matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can’. . . . Movement is not thought about
movement, and bodily space is not space thought of or represented”
(159). Instead, we project ourselves towards things through the body
and its movement. The moving body is a medium: “Consciousness is
being-towards-the-thing through the intermediary of the body. A move-
ment is learned when the body has understood it” (159–60). Instead of
first forming a representation of an object and then transporting the body
to a point in space, the body inhabits space and time and understands
its world without symbolic or objective representation (162). Motility
already gives meaning, and our bodily and spatial being is a condition of
possibility for thought and perception (164).
This was a revolutionary insight and its implications are still not
entirely used and elaborated in all areas of contemporary philosophy. An
exception is a current in philosophy that embraces what is now known as
an embodied and enactive approach and often connects to both Merleau-
Ponty and cognitive science. For example, Alva Noë has argued that “per-
ceiving is a way of acting . . . something we do” (Noë 2004, 1). Instead of
representing or reflecting, we probe, touch, and move around. Perception
is not a process in the brain that constructs internal representations but
“a kind of skilful activity on the part of the animal as a whole” (2). And
Gallagher (2009) has argued that cognition is a form of action. We know
and experience as we do things and as we move. In cognitive science,
there is also an influential strand that stresses the embodied, situated,
and enactive character of mind and cognition (e.g., Varela, Thomson,
and Rosch 1991). Recently Simon Penny has rightly argued that we can
learn a lot from these kinds of approaches for understanding interac-
tive arts practices. Mind-body dualism cannot account for such prac-
tices; we need a new performative aesthetics instead of one based on the
plastic arts (Penny 2017). Influenced by Pickering (1995), whose work
I will discuss in the next chapter on the theatre metaphor, Penny argues
against representationalism and proposes an aesthetic theory based on a
performative ontology (Penny 2017, 414). For such a project, not only
cognitive science but also Merleau-Ponty’s thought (and the philosophers
he influenced such as Dreyfus) is useful.
For dance, the emphasis on the body and the attention to motility is
of course very relevant. Merleau-Ponty himself already mentioned dance
when he wrote that the body “comprehends” movement (165). But his
insights reach far beyond dance: they also enable us to better understand
everyday movements. It is at this point in the text that Merleau-Ponty
gives the examples of a woman with a feather in her hat who feels where
the feather is, driving a car through a narrow opening without measur-
ing, and the blind man’s stick that extends touch—examples well known
in philosophy of technology. We also find the still very relevant everyday
example of typing, which shows that the typing is incorporated and does
not require objective representation (167), and the example of playing
an organ: Merleau-Ponty writes that the organist’s body and his instru-
ment are “merely the medium” of the relationship between score and
the sounding notes (168). Indeed, one may question who or what is
the instrument. Furthermore, musical instruments are often used in an
embodied relation to the human: through the development of skill, they
become incorporated. Phenomenologically, they merge with the human.
(See also my chapter on the metaphor of music.) But these are not only
examples of technological embodiment, as Ihde and others use them in
philosophy of technology; they are also and perhaps primarily exam-
ples of a knowledge we gain through movement of the body—examples
of moving with technology. For instance, it is very interesting for the
purpose of this book that Merleau-Ponty understands typing as a per-
formance, in particular a performance of “movements” (167). It is that
(embodied) performance and those movements that give us (embodied)
knowledge and meaning. Meaning is not necessarily constituted by con-
sciousness; the body (and I stress: the moving and performing body) also
generates meaning; it is the basis of knowledge and meaning and is in this
sense itself what Merleau-Ponty calls a “meaningful core” (170).
This is an important point for both philosophy of dance and philoso-
phy of technology. The latter has only very selectively read Merleau-
Ponty. As said, embodiment is not just a particular human-technology
relation (Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2005); it is the very way we exist in the
world. And while entirely in line with much other work in the humanities
and social sciences in the second half of the 20th century, by now there
has been sufficient attention given to the body and embodiment in phi-
losophy of technology—at least in postphenomenology and in particular
in the work of Don Ihde (Ihde 1990, 2002)—there has been much less
attention to movement and performance. Inspired by Merleau-Ponty and
focusing on embodiment in relation to new technologies, Ihde has argued
that we should move beyond “outdated seventeenth-century epistemol-
ogy that does not recognize embodiment or performance or the produc-
tion of knowledge” (Ihde 2002, 128). It is an exceptional moment when
he does mention performance, but neither in this book nor in his work as
a whole does he sufficiently elaborate on the movement and performative
aspects of our use of technology (which he could have done by picking
up the movement and performance aspects in Merleau-Ponty). His focus
remains on body and embodiment; in his work the body does not move
enough.
But there is more to say about dance. As Kozel rightly remarks, while
Merleau-Ponty addressed movement, he does not go far enough (Kozel
2007, 38). With “not far enough” I mean that the theory of the body
schema is still mainly a theory of perception (Merleau-Ponty 2005, 239),
not a full theory of the moving body or of dance. There is much more to
say about movement and about the knowledge and experience in dance,
and much of that goes beyond the phenomenology of perception.
Dance as a Happening, Flow, Know-How, and Skill

What is dance experience? To dance is to move one’s body. But there is
more: if we attend more closely to the phenomenology of dance (and per-
haps movement in general—see later), there is also something happening,
and this further questions the model of the Cartesian modern agent who
thinks, represents, and acts on the basis of that thinking and representa-
tion; Kozel observes that to dance is also being danced and being moved:
“the dancer dances and is danced by the force that she sets in motion”
(38). We animate our body but then the movement of the body is further
animated as it moves through time and space:
The dancing-danced, or chiasm between moving actively and let-

ting ourselves be moved by things, or people, or the world, is about
expanding the space between control and being controlled. . . . More
than the rest of us in our daily patterns of movement, the dancer
mentally controls her body but also plays at the edges of control,
letting physical momentum chart a path through space. The rigidly
conscious subject withdraws and returns by degree. . . . It is as if
movement were determined by the temporality of the dance that is
in the process of emerging . . . the dance dances through the dancer.
(Kozel 2007, 39)
Another way of putting this is that the dancing body is “both the mover
and the moved” (Parviainen 2002).
This point about dancing as a doing and as a happening (at the same
time) also bears some analogy to the presence and making of different
kinds of knowledge in dance. On the one hand, the dancer is aware of
what she does and thinks about it. She is also aware of her body and
movements. This is what Fraleigh calls “a conscious, intentional position
towards the body as an object of attention” (Fraleigh 1987, 14). On the
other hand, the dancer may reach a state in which there is know-how but
no explicit thought and reflection. Both can alternate, or even exist at the
same time. For example, there are rules of choreography one needs to
follow but at the same time one enters what Kozel calls a “flow” (see also
Csíkszentmihályi 1990). Kozel remarks that even improvisation “occurs
within loose rules and the flow is about entwining a version of rational
critical thought process with the flow of movement, speech, and affect”
(Kozel 2007, 51). It seems that both aspects are present in dance. And
maybe sometimes there is no rational critical thought at all. (Note that
in some cultural forms the absence of rational thought and control is
encouraged and aimed for, for example in the Western tradition we find it
in Dionysian dance and ritual. As Nietzsche put it, such dancers, at least
when they are in the dance, “have forgotten how to walk and speak”
(Nietzsche 1999, 120).)
Shaun Gallagher has done further conceptual work departing from
Merleau-Ponty but also moving away somewhat from his view: he dis-
tinguishes between “body image”, which is about perceptual monitoring,
attitudes and beliefs about one’s body, and “body schema”: “a system
of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the
necessity of perceptual monitoring” (Gallagher 2005, 24). Following
Merleau-Ponty and Gallagher, I have argued1 that this gives us two modes
of experience/knowledge in dance: one is about representation and know-
ing-that (propositional knowledge), whereas the other is knowledge-in-
action and knowing-how. The latter is about embodied skill. The dancer
may well need explicit knowledge through instruction, but without the
experience of movement and dance she cannot learn the dance. Both
modes or aspects are necessary for leaning the dance and for dancing.
One learns the dance through dancing, not only through instruction. As
with all skills, the main challenge is the acquisition of embodied knowl-
edge. Following Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1980) we could add that maybe
in the beginning there is more instruction, whereas the expert dancer has
more implicit knowledge. Perhaps it is also true that at a high (the high-
est) level of expertise and when one is “in” the flow of dance, there is no
longer purposeful, intentional action. As Fraleigh puts it:
Mastery in dance does not rest on wilful domination of ourselves in

our movement. . . . Grace, freedom, and mastery appear as wilfulness
disappears and as effortless ease is achieved.
(Fraleigh 1987, 20)
In such a state there is what in psychology is known as “flow”: when the

person is fully immersed in the activity, the self disappears and there is
only spontaneous action and joy (Csíkszentmihályi 1990). As we have
seen, Kozel also uses the term. One may further discuss the question
whether it is possible to have both flow and intentional action, or if it is
the one or the other. But in any case implicit knowledge, know-how, and
skill are essential in dance, and dance is not only about doing but also
about happening.
Moreover, it seems that explicit thinking and intentional action is
always linked to embodied, implicit knowledge. If embodied and enac-
tivist approaches are right, then even when we think, this thinking is
rooted in embodiment. The explicit thinking is based on implicit bodily
movement and know-how. As Polanyi already argued, we know more
than we can tell; there is always also “tacit knowledge” (Polanyi 1966),
especially in skilled practices. Both kinds of knowledge are present in,
and created by, the activity and practice of dance. And conceptually we
can make a distinction between different kinds of knowledge, but Kozel
suggests that in dance experience both kinds of knowledge are not sepa-
rated: according to her, dance is as much a style of thinking as it is a
style of movement (Kozel 2007, 51). As in other areas of life, there is
no duality between body and mind or between experience and thinking;
thinking is also a kind of experience (70). One could also say: both think-
ing and experience are related to movement. And knowing can be verbal
but also non-verbal (Parviainen 2002). Furthermore, dance does not just
draw on existing (implicit and explicit) knowledge. Through dance, new
knowledge emerges. Parviainen (2002) has argued that dance creates new
knowledge of the moving body. This is especially so in improvisation.
Dancers can imagine, or rather move/create, new possibilities. If Dreyfus
is right, then perhaps this is especially true for expert dancers. Expert
dancers may be able to improvise in a way that really does something
new. But in principle everyone can improvise.
Furthermore, as already suggested in the previous pages, dance is not
only about bodies or embodiment, or about skill, it is also about move-
ment. Dance does not only illustrate the insights of the more embodied
and enactive approach. Dance also reveals movement as movement; it
makes us reflect on the importance of movement not only in the arts but
also in human lives in general. Let us delve deeper into the history of
philosophy of dance to support this point.
Movement, Time, Space, and Rhythm

In her classic The Phenomenology of Dance (1966), Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
defines dance as movement: “Dance is movement, and its opposite, in
time and space” (ix). Like Kozel, she takes a phenomenological approach
in the sense that she is not so much interested in Merleau-Ponty’s abstract
concepts such as body-schema but in “first-person experiential realities
of movement and thus experiential truths of kinaesthetic consciousness”
(Sheets-Johnstone 2015, xiii). She criticizes philosophers’ focus on vision
or on having a body and neglect of kinaesthesis and the lived body.
Like Kozel, she wants to understand everyday experience of movement,
everyday kinetic phenomena (xxii), through the lens of the extraordi-
nary: dance. In practice, that is, in her academic practice, this means
that her phenomenological analysis of movement takes the form of a
description, in particular description from a first-person point of view: “a
description of movement as it is lived through, not as it is or might be dis-
sected in a laboratory, recorded by an observer, rendered in a third-per-
son account, and so on” (xxxiii). She distinguishes between, on the one
hand, the immediate encounter with, direct apprehension of, and lived
experience of dance (pre-reflective involvement), and, on the other hand,
all the knowledge we already have of dance based on what we have seen
before and our evaluation of, and reflection on, the dance (prior knowl-
edge and reflective efforts afterwards) (Sheets-Johnstone 1966, 1–2). For
her the lived experience is central. A notion of dance is not a dance. And
dance is not a force or a combination of objective factors (10). It has to
be created and it has to be experienced. It has a wholeness to it. Again
we see, after phenomenological analysis, that there are different kinds of
experiences and knowledge related to dance as movement. Of course,
Johnstone also talks about the body: it is “a spatially present totality”
(17) rather than something to have or to reflect on. But for her the lived
experience of the body is itself a kinetic phenomenon, one which we do
not only find in dance but also in everyday life: it is about “crossing the
street, reaching for a pen, creating a dance” (21). Again she distinguishes
between the living experience and the reflection. That living experience
can be one in which the dancer is not reflecting upon “what her body is
doing or what she is doing with her body” (31) and feels one with the
dance in an ekstatic way, whereas in reflection she or the audience may
construe her body in movement as an object. Again there seem to be dif-
ferent modes of experience in dance, and again pre-reflective awareness is
stressed. Interestingly, Sheets-Johnstone argues that this kind of implicit
knowledge is necessary for what we may call performative purposes in
the context of staged performance: it is necessary to uphold the illusion,
which is the illusion of force:
The dancer is not conscious of her leg and how long she must keep
her leg extended in the air, nor of her arm and how far she must
abduct her arm. She cannot reflect upon her body in movement as an
object and make it exist apart from the form she is creating, without
immediately breaking the spatial unity and temporal continuity of
the dance into discrete points and instants. Similarly, the audience is
not aware of how long a dancer’s leg is extended, or to what extent
her arm is abducted. If the audience reflects upon the dance as it is
being presented, it destroys the illusion of force by dividing it into
discrete moments and points and ascribing values which are non-
existent within the world of illusion.
(Sheets-Johnstone 1966, 36)
I add that next to “pre-reflective” this kind of awareness can also be
“post-reflective”: keeping Dreyfus in mind, it may be that in instruction
there is first reflection but then afterwards in the actual dance, that is,
when staged as a dance performance, there is the non-reflective whole-
ness that Sheets-Johnstone talks about. Of course, there is form in dance,
and dancers may also work with form when creating a dance (form
abstracted from the everyday, choreography in the sense of notation, for
example), but the form does not exist outside the creation and experi-
ence of the dance, in which there is sense and feeling, and, of course,
movement. In dance there is form-in-the-making (60), which can never
be reduced to a description that is abstracted from this performative and
lived process.
Furthermore, dance does not only happen “in” time and space, as if
time and space are a fixed décor for our actions; it also creates its own
space (43) and its own time, which are bound to one another. This is
imagined space-time. For example, when looking at dancers we may
imagine a circle being drawn (94); the circle is created by the movement.
And I add that we can only imagine this since we are ourselves mov-
ing and dancing beings, who in our own lives already acquired some
implicit knowledge about movement and the creation of space by mov-
ing. Past experience is needed; this is what gives us knowledge. Here it is
the experience of our body moving. Sheets-Johnstone stresses the implicit
character of the dancer’s knowledge: “The dancer implicitly knows that
she has completed the circle” (95) because of her past experiences with
her body exerting influence. She refers to Merleau-Ponty’s example of the
blind man’s cane:
The question “How does the dancer know?” is really “How does
the dancer implicitly know?” and the answer might be given, “In the
same way a blind man ‘sees’ with the tip of his cane”.
(Sheets-Johnstone 1966, 97)
Force is projected and a space is created, and this is made possible by an

implicit knowledge and know-how that the dancer has. To achieve such
knowledge, the dancer must “grasp her body in movement as a dynamic
form-in-the-making” (112), which means she must not only reflect but
also stop reflecting. Reflection can get in the way of achieving implicit
knowledge. Again, if the dancer were to suddenly reflect on her move-
ments during the staged performance (or at any other moment for that
matter), the flow, the illusion, and the magic of the dance are gone. But
also during the learning process, the dancer needs to get to know her
moving body and movements and of course the dance as a whole in the
dance and by dancing. This is where the implicit knowledge emerges.
Furthermore, taking seriously movement and temporality in dance and
elsewhere also means that we attend to rhythm. There is theory about
rhythm, rhythm in music and in dance. We can make descriptions and
notations. But for Sheets-Johnstone, rhythm does not exist on its own,
but only in the dance (81). It must be danced, lived, and felt. Composing
a dance, then, can only be done by living the form that is being created
(111). It is in this lived experience that we can experience “the sheer phe-
nomenon of movement” (115).
So far, however, we have mainly discussed the knowledge and experi-
ence of the individual dancer—phenomenology in the sense of taking
a first-person perspective. But knowledge and experience in dance and
movement is never entirely individual in several senses.
Social Aspect, Audience, and Choreography

Dance is also a social activity, in the sense that one creates the dance
together and dances together but also in the sense that felt movement
is shared with, or resonates with, the audience. Dancers have their own
kinaesthetically felt movement and there is the kinetically perceived
movement of others. There is a sensus communis of movement (Sheets-
Johnstone 1966, xxviii). Dance is not only about one’s own movement
or body. There is also resonance with others. It is an inherently social
practice. We are bodily present to ourselves but also to others, and oth-
ers are also bodily present to us. What we do, our movements, may or
may not resonate with them. Kozel (2007) proposes a second-person
phenomenology, which is about sensitivity to another’s body language
and expressiveness (Kozel 2007, 57). Influenced by Critchley, she also
suggests that exposure to the other can be the basis of ethics, a corporeal
ethics. We respond to others (see also Levinas) and create responsive rela-
tions with others (70). But taking into account the social aspect may also
imply looking at what performance means in capitalist economies or at
how people perform their (gender) identity (66). There is always a wider
social and cultural context.
Furthermore, dance is not only co-dance in the sense of “dancing with
others on a stage”. It is also social in the sense that there may be people
watching the dance (the audience, spectators, etc.—these visual terms
are inadequate since they tend to focus on one sensory faculty and forget
the whole body). There is also the third-person perspective. Here the
dancer can appear to the spectator in different ways. On the one hand,
there is always the possibility that the other objectifies us. As Sartre put
it: “at least one of the modalities of the Other’s presence to me is object-
ness” (Sartre 2015, 252–53). Confronted with the gaze of the other, the
dancer realizes that she has a body. I apprehend that “I am seen” (259).
In that case, the dancer is no longer one with her body and self; there is
no longer flow. Moreover, the choreographer (see later in this section)
may also turn the body of the dancer into an instrument. It then becomes
what Foster has called “the hired body” (Foster 1997). There can also be
objectification of the body by the dancer herself, often at the same time.
On the other hand, it is possible that the dance is shared by the specta-
tor as it happens through the spectator’s body. Fraleigh writes: “when
I am in sympathy with the dance, my body is vitalized . . . the dancer
and the audience . . . share the dance—as body” (Fraleigh 1987, 55).
The dance passes between dancer and audience and binds them together:
“The dancer and the audience commune through the lived ground of
their bodily being” (61). In a sense, if and when this happens, the specta-
tor is no longer a mere “spectator” and also the term “audience” is mis-
leading since they reduce the experience to one sense and miss the aspect
of movement. Instead, dancer would be a much better name. Fraleigh
argues that when dancer and audience commune, both the dancer and
the spectator become dancers: “then the dancer’s dance also becomes my
dance” (62). This means that the “spectator” (who, as was said, is never
a mere spectator or listener) is also moving and dancing. Literally. We
learn to sit still, especially in the West. But this is never entirely success-
ful. There are at least micro-movements and neuroscientists have shown
that when we watch dance, this engages our motor system (Bachrach
et al. 2015). And there are “inner” movements: emotions. (But we should
avoid the dualistic language of “inner” and “outer”—see what follows).
The body moves and is moved. The body of the “spectator” dances, or
better: both the body of the dancer on stage and the body of the “specta-
tor” dance (on-stage or off-stage).
Furthermore, dance is social in the sense that the forms and practices
of dance embody cultural knowledge (Thomas 2003). In contrast to text,
“dancing constitutes a form of cultural knowledge that is articulated
through the ‘bodily endeavours’ of dancing subjects and not through the
‘power of the word’ ” (215). The movements of the dancers are related to
how “we”, as a society and as a culture, relate to our body, do things, etc.
Moreover, what the dance “is”, that is, how it is done and experienced,
is socially constructed (Foster 2011). As dancers, choreographers, and
audience members, we bring a lot of social knowledge and interests to
the dance studio, the stage, and the theatre. STS scholars know that the
design and use of artefacts are a social process, but so are the making and
the watching of a dance.
Finally and importantly: staged dance as it is practiced in the West is
usually also about choreography. The movements and the interactions
of the dancers (I prefer “dancers” rather than “bodies”) are directed by
someone (the choreographer). Sometimes there is more than one. Often
in contemporary dance choreography also involves the dancers them-
selves, who co-create the dance. And in a broader sense this is always the
case: what the dance “is” is not just what the choreographer had in mind
or imagined beforehand; it is what the dance becomes through the danc-
ers and the directions of the choreographer. This means the creation of
dance is a deeply social activity. Furthermore, choreography, like dance,
is an art in itself: it is an art to design the movements and interactions
of the dancers. In dance improvisation, when there is no set choreogra-
phy, the role of the choreographer is a different one: instead of directing
every movement, she may offer a kind of framework in which the dancers
develop their own choreography. And, of course, some dancers choreo-
graph or improvise themselves. But note that even in that case the dance
movements and dance patterns will refer to a wider culture of forms
of movement, including perhaps the history of dance but also everyday
movements, other existing dances, movements that have already been
used, etc. Choreography as dance creation, like all art and creation, does
not happen ex nihilo. In this sense, not only dance experience (Foster
2011) but also the choreographing of dance is socially constructed.
Choreography can also refer to the written notation of the (sequence
of) movements and interactions. There are not always written notations.
Video can also be used, or the choreographer can use her memory of
the dance or of particular movements and show them by dancing them.
Sometimes choreography is also called dance composition, since move-
ments and patterns are arranged by the choreographer. But the aim is the
performance of the dance, and in order to “compose” the choreographer
needs to move, get others to move, and engage in embodied thinking.
Choreography can never be a mere symbolic activity, mere representa-
tion, or mere thinking “in the head”. Finally, if objects are involved in the
performance, the choreographer will also direct their role and position
and direct the movements in relation to the objects. This leads us to the
next point.
Technology
Dance is also a technological practice. Usually it is understood only in
terms of bodies and movement, and the technological and material side
is neglected. But just as one can apply theoretical frameworks from phi-
losophy of technology and STS to any other practice, dance can be stud-
ied as involving material artefacts and infrastructures of various kinds.
Think about the stage and the lights but also objects used in dance and
the clothes of the dancers. Parviainen (2016) has used Latour’s work
to suggest that we can talk about an assemblage of humans and non-
humans involved in dance. Dance practices as an art is of course a human
activity; but it also always involves non-human elements, and this should
not be neglected. I suspect that since dance as an art often displays and
literally foregrounds the human body, the technologies that make pos-
sible the dance or even the artefacts that are used in the dance move to
the background.
But this is not always the case. Sometimes dance and choreography
explicitly use technologies, especially new digital technologies, in the
dance, and this is often done with the aim of stimulating research and
reflection on technologies and dance. There is already a relatively long
history of using new media and technologies in dance and other per-
forming arts (Dixon 2007). Consider, for instance, work by dance com-
pany Troika Ranch, which (among other themes) has explored unions
of computers and machines using motion sensing equipment and video
projections (Dixon 2007, 256); work on embodied experiences of new
media and digital technologies by Sita Popat, which has explored what
it means to have a robotic dance partner in dance improvisation (Wallis,
Popat, and Mackinney 2010); Susan Broadhurst’s performances with an
avatar performer; or more recently Kerry Francksen, who experiments
with interactions between “live” and “digital” bodies in what she calls
“live-digital dancing” (Francksen 2014).
In philosophy of dance, Kozel (2005, 2007) has connected Heidegger’s
questioning of technology to questioning technology while “moving in
responsive computer systems” (Kozel 2007, 73). She has also argued
that technology can be used to create responsive relations with others:
“we can regard technologies not as tools, but as filters or membranes for
our encounter with others” (70). In what turns out to be a posthuman-
ist view, she sees technologies as part of “flesh” that “makes up us, the
world, objects, animals, and thought” (77). Remshardt (2008) has also
argued against the “anthropic bias” in performance studies, which ties
performance to individual humans and their bodies and agency. Instead,
he explores a posthumanist view that responds to digital technologies
and how they mediate performance. Thus, moving beyond the obses-
sion with bodies (and hence human dancers), we find not only movement
but also technology. This gives us an interesting perspective for think-
ing about dance and for thinking about technology: dance then becomes
a site where we can explore the phenomenology and ethics of human-
technology relations.
2.2. How We Move With Technology and

How Technology Moves Us
The previous section reveals dance as an embodied practice, as move-
ment situated in time and space (in a sense even creating time and space),
and as thinking, as involving know-how and skill, as a social practice,
and as a technological practice. But it also turned out that these features
are not unique to dance. While dance displays them, puts the spotlight
on them so to speak (see also the last section in this chapter), they are
actually features of everyday human life and existence. We are embodied
and moving beings, our experience and knowledge is not only a matter of
knowing-that but also and especially of knowing-how, and our practices
are always both social and technological. Philosophy of dance thus shows
us something about how we exist, move, and think as human beings. To
philosophers obsessed with symbolic representations and language-based
practices such as writing, it shows in particular that we are moving and
dancing beings and that “even” our writing and thinking, including phil-
osophical thinking, is always anchored in embodied experience, implicit
knowledge, and a wider social and technological background that makes
possible our thinking, our movements, and our ability to make sense.
If this is so, then when, as philosophers of technology, we want to bet-
ter understand and evaluate contemporary technologies, we better use
the dance metaphor in our conceptualizations of technology. Some parts
of the picture are already present in contemporary philosophy of technol-
ogy: we know that our dealings with technology are embodied (I already
mentioned Ihde’s work) and we know that technology is always socially
embedded or rather that the social includes technology. But what is often
missing in existing thinking about technology is the aspect of movement
and performance. With the exception of Pickering (1995) and work
inspired by him (e.g., Penny 2017) that uses the term “performance”,
there has been very little attention to movement. So what does it mean
to (re-)conceptualize human-technology relations in terms of movement?
The mentioned work in philosophy of dance reveals something about
how we move in general and thus also how we move with technology.
Kozel (2007) already suggests that “the dance or performance studio is a
hothouse for understanding wider social engagements with technology”
(xiv) and for understanding “how human beings encounter themselves
and others through computers” (xv). This is possible since the metaphor
is more than a metaphor: there is no clear border between dance and other
movement practices in daily life; dance turns out to be “merely” a staged
version and imitation (mimesis) of what we are already doing all along.
We are already dancers and performers. Some literature in philosophy
of dance recognizes this. For example, Kozel refers to Richard Schech-
ner’s anthropological approach, which defines performance broadly to
include a continuum of human actions not limited to theatre, dance, or
music (Kozel 2007, 68). But in philosophy of technology, much work
still needs to be done on the phenomenology of moving with technology.
Moreover, taking into account that technology can have agency and per-
haps increasingly does so today, we should also explore how technology
moves us. Technologies are not mere tools for movement or tools we use
in moving; they also shape our movements. They choreograph us. Let me
unpack (that is, enact and perform) these claims, with a focus on contem-
porary digital technologies.
In order to do so, let me follow phenomenology’s dictum: to the life-
world! What does it mean to move with technology? We are used to
thinking of some activities with technologies in terms of movement. For
example, driving a car or riding a bicycle is a way of moving and uses
technology to do so. And we can use a smartphone or a watch when run-
ning. This is moving with technology. But, as Merleau-Ponty’s example
of the typewriter shows, there is also movement in activities and practices
we usually do not conceptualize in terms of movement. When I write this
text, I am sitting on a chair at a desk, typing these words on the key-
board, and, through use of a word processing program that runs on the
operating system of my PC, words appear on the computer screen. This
activity does not only involve many technologies (including the internet,
an entire electricity infrastructure, a house in which the desk is situated,
etc.); it also involves various movements and affordances for movement
(or not). The chair is a technology that largely immobilizes a part of my
body. In the meantime, other parts of my body move: my eyes move,
my arm, hands, and fingers move on the keyboard, clicking on icons on
the screen (graphical user interface), and so on. These movements are
embodied and involve implicit knowledge. It is true that, while using
the technologies, I’m not aware of the technologies, as Ihde following
Heidegger argued. But this is also true of movement: while using the
technology, I’m also not aware of the (micro-) movements I make. I have
developed the skill and habit of typing and writing, understood not only
as “use” but also as (sequences and patterns of) movement. The chore-
ography of typing was learned in a typing course; the dance of typing
became embodied. The choreography of using a word processor I also
learned by use, this time without a human choreographer. This is just one
of the many examples of choreographed movement with technology in
everyday life. The swiping gestures when using a smartphone is another
example. Again this is a micro-movement, one that is choreographed by
the designer of the smartphone software. Hence “moving with technol-
ogy” means not only using technology to move, such as transportation
technology, it also means “moving while using technology” or rather
“using technology by movement”.
Movement is necessary for our technological activities and practices.
It turns out that there is always a movement and performative aspect to
them. Some technologies are technologies not of mobilization but (partial
or full) immobilization, such as a chair or a bed. But even a chair or a
bed requires and affords specific kinds of movements such as sitting, lay-
ing down, getting up, and so on. Technologies such as the computer, the
internet, the smartphone, etc., are not transporting us to a sphere of non-
movement; instead they create new kinaesthetic skills, habits, practices,
and fields (for the term “kinaesthetic field”, see what follows). The new
smartphone user (today: a young child) needs to learn new kinaesthetic
skills and habits in order to use the phone. And when we are “online” or
in the so-called “virtual” sphere, we remain embodied beings. Consider
computer games: gaming is an embodied performance and games provide
performative spaces. Gamers are and remain fully embodied when they
perform: the gamer should not be reduced to “a pair of eyes” (Behren-
shausen 2007, 335). For example, when moving an avatar, the gamer is
not immobile but uses her body (not just the eyes but also hands, arms,
etc.) and she can have the immersive embodied experience of moving
as the avatar, co-creating a kind of hybrid reality or mixed reality in
which the border between inside and outside the game blurs. There is
movement—full stop. In terms of aesthetics: a visual aesthetics is not
enough, there is need for a kinaesthethics (353). More generally, the
specific way we are embodied includes movement. There is always an
outside of text, but there is no outside of movement and performance.
We exist, are-in-the-world as kinetic, moving beings. (And as beings that
perform for others; this aspect I will elaborate in the next chapter.) For
the use of technology, also so-called “digital” technologies, this attention
to movement means that our “use” of technology needs to be understood
differently: we never only use technologies; we also move with technolo-
gies and our use includes movement. So far (post)phenomenology has
largely neglected this aspect of technological experience/performance and
human-technology relations. We do not only perceive and act mediated
by technology, and there is not only embodiment in the sense of a specific
relation between humans and technology; we also move and dance medi-
ated by technology. From using a hammer to gaming: the technology user
is a dancer.
As we move, we respond to others, not only textually and visually but
also kinetically. There is kinetic resonance in others (co-dancers/audi-
ence). This also applies to our interactions mediated by technology. For
example, when we are active on social media, this activity is not only a
matter of vision (seeing what others do, being seen); it also includes move-
ment and making others move. This can be taken literally or kinetically.
For example, by means of a post consisting of text and image, I may want
to influence the clicking behaviour of others. Gaming can also be seen
as a social performance, in which gamers move and try to influence the
movement of others. Both in social media and in games there are various
audiences (see for example Crawford and Rutter 2007 on digital game
audiences). But movement in relation to others can also mean: people feel-
ing that they are “being moved” by an image or moving people to think
about something. In a non-dualist epistemology and phenomenology we
must question the inner/outer distinction. The aim of moving people can
also be political mobilization: getting people to move on the street or,
more broadly, making people do things in the political realm. In what fol-
lows, I will say more about choreographing people in a political context.
Making people move is not only a matter of using words. In philosophy
it is well known that words can do things and that we can make others
do things with words. Think about the work of Austin and Searle, which
is all about the performative functions of language. According to Austin
(1962) and Searle, words and sentences are active and performative. Per-
formative utterances are “speech-acts”. Searle (1995, 2006) argued that
language does not so much represent the world but rather create social
reality. But there are much more technologies that can make people do
things (see also Coeckelbergh 2017). Here the kinetic aspect of these
actions is emphasized. Our (micro-)bodily movements on social media or
our movements in games make others move. Language and other tech-
nologies move things and move people, and we move things and people
by using language and other technologies. (I will also mention this in the
chapter on theatre.) As we use technologies, these technologies shape our
actions and interactions. But this is not abstract; it always involves bod-
ies in movement. And they are social. Via technology we respond to one
another as living and moving beings.
Moreover, in contrast to Austin and Searle, we can emphasize the
embodied and kinetic aspects of language use: what Austin called speech-
acts are not disembodied texts; the use of voice is entirely mediated and
made possible by the body, and even typing a text (e.g., in social media)
is an embodied affair. The social that is created by means of language is
also a matter of moving bodies and embodied voice. Social institutions
only exist in the interactions of people, and these interactions always
have a kinetic aspect. Hence when we use digital technologies it is true
that in some sense we “create social reality”, but this reality should not
be reified and abstracted: it has movement and bodies in it. To pick up
the example again: digital social media interactions are not only a matter
of moving data, they are also a matter of moving people. The “dance of
agency”, to borrow Pickering’s term, is one that involves non-humans
but also humans, and here we can stress that these humans have bod-
ies and that they move, with their body and as a (living) body. There is
no “pure” digital or virtual sphere where, in a Platonic vein, one could
strive to get rid of the body or bodily movement. Flesh, to refer to one of
the terms in dance studies, is everywhere. There are always “analogue”
elements. There are material, bodily, and kinetic relations, actions, and
networks involved in the “digital” economy. In social media and games,
for example, the moving body is present and active. Dances of words and
dances of data are connected to dances of moving bodies.
Furthermore, as some technologies become more autonomous and
gain more agency, they do not only mediate our movements and our
dances but also take on the role of dance partner. Think of so-called
social robots that move around in the home: they are more than pas-
sive tools, they literally also move. They are not only cognitive agents,
as many philosophers of technology and scientists tend to conceptualize
them; they are also kinetic agents. Their sociality or quasi-sociality is
made possible by movement. Think also about bots that move on the
internet. Without movement, there is no agency. Therefore, the question
regarding artificial agency should be understood not only in terms of
their intelligence or cognition but also in terms of their movements. We
can then ask not only what machines do and can do in terms of cognitive
tasks (e.g., solving cognitive problems, making decisions, etc.) but also
what machines can do in terms of movement. The question is not only:
how intelligent are they but, also, how do they move?
For designers and users of “social” robots, this means that the former
design, and that the latter interact with, not only the robot-as-object but
also the robot as co-performer, co-mover, and co-dancer. Designers may
be aware of this to some extent in so far as they understand themselves
not only as designers of objects but also as designers of interaction and
movement. But as users we do not always think about movement. When
we encounter a (quasi)social entity, we simply take it for granted that
it moves. And it appears to us as social because it moves—and perhaps
because it moves in specific ways, ways we associate with sociality. But in
the interaction we do not notice the movement itself, we do not notice the
movement as movement. Only when something is wrong with the move-
ment or when there is absence of movement does the movement become
present-at-hand (to use a translated Heideggerian term). For example,
when the robot suddenly stops moving, we notice its movement aspect.
In the case of humans, movement can also come to the foreground in a
similar fashion, for example when we play sports and watch our own
movements, or when we meet a person who moves differently than we
do, such as a person in a wheelchair or someone who uses crutches. In
such cases we become aware of our own ways of movement and indeed
movement and the moving body itself. It may also happen that when we
are in a different country and want to open a door, the key or handle
turns the “other” way, that is, the way we are not used to; this renders
our usual grasp and movement entirely ineffective and reminds us of how
movement is deeply engrained and habitual, embedded in a particular
social-geographical context. This also shows again how implicit our
knowledge of our moving body is.
This application of the dance metaphor also raises the question who
choreographs us, our bodies, and our movements. As users dancing and
moving with technology, we are choreographed by the designer of the
technology and by other humans involved in the development and use
of technology, such as people in technology companies and governments
that issue regulations for the use of technology. They direct and organize
our movements with technology. Usually we are not aware of this, but
as users of smartphones, computer programs, etc., we are dancing the
dances that the designers and developers of the technology want us to
dance. We are doing the gestures that they designed, for example when
we use a smartphone. We are doing the movements that they have cho-
reographed, for example when playing a computer game. When using a
computer program, we follow the clicking sequences and rhythms they
programmed. We even follow daily routines that are encouraged by
them, for example getting up and checking our social media. This raises
the question to what extent we can still improvise, hack their choreogra-
phies, change our routines, or resist.
Moreover, to the extent that technology is more than a tool and is
itself a force that influences these daily choreographies of what we do
with technology, we could also say—influenced by Parviainen and others
(see below)—that we do not only move with technology, technology also
moves us and choreographs us.
Consider the normativity of technology, now understood in terms
of movement. The hammer does not only afford a movement; it also
“expects” and “demands” a particular movement and posture. I cannot
hammer in a nail by wiggling my toes. I have to grasp the hammer in a
particular way, do a very specific movement with my arm, perform a
particular hand-eye coordination (which is coordinating eye movement
with hand movement, thus organized movement), and so on. I “have” to
do this in the sense of: for the performance or dance of nailing to be suc-
cessful, I have to do these and these movements. This “have to” is nor-
mative. It is not a categorical imperative. It is a hypothetical, practical,
pragmatic one, but normative and imperative nevertheless. If you want
to get in the nail, then you have to move like this. The technology gives
you an algorithm for movement. A dance algorithm. Algorithms tell you
what to do; they are normative in the sense that they prescribe what you
should do. And when it comes to a technology that already exists for a
long time or when it is a complex digital technology, it is a normativity
that cannot necessarily be traced back to a particular individual designer
or other humans but that resides in the design of the hammer itself. It has
its own choreographic normativity.
Sometimes there is a little room for deviation. Consider the door han-
dle, another favourite example in the philosophy of technology literature:
if you want to open the door, then you have to walk to it in a particular
way, grasp the handle, pull it down (or up, depending on the country
and context), and so on. In this case, you can do it slightly differently.
For example, you can use your leg and foot to pull down the handle. But
the design of the technology strongly pushes for doing it exactly the way
most of us do it, that is, the choreography that rests in the very design
of the artefact. It gives you the easiest and optimal way to open the door
and pass through the door, that is, the easiest and optimal movement. If
you want to go through the door quickly, this is going to be the chore-
ography. Unless one changes the design, of course, which would create a
different choreography. To design a technological artefact is also always
to design and organize movement. The designer is a choreographer, and
to the extent that the human designer remains in the background and
the artefact gains more agency, one can say that the technology choreo-
graphs us.
Think also about the classic example of the speed bump in philosophy
of technology: the speed bump makes drivers slow down. It shapes our
action. But using dance and choreography terms we can conceptualize
it also in this way: the speed bump organizes our movement, it choreo-
graphs us. Latour (1993) used the theatre metaphor (actant), which has
been picked up by Verbeek (2005) and others in contemporary philosophy
of technology and earlier by those in STS (e.g., Pickering 1995). But if we
take a closer look at the metaphor used here, we find that the speed bump
is not so much an actant, since that would mean a kind of co-actor. Since
the speed bump, as Latour and Verbeek claim, tells us what to do (see
the following chapter), a better part of the theatre metaphor would be
to say that it is a director. The bump directs the act of driving. But if we
want to conceptualize the movement itself, an even more suitable meta-
phor is provided by choreography: the speed bump is a choreographer.
It organizes our movements as drivers. In particular, it directs the move-
ments of our legs, arms, and hands. For example, the driver may slow
down by putting less pressure on the accelerator or even by pushing the
brake. These are all movements. The choreography metaphor enables us
to look at the micro aspects and especially the movement aspect of what
technologies make us do. The actant term from Latour is about what
technologies do and (to some extent) about what they make us do but not
really about how they make us move. It is suitable for highlighting other
aspects, perhaps, but not so much for understanding what happens here
in terms of technology organizing our movements.
Note that movement must be seen in a holistic way. What the speed
bump does as choreographer is only part of a wider kinetic whole. There
are more moving humans and non-humans involved here. The choreog-
raphy of the speed bump is a delegated one. There is the human designer,
who has designed the speed bump by means of movement and who,
together with the authorities that employ the speed bump in order to
organize and control the movements of people, choreographs the move-
ments of the cars by means of the speed bump. However, the human
designer then disappears from the foreground and moves to the back-
ground or goes backstage; perhaps the choreographer is still at work but
is no longer visible. The speedbump becomes the (visible) choreographer,
directing the movements of the cars and their drivers. But there are also
the movements of the people who made the speed bump and the move-
ments of the trucks and equipment that was necessary for this. There are
the movements of other cars. There are many dancers and choreogra-
phers. There are choreographies of use but also choreographies of mak-
ing and development and choreographies of control and surveillance.
While Latour’s theatre metaphor can capture some of the performances,
it fails to show the kinetic aspects of the human-technology relations and
misses the choreographer’s role (or in his idiom: the director’s role—see
the next chapter).
This choreographical re-conceptualization of this stronger shaping role
of technology with regard to our movements can also be applied to the
use of contemporary digital technologies in order to highlight the latter’s
kinetic dimension. Games or virtual worlds obviously choreograph how
we move in those worlds. But digital technologies also direct and organ-
ize our movements in the so-called “real” world (and gaming is as real
as any other activity). Consider again the smartphone. There is the mak-
ing of the hardware, which involves labour understood as movements.
These movements are first choreographed by the engineers who designed
the machines and managers involved in the production, but then the
machine appears as choreographer on the scene, directing the movements
of human workers and their bodies. There is also the making of the soft-
ware: the designer of the phone and the developers of the apps choreo-
graph the user’s movements by inscribing the choreography into the code
of the operating system and the apps (done through the movement of writ-
ing). Once the phone and its software are developed, the human designers
and developers recede from view and we as users are confronted with
the choreographical normativity and hypothetical imperative of (the apps
and operating system of) our smartphone. The algorithm of the interface
tells us that if we want to use the phone, we have to do particular move-
ments with our fingers and hands, very specific gestures. The code tells
us how to move. The algorithm does not just tell the phone what to do;
it also choreographs us, directs, and organizes our movements. The code
may be authored by one, or typically more, several, humans, but then it
takes on its own agency: not as a co-actor or co-dancer but as a director
and choreographer. Similar points can be made for the mouse, the key-
board, and all kinds of user interfaces and artefacts in the world of digital
technology. It may be a delegated form of c horeography—perhaps the
real choreographer is the human being, for example the designer—but
it is a choreographic role nevertheless. Moreover, as this example shows
again, there are many choreographies connected to one kind of techno-
logical device. There is not only an artefact or a network of humans and
things, there are also particular ways these things and these humans and
things are linked, and one way is through movement. There is a kinetic
whole, a structure, and process of movement(s).
The example of production also shows that next to organizing our
micro-movements, such as the gestures to operate a mobile phone, tech-
nology can also organize our movements in the sense of choreographing
an activity and indeed an entire practice. It can organize our daily life in
its kinetic and other aspects. For example, a health app may encourage
you to run, perhaps at particular moments, with a particular frequency,
rhythm, speed, and so on. Or a hiking app, by monitoring and tracking
(and encouraging the sharing of data or transferring them somehow),
can also influence your actual movements and walks. A calendar app
choreographs the movements you make in the day: first get out of bed,
then move to the shower, go to the breakfast table, walk there, then take
this means of transport, move to that room, and so on. But the most
invisible, easily overlooked influence happens at the microlevel of bod-
ily movements, for instance when a smartphone shapes not only that
we do certain movements (e.g., a navigation app tells me to leave home
now and move to the tram stop) but also how we walk in the street, our
posture, our hand and eye movements, how we move in space, how we
interact with others, and so on. Consider people who sit at the kitchen
table or in a bar with their smartphones: they sit and interact differently
than without the technology because they make different movements.
The technology choreographs our movements, our lived spaces, our rela-
tionships with others, our lives. The design offers specific affordances and
shapes our practices and existence.
Another strong way of conceptualizing all these influences is to say
that the technology, as choreographer, controls us. Here issues concern-
ing surveillance are very relevant. Drawing on the phenomenology of
the body and commenting on tracking and monitoring practices, Tuuri,
Parviainen, and Pirhonen (2017) have argued that we are not in control
but that technologies control our moving bodies. Devices and other tech-
nological artefacts have an effect on how we move around: smart technol-
ogies “affect our bodily flow of everyday activities and movements—that
is, routines and everyday choreographies we regularly engage in, but
whose real contents and embedded meanings we rarely trouble ourselves
to become aware” (Tuuri, Parviainen, and Pirhonen 2017, 495). While
digital systems cannot understand “the lived-through gestural meanings
of the moving body” (496), they measure and model the body and they
influence our movements. Think again about the smartphone, which
“expects” specific gestures and movements, or biomonitoring devices
which are connected to embodied practices (Parviainen 2016). Not only
in our private life but also at work, such devices offer the possibility to
track yourself and others. For example, employers may want to moni-
tor the health of their employees (61). Other, non-digital and non-smart
technologies also organize our movements. Think again about the ham-
mer, which affords (and “expects”) a specific kind of movement of hands,
arms, and body. Or constructions on the street such as benches or plant-
ings may be used to choreograph drivers to slow down and give more
freedom to pedestrians (Tuuri, Parviainen, and Pirhonen 2017, 202).
Think also about the speed bump. But here the emphasis is on control,
tracking, and surveillance by digital technologies, which affords a specific
way of monitoring, influencing, and controlling movements. Maybe we
could say that the digital technologies enable a more “total” form of con-
trol and surveillance. “Every move you make” is recorded and becomes
part of an economy of data and control (which in turn can and has been
conceptualized in choreographical terms—see what follows).
However, it would be misleading to say that technology is the only
choreographer (just as it is misleading to say that technology is the only
actant). Clearly technology is not the only choreographer; humans are
also involved in various ways, most prominently as designers and devel-
opers but also in other ways. Consider a company that decides to use a
monitoring system for controlling its employees. Humans make that deci-
sion, not the technology. Moreover, one could say that it involves both
humans and things. Tuuri, Parviainen, and Pirhonen have argued that
the choreographies of our everyday life are co-constituted (497). This
approach, which looks at combinations of humans and non-humans, is
also influenced by Latour, who is well known in philosophy of technol-
ogy. In “Quantified Bodies in the Checking Loop”, Parviainen (2016)
explains that in these quantification processes, people, objects, and tech-
nologies enter in relations with one another and that human bodies are
also connected to technologies: “When digital technologies, action, and
materiality intertwine, human bodies do not remain independent enti-
ties from technologies. In this assemblage, embodied connections with
digital technologies modify physical and lived bodies, forming new kinds
of embodied practices” (Parviainen 2016, 62). The term assemblage is
used here to conceptualize that technologies shape new bodily practices
in ways that involve and connect humans and non-humans. Parviainen
says about running apps:
Although running with wearables mobilizes a new type of assem-

blage, it also changes the style of running when runners need to
check certain numbers and figures on their wristbands to adjust their
running speed. In this relational materialism, actants are managed to
make new relationships and form new running routines as embodied
practices.
(Parviainen 2016, 63)
However, it is not necessary to use the term “assemblages” or “act-

ants” to make this point. As I argued, the term actants may not tap into
the best available metaphor here. One better employs a dance metaphor
here: humans and non-humans co-choreograph. In any case, the point is
clear: both humans and non-humans shape how we move.
Moreover, in the context of biomonitoring and many other smart tech-
nologies, this “microlevel” choreography is also linked to what Parvi-
ainen calls the “macrolevel choreography of big data” (Parviainen 2016,
abstract). The “microlevel” embodied practice of biomonitoring is con-
nected to, and generates, the circulation of personal data; together this is
a feedback system (67). Parviainen writes:
Moving bodies, monitoring their health informatics on the screen,

can be seen to be involved in a much bigger loop beyond just a sim-
ple, personal, and intimate checking loop. This big loop concerns
feedback systems that are built from the big data of health informat-
ics and sent back towards customers.
Although the micro-macro distinction is maybe not so helpful here (I pro-

pose to simply talk about the movement of humans and the movement
of things, including data), this choreography-based approach (if neces-
sary at all in combination with theory from STS) thus helps us to craft a
new conceptual instrument to analyze and discuss the politics of digital
smart technologies. Rather than analyzing, for example, big data in terms
of “information” systems and “information” technologies, we can now
analyze the more embodied and choreographical aspects of what hap-
pens here and reflect on what Parviainen calls “the streams and traces of
big data and their connections to the affective microchoreographies of
users” (69). As users of smartphones and social media, for example, our
human bodily movements (e.g., movements needed to make a “click” or
running movements, perhaps one could also include emotions) are con-
nected to movements of data in various ways, which include feedback
loops. These choreographies are usually invisible to users, let alone that
all (human and non-human) choreographers are known. This presents a
problem for the responsible use of these technologies.
Parviainen’s approach to data is not entirely new. A decade earlier,
Kozel already wrote on wearable technologies and data choreography,
proposing a performative approach to wearables. She argued that “all of
our devices invite a set of physical gestures” and already pointed to data
choreographies, although at this point she talks about choreographing
one’s own data and in a postmodern voice emphasized the playful aspect,
rather than control, normativity, and power:
Choreographing the flow of data involves being aware of what it

is, who receives it, when and in what form, according to which
rhythm, and whether of narrative or affective quality. Choreograph-
ing my data, whether my movement patterns, my voice, my scribbled
thoughts, or my heart rate, is like saying I want to play with my data
and yours, to flirt with them and with you.
(Kozel 2007, 274)
A macro perspective on choreography as proposed by Parviainen and as

suggested by Kozel is helpful to bring in questions regarding control and
power. But the emphasis on data as the object of choreography sometimes
makes it seem as if it is no longer about concrete people and their bod-
ies. It is not only data that are choreographed; the main point is that we
and our bodies are choreographed through the technology and its data
circulation. A more posthumanist view à la Latour should not obscure
this. The point is, as Foucault already knew, that control is enacted upon
our bodies (Kozel 2007, 306). The ethical problem concerns the control
of people and their bodies; it’s not about data as such. But in spite of
his work on the disciplining of bodies, Foucault did not make a cho-
reographic turn and neither did, for instance, Deleuze in his interpreta-
tion of Foucault: while he mentions that power-relations move “in a field
of forces, marking inflections, resistances, twists and turns, when one
changes direction, or retraces one’s steps” (Deleuze 1988, 73), this dance
of power relations remains too abstract and I miss the concrete chore-
ography of bodily movement. How can Foucault be re-performed from
the perspective of a dance and choreography metaphor? Let me unpack
this and look at questions regarding ethics, power, and politics through
the lens of dance and choreography. Again it will become clear that the
metaphor is more than a metaphor: it makes sense to try to understand
actual (changes and transformations of) movement with technology and
choreographed by technology.
2.3. Ethical and Political Questions

While it is impossible to draw out all the ethical and political implica-
tions of the approach that is being developed here, we can explore some
routes in this direction. What may happen to our conceptualizations of
ethics and politics of technology when we employ the metaphor of dance
and choreography?
First, we can ask what a dance-, choreography-, and movement-
oriented approach can do for thinking about ethics and the good life in
relation to technology. In ancient and contemporary ethics the question
regarding how to live one’s life is usually asked in terms of virtue, that is,
in terms of personality, mental attitudes, and habits. Socrates, Aristotle,
and many philosophers after them recommended self-reflection and self-
control: know yourself and master yourself, interpreted in the cognitive
sense and in a dualist way, as control of the mind over body. But the
kinetic, or rather “kin-ethic” aspect of the good life is overlooked. What
does it mean to know and master yourself in terms of your bodily com-
portment and movements? What is the good kind of movements and of
movement habits? What is the good way of moving about? What does
human flourishing mean in terms of movement? Can virtue be related
to particular bodily skills that involve movement? What does the wis-
dom and phronesis of movement mean? Do we attain eudaemonia if we
choreograph our life well? What does that mean? And what is the role
that technology does and can play in all this? What is good movement?
(A modern question would be: what is right movement?) These ques-
tions are so new in the philosophical tradition that it is hard to find any
direct answer in a classic philosophical text; perhaps this is so since the
body and its movements were often not valued as much as reason/logos.
A performative and dance-inspired approach, by contrast, suggests a
very different, non-dualist way of formulating the question regarding
the good life. It is not a question about what the mind should do as
opposed to the body, but what we, as embodied and reflective beings,
should do in the sense of how we should move, what we should move,
who we should move, how should we choreograph our life and that of
others.
For the ethics of technology, this performative, movement-oriented
turn means that we must ask: how should we move with technology,
and should technology move us, or rather, how should it move us? Who
should we move with technology? By whom or what are we moved? For
example, are the ways we move around and move with other people (for
example in urban space) by and when using a smartphone or a car good
ways of movement? Does it lead to eudaemonia? What is the “good flow
of life” (to borrow an expression from the ancient philosopher Zeno)
with technology, in terms of movement and rhythm? What kind of dance
do we want to create together, and what kind of technologies do we
need for this? How should I move, and who or what has the power to
move us and organize our movements? And is it acceptable that we are
choreographed by a limited number of people located at high tech com-
panies, without our having a chance to participate in the choreography?
This question regarding power and control leads us to the next set of
questions.
Second, we can look at the politics of technology in terms of dance and
movement. Who or what choreographs whom? Who has the power to
choreograph? In the literature we find support for this kind of direction.
I already mentioned Tuuri, Parviainen, and Pirhonen (2017), who ask
the question “Who controls who?” I suggest that this approach gives us
a new tool to think about the politics of technology, this time focusing on
movement. To develop this thought, we need to connect more directly to
political philosophy and social theory.
Moving away from the macrolevel theories about power, Michel Fou-
cault already pointed to the micro-mechanisms of power: power that
resides (one could add: moves) in social relations, in institutions, and
even at the level of how the subject shapes itself. Foucault convincingly
showed that power is not only a matter of macrolevel political and eco-
nomic systems such as capitalism. He argued that power is omnipres-
ent “because it is produced from one moment to the next” (Foucault
1998, 93) and that there are “micro-mechanisms of power” (Foucault
1980, 101), for example in prisons and hospitals. But his focus was on
discourse and on the visual aspects of power: the Panopticon, a prison
architecture and technology that enables the guards to see the prisoners
but not vice versa, is all about who sees whom. Foucault was occupied
with the language games of power and used the metaphor of vision for
conceptualizing power relations. But we could extend Foucault’s frame-
work from vision to the kinetic aspects of power and politics, to the
micro-mechanisms of power conceptualized in terms of movement and
dance, to the kinetic conditions of possibility for the exercise of power.
And this can then be used for thinking about technology. A good exam-
ple from the past may be the Taylorist assembly line, which choreographs
the movements of the workers and the rhythm and routines of work, and
in this way exercises power over them (and enables humans to exercise
power over other humans). But the example of the smartphone gestures
also shows how there are kinetic micro-mechanisms of power embed-
ded in technological design, directing the movements of my fingers and
hands. And the discussion about surveillance and movement shows that
surveillance is not only a matter of seeing. For example, we may want
to re-conceptualize privacy: instead of “not being seen” or “not being
heard” by others (via the technology) it could also mean “not being
moved and choreographed” by others via the technology.
In light of the question regarding the good life, it may also be worth-
while to develop Foucault’s later work on care of the self in a more kinetic
and choreographic direction. Foucault defines technologies of the self as
a “matrix of practical reason” which enables individuals
to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain

number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, con-
duct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to
attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or
immortality.
(Foucault 1988, 18)
Here the emphasis is not on the exercise of power by others but in

self-constitution, self-transformation, and self-understanding: a “herme-
neutics” of the self (19). For that project Foucault mobilizes Stoic ascesis,
Epicurean exercises, and early Christian penance, including writing letters
to friends and hard sporting activities. I propose to interpret such prac-
tices as performances and as involving bodily movement. Think about
writing and sport. Epicurean gymnasia (37) and Stoic “mortification of
the flesh” (37) show that care of the self also has a kinetic, performative
dimension. In order to transform, the self has to be performed. This is
clear in contemporary social media, which involves writing and other
kinetic performances such as clicking that contribute to constructing the
self. Technologies such as paper (consider historical diaries) or digital
technologies provide a basis for such work on the self. Social media are
literally technologies of the self.
The idea that the self has to be performed is also present in another,
related direction of inquiry provided by feminist theory: Butler (1988)
is famous for her focus on performative acts, albeit her focus is mainly
on discourse (see my next chapter which employs the theatre metaphor).
But in terms of real bodily movement a very relevant article that looks
at what we could call the micro aspects of power and the politics of
movement is Iris Marion Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl” (1980). Young
comments on the question whether there is a difference in the manner
of throwing between men and women (or whether there are “feminine”
styles), and, if so, what explains the difference. Commenting on Simone
de Beauvoir’s view, she argues that such movements and identity are
socially and situationally constructed, rather than due to a mysterious
female essence (138). Whatever the right answer may be, it is very inter-
esting that Young presents the situatedness she argues for not as related
to an abstract kind of identity (e.g., only expressed in philosophical text)
but in relation to “the woman’s actual bodily movement and orientation
to its surroundings and its world” (139). The paper is concerned with
“the basic modalities of feminine body comportment, manner of moving,
and relation in space” (139) and how these relate to the social. It raises
questions about gender in a way that point to the gendered and socially
constructed ways of movement of everyone. How do you and I typically
move, and is this movement gendered? How does it relate to expecta-
tions and power structures in society? More generally, it raises the ques-
tion if and how everyone’s movements are socially constructed, what the
existential meaning is of our body, and if it is shaped by society. This is
a very helpful perspective for developing a politics of technology under-
stood as a politics of movement and choreography. Are our movements
choreographed in a gendered way, how do these choreographies relate
to societal power structures, and what is the role of technology in this?
Of course it is also possible to understand the politics of movement in
the sense of “movement with a political aim”, and in particular “chore-
ography with a political aim”. Parviainen (2010) has argued that bod-
ies have always been used as a political tool in activism. She analyzed
what she calls “choreographies of resistance” (311). In demonstrations
and performances, activists express their political ideas as gestures, pos-
tures, or kinaesthetic relations. Think about demonstrations: people use
their bodies to march on the streets. But the point is not about symbolic
representation, it is also and especially about movement and its impact
on the social surroundings. Parviainen rightly sees choreography and
dance as part of the social world, not restricted to a particular arts field
(312). She defines choreography broadly as referring to “all activities and
events in which movement appears as meaningful interactions and rela-
tions between various agents” (315). This focus on social choreography
(and use of phenomenology) enables her to analyze what she calls the
“kinaesthetic field” of protests, which has been neglected by political
theorists. She thus takes seriously the “movement” part of “social move-
ments”. Not only speech acts move or touch people; choreographies also
do something with us. And for political purposes the choreographies can
be carefully constructed or not.
Such choreographies, one could interpret her text as claiming, are
about both humans and non-humans. It crucially involves technologies,
such as tanks, climbing gear, and all kinds of material-social environ-
ments. Furthermore, it is interesting that for Parviainen “movement” in
social movement means both “inner” and “outer” movement, and so
also emotions and not just physical movements. Understood broadly,
then, what we could call political choreography is not only about moving
people in the sense of moving bodies but also about affecting and touch-
ing them (emotionally), exerting emotional influence on them. One could
say: it is about motion and emotion. Her use of the term “kinaesthetic
fields”, borrowed from Husserl, is a way to contribute to the deconstruc-
tion of the inner/outer and experience/movement duality:
Instead of focusing on ‘kinaesthetic experiences’ in the body, Husserl

suggests that the kinaesthetic system should be analysed as whole,
as ‘kinaesthetic fields’. Motion appears to us simultaneously in inner
and outer space. Within our capabilities of moving and understand-
ing movement, we are an inherent part of the moving world, moving
and being moved.
By using this concept, we can describe at the same time the “political,
emotional and social tensions” (321). For example, Parviainen describes
how Greenpeace activists and “the Tank Man” each in their own way
created their own choreography in response to dominant kinaesthetic
fields (construction sites and tanks rolling in the avenue), used the vulner-
ability of their body for political purposes, and “had effects on witnesses
by arousing strong emotions, encapsulating hopes and desires, construct-
ing interests and even defining new agents on the political stage” (326).
Another interesting example of choreography in a non-art context is
the flash mob, analyzed by Parviainen and Pirhonen (2013). Here, too,
the authors show how choreography is used to affect (literally) bodies.
They argue that most of our movements are pre-choreographed by the
environment, for example the urban environment, which we are a part
of. But flash mobs, whether for commercial or political purposes (the
authors talk about “kinaesthetic marketing”), disrupt the dominant cho-
reographies and seduce or force passers-by to respond to the moving
bodies. This kind of research makes us think again critically about how
we move, for example in public spaces, and who controls our move-
ments. It shows again the social aspect of movement and dance. And it
makes us reflect again on the influence of technologies, infrastructures,
and human-created environments on our kinaesthetic experience and
existence.
2.4. Choreography, Philosophy, and Technology

The metaphor of dance/choreography works in the context of what we
do with technology (and what technology does with us) because chore-
ography is a way of organizing movement, because our everyday lives
are made up of movement (among other things), and because technology
is not only a tool but also organizes us. Art and philosophical reflection
upon art practices such as dance and choreography can help revealing
this kinetic aspect of technology—and of human lives. In Strange Tools,
Alva Noë writes:
Technologies organize our lives in ways that make it impossible to

conceive of our lives in their absence; they make us what we are. Art,
really, is an engagement with the ways our practices, techniques, and
technologies organize us, and it is, finally, a way to understand our
organization and, inevitably, to reorganize ourselves. The job of art,
its true work, is philosophical.
(Noë 2015, xiii)
Choreographers, Noë writes, show us that dancing is not a special activ-

ity; we do it all the time. They show us the dancing aspect of our lives. The
choreographer “puts dancing itself on display”; choreography “exhibits
the place dancing has, or can have, in our lives” (Noë 2015, 13).
While I disagree with Noë’s view that art and dance are not technologi-
cal practices (xiii) and that technology is merely a precondition and not a
contribution to art (Noë 2015, 98)—in my view, the arts are technologi-
cal practices—his view that art operates at a meta-level just like philoso-
phy does is helpful. We are already dancing—all of us—and technology
choreographs us. Dance and choreography as art forms then perform a
philosophical function, as they reflect on that dancing and that role of
technology in our lives (16). Both choreography and philosophy are what
Noë calls “level-2” practices: they display and investigate level-1 organ-
ized activities and practices. Dance itself is a way of doing philosophy
of the moving body (43). The choreographical approach proposed by
Parviainen and Kozel, but also Noë’s focus on organization, are (part
of) such level-2 practices: they reveal us as moving and dancing beings
and offer what I, influenced by Wittgenstein, have called a relational and
holistic approach to what technology is and does (Coeckelbergh 2017).
Noë gives the example of door handles, which presuppose the kind of
bodies we have and entire ways of living, “a whole cultural and biologi-
cal stage” (Noë 2015, 22) or what Wittgenstein calls a form of life (see
also Coeckelbergh 2017).
This approach to thinking about technology, then, implies that new
technologies create new practices, new ways of doing things, new ways of
life, and new ways of thinking. For example, writing shapes our speaking
and thinking—whether as philosophers or artists. And revelations and
reflection on how technology choreographs us and indeed choreography
itself can indeed “loop back down”, as Noë puts it (Noë 2015, 31), to
the activities and practices under investigation and change, reorganize,
transform them. In this sense it is true that art and philosophy can change
the world.
Let us now turn to another set of performative embodied practices (to
use a term both Kozel and Parviainen employ), which also teaches us a
lot about who or what we are, about what we do with technology, and
about what technology does with us: theatre.
Note
1. “Moving Perception and the Logos of Dance: Reflections on Dance, Embodi-
ment, and Technology.” Invited talk delivered at Philosophy Institute, Univer-
sity of Stuttgart, 21 June 2012.
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3 Acting With Technology
How Machines Act and Direct Us
3.1. Introduction
In contrast to dance and music, theatre metaphors have already been
used for some time in thinking about technology, particularly in STS.
Bruno Latour is a prominent name in this area: consider actor-network
theory and his work with Madeleine Akrich on the semiotics of human/
non-human assemblies (Akrich and Latour 1992). In contemporary phi-
losophy of technology this work has been picked up by Peter-Paul Ver-
beek in order to argue that technology also has agency and mediates
our actions (Verbeek 2005). Andrew Pickering’s performance-oriented
approach (Pickering 1995, 2013) can also be interpreted as referring to
theatre, although as noted in the previous chapter his “dance of agency”
concept also has affinities with the metaphor of dance, of course.
But in the social sciences more broadly the metaphor has a longer his-
tory. An important milestone in sociology is Ervin Goffman’s work The
Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), which uses the metaphor
of theatre to understand the social life. In anthropology Victor Turner
(1986) and Richard Schechner (e.g., 1985, 1988) are known for address-
ing theatre, although in contrast to Latour’s use of the theatre metaphor
their work is mainly anthropology of performance and theatre. In femi-
nism and gender studies, Judith Butler’s argument about “performative
acts” and gender constitution (Butler 1988)—already mentioned in the
previous chapter—is well known. And often theatre also relies on lan-
guage and narrative. Here the work of John Austin (1962) and John
Searle (1975) on speech acts was pioneering, next to Searle’s work on
the construction of social reality by means of language use (Searle 1995,
2006). For narrative theory, Paul Ricoeur is a landmark name, in particu-
lar his work on Time and Narrative (1983; see also already 1980).
I will soon review these theories in more detail. Yet, as in the previous
chapter, I am not interested in the theories as such, but rather in using
them to better understand what we do with technology. And like the
previous chapter, my emphasis will be on what technologies do with us.
What does it mean to say not only that we act with technology but also
Acting With Technology 49
that technology acts? And are we the directors of our acts and plays, or
is technology increasingly directing us?
While some of these questions may sound familiar to philosophers
of technology, they often use the theatre metaphor without explicit and
systematic reflection on the metaphor and its application to technology.
This chapter aims to make full use of the metaphor and reveal and discuss
further implications for thinking about (the social life with) technology.
Moreover, in Verbeek’s use of the metaphor, the social aspect, inherent in
the metaphor, often vanishes from the stage. Therefore, instead of jump-
ing to thinking about technology, I propose to start with theory about
theatre and theory about the social that uses theatre and performance
metaphors. Then I will discuss what this implies for thinking about
technology, responding to work in STS and philosophy of technology,
but also going beyond it by means of a more systematic unpacking of
the metaphor. This will give us a broader framework, i.e., a broader
metaphorical-conceptual playing field, than the one provided by Latour
and Verbeek. Moreover, their approaches turn out to be limited to one
particular kind of application of the metaphor: the idea that technol-
ogy acts. But we also act with technology and technology can also be a
(co-)director and script writer, not only an actor. Moreover, I will argue
that both the language-oriented theatre theory and the artefact-oriented
theory about technology miss the dimension of the moving body, which
is always part of theatre and indeed of social life with technology. To
show the hermeneutic value of this approach, I will give examples from
the areas of social media and gaming (acting with technology) and robot-
ics and AI (technology acts, not only to shape our actions as co-actors,
say, acting alongside humans, but also instead of humans, taking over
particular characters and roles), and explore the idea of software as a
way of organizing behaviour (technology directs). The theatre metaphor
will also point us to the normative dimension of what technology does
with us, that is, of living “under” technologies.
In order to unpack the theatre metaphor and identify some philosophi-
cal issues that could be useful for thinking about technology, let us first
take a brief look at what philosophers have said about theatre.
3.2. Philosophy of Theatre and Theatre Theory:

A Very Brief Encounter
As Stern (2014) shows in his helpful introduction to philosophy of thea-
tre, it is not easy to define theatre. Theatre has a lot in common with
other performing arts. Usually there is a place where it happens, there
are human performers, and there is an audience; these are all typical
“elements” (Stern 2014, 1–2)—although all these are questioned today,
for example, when the play happens outside the classic theatre build-
ing, when robots “perform”, or when the audience participates in the
performance. The definition may also ignore non-Western forms of the-
atre. And, for example, puppet theatre or mime is also called theatre.
Sometimes theatre is based on text, but not always, as in improvisation
theatre (compare: improvised music that does not use a score). What
distinguishes theatre in the “narrow sense” (and perhaps: Western sense)
from dance and music is the emphasis on the spoken word (8). And like
questions in ontology of music (see the next chapter), there is also discus-
sion about the relationship between text and performance: is there some-
thing like a theatre work of which the performances are mere instances,
or is what counts the performance and is text less important, rendering
theatre more “akin to music and dance” (13)? My emphasis in this chap-
ter is on theatre as performance, but in order to develop the metaphorical
toolkit we need to go into the specific features of theatre. Two central
themes in philosophy of theatre have always been imitation and illusion.
This leads us straight into philosophy and in particular into the issue
regarding the relation between philosophy and theatre.
Traditionally, philosophy has not been very friendly to theatre and
the performing arts: it was usually supposed to be neither good nor true.
In the Republic, Plato famously argues against most forms of poetry,
including most forms of theatre. In Book II he writes that the poets write
stories full of “the greatest falsehood” (Plato 1997, 377e) and do not
represent the gods as they are (379a). Such poetry, he argues, should not
be used in the education of the young and the guardians (385c). Poetry
is a kind of imitation and is capable of imitating anything and anyone,
including “bad men” and “mad people” (395e–396a). This should be
avoided as it does not contribute to shaping the good character of the
guardians—or anyone else for that matter. We can infer that theatre, as a
form of poetry (for the Greeks poetry was understood as performed), is
not to be recommended to guardians of the city.
But Plato opposes theatre not only to the good but also to truth. Thea-
tre is only about appearances and illusion. The clearest illustration of this
point of view is the famous cave allegory in Book VII. Here Plato uses a
theatre and performance metaphor: a kind of puppet theatre, and almost
what we now might call cinema. The prisoners in the cave can only see
the projected shadows of objects, with a wall functioning as a “screen in
front of puppeteers above which they show their puppets” (514b). They
believe that the shadows are the truth, whereas the truth is elsewhere,
outside the cave where the sun shines. Theatre, then, is only a place for
appearances, not for truth. Theatre is about deception and falsehood. In
Book X, Plato further argues that poetry is in fact “far removed from
the truth” (598b) since it is only an image of an image: the objects we
create are already an imitation of nature, and hence theatre—for exam-
ple the tragic poets—is not more than an imitation of an imitation. It
is not serious, it is not true, and therefore it should be banned from the
city. Or more precisely, most of it, except the poetry that can contribute
to the good character of people: “hymns to the gods and eulogies to
good people are the only poetry we can admit into our city” (607a).
In the last chapter, we will see that Plato’s view of the relation between
theatre and philosophy is more complex. Consider for example his very
use of the theatre metaphor and indeed the dialogue form of his texts,
which is a theatrical device. Nietzsche has already pointed out that Plato
condemned tragedy but at the same time, as an (ex-)poet, created Pla-
tonic dialogue “hovering somewhere between narrative, lyric poetry and
drama” (Nietzsche 1993, 68–69), in other words, the novel. Moreover,
several philosophers including Derrida (1995) have commented on the
meaning of chora (χώρα) as used in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus: a some-
what mysterious notion sometimes translated as “receptacle”, “space”,
“mother”, or “earth”, which plays a role in Plato’s account of the uni-
verse as a space between the world of being and the world of becoming
and which might be etymologically linked to (the ground or space for)
ancient Greek theatre and dance. But generally speaking Plato’s view of
poetry and theatre as it emerges from the Republic is rather negative and
illustrates how and why many Western philosophers have either com-
pletely ignored or rejected theatre and performance.
Like Plato, Aristotle also thought that poetry is all about imitation,
but he had a more sympathetic view of theatre and taught about the
elements of theatre, particularly tragedy. In the Poetics, he argues that
tragedy is a mode of imitation (Aristotle 1984, 1447a15) and that this
kind of arts imitate in the sense that they represent actions, with agents
being either good or bad (1448a1). Tragedy is “the art [of] imitating by
means of action on the stage” (1459a15). The action is represented in
the plot, which is “the combination of the incidents, or things done in
the story”, and character is about the qualities we ascribe to the agents
(1450a5–6). Aristotle emphasizes that imitation is something natural
(1448b6) and that tragedy began in improvisations (1449a10). But as
staged drama, tragedy arouses pity and fear in the spectator. The emo-
tions can be aroused by the spectacle but also “by the very structure and
incidents of the play” (1453b1), which according to him is the better
way to do it. This pity and fear may lead to the “catharsis of such emo-
tions” (1449b28). What Aristotle means by this catharsis or “purifica-
tion” of emotions remains unexplained and has always been subject to
much discussion. Does it mean “purging” in the sense of getting rid of
an emotion? But where do these emotions come from: are they aroused
by the theatre or does the spectator have them before going to the the-
atre? Or does catharsis refer to some kind of religious “purification”?
But what does this mean? Getting “clearer” about one’s emotions? (For
more discussion, see Stern (2014, 151–55).) But it is clear that Aristo-
tle recommends theatre as a way to deal with our emotions and—if we
take into account his views on ethics—possibly also a way to become
more virtuous. And, in contrast to Plato, Aristotle thinks that poetry is
philosophical and serious since it is about things that might be and is
hence even “of graver import than history” (1451b5–6).
Note that Aristotle also wrote about language and its effects, in the
Rhetoric and the Poetics. I will say more about language below, since
it is also an important element in (Western) theatre. Seen in the light of
the previous chapter, however, the remarkably absent character in these
philosophical narratives and treaties about theatre so far is the human
body and its movements. It seems as if the actors considered by Plato and
Aristotle are disembodied agents, imitating actions and using words but
apparently having no fleshy and moving body to do so. The moving body
may well be assumed in these dialogues and texts; but it is not staged.
Today, performance theory remedies this problem. But the gap between
theatre and other forms of performance such as dance and music is still
often institutionally maintained: both in theory and in the world of the
arts there are separate discourses and stages.
Note also that it is not clear at all what “imitation” and “illusion” are
and mean in theatre, and whether they amount to deception. For example,
whereas Plato thought that theatre imitates the appearances of daily life,
Aristotle thought that theatre can also imitate things that do not exist or
did not happen (Stern 2014, 34). And as Stern helpfully shows, “illusion”
can mean many different things and does not necessarily imply deception.
For example, it can mean the illusions of the stage magician, which are
meant to deceive people and let them really believe that something did
(not) happen (and such illusions happen sometimes in the theatre—see
also later in this book), but it can also mean the “spell” of the theatre
(63), which does not necessarily involve deception: when asked whether
they were deceived, spectators would say that they do (did?) not really
believe that the events on the stage took place. The character is not really
mistaken for the actor and vice versa. But I used a question mark for
“did” since it is unclear if this is also true during the performance when
one is immersed in it. It is difficult to tell what the spectator believes (64).
On the one hand, there seems to be some deception possible since peo-
ple sometimes transfer qualities from the character on stage to the actor
(61–62), but, on the other hand, the fact that spectators actively engage
with the play and seem to give their consent to being part of the illusion
suggests “that the spectator is not deceived” (65).
There are more views about theatre in the history of philosophy, of
course. Many are distrustful of theatre; only few are positive. For exam-
ple, Nietzsche’s love of tragedy found expression in The Birth of Trag-
edy. Although he is sometimes said to be anti-theatre, he was one of the
only major modern philosophers who took theatre seriously and who
disagreed with Plato that theatre is not about truth. Nietzsche had also a
more positive view of the body, imagining the origin of the tragic chorus
in “those centuries when the Greek body flourished” (Nietzsche 1993, 7).
Against Platonism, Christianity, and the romantic German theatre of this
day, he tried to imagine a music and a theatre that is not longing for
a truth behind appearances and that is not romantic but what he calls
“Dionysiac” (10). Such a music and theatre would not be opposed to life,
art, and the body. In the Dionysian festivals, he imagined, there would
have been “an extravagant lack of sexual discipline” and a “mixture
of lust and cruelty” (19). The Apollonian narrative order that Aristotle
(and below: Ricoeur) describes may well be a feature of staged tragedy
of late ancient Greek times and today. Nietzsche suggests that its origin
is Dionysian, that is, far more chaotic and bodily and, indeed, far more
tragic. He argued that Plato and Aristotle, and later modern theatre and
philosophy, forgot this tragic element and also the music that was part of
the Dionysian rituals. Song and dance were ignored in favour of plot and
character (Stern 2014, 69); if Nietzsche is anti-theatre at all, it is against
such a theatre that he argued, not against theatre in general. He also
argued that, while theatre is also about illusion, it can also show truth:
tragedy teaches us something about life. Tragedy shows the Schopen-
hauerian truth that life is full of suffering and that in reality we are not
individuals but one being. But to protect people from this inconvenient
truth, it is clothed in Apollonian illusion (they think it only happens to
others). Since it happens in theatre, this truth is bearable (Stern 2014,
69). As in Plato, here views about the theatre are firmly connected to
metaphysical views and other philosophical views, and in such a way that
shows a clear interest in theatre.
There are also philosophers who used theatre metaphors without
reflecting too much on the metaphor they were using, such as Hume, who
in his Treatise of Human Nature compared the mind to a theatre: “The
mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make
their appearance” (Hume 2000, 165). The metaphor continues to play a
role in philosophy of mind today. Consider, for example, Dennett’s rejec-
tion of the “Cartesian theatre”. But these are not views about theatre and
do little to fully use, let alone stretch, the metaphor.
This overview of philosophical views of theatre is of course (too) brief.
(For a more detailed and comprehensive overview see, for example, Stern
2014.) Nevertheless, there are already a few lessons to learn from this
brief encounter with ancient philosophy of theatre for thinking about
technology.
First, Plato’s rejection of theatre explains why the theatre metaphor
has always been met with suspicion by philosophers, and hence why its
application in philosophy of technology is not obvious. For example, in
discussions about new technology there are a lot of worries about decep-
tion and about leaving reality, which turn out to be Platonic worries. In
discussions about ethics of robots and ethics of games Plato seems still
very much alive. To use the theatre metaphor in describing how we live
with technology, then, might be seen as siding with the enemies of good
and truth.
Second, Aristotle and Nietzsche suggest that, once we leave our Pla-
tonic hesitations behind, there may be a lot to be learned, not only about
theatre but also about human life itself. Does life itself also have a dra-
matic, sometimes tragic structure? Does it also have a plot with events
and characters? Philosophers such as Ricoeur and MacIntyre, who, to
use Nietzsche’s words, focused on the Apollonian elements of the theatre,
suggest that there is a relation between narrative and life. Ricoeur’s nar-
rative theory (Ricoeur 1983), for example, was inspired by Aristotle and
uses the concepts of mimesis and plot. It is an important contribution
to hermeneutics. But is theory about narrative structure only relevant
to texts and theatre or is it also helpful to understand how we live? And
what does all this mean for thinking about technology? In the remainder
of this chapter I hope to show that, even if we retain some sense of thea-
tre as imitation, it is worth exploring what it means to use theatre as a
metaphor for (the social) life, including living with technologies and per-
haps being lived by technologies. And, as this brief exploration of ancient
views on theatre already shows, using the metaphor of the theatre, that
is, crossing the theatre/life border, also helps us to introduce some per-
ennial philosophical questions regarding imitation and representation,
truth, etc., into discussions about technology. Let us first consider some
theory that uses the metaphor of theatre for understanding the social life,
including Ricoeur’s work but also work from sociology, analytic philoso-
phy, and feminism. Then I will extend the metaphorical bridge to think-
ing about technology.
3.3. The Social as Theatre

Can we understand the social life by using the metaphor of theatre? Life
in general has often been compared to theatre. Shakespeare famously
wrote in As You Like It:
All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts
Or, in The Merchant of Venice:
I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;

A stage where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.
But what does the metaphor deliver for thinking about the social life?
Let me first consider two connections between theatre and the social that
focus on language—language as narrative structure and language as the
use of words (with the grammatical structure of declaration)—but do
not go all the way to understanding everyday life by means of the thea-
tre metaphor. Then I will turn to work in sociology and gender studies,
which makes a closer connection.
Ricoeur: From Greek Theatre to Narrative Theory

Ricoeur’s narrative theory is influenced by Aristotle (and by Augustine,
in particular his interest in temporality), and is thus indirectly indebted
to thinking about the theatre. What is narrative? For Ricoeur, narrative is
very much linked to the social. In contrast to scientific time, it represents
social and public time; it is the time of “being-with-others” (Ricoeur
1980, 188). It is human time. It is also crucial for the making of mean-
ing. What we do when we narrate is that we create a plot: “the intel-
ligible whole that governs a succession of events in any story” (171). By
organizing otherwise unrelated events into a plot, we thus create mean-
ing, make sense. Action and events become meaningful through our use
of language, including narrative. Our experience is always mediated by
narrative and, more generally, by the use of language. But narrative is
not the action; it is its imitation. In the first volume of Time and Narra-
tive (1983), Ricoeur uses Aristotle to argue that the plot is the imitation
(mimesis) of action (Ricoeur 1983, xi) and that it entails the organization
of events in a plot. Developing Aristotle’s writings on tragedy in the Poet-
ics, Ricoeur argues that in narrative there is mimesis in three senses and in
the following order: first, a reference to familiar pre-understanding, then
poetic composition, and finally a reconfiguration of the pre-understood
order of action (xi). Narrative is thus imitation, but Ricoeur shows that
it is also connected to real life and experience in that it refers to our
pre-understanding and transforms lived experience and practice. For
example, tragedy, that specific form of poetry and theatre Aristotle wrote
about, has the capacity to configure characters and events into a mean-
ingful whole (emplotment) and this transforms our understanding. Or,
more precisely: there is a chronology of events, but there is also a mean-
ingful a-chronological whole: in the end there is a resolution and we see
the narrative as a meaningful whole; we see that the story makes sense.
This then helps us to better understand the social world, which closes the
hermeneutic circle. Moreover, to act is always to act with others (55).
The narrative process is always social. Ricoeur’s view thus supports the
idea that there is a link between theatre and everyday life: theatre is also
social, and as narrative it has the capacity to reconfigure our lived time
and experience. Narrative, then, is not only something that happens in
the theatre; it is a crucial part of the public life and meaningful existence.
It does not imitate the social in the sense of “representing” or “copying”
the social; through mimesis in the Aristotelian and Ricoeurian sense, it
actually (re)configures it. This closes the hermeneutic circle.
Thus, while Ricoeur still separates narrative and the social, both are
connected since narrative gives meaning to the social life and transforms
it. Theatre can be seen as one form narrative takes and as a transforma-
tive imitation.
Austin and Searle: Speech Acts

Another way to connect theatre with the social—again via thinking about
language—is to interpret and use Austin and Searle. Here the focus is not
on narrative but on the use of words, in particular the performative use
of words, although it is also about the structure or grammar of language.
If one were to make a link to Aristotle here, it would be the Rhetoric
rather than the Poetics. Moreover, in contrast to Ricoeur, here the social
world is also made by language, but in a far more direct and simpler, non-
hermeneutic way. And important for the purpose of this chapter: their
thinking also draws on theatre, albeit implicitly. As Butler has remarked,
philosophers like Searle “do have a discourse of ‘acts’ that maintains
associative semantic meanings with theories of performance and acting”,
although they “rarely think about acting in the theatrical sense” (Butler
1988, 519), that is, they do not explicitly reflect on the theatre metaphor
they are using. But we can do better.
Austin and Searle developed speech-act theory, which holds that speech
acts do not just represent the world but also create social reality. We “do
things with words”, as Austin said (Austin 1962), and this includes what
Searle called creating “social facts”. According to Searle, we collectively
give a certain status to a person or object. For example, we collectively
give a function to money (Searle 2006, 17). This happens by means of
agreement and declaration: we declare that a particular object or person
has a specific status. Now one could interpret this view as involving a
theatre/performance metaphor. Declaration can be understood as a per-
formative act, in particular a speech-act that has the grammatical form
of a declaration or “status function” (18). The thought experiment Searle
stages involves a kind of “original position” (to use a Rawlsian term) in
which there is an original performance or ritual, an original speech-act by
the collective: a collective declaration that gives a status to an object or
person. Afterwards the object (e.g., money) or person then performs that
function in society. Thus, according to this interpretation there is a link
between theatre and everyday social life in the sense that the latter must
be supposed to be shaped by performative use of language, including,
first, a kind of original position or one might say a “declaration theatre”
in which agreement on a specific function takes the form of the speech-
act of declaration and, second, performances (by humans and objects)
that maintain this function and hence uphold the social institution.
Coming from very different traditions, these theories thus make links
between, on the one hand, theatre and performance (theatre, text, and
language use) and, on the other hand, the social. However, in Ricoeur
and in Searle there is still a significant gap between both. Yet it is also
possible to create more direct bridges between the two and understand
and interpret the social as performance and theatre. One could attempt
to make full use of the theatre metaphor and harvest more of its herme-
neutic power in order to better understand the social.
Some of this work has been done in sociology and anthropology, by
authors such as Goffman, Turner, and Schechner.
Goffman, Turner, and Schechner: Sociological and

Anthropological Uses of the Theatre Metaphor
In his seminal The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956), Erv-
ing Goffman interpreted everyday social life as staged performance and
(theatre) play. When we appear before others, he argues, we wish to
control the impression the other receives. This presenting ourselves and
our activities before others is a matter of performance; it is a “drama-
turgical” problem (Goffman 1956, 8). Performance and theatre, then,
should be studied by sociologists, since performance occurs “everywhere
in social life” (8). We present ourselves before others, in a particular
“setting” with furniture, decor, and all kinds of other background items
(13). Social relationships arise when there are routines. The same part
is played to the same audiences on different occasions (8–9). People cre-
ate an appearance that communicates their social status to others. This
appearance or “front” is usually not new but is already given in society;
it is already connected to a role. Actors take up established social roles
for which “a particular front has already been established for it” (17).
People play different roles, as in a professional environment there is a
different role to be played than at home. One can invest more in one role
or one routine than in others. And when one performs, one hides one’s
variable “moods and energies that change from one moment to the next”
and rather tries to “give a perfectly homogeneous performance at every
appointed time” (36). Some people are better performers than others.
Some performers delude their audiences. And in economic services, Goff-
man observes, often the stress is on performance rather than the quality
of the product, since “poor quality can be concealed but not slow ser-
vice” (28). More generally, he notes that there is a tendency to focus on
performance and communication rather than the work-task (43). Thus,
Goffman has a descriptive view—he re-describes the social life in terms
of theatre—but also a normative view: we focus too much on appearance
and performance. The latter is the Platonic dimension of the book. But
let us stick to his (re-)description.
People are also co-performers, in the sense that there are always other
performers at work but also that we often perform together with oth-
ers. Goffman uses the term “team”: people stage similar or dissimilar
performances “which fit together into a whole”, creating “an emergent
team impression” (49). When one member makes a mistake, the person is
not punished until the audience is no longer present (55). Team members
will be selected if they “can be trusted to perform properly” (56). Audi-
ences are not entirely passive but present their own team-performances
(58), even if they are not in face-to-face contact (106). Think about clap-
ping, for example: this is a performance by the audience.
Interestingly, while Goffman distinguishes between “our all-too-human
selves and our socialized selves” (3) and, as said, at times still suggests
a Platonic way of thinking, when it comes to the social life, he does not
make a sharp difference between performance and reality. Instead, he
seems to adopt a performative view of reality. Giving the example of a
wedding party, he writes:
To stay in one’s room away from the place where the party is given,
or away from where the practitioner attends to his client, is to stay
away from where reality is being performed. The world, in truth, is
a wedding.
(Goffman 1956, 23)
That being said, there is what he calls backstage and frontstage. Some
things cannot be treated openly (42), some parts of the cooperation that
makes possible the performance may be concealed (64), and each team
has their secrets (87). And one may need a break from frontstage perfor-
mance. Backstage, the actor can “take his jacket off, loosen his tie, keep
a bottle of liquor handy” (77), etc.; one needs relaxation (82). Behaviour
and language may differ considerably. For example, backstage language
may include first-naming, informal dress, sloppy posture, shouting, and
so on, whereas frontstage behaviour and language will tend to avoid this
(78). Backstage one can also change between performances, getting ready
for taking on another personal front and role (84). And one can share
experiences and secrets. For example, colleagues may not be teammates,
but generally “present the same routine to the same kind of audience”
and can share some things that they hide for the audiences (102); solidar-
ity can develop. Access to backstage is controlled in order to prevent the
audience from seeing it (152).
Goffman also notes that there can always be performance disruption:
“unmeant gestures, inopportune intrusions, faux pas, and scenes” (134).
Performance requires discipline. Luckily, if something goes wrong, the
audience may protect the maintenance of a show “by exercising tact or
protective practices on behalf of the performers” (149). Again one could
say that the audience co-performs.
And then last but not least there is the aspect of direction: individu-
als may attempt to direct the activity of others “by means for exam-
ple, of enlightenment, persuasion, exchange, manipulation, authority,
threat, punishment, or coercion” (154). But even if someone “has” for-
mal power, power needs to be performed: “Power of any kind must be
clothed in effective means of displaying it, and it will have different effects
depending upon how it is dramatized” (154). Even physical coercion,
according to Goffman, is often “a means of communication, not merely
a means of action” (155).
This emphasis on performance does not imply that there are no moral
standards, but rather that “qua performers, individuals are concerned
not with the moral issue of realizing these standards, but with the amoral
issue of engineering a convincing impression that these standards are
being realized. . . . As performers we are merchants of morality” and
“the very obligation and profitability of appearing always in a steady
moral light, of being a socialized character, forces us to be the sort of per-
son who is practiced in the ways of the stage” (162). Thus, we can infer
that as social beings, we are busy with putting on a moral appearance, or
rather, a moral performance.
To conclude, according to Goffman, as social and socialized beings, we
are always performing in the sense that we are always playing a role. As
Schechner summarizes his view:
By means of roles people enacted their personal and social realities

on a day-to-day basis. To do this, they deployed socio-theatrical con-
ventions (or “routines”) even as they devised personae (sometimes
consciously, mostly without fully being cognizant of what was hap-
pening) adapted to particular circumstances.
(Schechner 1988, x)
And we could add: people also enact and perform morality.

In response to Goffman, however, one could point out that there are
also differences between theatre and social life. First, while from a social
scientist, that is, observatory third-person perspective it may well be true
that we all perform, from a first-person perspective we believe that we
really are the character, whereas in the theatre the actors (and the audi-
ence) know that they are not the character. As Sartre—who was also
a playwright and did have to say a lot about theatre as philosopher—
argued, “Kean is not Hamlet, and he knows it and knows that we know
it” (Sartre 1976, 160); see also Levy 2017). For example, when some-
one performs as a medical doctor, both the doctor and the patient really
believe that she is a doctor. Consider also again the discussion about
illusion in theatre: the social life seems not to involve the “spell” of the
theatre and no illusion in the sense that the doctor really is the doctor.
Nevertheless, one could stress with Goffman that the roles (e.g., doctor
and patient) still need to be performed and that it is still a role differ-
ent from other roles the person might have (e.g., friend, mother, partner,
etc.). And perhaps there is some kind of spell in play in the social life. For
example, when patients see the doctor in a very different context, when
she is not playing her role (e.g., when they see her in a bar or she posts
about her holidays on social media), something of the “spell” connected
to the professional performative role and context may be gone. Second,
whereas in conventional theatre there is a sharp distinction between
actors and audience, in social life we are both actors and audience: audi-
ence of the acts of others. Hence social life is perhaps more comparable
to participatory and interactive forms of theatre, where the distinction
actors/audience is blurred. Note that we are also audience of our own
acts, but this is similar to actors in the theatre. This is also true for moral
performances: we are not only watched by others, we also watch our-
selves, i.e., our own behaviour.
In cultural anthropology, there is also work on theatre and perfor-
mance, although it is often anthropology of theatre, not so much use of
the theatre metaphor to understand social and cultural life. For example,
Victor Turner’s The Anthropology of Performance (1986) analyzes some
situations and rituals in terms of their dramatic character, especially those
he characterizes as crises in social interaction. But he does not go as far
as Goffman, who sees all social interaction as staged. Richard Schechner,
one of the founders of performance studies who was influenced by Goff-
man and Turner, turned things around: he tried to understand theatre by
using anthropological concepts. Rites should be understood performa-
tively, but the performing arts should also be brought “in active relation
to social life, ritual, play, games, sports, and other popular entertain-
ments” (Schechner 1988, xi). An excellent example of a meeting point
between theatre and ritual are of course the Dionysian rituals/theatre,
very important in the (Western) history of theatre and the history of
philosophy (see Nietzsche). According to Schechner, such rituals share
characteristics with theatre, sports, games, and play. He argues that they
share the following qualities: “1) a special ordering of time; 2) a special
value attached to objects; 3) non-productivity in terms of goods; 4) rules.
Often special places—non-ordinary places—are set aside or constructed
to perform these activities in” (Schechner 1988, 8). For example, ritual
separates itself from clock time and productive work. Theatre also does
this. It also takes place in specific performance spaces. This approach
thus gave a new, broader interpretation of theatre. But Schechner, too,
focused only on a limited range of (ritualistic) activities, not on the social
life as a whole. There is also performance in professional contexts and in
all kinds of spaces. Yet even though they did not go as far as Goffman,
these authors still contributed to giving performance and theatre a more
inclusive meaning. Schechner writes:
Theater is only one node on a continuum that reaches from the ritu-
alizations of animals (including humans) through performances in
everyday life—greetings, displays of emotion, family scenes, professional
roles, and so on—through to play, sports, theater, dance, ceremonies,
rites, and performances of great magnitude.
(Schechner 1988, xvii)
This broad interpretation of theatre, which continues its life in contem-

porary performance studies, makes it easier for us today to use the meta-
phor of theatre to describe social life. Social life is full of performance
and theatre, in the sense that people play roles and enact various char-
acters in different settings and spaces, and even do moral performances.
And some performances take the form of ritual.
Butler: Performing Our (Gender) Identities

Another interesting source for understanding social life through use of
the theatre metaphor can be found in feminist and gender studies litera-
ture, in particular in Judith Butler’s famous essay “Performative Acts and
Gender Constitution” (1988), also from the 1980s. Against naturalist
and essentialist accounts of gender, Butler argues that our social identity
is always a performed identity. According to her, gender is not something
stable or essential but rather is always enacted. It requires the “stylized
repetition of acts” (Butler 1988, 519). Identity, including gender iden-
tity, is constructed in the sense that is performed. It is “a performative
accomplishment” (520). That identity then becomes “a compelling illu-
sion” (520) that is socially sanctioned: those who “fail to do their gender
right” are punished (522). Gender is an act; we “do” our gender, and
we do so within the context of cultural norms, for example norms that
favour heterosexuality (525). Butler thus straightforwardly uses theatre
metaphors and explicitly refers to the theatre: “the acts by which gen-
der is constituted bear similarities to performative acts within theatri-
cal contexts” (521). In her case, the metaphor helps her to go beyond
the methodological individualism of classic phenomenology. Theatre
is social and political. There are already scripts. At the same time, it
requires individual actors to actualize and enact the script. Moreover, it
requires repeated performance. Interestingly, here Butler quotes Turner:
this is a case of ritual social drama. And contra Goffman, she argues
that this is not only about outward role playing; through the acting, gen-
der also becomes psychological interiority (528). People believe in (their)
gender as if it was an essence. Thus, according to Butler, there is not
first an interior gender, which is then expressed in performance. Instead,
gender is constituted through the performance, including the psychologi-
cal illusion of its essence. The gestures and the body express “nothing”
(530); one could say that they create something. And if gender is about
performance, this conception gives room for improvisation (531). People
can try, play, explore. Although there is social pressure, their gender and
identity are not fixed.
Butler thus effectively uses performance and theatre metaphors to
perform a philosophical operation that moves away from essentialist,
expressivist, and individualist accounts of gender and identity. This once
again brings theatre and the social life closer together.
However, I wonder if the metaphor has been fully used and devel-
oped. Many of the accounts discussed so far focus on language or role
play. But where are the body and bodily movement? Butler mentions
“bodily gestures” (Butler 1988, 519); the acts through which gender is
constituted are corporeal acts and “one does one’s body” (521). This
remark is important, since it makes a link between performance and the
body, which effectively makes a switch from the body as thing/object to
the body as performance. But there are no phenomenological descrip-
tions and there is not much to be found on movement. Generally, in
the texts presented so far, the bodily and kinetic aspect is absent from
their approaches to theatre. This bodily and kinetic aspect was better
represented, of course, in the theory on dance we reviewed and used in
the previous chapter. But there is no reason to limit accounts of bodily
movement to the area of dance: theatre, too—and hence also the social
theatre—is not only a matter of role play but also of bodily movement.
Both dance and theatre, considered as practices and performances rather
than as texts or other objects, have a kinetic (and indeed role playing)
aspect. The social life is a matter of what role we play and what iden-
tity we enact, but it is also a matter of how we move. The “front” that
Goffman talks about, the appearance we present to others, is not only a
matter of discourse; it is also a matter of how we move. With regard to
gender, for example, think again about Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl”:
social life, including gender understood as social interaction and social
identity, is about the words we use, about the roles we play, and about
the narrative(s) we play out and constitute with our performances, but it
is also about the (micro-)movements we all make.
Moreover, what is certainly missing so far is materiality and technol-
ogy. Goffman mentions the stage and artefacts used on stage such as
furniture. But there is no systematic account of the role of technology in
the theatre and the social life, let alone a metaphorical bridge to under-
standing our relation to technology. For this purpose, we turn to some
authors in STS and philosophy of technology that have made use of the
theatre metaphor to say something about technology, albeit usually with-
out being very upfront and self-reflective about the use of that metaphor.
3.4. Using the Metaphor of Theatre for Thinking

About Technology as a Social Practice
I just took a detour, since it was not about technology but about thea-
tre, but it was meant to be a productive detour. To think about tech-
nology through the metaphor of the theatre is very much in the spirit
of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, which recommends taking a detour through
language, for example, through metaphor. According to Ricoeur, meta-
phor plays a crucial role in the creation of (new) meaning and helps us
to better understand reality. As Kaplan explains, for Ricoeur it is a form
of creative discourse that enables us to learn something about reality and
in the end transform ourselves and even reveal new possibilities of exist-
ence (Kaplan 2003, 48). Indeed, in The Rule of Metaphor Ricoeur argues
that metaphor has the power to “redescribe reality” (Ricoeur 2003, 5),
similar to poetic discourse (282). This is the power of the hermeneutics
of metaphor. Of course it is a challenge to do it well. To metaphorize
well, according to Aristotle and Ricoeur, is to perceive the similar in dis-
similars. In this kind of semantic innovation and imagination understood
as a “seeing as”, as Ricoeur calls it, inspired by Wittgenstein, there is
always “a tension between identity and difference”. (Ricoeur 2003, 4)
So what does it mean to compare technology to theatre? What are the
similarities? What is “seeing technology as theatre”? Or better, in order
to move beyond the seeing metaphor: how can we perform (the concept
of) technology as theatre? What can be gained by using the metaphor?
Technology as Theatre: Separate World Versus Same World

In analogy to the metaphysics of the theatre we can have at least two dif-
ferent approaches to technology. First, technology can be seen as belong-
ing to a separate world, just as for Plato, Aristotle, Ricoeur, and indeed
for most philosophers, theatre belongs to a separate world. The question
is then whether that other world is entirely separate and an illusion, if it is
problematic, and if it is a case of deception and is opposed to the truth, as
Plato argued, or if there is in fact a closer relation between the two worlds
and if there is at least the potential of a productive and ethically beneficial
transfer, perhaps even a transformation of meaning and possibilities of
existence, as in Aristotle and Ricoeur (and, one could say, in Nietzsche).
Consider discussions about the internet, social media, or violent com-
puter games: often the “digital world” or the “virtual” world of games
is presented as another, illusory world. That world is then contrasted
with the real world: the offline world, the world outside the game. Or a
distinction is made between the world of, say, Facebook, and the “real”
world. One can also consider discussions about care robots and other so-
called social robots: the robots are seen as deceiving their users. Hence
gamers and users of robots (and earlier TV audiences) are seen in the
role of the prisoners in Plato’s cave. Chained to the technology, they are
victims of deception. They live in the world of appearances. The philoso-
pher, in the role of ethicist of technology, then takes upon herself the task
to liberate them, or at least to call for a liberation. The illusion created
by the technology theatre is here seen as leading to deception, as opposed
to the truth.
If one takes a more Aristotelian approach, however, one may also point
to potential benefits coming from the world of technology. For example,
if gaming can really lead to real violence, then the opposite is also pos-
sible: there can be games that lead to benefits in the real world. Perhaps
games can make one more virtuous rather than less. And just as the thea-
tre can lead to catharsis, the technologies—through their narratives—
could also have similar benefits. (And, in a Nietzschean vein, maybe
games could reveal the true nature of human life and existence.) There
seems no reason in principle why tragedy, which rests on techniques of
emplotment and imitation studied by Aristotle and Ricoeur, needs to be
confined to the theatre stage.
But technology can also be seen as a belonging to the same world, just
as theatre belongs to the same (social) world according to Goffman and
Butler. This view opens up a different kind of investigation of technology,
which sees technology as part of the lifeworld. Rather than crossing the
theatre/technology barrier, it is productive and fruitful to instead delete
it. If we make this move, we can make full use of the metaphor: we
can use all the characteristics described in the previous sections: appear-
ance and illusion, imitation, catharsis, narrative and transformation, role
playing, ritual, etc., for understanding social life with technology. More
precisely: we can use the theatre metaphor for conceptualizing what we
do with technology in a way that puts the use of technology in the con-
text of social and cultural practice (see also Coeckelbergh 2017). Tech-
nology then becomes a tool on the social stage (and, as I will argue,
more than a tool). I will argue that this is true for technologies usually
seen as “virtual” or “digital”, such as games and social media, but also
for other technologies. Both so-called “virtual” life and so-called “real”
life involve performances with technologies. Analyzing both from a per-
formative perspective blurs the boundaries and enables us to ask differ-
ent, non-Platonic questions.
What We Do With Technology (in the Social Theatre)

We can indeed use technology to create illusions and imitations and to
create stories. However, against a Platonic view, we could see this not as
setting up an unreal, untrue, and bad world against a real, true, and good
one but as a normal part of everyday social play. As Goffman argued,
we present ourselves to others and we create appearances as part of our
social roles. As Butler argued, we construct and perform our identities.
As Ricoeur suggested (but maybe did not sufficiently emphasize), we cre-
ate narratives in our social lives. Now we can add that technologies are
often used as tools for role playing, appearance creations, identity perfor-
mances, and narrative creations. This includes low tech such as clothes,
status objects, and material architectures that set the stage but also high
tech such as computers, chat and email programs, social media, gaming,
and all kinds of so-called “online” activities and environments. These are
all performances with technology. Some of these performances can have
a ritualistic aspect and happen at specific time and places, for example
the ritual of playing a particular game with particular people at a spe-
cific time, but often these activities take place throughout everyday life.
Whether or not there is some kind of inner core, fixed personality, unique
soul, or natural basis (e.g., whether or not we agree with Butler that
there is nothing to express—consider also Schopenhauerian, Buddhist,
and perhaps Foucaultian views), as social beings we perform who we are,
we perform the social roles we have, we create narratives about ourselves
and others, and we use technologies as tools to do this. As social beings
we are actors, and as actors we make use of various technologies (new
and old) as tools in and for our acting.
A good example of social theatre and social performances with tech-
nology is role playing in computer games. In game studies several authors
have argued that in and through the gameplay—which is technologically
mediated—gamers perform roles and identities. For example, influenced
by Butler, Harper (2013) has argued that fighting gameplay in fighter
games is a type of identity performativity. Because of Butler’s influence,
the model is still discourse, but some have referred directly to theatre met-
aphors. Fernández-Vara (2009) has argued that the player is a performer
(and spectator of her own interactions and those of others). Games can
also have large audiences, for example when fighter games are watched
by many people. And the social theatre aspect is especially clear in mas-
sively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), in which the
social interaction is all about playing roles. These can be different roles
than in “real” life and some players may express themselves in ways they
may not feel comfortable doing in “real” life (Cole and Griffiths 2007).
But they might also simply have fun playing different roles. However,
such computer games are not special when it comes to performing with
technology. We play a role and perform our identities in social life in gen-
eral, and technologies are means and media we use for this. In this sense,
both “real” places such as homes or workplaces and so-called “virtual”
or “digital” spaces such as games or online social media are multiplayer
role playing games, understood as performative practices.
Moreover, when as actors we also respond to other actors, we may
cooperate or compete with them. We can use technology to communi-
cate, of course, but this communication can also have a performative
aspect: it can do something or be intended to have the other person do
something. Consider again the performative use of language as theorized
by Austin and Searle. Language is a technology, but all technologies can
be used to perform and to have others perform, often but not necessar-
ily in combination with language. For example, I can send an email to a
co-worker to ask that person to do something. Or the email itself does
something, for example, it may declare that person X now has the role A.
Social media can be used to make other people think and do something.
Some people try to influence and shape entire meanings and narratives.
And within the gameplay of MMORPGs and other games, players may
try to have other players (or non-human players that appear human) do
things by means of language or other technologies.
Note that in the social media theatre there is of course some degree
of illusion, but this illusion is not necessarily a form of deception. Of
course it is always possible that people use tricks to present themselves
in different roles than they have in the social life. But usually there are
non-deceptive performances, now mediated by the technology. If there is
a “spell” created by the technology, it is a spell that is also there “out-
side” or “before” the technology: it is the spell of social life, understood
as performances. The person using a particular technology, then, does
not enter an illusion in the sense of a different world. The “illusion” is
part of social life understood as performance and can be mediated by
various technologies. The modern social life is “illusion” in so far as it is
a kind of Apollonian order, suffused, mediated, and maintained by vari-
ous technologies and media, and performed on all kinds of stages. The
so-called “illusion” is also very real in the sense that when social media
users or, for example, gamers enter the stage, they might play a different
role and try out a different identity, but they still have their own bodies,
identities, and backgrounds, which frame their play and influence the
way they will play their role. A better way of speaking, therefore, is not
about reality versus illusion but about different yet interconnected stages
or performative spaces where one may play different roles. From a per-
formative point of view, these technology-mediated environments are not
different realities or “virtual” spaces but simply one of the performative
spaces of the social life.
Note also that in the social theatre with technology, there is no strict
distinction between actors and audience. Consider social media or games.
When we post, like, message, etc., or play a multiplayer computer game,
we are actors, but we also watch others (and ourselves) at the same time.
Actors and audience merge. (Think again of what I said in response to
Goffman: this is a characteristic of the social life in general, which is
participatory and interactive.) Maybe this setup is similar to Dionysian
theatre as Nietzsche imagines it. Nietzsche remarks about the Dionysian
that there is no fundamental opposition between audience and chorus
(Nietzsche 1993, 41). If in social media audience and actors are mixed
and interact, this can also be expressed as: we are chorus and audience at
the same time.1 A similar point can be made about massively multiplayer
games.
Furthermore, while most theories we have reviewed stress the perspec-
tive of the actor, there is also the perspective of the script writer and the
director. Technology can be used to emplot and configure the life of oth-
ers, to structure its temporality. Think about the Taylorist conveyer belt,
which structures the time and work life of the workers, but also about
email, which tries to organize our time, or social media such as Face-
book, which structures how we script and direct our lives and which tries
to structure, narrate, and configure our time (e.g., our day, we “have”
to check our notifications) and our life-time (we are presented “impor-
tant moments” and our life is organized in the form of a timeline). Simi-
larly, games may configure our time. Here one may well ask to what
extent humans still use the technology to script and direct (developers of
games, e.g., management of a factory or social media company) and to
what extent the technology itself scripts and directs. Of course, humans
develop the software and the games. Humans also manage the companies
that make profit from social media and games. But then the technology
takes on its own life as an organizer of our time and our life. Moreover,
sometimes these technologies become co-actors. One could ask: if the
email program does something by itself, to what extent is the email itself
an actor or performer? The theatre metaphor thus provides a number
of concepts to think about what we do with technology, but also about
what technology is doing with us. I will discuss this in the next section.
This focus on technologies in everyday life (and seeing them not as a
separate sphere) is in line with much contemporary philosophy of tech-
nology, for example postphenomenology or philosophy of information.
Technology is then no longer seen as something separate which may
dominate or colonize the lifeworld, but which is interwoven with the
lifeworld. For example, Ihde has analyzed human-technology relations in
the lifeworld (Ihde 1990) and Floridi has argued that our contemporary
use of the internet is neither online nor offline but increasingly “onlife”
(see for example Floridi 2015). Moreover, we can learn from the empiri-
cal and material turn in philosophy of technology and from empirically
oriented STS (a turn which happened in the 1980s and 1990s and was
directed against theory that focused only on the symbolic) that many of
these technologies perform their function as a tool because of their mate-
riality. This argument can be used to criticize accounts of the theatre and
the related theory I surveyed earlier in this chapter: theory by Aristotle,
Ricoeur, Goffman, Austin, Searle, etc., tends to be focused on language.
Against this, one can stress the material aspect of both theatre and tech-
nology. Both theatre and the social life with technology, understood as
theatre and performance, are not only about the use of words but also
about the use of (material) things. To perform is to speak, but it is also to
do things with things.
However, as I have argued previously (e.g., Coeckelbergh 2017), in
its understandable urge to reject the postmodern obsession with signs
and the symbolic, the material turn has unnecessarily neglected language
and related technologies such as text and writing. Moreover, postphe-
nomenology (e.g., Ihde 1990; Verbeek 2005) has given little attention
to the social aspect of our use of technology and to the role of language
in technology use. The theatre metaphor can help to remedy these lacu-
nas, since as I have shown it can be used to support a social-oriented
approach (consider again Goffman and Butler) and since it traditionally
has given much attention to language, sometimes also in connection to
the social (e.g., Ricoeur). Using the theatre metaphor for thinking about
technology in the lifeworld reminds us that our dealings with technology
are deeply social and also mediated by language, next to (more material)
technologies.
What tends to be missing in most thinking about theatre and in most
applications of the theatre metaphor to the social life, however, is atten-
tion to the moving body. I already noted this about Plato, Aristotle,
Ricoeur, and Searle but also in Goffman, for example, the body seems
absent from the stage. Like in the mainstream Western tradition in gen-
eral, perhaps it is only allowed to manifest itself backstage, when nobody
is looking. Keeping in mind the previous chapter, we have to add that
theatre is not only about the use of words and the use of all kinds of
technologies but also about moving bodies, and we should include this
aspect when applying the theatre metaphor. When we use technologies to
play our roles, construct or contribute to narratives, etc., we do not leave
our body at home. For example, when we engage with others via social
media or computer games, we act as embodied beings. If the social-with-
technology can indeed be compared to a theatre, we should not forget the
embodied aspect of theatre.
Let us turn again to the metaphor itself. When we perform, we per-
form also bodily and kinetically. Our use of voice, for example, is very
much embodied but also our acting in general is about movement. To
put it from a director’s perspective: to direct actors is not only to direct
them regarding the use of words in the abstract, as it were; it is also
to direct about the use of voice and the use of the body and its move-
ments. Theatre directors are also choreographers (and, to some extent,
vice versa). To play a role and character as an actor is also to learn the
movements and postures that belong to the role and character. To play X
is not only to say the things X would say but also to move like X would
move. If theatre is imitation at all, it is not only the imitation of abstract
actions or roles or the imitation of speech considered as something sepa-
rate from the body. It is the imitation of life and it is life, which for beings
like us always includes bodily movement. Even if we were to adopt an
Aristotelian emphasis on logos in our philosophical anthropology (which
Ricoeur still seems to borrow), then it must be noted that in the theatre
(as a separate space and as the social life) words must be spoken, that
narrative must be lived as embodied beings, and (again) that the use of
voice can be conceptualized as (involving) bodily movement.
When we use the theatre metaphor to understand the use of technolo-
gies, then, it is important to use the metaphor in such a way that acknowl-
edges these aspects of embodiment and bodily movement. Technology
is a tool used by embodied actors whose acting always includes bodily
movement. As said in the previous chapter, “even” moving about with
an avatar in a “virtual” or game environment includes bodily movement
in the sense that gameplay actually requires bodily movement. But also
in the sense that the avatar and the game play themselves refer to my
embodiment: it presupposes it, otherwise I would not understand the
very concept/practice/performance of avatar, which is a virtual body.
I move my eyes, hands, arms, and so on to move the avatar, involving the
same brain activity as if I were doing it in “real” life. But when playing
I also think and perform as an embodied person. And perhaps we should
delete “as if” here: gaming is real life, just as all theatre is real life and is
as real as reality can be. I agree with Saltz that theatre is best understood
as “a real world event” since spectators engage with real human beings,
even if these beings are playing “games of make-believe” (Saltz 2017,
165). The phenomenology of watching theatre is one in which the focus
is on “the here-and-now of the performance itself” (174). This is also
true for the social life with technology, including computer gaming as a
social and performative activity: these are real world events, real games,
and real performances. Technology functions as a tool and medium in
these acts, events, games, and performances.
Note that the example of computer games also raises the question
about the relation between performances and games in general. As I have
argued, inspired by Wittgenstein, the concept of games can be used in a
broader sense and as a metaphor to understand not only the social life
but also what we do with technology and especially how technologies
are always socially and culturally embedded (Coeckelbergh 2017). Let it
suffice to say here that the performances with technology may take the
form of social games with specific rules and stages/spaces, for example,
the theatre game or a specific computer game.
But technology does (more). As I already suggested it is not only a tool
used by social actors or a medium that creates a performative space; it is
also more than a tool (an acting tool) and a medium in the sense that it
may also itself take up the role of actor, director, and script writing, albeit
usually together with humans. Let me further use these elements of the
metaphor to elaborate the roles of technology.
What Technology Does and What It Does With Us

(in the Social Theatre)
As noted in the introduction, some thinking in philosophy of technology
and STS already uses the theatre metaphor, albeit not always in ways that
are entirely upfront about this and that make full use of the metaphor.
Bruno Latour has used a theatre metaphor to say that not only humans
but also non-humans such as texts and technologies can be what he calls
“actants” (Akrich and Latour 1992; Latour 1993), that is, non-human
actors. According to Verbeek, who is influenced by Latour, the point is
that technology is not just a mere instrument but itself has agency (Ver-
beek 2005). Akrich and Latour, influenced by a direction in semiotics that
uses the theatre metaphor, claim that human actors and nonhuman “act-
ants” have competences and performances. Moreover, material artefacts
can have or rather “translate” a script. They give the example of heavy
hotel keys: the text “Do not forget to bring the keys back” is translated
by the heavy weights attached to the keys, which is meant to encour-
age people to return the keys. Although here the text metaphor is still
dominant (and the linguistic metaphor of translation), the metaphor of
the theatre is also present. Latour’s source for the latter is Greimas, who
used the concept of “actant” in linguistics, in particular in his semiotics,
to describe structural elements in a narrative (Greimas 1983).
There are more authors in the social sciences that use the theatre meta-
phor. But in contrast to Goffman, Greimas, and others, Latour stresses
the material aspect. Instead of focusing on discourse, Latour’s view of the
social includes material objects and machines. Humans delegate speech
to artefacts, and humans let things speak. In other words, the theatre
metaphor is extended here to material artefacts as a kind of actor (“act-
ants”), who are themselves performers and help to translate the script.
For Latour and thinkers such as Pickering (1995), the social is a stage on
which humans and non-humans act and interact. Science, then, is a social
enterprise, which is also a matter of storytelling, role playing, and acting.
Although Pickering uses “agency” more than “actors” and “actants”, his
idiom is often theatrical and, more generally, performative—including,
as already noted, dance: there is a “dance of agency” (Pickering 2010).
He writes that his main perspective is performative:
If you want to understand scientific practice, you should start by

thinking about (a) the performance of scientists—what scientists do;
(b) the performance of the material world—what things do in the
lab; and (c) how those performances are interlaced with one another.
(Pickering 2013, 78)
Latour himself, by using the terms actor, actant, and script, stays closer
to the theatre metaphor rather than performance in general. Verbeek has
extended Latour’s theatrical language to what technology “does” in eve-
ryday life (Verbeek 2005). But like Pickering he also talks a lot about
agency rather than “actors” and “actants” and uses Latour to show how
technology mediates “programs of action” (Verbeek 2005, 157). One of
his favourite examples is that of the speedbump: the task of the police-
man is delegated to the speed bump, an “actant” in which the program
of action is inscribed (160). Although Verbeek first uses Latour’s term
“actant” and borrows the theatre metaphor of “script”, he then trans-
lates (Verbeek’s own words) Latour’s vocabulary to that of the mediation
of action and of human-world relations (168). This translation is under-
standable given Verbeek’s main project to do something with Ihde’s
postphenomenology. But one implication is that the theatre metaphor
is hardly retained, let alone reflected upon. Maybe this happened partly
because Ihde’s phenomenology itself is mostly blind to the social aspect
of technology and science, focusing on individual human- technology
relations. Or it happened because engineering-oriented philosophy of
technology, embraced by Verbeek and other empirical turn advocates,
imported the insensitivity to the social that is often (but not always) to be
found in the engineering sciences. In any case, the theatre metaphor gave
way to a vocabulary of mediation.
If we do explicitly use and reflect on the theatre metaphor, however,
and take distance from Latour and Verbeek, then we can ask in what
sense, precisely, technologies “act” and which roles they have in social
life. This is important in order to refine the analysis of technology and
to account for differences between humans and non-humans (something
which neither Latour nor Verbeek sufficiently do). The speed bump and
the hotel key “act” in the sense that they help to execute the script writ-
ten by humans. They also perform and make humans perform in specific
ways in the sense that they make cars slow down and make people return
their key to the hotel. But compared to a human actor, they are different
or rather (using the theatre metaphor again rather than the language of
ontology) they perform differently or do a different kind of performance.
Technological artefacts do not interpret their role, they do not improvise;
they “do” things but do so in a rather passive way and have no freedom
to do otherwise. If this is the case, then one may well ask if this is simply
a different kind of performance or if they can be compared to performers
or actors at all. After all, in spite of their “mediating” functions, they are
still mainly tools used by humans. The hotel key with the weights is used
by the human hotel manager to encourage people to return their keys.
The speedbump is used by the police to make sure the cars slow down at
a particular point. If they can be compared to actors at all, they are a kind
of dead actor, very different from the living, embodied, live-performing
human actors on the stage. Thus the metaphor only partly works here.
This renders the use of the words “actors” or “actants” problematic if
used for non-humans, as Latour and Verbeek do. If one really wants
to use them, then one must specify how the kind of “acting” or “per-
formance” done by non-humans significantly differs from human per-
formance. A symmetrical approach such as Latour’s, which talks about
actors and actants without making explicit differences in performance (if
it is performance), is insensitive to such differences.
There are, however, technologies that act in a stronger sense. Not all
technologies are like a speed bump. Computers and software, for example,
can do things. With regard to computer games, Fernández-Vara (2009),
for example, has used theatrical performance as a metaphor in order to
argue that the computer is the performer, based on the code (similar to a
dramatic text) and the interaction is then the mise-en-scène. But software
does not only execute pre-written scripts. Software can also power char-
acters within games. More generally, technologies can act in the sense
that they take over the roles of humans. Robots, artificially intelligent
systems, bots on the web, and other more intelligent and autonomous
technologies sometimes wholly or partly take over human roles. To the
extent that they do so, they can be said to be acting or performing.
Given the social connotation of these terms, this is especially applica-
ble to so-called social robots. For example, a robot may take over the
role of conversation partner and friend (with a particular character),
or the role of nurse. Is this acting? Is this performance? It depends: the
robot can be used as a mere “tool” or “machine” for lifting a patient,
for example, or it can assume a human shape and/or use a human-like
voice interface. In the latter case, there are certainly more similarities
with human acting and performance. There is a lot going on in terms of
what has been described before in this chapter: imitation, role playing,
putting on an appearance. And there is the possibility to use artificial
voice, which creates the appearance of a human person/character. The
machine then performs a role. It is also performance in the sense of make-
believe. The robot pretends to be your friend. The AI takes up the role
of doctor. The smart assistive device imitates the teacher. This then raises
the Platonic objections mentioned before, exactly because this interaction
with these technologies is so similar to theatre. The Platonic objection
presupposes that there is performance going on. The performance meta-
phor thus seems to make sense. But, we should ask again, what kind of
performance? Performance in which sense?
Now the performance of a machine, whether a social robot or a char-
acter in a game that is produced by software, may not seem to be per-
formance in the full sense, that is, in the sense derived from humans and
human theatre. Improvisation, interpretation, and creative and sponta-
neous performance may be missing. (I will say more about improvisation
in the next chapter.) It could be argued that human actors can improvise,
whereas machine actors cannot. Moreover, whereas it can meaningfully
be said that the designers or companies that use the robot or game char-
acter might aim at deception, make-believe, etc., the machine itself does
not really play a role, does not really intend to make us believe it is X,
does not really act in this sense. Alternatively, one could say: I accept
that the machine is performing and acting, that it fully counts as a per-
formance and act, but the performance and act is not as good as the
human, because it, for example, lacks the capacity to improvise and act
spontaneously. Or one could say that it is a bad performance. So here
we have a non-Platonic objection to this kind of machine: the point then
is not that imitation, theatre, deception, etc., are bad per se, but rather
(a) that the performance is not performance enough in the sense of “not
performance in the fullest and richest human sense” or (b) that the per-
formance is not good enough, or that it fails, does not succeed. (See also
Coeckelbergh 2018 on magic and technology.) For example, one could
argue (a) that a robot nurse does not really “act” or “perform” since,
in contrast to the human, it does not have another option to do what
it does, it cannot be something or someone else or it cannot take on a
different role, and it cannot improvise, its role and performance is fixed,
even if it can get better at it by machine learning and/or (b) that the robot
nurse fails to fully imitate the role of the human nurse, which is not only
about, for example, lifting a patient but also about having a brief chat
with the patient. (In addition, it could also be the case that the robot fails
to fulfil its function as a tool, for example, that it fails to properly lift
the patient. Consider, for example, that most robots still fail to imitate
human walking. “Failure” can mean: failure in this particular instance
or it can mean it always fails when it attempts to perform X.) Whether
or not the robot fails, the formulation of this objection to robots—or
rather to a specific robot or robotic application—is made possible by
taking the theatre metaphor seriously, and by asking what “performing”
and “acting” mean. In addition, this performance-inspired response to
the problem also gives some normative guidance or a normative anchor
point, namely human performance or successful performance according
to another criterion, whereas to say that technology “mediates” does
not: it is unclear what good mediation is (it is very abstract). Good or
bad performance is rather clear: one can observe it, experience it, and
compare it to human performance or to a specific goal. To take another
example, which goes beyond the theatre metaphor: if an AI is said to
make “music”, then one can either say that it deceives the audience (Pla-
tonic objection) or one can discuss the quality of the performance of the
AI according to some criterion (and this is not necessarily whether it is
good in imitating the human).
Furthermore, while it may make sense to say that technology can “act”
in the various senses just discussed, to limit the discussion and metaphor-
ical vocabulary to one element (acting and its derivative “actant”) leaves
out other aspects of theatre and hence other meanings of social life. This
includes material aspects, for example the material infrastructure and
stage or the material artefacts used during performance and the scenery.
These are also part of the social and can also “mediate” and shape what
we do, even if they do not “act” in any sense. In particular, as objects,
stages, and infrastructure, they constrain and make possible our perfor-
mances. For example, internet and mobile communication infrastructure
make possible the use of mobile social media apps, understood as social
performances. Road infrastructure makes possible the use of cars and
shapes entire worlds, that is, entire stages and performances (e.g., it cre-
ates “pedestrians” that need to cross streets, it creates cities that are built
around roads, etc.). Different media create a different stage: a virtual
world or game is a different stage than a chat program and will require
different kinds of performances. Different chat programs will have differ-
ent performances or performance styles. Different social media platforms
require different performances. For example, a post on Facebook is a dif-
ferent performance and game than one on Twitter, potentially involving
different roles. (For example, someone might choose to play a “private”
role on Facebook and a “professional” role on Twitter, or vice versa.)
Often media encourage one role rather than another. Each technology/
medium and each infrastructure creates a different stage, which encour-
ages different roles and acts, perhaps also different styles of acting, and
hence is not neutral. To frame this more structural, grammatical role
of technology in terms of acting (or agency) does not really work. The
theatre stage is the better metaphor. Using theatre as a metaphor thus
provides a toolbox of conceptual tools to understand what technology
does. Acting is only one metaphorical tool.
Moreover, beyond the stage we find more elements of theatre. To
discuss technology only in terms of its “acts” leaves out another very
important role of technology, which goes far beyond its instrumental
or tool-like character: technology can also take on the role of director.
Smart algorithms, AI, robots, etc. take up the role of co-actors, but they
also direct our lives and sometimes even co-write its script. We do not
only use technology to act; we also live and act “under” technology, that
is, directed and organized by technology, next to humans who of course
also direct us, often through technology.
Often the social script is the same, but a new technology organizes and
directs how we act out the script. For example, when we use social media
or play computer games, we do what we always do as social beings:
we connect with others, we communicate, we put on an appearance, we
watch others, and so on. But how we say and do all this is influenced by
the technology/medium. Technology reorganizes the stage, “interprets”
the script, edits the timeframe, gives new rules for our rituals, creates new
roles, asks us to play our role in one way rather than another, makes us
move in a different way, makes us say things differently, or even makes
us say different things and edits the script. Of course we (humans) are
still performers, and this gives us some freedom. We perform and we
do so according to our plans and ideas. We create our roles and narra-
tives. But the technologies, together with other humans, co-direct how
we perform these roles and narratives. How we play is never just up to
us as individuals; technologies and other humans have a hand in it. For
example, software contains algorithms that are basically ways of humans
telling the machine what to do. They start their life as instructions given
by humans to the machine. But when used, the software also tells humans
what to do, or at least how to do it. For example, a social media program
tells me to communicate in so many characters and send small messages
rather than write a long email or letter.
And sometimes technology even tells humans what to do. Technology
can be very normative. Software tells us to follow specific steps. It basi-
cally gives us an algorithm. And more generally, at a higher or broader
level of analysis, technology influences our daily lives to such an extent
that it also changes what we do. For example, the technology encour-
ages, in a sense “demands”, that I check my email and other messages
every day—preferably many times during the day. Software organizes
our behaviour and our day. It does precisely what Ricoeur meant with
emplotment, but in this case not in text or theatre, but in real life. Let me
unpack this by using another theatre metaphor.
To express the organizing role of technology, one can use the direc-
tor metaphor but also the script metaphor. Sometimes technology does
not merely influence how I act, e.g., how I improvise or how I act out a
script; sometimes the script itself is written or altered. This can be literal,
as in the case when the computer tells me what to do. It tells me what to
click on the screen, for example, or how long I should continue running
(it can be very normative). Then the algorithm is not just a script for the
computer; it is also a script (and prescription) for human performers. But
technology can also change and shape the entire social interaction. The
narrative changes. For example, email gives me a different script to com-
municate with a colleague than the script “go to this person’s door and
talk to her”. Technology is then a script writer: it can change the script
and rewrite narratives. It can create new roles. It organizes and reorgan-
izes a narrative, in the sense of emplotment. It organizes characters and
events into a (new) plot. It can be seen as emplotment and reconfigura-
tion in a Ricoeurian sense; Reijers and I have proposed the term “narra-
tive technologies” to capture this role of technology (Coeckelbergh and
Reijers 2016). Using the theatre metaphor, one could say that technology
writes and directs the narrative of social life; in particular it organizes
characters and events into a plot and also shapes the meaning of the nar-
rative as a whole. It configures the temporality and structure of human
social life; it configures our lived time.
This happens literally and in a specific context, that is, on a specific
stage, for example, when our lives are organized within and by an email
program or when we perform within and by the scripts of computer
game environments, but it also happens to our lives and society as a
whole. For example, new transport and communication technologies
have created new ways of working and commuting, that is, new ways of
configuring daily work and life time. In industry machines have created
new roles for workers. All this has led to new narratives, in the sense
of specific organizations of our time, specific plots, and—if we follow
Ricoeur—in the sense of new meanings that become part of our lives
and existence. Technology has influenced the way we make sense of our
lives as a whole. We do things in ways directed and organized by the
technology, and we make narrative sense of this and of our life, identity,
and existence. Technology influences the content and meaning of “This
is what I do”. And: “This is what I am”. “This is how life is”. Through
and after the changes brought about by a new technology, we see our
lives and ourselves in a new way. There is a process of transformation
(but perhaps not necessarily Aristotelian catharsis). For example, mod-
ern technology has resulted in a new, modern way of seeing ourselves
and the world. And through the use of social media we may see reality
in a new light. Influenced by the medium, we may come to see social life
as a theatre of profiles and posts. Or, going beyond Ricoeur’s still rather
dualist thinking (theatre/text versus real life), we could say: reality itself
is already reshaped and reconfigured by the technology. The point is then
not that when I’m “on” social media the technology changes and organ-
izes my life, whereas when I’m “off” it does not; rather, the technology
reconfigures my life as a whole. It has the potential to (re)organize all my
actions, including so-called “offline” actions. It shapes characters and
events. It directs and scripts me on all theatrical stages and all performa-
tive spaces of the social life, not just “online”. Social media technology
has become at least a co-director and co-script writer of our lives. It is
not a separate reality or thing. It plays (several) roles in our social lives.
To use a linguistic metaphor: it is a point about “grammar”, as I have
called it (Coeckelbergh 2017). Technology shapes the structure of the
social life. Of course we also use technologies as tools. And we may
think that they are mere tools. But the tools are an important part of
the social theatre: as stage, as objects used on stage (props) and scen-
ery, but also as co-actors and directors. Technology is not only about
specific interactions or a limited set of human-technology relations; it
also (re)directs and reorganizes lives, times, and societies and in the end
shapes our existence. This (post)hermeneutics can better be described by
using theatre metaphors than by, for example, mediation language, and
is more sensitive to the linguistic and social dimension of human exist-
ence with technology and by technology.
More generally, these changes to our social lives cannot be captured by
an individualistic framework or can only very partially be described and
interpreted with conceptual frameworks that use the theatre metaphor in
an unreflective, almost accidental way. By systematically unpacking the
metaphor, more meanings could be revealed: more ways in which tech-
nology contributes to the creation of meaning and indeed more meanings
of technology itself. This expansion and transformation of meaning is,
as Ricoeur taught us, the power of metaphor. Metaphor, like narrative,
can help us to see things in a different light; it can play an important
hermeneutic role. Here I have attempted to expand the meaning(s) of
technology, but this is just one example of what metaphor can do—for
philosophers (e.g., philosophers of technology) and for all of us. To
neglect language, as happens in, for example, postphenomenology and
most philosophy of technology after the empirical turn, is also to neglect
metaphor and its hermeneutic powers. This is an unnecessary, undesir-
able, and unproductive omission.
Furthermore, keeping in mind the lessons from the previous chap-
ter about technology and the moving body, it turns out that both the
theatre theory we reviewed here and the technology theory (and some of
the game studies theory) referred to miss out on an important aspect of
theatre: embodiment and the moving body. This is better in Ihde’s post-
phenomenology. But while authors such as Ihde and Verbeek acknowl-
edge the body in our dealings with technology, they tend to focus on
embodiment as one particular kind of human-technology relation and
miss out on a more general and important phenomenological aspect
of doing things with technology (and what technology does with us):
embodiment as connected with movement. As we can learn from the
previous chapter, using technology is always a matter of bodily move-
ment. This is so for technologies like a hammer, of course, but it is also
true for advanced technologies like computers and smartphones. As we
have seen in the previous chapter, the technology often choreographs us.
It is a limitation of the theatre metaphor as applied so far that it cannot
capture this phenomenology of the moving body with technology (and
technology that moves us).
We thus have to add to our use of the theatre metaphor in this chap-
ter that acting also involves the body and bodily movement and that,
therefore, if we apply the acting metaphor to what we do with technology,
it should also reveal technological action and practices as a bodily affair,
not just acting in the abstract. To act with technology involves the use
of words but also involves gestures, postures, and other bodily aspects.
Using social media or playing games does not happen separate from the
body but crucially involves bodily activity and indeed bodily thinking or
thinking bodies. (Talking about the body and bodily activity could be
seen as still too dualist: acting is “mental” and “bodily” at the same time.
The two cannot and should not be separated.) This needs to be added
to all theatre metaphors used here, including directing as a metaphor
applied to technology: directing involves not only guiding people what
to say and how to say it but also how to move. Software used in social
media, for example, may influence how we shape our m essage—perhaps
even the message itself—but this is not only an influence on the “men-
tal” or cognitive level; it is also an influence on the movements we make
and on how we make them. For example, when using a smartphone,
the software choreographs my clicking, typing, swiping, eye movements,
posture, ways of walking, and so on. Here theatre metaphors used in
much of the philosophy of theatre are too limited; the theory focuses too
much on language alone. The metaphor needs to be enriched, made more
complete. Performance studies and dance studies offer an important met-
aphorical supplement. Perhaps we could even use some philosophy of
theatre which does not neglect the body.2
Finally, taken together all these roles of technology (co-actor, stage,
director/choreographer, script writer) point to the normative-grammatical
aspects of technology. To express this normative role, next to agency, it
makes sense to say that, as Latour and Verbeek have done, technology
“does” things, “translates” humans scripts, and plays the role of “act-
ant”. But I have shown that technology also takes up other theatrical roles
such as director and script writer. This is perhaps most clear when tech-
nology comes in the form of automation technologies such as robots or
AI systems, but it also happens—in subtle and often invisible ways—when
we use technologies such as social media. Furthermore, the metaphorical
exploration and discussion in this chapter revealed that it is not clear in
what sense technology “acts” or “performs”. Technology is sometimes an
actor in a stronger sense of imitating human acting (e.g., in the form of
a humanoid robot or advanced AI), but it is not so clear if this counts as
“performance” or “acting” if the model is human performance or human
acting. And technology is not just an agent, understood by means of the
metaphor of (co-)actor, but also shapes the infrastructures and structures
of our lives. It does not only translate action programs written by humans
but often gives us a new script. It shapes the stages on which our social
lives take place. And it (re)directs and (re-)scripts what we do and how
we do it, including our bodily movements. These structural and “gram-
matical” changes (linguistic metaphor), including their normative aspects,
cannot be captured by all too limited uses of the metaphor, as in Latour
and Verbeek. This chapter has sketched a richer conceptual-hermeneutic
framework, achieved by means of a more complete unpacking of the thea-
tre metaphor (and small, tolerable doses of linguistic metaphors).
In Chapter 5 I will further analyze a specific performance metaphor
that has some similarity with theatre performance: stage magic. This will
enable me to further develop the discussion about reality (and sincerity?)
versus illusion and—sometimes—deception.3 It will also enable me to
highlight the perspective of the technology designer or developer (rather
than the general user), a perspective that can be helpfully understood by
means of the choreography and theatre director metaphor but also the
stage magic metaphor. The designer or developer, by shaping the technol-
ogy, is a choreographer, director, and script writer of our lives, but he or
she can also be seen as having the role of a magician who creates illusion
and (sometimes) deceives, perhaps putting people under a “spell” and
giving them false belief. To further discuss what this means is important
with regard to connecting to a wider spectrum of work in contempo-
rary philosophy of technology, which is not only about technology use
and experience but also about understanding and evaluating technology
design, development, and innovation. In particular, I will show that using
the stage magic metaphor can enrich discussions about illusion, decep-
tion, and technology design.
But first it is time for music.
Notes
1. Social media can also be Dionysian in other, related ways. McLuhan suggested
that there might well be a more integral kind of experience afforded by the new
media and technologies, one that is more similar to tribal, pre-modern society
than to modern Apollonian theatres. Hence social media and games have both
Apollonian and Dionysian aspects, and if we follow Nietzsche and McLuhan,
then the latter may point us to a deeper truth about reality, which according
to Nietzsche is the illusion of the individual and the music of world harmony.
2. Although much philosophy of theatre neglects the body, there are some excep-
tions. Sartre seems to have acknowledged the gestures of the actor, for exam-
ple. And perhaps Nietzsche could be used, too, to further elaborate this bodily
aspect of the theatre metaphor. For example, one could use his writings on
the Dionysian. Yet it is questionable if that particular metaphor works for
today’s social life with media and technologies. The social media choruses, for
example, are remarkably behaved, not very Dionysian. There is also a lot of
conformism, which Nietzsche would have hated.
3. See also Stern on Nietzsche and masks in his edited volume.
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Figure 4.1 Tanja Illukka in Human Interface (2012)
Source: Photo by Uupi Tirronen. Courtesy of Thomas Freundlich, Choreography and Robot
Programming
4 Making Music With Technology
How Machines Play and Conduct Us
4.1. Introduction
Like dance and theatre, music is another very important performing art
that can be used as a metaphor for our lives with technology. Music
has all kinds of interesting forms and aspects. For example, it can be
considered as a (live) performance, as art, as a social activity or cultural
ritual, as business or a product for consumption, as a material and tech-
nological practice, as improvisation and skill, as sound, as voice, etc. It
can also be understood in a more Platonic way, as a “work of music”
existing apart from such performances, practices, and embodied forms:
as a music “object” or in the form of numbers and ratios in a kind of
mathematical-musical sphere remote from material and social life. Music
can also be recorded in the form of digital data and material carriers of
these data. I will soon say more about some of these aspects; there are
many philosophical issues and discussions in the philosophy of music.
There is also much diversity in music, for example there are also many
non-Western forms of music, and music is not always clearly distinguish-
able from other forms of performance (in the history of the West: think
again about Dionysian theatre). In this chapter, my emphasis will be on
music as a performance (rather than work), as art and play (rather than
business), and as a material, social, skilled, embodied, and technologi-
cal practice, which involves the organization of sound and which may
involve improvisation. I will also consider playing from scores and con-
ducting (or being conducted) and contemporary digital technology medi-
ated practices such as recording, mixing, etc., which can also be creative
musical play and practices. While the literature I use is often linked to
Western forms of music, many of the features discussed here can also
be found in other forms of music and seeing music as performance may
itself facilitate such broader, more inclusive perspectives. In any case, to
understand music as performance leads us into a fascinating area of phil-
osophical inquiry.
While I agree with Godlovitch (1998, 1) that musical performance
deserves philosophical attention since it brings up a lot of interesting
philosophical issues, to understand and discuss music as performance is
not my primary aim. My goal is to use this material in order to better
understand technology. As in the previous chapters, I will first elaborate
on some of the aspects of music, particularly music as performance, using
philosophy and theory. This material is used to construct the metaphor
or, rather, a set of related metaphors, which are then used to say more
about what we do with technology and what technology does with us.
4.2. Some Philosophy of Music: Music as Performance

and as Embodied, Skilful, Social, and
Technological Practice
Let us start with the ontological question: What is music? As with dance
and theatre, one can ask if there exists something like “music” or a
“musical work” apart from its performances. The Platonic and nomi-
nalist views see music as a kind of object and as existing independent of
its performances; performances are then instances or executions of the
work. Others, at the other end of the spectrum, think that musical works
do not exist (Kania 2017). One could try to take a middle position and
claim that both the work of music and the performance exist and need
one another: for example, one could say that there is something like a
work of music, but that it needs to be performed in order to fully count as
music. But in so far as the discussion is still framed in terms of the work
and its “instances”, it is still Platonic. Maybe the so-called instances are
the real thing, whereas abstract representations of these are secondary.
What, exactly, is the relation between the two?
Typically, modern Western philosophical aesthetics has focused on
(formal) ontology of music or of the musical “work”, and has neglected
performance. As Godlovitch writes, performance is and was often seen
as “instances” of music or of the music work, or the focus is on listening
to music, with its embodiment and creation left out of the picture (God-
lovitch 1998, 3). But performance need not be seen as necessarily subor-
dinate to the work; performances may help create the work itself (5)—he
uses a storytelling metaphor: “a story grows out of its telling” (96)—and
probably has helped to create the work in the first place (e.g., through
improvisation—see later in this chapter).
There is also the discussion of whether music represents or expresses
something else (e.g., represents a narrative or express emotions) or if it
should be considered in its own right and what this means. And in what
way, exactly, does music differ from other “organized sounds” (to use
a famous definition, also quoted in Kania 2017) such as a speech or the
noise of a machine, given that these sounds are also used in some kinds of
music? Moreover, one can also hold a conventionalist definition of music:
music is what we, as social groups or societies, call music and treat as
music. (This gets us already to the social aspect of music, which is often
Making Music With Technology 85
not even mentioned in most philosophical accounts of music.) There are
many aspects and issues.
In this book, I focus on performance, and in this chapter, this means:
music as performance. This performance can then be represented, formal-
ized, recorded, and so on, which requires further performances (musical,
philosophical, and others). For example, if we use the term performance
in a broad sense, then even the recording and playing of music can be a
performance—I will return to this. But let us start with performance in
the common, narrow sense.
Within this category of performed music there are at least two pos-
sibilities: music as performance can be the performance of a composed
work, which is, for example, noted in a score as it is in so-called classi-
cal music, or it can be improvised, like in jazz music. Philosophers who
have in mind (Western) classical music often assume that there is first a
work, written down in the form of a score, which is then performed. But
this assumption is problematic: creating music is not only and not nec-
essarily about writing a score. Perhaps all music is or was once impro-
visational, before it was notated or recorded. If I use the metaphor of
musical performance, then, I have to distinguish between improvisation
and other forms of doing music. The same is true for dance and thea-
tre: so far, I have mainly used these metaphors under the assumption
that there is a choreography and a script. But in all performing arts, it
is also possible to improvise. Since in the previous chapters this aspect
has received less attention, in this chapter I need to say more about
improvisation.
Furthermore, music as performance is not only about what musicians
do but also about what the audience does. One could even say that all
performance is something that happens “between” performers and audi-
ence, and that without the audience there is no performance. According
to Godlovitch, the musicians are judged by the audience (Godlovitch,
1998, 41–43) and are thus exposed and vulnerable (45). One can also
say, as Godlovitch does, that performance is a kind of ritual: not only
because it demands continuity but also because—I would add—it is a
social activity per se and it structures social time (or is structured social
time), subject to social norms. Note, however, that, in contrast to what
Godlovitch seems to assume, a performance need not have the particular
order of a classical concert hall with “attentive listeners”. Consider an
open air rock concert. And not all listeners “judge”.
However, such a view, which sees music as a performative, impro-
visational, and social activity, is not very common. The neglect of
improvisation and of the social-cultural aspects signals a larger prob-
lem in mainstream philosophy of music: it focuses too much on abstract
ontological and psychological issues and neglects (a) the social aspects
of music, (b) the embodied and skill-full aspect of music, and (c) the
material and technological aspect of music. An interesting question with
respect to the latter is also the status of the human voice: is it also an
instrument, and, if so, how does it differ from “external” musical instru-
ments? Moreover, one can ask if a machine can create music. This also
reminds us of a question in the previous chapter: can machines perform
at all, and, if so, what kind of performance is that?
Let me now unpack some of these aspects and issues.
Improvisation
Improvisation does not only happen in jazz, blues, rock, folk, and all
kinds of contemporary music. Historically, classical music composition
involved improvisation, and some have argued that even performing
composed music involves improvisation since the score needs to be inter-
preted (Gould and Keaton 2000). But jazz improvisation is a good exam-
ple for learning what improvisation means. Young and Matheson (2000)
have argued that in jazz there are also guidelines and instructions, hence
that there is a work, but that the guidelines are more tacit. Kania (2011)
stresses that jazz performances are not so much about a work (being
performed) but more about live performance. In so far as this is the case,
it renders jazz more a performing art than classical music. However, here
we are not so much interested in the ontology of jazz (or in distinguishing
it from other types of music) but rather in understanding improvisation.
What is improvisation?
While there is discussion about how much improvisation is actually
going on in jazz (Peters 2009, 78–79), it is clear that jazz involves some
spontaneity and freedom, leading to something new. But to do this, one
has to have a lot of background knowledge, in particular tacit knowl-
edge: know-how and know-that. There are already standards, chord
progressions, and all kinds of structural elements. One has to know the
genre. And one has to know how to play the instrument(s). One needs
skills to interact with the instrument. Peters stresses the know-that neces-
sary for improvisation and puts it in the more cognitive-psychological
and ontological terms of memory and “the work” rather than elements
of the performance, but it is clear that the freedom and spontaneity of
improvisation requires some kind of background of knowledge:
Improvisation requires a powerful memory: memory of the param-

eters of the instrument, of the body, of available technology, the
parameters of a work’s structure and one’s place within it at any time,
the parameters of an idiom, a genre and its history, its possibilities.
(Peters 2009, 82)
Hence improvisation is never radically free; it is always based on something—

structure, perhaps—that is already there. There is old and new, difference
and sameness.
But in this discussion there are at least two aspects that receive too
little attention: the social aspect of music and the embodied skill of
the performer’s know-how. The “memory” is linked to others and to a
social-cultural background, and it is also embodied. Improvising is also
about communicating with and responding to others. And it presup-
poses skilled and embodied engagement with the material instruments
involved—whether it is a classical music instrument such as a violin,
electric guitar, or computer (program). Peters’s vocabulary of memory
and “parameters” does little to foreground the social dimension and the
embodied, skilful engagement with materiality.
Social
Performance is social in the sense that one plays (be)for(e) others and
(sometimes) before an audience. As noted, musical performance is always
connected to listening. Performance can be defined as an activity that is
performed for an audience, or it can be defined as an activity in which the
audience participates as listeners, or it can even be defined as something
musicians and listeners do together; perhaps listeners have more agency
that one thinks. (Usually only the agency of musicians is considered.) In
any case, there is an entire domain of aesthetics that focuses on what lis-
teners do (or what happens to them) and this is important to understand
what performance—understood as a social activity—is.
But performance is also social in the sense that one plays with others
and that one always plays within a wider social and cultural context.
What Godlovitch, who focuses on solo performances, misses, is that in
many (other) cases the “first” audience or listener is always one’s fellow
musicians, the co-players. This becomes clear once we return to the topic
of improvisation.
Fesmire (2003), who uses the metaphor of jazz improvisation for
describing a Deweyan art of ethics, acknowledges that there needs to be
novelty and that there should not be a blueprint for action (Fesmire 2003,
95), but, like Peters, he does not think that improvisation is absolute
freedom, arbitrariness, or “discontinuous drifting”; instead it is rather
organized (94). Yet unlike Peters (and in fact unlike most philosophers),
he stresses the social aspect of improvisation and music. He describes jazz
improvisation (and related genres such as blues) as a group affair:
A jazz musician . . . takes up the attitude of others by catching a

cadence from the group’s signals while anticipating the group’s
response to her own signals. Drawing on the resources of tradition,
memory, and long exercise, she plays into the past tone to discover
the possibilities for future tones in the way moral imagination ena-
bles us to see the old in terms of the possible.
(Fesmire 2003, 94)
Thus, like Peters, Fesmire thinks the novelty is somehow created by loop-
ing through the past. Memory is important. But that is always a social
memory. There is a tradition, “one does not experiment in a vacuum”
(96). By pointing to group interaction and tradition, Fesmire adds that
social element. He writes that “beauty in improvisation emerges as mem-
bers revel in supporting others, not when they jockey for a solo” (94). It
is about listening and responding to others, about picking up cues from
others, not only playing oneself. It is like a conversation (95). The jazz
musician is responsible to others and to the historical tradition. One has
to improvise on something (96), and this something refers to musical
structures and to a social situation and a social tradition.
Beyond improvisation, one could say that music at large is very much a
social and cultural phenomenon. Its performances do not take place in a
vacuum but involve social interactions and a social-cultural context. This
is often neglected by philosophers. As Alan Merriam already remarked
in his The Anthropology of Music (1964), music is “often treated as an
object in itself without reference to the cultural matrix out of which it is
produced” (Merriam 1964, vii–viii). But music exists in a social context:
the ways music is performed and perceived depends on places, times,
other people, and the historical and cultural context (North and Har-
greaves 2008, 1). If one draws on the sociological tradition, it can be
studied as social behaviour or as a social phenomenon or “social fact”, to
use a Durkheimian term. For example, it has been analyzed as a symbolic
fact (Molino 1990). It has a social history and there are music institu-
tions. There are music rituals. Music has a politics. Music is important
in the construction of the personal and the social life. It has many social
effects (DeNora 2000). For example, in Music in Everyday Life, DeNora
provides ethnographic studies of music in order to show how music gets
into action “so as to organize subjects in real time” (DeNora 2000, 8).
She argues that music organizes and structures us. It shapes our experi-
ence; for example, it redefines the temporal situation. Interestingly, she
notes that it also has effects on the body and embodied action.
Not only music making but also listening draws on previous experi-
ences and is always social in terms of the background that shapes it.
Feld, an ethnomusicologist, speaks of “interpretive moves” (Feld 1984,
8) that place musical objects and events in a meaningful social space
(14). Listening to music, understood as organized and performed sound,
is an active process that relies on all kinds of background knowledge.
Social conventions play a role in this, although they do not fix meaning
(10). The meaning is socially constructed in the sense that shared experi-
ence and attitudes enter into the interpretive process (11) but emerges
more in the moment. Language, in the form of speech or writing, also
helps us to make sense of music. This shows again the social dimension
of music, if not its social nature. And as an anthropologist, Feld is of
course sufficiently sensitive to cultural differences in music playing and
music experience (this can support a postmodern celebration of differ-
ences but it can also support a cosmopolitan project, see Feld 2012).
However, like many more cultural and social theories about music, Feld
talks about music in terms of the symbolic: the listener is framed as a
“symbolic consumer” (15). Music expresses a “symbolic order” (16).
While he acknowledges the role of feelings, there is very little attention to
the bodily and material aspects of music.
In order not to forget the body and materiality, let us turn to skill.
Skill and Embodiment

Fesmire already suggested that embodied skill plays a role in music
improvisation when mentioning the “long exercise” element. But embod-
ied skill is also needed for music in general. Music, understood as play and
performance, requires knowledge and memory in the sense of knowing-
that but also knowing-how, which involves tacit or implicit knowledge.
Implicit knowledge is important in creativity in general (Mahrenholz
2011) and also performance, including music. This becomes clear once
we look at “musical gestures” (Funk and Coeckelbergh 2013). Here this
term refers to a particular kind of bodily movement: the “micro” bodily
movements needed to play a musical instrument. One can also under-
stand musical gestures or even movement in a more metaphorical way,
referring to the meaning of some part of the music, for example, but
also these gestures and movements need to be produced by means of
micro bodily engagement with the material instrument, which is always
a movement in a very concrete, kinetic sense. Gestures—in music but
also in other performing arts and in life in general—are a form of move-
ment, intentional and meaningful movement (Funk and Coeckelbergh
2013, 115–16). And these gestures require knowledge, especially tacit
knowledge. Instead of only Platonic a priori and propositional knowl-
edge and theory, playing and performing music requires at least embod-
ied tacit knowledge as well or, in other words, skill. Performing music is
a skilled activity. The musician knows more than she can tell, to para-
phrase Polanyi. She can perform meaningful bodily movements, with-
out explaining—perhaps without being able to explain—in words (119).
Musicians exercise in order to learn to make these gestures and bodily
movements, to learn the required skill. The exercises themselves con-
sist in bodily movements. However, use of the word “bodily” should
not be read in a dualist way. Learning a skill is neither “merely bodily”
nor “merely something that happens ‘in’ the mind” (as if any of this
would be possible). Both playing music and listening to music are—like
all activities—to be understood in a non-Cartesian way. Music as perfor-
mance is a matter of what cognitive scientists call “embodied cognition”
and, if we care about trying to move beyond dualism, we should add that
it is also a matter of the knowing body.
Indeed, in musicology the paradigm of “embodied music cognition”
(Leman 2007) attends to the topic of gestures (e.g., Godøy and Leman
2010) and stresses the role of the body in both listening and music-
making. Leman argues that people who play music or listen to music
engage in “in a corporeal way rather than a cerebral way”, seeking direct
involvement rather than awareness and description—let alone sym-
bolic narration or meta-experience. Music—and, I would add, music as
performance—involves an “embodied intentionality” and “behaviour

resonances that we cannot resist” (Leman 2007, 18). (He also notes that
technology mediates these experiences—see below.)
Leman uses the term “gestures” in an effort to seek a non-linguistic
way of describing music, one that focuses on “body movement” (19).
Gestures can be made during a music performance or they can accom-
pany listening to music or indeed conducting music; they can be seen as
“corporeal articulations” (22) that capture moving sonic forms and can
range from tapping along with a finger to forms of conducting. Gestures
are not accidental or unimportant with regard to music; there may well
be a very close relation between sound and movement (which is inter-
esting also in view of the earlier chapter’s consideration of dance and
choreography). Godøy and Leman (2010) claim that music is “a com-
bination of sound and movement” and they use the term “gestures” to
express the meaningful combination of sound and movement (ix): not
all body movements are gestures; there needs to be expression of mean-
ing (5). Shifting away attention from abstract notation, they articulate
an embodiment paradigm according to which we experience and under-
stand the world through body movement, and music is part of that (ix).
Caruso, Coorevitz, Nijs, and Leman (2016) also focus on gestures in
their description of the artistic process and music performance. For them,
musical performance is about embodied interactions. Like Leman, they
see the interpretation of a musical work as a process of enactment, which
is deliberative but also involves sensorimotor schemes, which is why
years of training are required (404–5). The authors also show that one
can take a third-person or a first-person perspective on performance: for
example, one can monitor body movement (by means of measuring/sen-
sor technologies), but one can also start from the lived experience of the
performer. This can give researchers access to the intentions behind the
gestures rather than just seeing patterns. One could add that this shows
again how performance and gesture, mind and body, inside and outside
are intimately connected—if such terms still make sense at all.
Indeed, as Godøy and Leman remark, an advantage of the term “ges-
ture” is that it “bypasses” the Cartesian body-mind dualism (2010, 13)
since it kind of bridges “bodily” movement and “mental” meaning. An
obvious link to other theory here is the embodied cognition approach in
cognitive science, which is also used by Leman and others. For example,
Clayton and Leante (2013) link theory from cognitive science to thinking
about music performance, which also includes studying gestures in per-
formance. They argue that music is produced in bodies or through action
of bodies but is also embodied in the sense that we experience and make
sense of music through bodily experience and the metaphors that are
based on this. They show connections between music-theoretical con-
cepts and embodied image schemas such as balance (191). And Cross-
ley (2015) has described interplay between body techniques and “music
worlds” such as networks and places, thereby connecting to sociology.
How we use our bodies (for music) is also a social matter: it is socially
learned, for example, it is learned in networks (473). Drawing on Witt-
genstein’s anti-Cartesian view, Crossley says that understanding is a pub-
lic phenomenon (482) and that there are implicit agreements in “form of
life”, which Crossley interprets as social conventions (483). Body tech-
niques in music are thus linked to social conventions, and again it must
be stressed that this kind of knowledge is implicit. This is relevant to an
understanding of performance as making music but also of listening to
music (performance).
Focusing on the voice is also an excellent way to discuss embodiment
and music and is an interesting topic in itself for philosophy of music and
thinking about technology that deserves more attention. Voice is often
used in music, but what is it? Is it part of the body? Is it an instrument?
Or both? Does it express the soul or persona, as the ancients might have
said? What is the relation to speech and language? To emotions? Can
speech or song be framed in terms of gestures? What kind of knowledge
is “voice knowledge”? Interestingly, Godlovitch includes voice in the cat-
egory of music instruments (Godlovitch 1998, 16). Below I will briefly
return to the question concerning voice.
This section shows again how important (bodily) movement is in per-
formances, including in art forms that are usually not associated with
bodily movement. This is true for music playing but also for listening to
music.
Finally, music is a technological practice.
Music as Technological Practice, the Question of Voice, and

the Question Whether Machines Can Be Musicians
Playing a musical instrument is not only a social practice, since, embed-
ded in a wider social-cultural whole, it is also a technological practice.
Creating, performing, editing, recording, and mixing music involves all
kinds of technological artefacts, such as an electric guitar, a computer, a
microphone, an amplifier, wires, software, and technological infrastruc-
ture such as electricity and a studio. Musical performance is a material
practice. But also listening to music today is often mediated by all kinds
of material technologies. Leman notes that today access to music “pro-
ceeds via digital technology” in music production and music consumption
(Leman 2007, 22). And, as van Elferen says about digital music, in terms
of mediation:
not only do we hear this music through the digital media of key-
boards, samplers and MIDI—and we might download it in mp3
format via P2P networks—we also interact with it with the help of
digital agents such as iPods, Internet radio and club turntables.
(van Elferen 2009, 121)
Today we interact mainly with music via smartphones, tablets, and similar
smart devices. Van Elferen also uses the theatre metaphor: she sees these
technologies as “actors”. As I argued in the previous chapter, this use of
the metaphor misses out on some other metaphorical tools theatre (stud-
ies) offers. But, to be sure, there is mediation by digital media, although
these digital media are also material; material technologies play an impor-
tant role in our creation, perception, and interaction with digital music—
and other music—and digital music is very much part of daily practices.
These musical practices are material and cultural at the same time.
Indeed, musical practice and performance rely on material arte-
facts, but these artefacts are embedded in what Funk and I—inspired
by Wittgenstein—have called a “form of life” (Coeckelbergh and Funk
2018). This becomes especially clear if we look at the issue at the level of
the actual musical performance: the playing is linked to styles and tech-
nique, which in turn are connected to wider socially and culturally shared
“games” and “grammars” (Coeckelbergh and Funk 2018). For example,
the electric guitar is connected to rock subcultures. When the rock musi-
cian starts playing, there is already a material artefact (the electric guitar)
but also an entire culture that makes possible and structures the playing.
The latter is not independent of the former. With the invention of the
electric guitar, an entire new subculture emerged. The same can be said
about computer technology and techno music.
Another way to bring together the material and the cultural is to take
a network approach, which enables an analysis of both humans and non-
humans. Latour could again be a source of inspiration here. An example
of a network approach can be found in Godlovitch (1998), who sees
performance, at least in its idealized form, as “a complex network of
relations linking together musicians, musical activities, works, listeners,
and performance communities”, which describes a “total performance
environment” (1) or “ecology of performance” (3). This definition
includes humans and non-humans: human musicians, but also things like
works. But “works” is rather abstract. There are material artefacts such
as scores (like paper) and recordings (like digital MP3 format on a smart-
phone). One could also include (more) material artefacts in the defini-
tion: musical instruments and equipment such as amplifiers and speakers,
for example, may be part of the ecology of performance.
Moreover, the body and embodiment are once again an important
aspect of this playing and performance. Playing a musical instrument
well requires technique. The way one plays a music instrument can also
be seen as a habitus in Bourdieu’s sense, that is, it is embodied social
knowledge (Bourdieu 1990); it is an embodied kind of understanding,
similar to the way a person walks (Sterne 2003, 375). The body under-
stands how to play the guitar; it is not just something mental.
Given the skill/technique character and the social character of perfor-
mance, musical performance has also been compared to a craft. God-
lovitch has argued that performance “belongs squarely within the craft
tradition as a professional practice governed by inherently conservative
standards of manual skill and expertise” and is linked to a “performance
practice community”, with rules and obligations similar to those of the
Guild tradition (Godlovitch 1998, 1). “Performance communities” are
groups unified under an instrument and a body of technique (61). For
example, becoming a violinist means becoming a member of “a unified
club of skilled specialists”, which has its own schools, standard reper-
toire, standardization, rankings, masterclass circuits, and so one—there
is a “scene” (76). Skill acquisition and training is seen as very important
(4). One has to know how to use one’s body (often including the hands)
and one has to know the instrument (55). It takes time to get acquainted
and intimate with one’s instrument. It takes effort to gain mastery.
Note that what counts as a musical “instrument” may change. Sterne
(2003, 7) gives the historical example of the turntable which was turned
from a playback technology into a musical instrument. Another, contem-
porary example: today’s DAW (digital audio workstation) is software
that enables recording and creating music. It hence can be seen as a music
instrument.
Recording technology also raises issues about the status of performed
music versus recorded music and, more generally, new digital technolo-
gies versus older technologies. Godlovitch (1998, 2) has argued that, by
means of its ritualistic aspects alone, music performance has resisted the
challenges brought on by the new technologies. Now, Godlovitch sees
electronic sound-making technology as opposed to such crafts practices
and as involving less skill or even no skill, whereas I think we can also
understand such electronic or digital music practices, including record-
ing, mixing, editing, etc., in terms of crafts and as linked to practitioner
communities—new ones, perhaps, since based on relatively new tech-
nologies but craft communities nevertheless. For example, creating music
using a DAW definitely requires the development of skill, and what a
DJ does counts as a music performance and is also based on skill. These
activities do not involve the direct contact with, for example, the material
strings of a string instrument like a guitar, but they involve “direct con-
trol” (53) of sound and direct contact with all kinds of material equipment
and skill to use it in a creative way. And in contrast to what Godlovitch
thinks (101), computers and DAW software are musical instruments if
they are used for making music. Of course, as in classical music and other
types of music, some people are better musicians and/or better perform-
ers than others and are more skilled and more creative. Some are virtuosi
(77); many others are not. Making sound with digital technologies is
easy; making good music (and good quality sound) requires skill and tal-
ent. Using digital instruments also requires the learning of skills within
communities, regardless whether such communities sustain themselves
via digital communication (online) or not (offline). For example, if I want
to learn how to use a DAW in order to create music, or when I want to
learn to play an electric guitar, then I can watch online videos that teach
this, videos that work very much according to the master-apprentice
model. Thus, for musicians and listeners, the choice to make in terms
of medium and technology is not between craft or not, as Godlovitch
suggests, but rather to choose between different kinds of craft practices:
traditional ones and more recent ones. I do not claim that using a digi-
tal instrument is the same as using a traditional one; different kinds of
instruments afford different kinds of music and creativity, and perhaps it
is true that some instruments enable or encourage a more “remote”, less
engaged playing than others. This deserves further discussion, as many
other information technologies and digital media do. But there is not
necessarily less skill involved. Moreover, in contrast to Godlovitch I see
working with digital technologies (in music and elsewhere) not as entirely
different from, or necessarily opposed to, performance; instead, the new
practices that come with the new digital technologies, such as mixing
and digital recording, can also take on a performative character. And
these practices and performances do involve “physically immediate art-
making” (5), albeit with different instruments (computers and computer
software, for example). Compare the guitar and computer software: in
both cases there is mediation by an instrument, and in both cases there is
physical and embodied action and agency on the part of the musician(s).
While I agree that it is problematic to say that machines can perform—
this needs further discussion—and while I do not claim that the music-
making and performances in the narrow sense are the same (there may be
different skills involved, and perhaps more or less manual skill), when we
consider humans performing with machines there is no reason to a priori
deny that what these humans do counts as performance. To create and
play music is also performance, understood in a broader sense developed
here. Godlovitch is wrong to reject digital ways of music making as being
non-physical and as involving only manifestations of information. His
view represents only one way of looking at such technologies and not the
most useful and adequate one when it comes to understanding (music as)
performance.
Moreover, the technology itself should not be taken as given, socially
speaking. As we can learn from STS scholarship, for example Pinch and
Bijker (1984) and Oudshoorn and Pinch (2003), technologies and their
users (and other relevant social groups) mutually shape one another.
Music instruments have to be understood as linked to particular groups
(e.g., electric guitar to rock musicians) and the design and development
of the instruments is shaped by these groups and vice versa. Not only
music at large but also musical instruments are social phenomena and
socially constructed artefacts. For example, Pinch and Trocco (2004)
have analyzed the design of early Moog synthesizers, showing that music
instruments as artefacts should not be seen in isolation from their use(ers)
and design(ers). There are all kinds of social groups and communities
involved in music making and music listening. Also in this sense music
and music technologies are deeply social.
Finally, most of the theory reviewed here assumes that we are in control
and in charge when we play music. But technology can also gain more
agency of its own in the creation and playing of music. It can compose
music works, it can play instruments, and it can make decisions for us
concerning music, for example, what we will listen to next. For example,
Godlovitch asks if human intentional agency is necessary in performance,
given that there are already computers that compose music. He also ima-
gines that machines could learn to develop their own performance style,
after analyzing interpretations by human players (Godlovitch 1998, 6).
This leads him to emphasize what he thinks listeners appreciate in human
performers: rigour, skill, and creativity (7). Not rule following, but craft
and skill are something we appreciate and something humans are good
at (137). We want the music to be the result of real effort, inner states,
and stories; in other words, persons. Performers, according to Godlo-
vitch, better be mortal, dependent, fallible human beings (140). We are
the kind of beings for which something is at stake. Godlovitch writes: “In
every human performance, something is at stake, something matters for
all involved. The machine recital is . . . indifferent, without risk, failure,
success, or creation” (144). What is communicated through the perfor-
mance, then, is not so much a work, but a person.
Whether or not Godlovitch is right about this, his (personalist) view
makes us wonder if machines can have skill and if machines can be
creative. Connecting work in computational creativity to discussions in
aesthetics and philosophy of art, I have argued that answering such a
question requires us to get clearer about the process, product, and agency
involved in creativity (Coeckelbergh 2017b). For example, is an internal
state necessary for creativity, is a work of art creative (and a work of art
at all) if we simply agree on it, and do we exclude artificial agency a priori
from our definitions of creativity? Furthermore, this discussion also raises
once more the question whether—and if so, in what sense—machines
can “perform” at all, and if simulation is a problem (Godlovitch 1998,
126–27) or not—not only in case of new music instruments but also in
new technologies in general. In that respect, it is also interesting to ask
again if machines have a “voice”. They can simulate the human voice
and can “speak” when they take the form of personal digital assistants
or “friends”. But is it voice and is it speaking? In the history of thinking,
voice is often related to soul or persona, which machines are not sup-
posed to have. But if we agree that such machines do not have voices,
then what exactly is the ontological status of “machine voices”?
Conducting/Being Conducted
Sometimes music involves conducting. It typically happens in perfor-
mances of (Western) classical music. It is the art of directing a musical
performance,1 usually one involving many players, like an orchestra and/
or choir. This includes interpreting the score, cueing to indicate when
a performer or several performers should start playing and setting the
tempo. Conducting is done by talking to the musicians beforehand (ver-
bal instructions) and by giving cues during the rehearsals and during the
performance. Often the right hand indicates the beat and the left hand
gives other cues, such as those pertaining to volume and articulation.
Tempo can be measured (by instruments such as a metronome and a
computer) and can be seen as “objective”, but it can also be understood
as emergent or in need of interpretation/performance by the conduc-
tor and the orchestra. To play music while being conducted, then, is to
respond to the interpretation and cues of the conductor, as well as to
respond to the playing of others.
In other types of Western music such as jazz, blues, and rock music,
there is usually no formal conductor and not much conducting going
on, but this does not mean that there is no coordination, direction, or
organizing at all: players give cues to one another, and sometimes there
is one person conducting, albeit in a more informal style, while playing
and without many big gestures. For example, one may make eye contact
with one of the other musicians or make a small nod of the head to one
or more of them. Conducting is about organizing temporality and about
organizing other people—which is a matter of communication, verbal
and non-verbal.
Let me now use these aspects and dimensions of music performance as
metaphors to say something about the use, experience, and development
of technologies.
4.3. Playing and Improvising (With) Technology

and Being Conducted by Technology
Technology as Performance
Like music, technology can be considered in a way that abstracts from
concrete performances with technology, from concrete artefacts, and
from social-technological practices and contexts. Technology can take
the form of a concept—for example Heidegger’s “modern technology”
or the concept of a “universal Turing machine”. It can be considered as
code, information, system, and so on. Concrete, material technologies are
then instances of these abstract concepts. But technology can also be con-
sidered in its use and understood as performance (Coeckelbergh 2017a).
It can be seen as something that embodied people do in concrete material
and social contexts. The latter non-Platonic approach enables us to high-
light a number of features technology shares with musical performances.
I will first apply the metaphor of music performance to what we do
with technology: how we play, improvise, and conduct others with tech-
nology. Then I will argue that there is also a sense in which technology
plays and indeed plays us and conducts us.
Playing (With) Technology: Improvisation, the Social,

Skill and Embodiment, and the Network of Humans
and Nonhumans
If we use the metaphor of performing and “playing” technology, we can
describe two kinds of performances with technology. In one type of per-
formance, one closely follows the “score” of the technology when using
the technology. One does what the designer and company that devel-
oped the technology intended one to do with the technology, or at least
one interprets what the designer and company intended. Due to such
interpretation every performance will be slightly different, just as it is in
classical music. There is interpretation. But one follows the score or—to
use a theatrical metaphor again—the script. To design a technology is
then to “compose” the technology, the writing of a “score” dictating
how the technology should be used. This is not always done explicitly;
it is often embedded in the design itself. There may be a user’s manual,
which is an explicit means of instruction, but what is meant here with
“score” also refers to the intended function of the designer, in which
contexts the technology is meant to be used, which gestures should be
used, and so on. In another type of performance, however, which is far
less common, the user draws on the structure, patterns, and “tradition”
of the technology to improvise. One uses the technology not exactly as
the designer or company intended. Adapting to the situation and pick-
ing up cues from others, one creates a new use. As remarked, this use is
still linked to the “tradition” and is based on structures and patterns of
use that are already given. For example, using old tires to build a boat
refers to the tradition of making boats, and when the boat is used there
are already “scores” given for that use. But one is no longer bound to
a “score”, or at least one is no longer bound to the original/old score,
whether it is the boat building “score” or the use of tires for cars “score”.
Using a computer metaphor (and originally: wood chopping metaphor),
one can also call this kind of improvised use “hacking” the technology.
Moreover, design of technology, understood as composition, can then
be understood as originally involving improvisation—just as composing
new music, even if it leads to a score and a “finished” piece in the end,
involves in the beginning performance and improvisation.
The advantage of the improvisation metaphor is that, based on a
rich understanding of improvisation, we can not only point to the skill
involved in using and developing technology (see below) but also stress
that even such improvisations with technology always draw on previous
patterns of use. These patterns are part of a “tradition” of a particular
technology. Thus, the metaphor of jazz improvisation is a good metaphor
for the more “creative” social life with technology: in the unusual case
when we don’t follow the score, there are still patterns such as “chord
progressions” and “standards” we use. We play things “over it”, “on top
of it”. And as with particular styles of music, there is a particular tradi-
tion and cultural context. In my book Using Words and Things (2017a),
I have called these patterns and culture(s) “games” and “form of life”:
the meaning of technology can only be understood as part of a social and
cultural whole.
This leads us to the social aspect of performing with technology. When
we perform with technology, there is often an audience involved. For
example, the writer using a word processor has an audience in mind.
The writing is performed (be)for(e) that audience. Another, less literal
example: the car driver performs in traffic, that is, before an audience of
others, potentially also the police. The audience does not need to be pre-
sent at the time of performance: there can be “recordings” in the sense of
the driver’s memory of traffic situations and the memory in a navigation
device, but there is a performance (be)for(e) others. Using technology is
a social practice. Sometimes the audience is present, as in a performance
with power point or a social media performance, when there are real time
responses and delayed responses, and where one’s performances (post-
ings, likes, etc.) are recorded by the software. Like performing music,
performing with technology is always a matter of social interaction, very
similar to what Fesmire says about improvisation: it is about responding
to others, playing into the tune of a conversation (linguistic and commu-
nicative metaphor), and indeed it is about playing jazz together. In social
media, for example, one only plays well (is good at playing the game, to
use another metaphor) if one picks up and plays in “rhythm” and “tune”
with respect to the performances of others. A solo is possible but only if it
is embedded in the larger whole and flow of the ongoing performance(s),
and if it is “granted” by others. The performance of posting something
on Twitter, for example, is only successful and indeed really performa-
tive if the person who tweets is able to pick up the tune and rhythm of
a particular conversation—on Twitter and in society at large. Perform-
ing also means listening and responding to others. As in jazz or blues
improvisation, there needs to be a balance between giving room to others
and going for a solo, and a continuous “listening” to others needs to be
practiced. The same may be true for more socially complex multiplayer
computer games.
But performances with technology are also social in the “deeper” or
more structural (one might also say: transcendental) sense mentioned
before: there are already patterns, there is already a “grammar” of use
(Coeckelbergh 2017a). To say it with a Wittgensteinian term: there is no
private music and there is no private technology. Again, one can use the
music metaphor: as with jazz improvisation or any other music, at the
moment when one starts performing, there is already a tradition of use
and there are standards and patterns of use. One’s performance is always
a response to that tradition and at the same time constitutes and contin-
ues the tradition. Blues, if it is to be more than a historical tradition, needs
to be performed time and time again. Similarly, what it means to drive
a car relies on how people have used cars in the past and is constituted
and continued every time someone drives a car. The use of a car, then,
is not just individual but also social and cultural in the sense that one is
and becomes part of a community of drivers, that is, people that use cars
for driving. Of course one can improvise a bit, and, for example, use the
car for sleeping instead of driving, but even this improvisation refers to
the standard use and the tradition of car driving and home building (and
even the “normal” car is and was already a “mobile home” in the sense
of a semi-private space where one could feel at home). Moreover, such
improvisation creates their own new kind of practice and (sub)culture,
for example, the subculture of camper vans, which is not only about tech-
nology but is also connected to lifestyles. If the rock guitar gave rise to
rock culture or if digital technology gave rise to techno music, this is not
exceptional: every technology creates its own culture or contributes to
the shaping of a (larger) culture. For example, social media technologies
like Facebook or Twitter or popular multiplayer computer games shape
their own cultures and are in turn embedded in styles and cultures that
sustain the performances with these media and that are in turn supported
and constituted by the concrete performances. For example, fantasy nar-
ratives in games refer to fantasy narratives in the wider culture within
which that game is embedded, and ways of interacting, cooperating, and
discussing within the game may not fundamentally differ from, and in
any case refer to and respond to, ways of interacting, cooperating, and
discussing in the so-called “real” world.
Moreover, performing with technologies, also so-called digital tech-
nologies, is not necessarily easy, skill-less, or disembodied. As is stressed
in the postphenomenological tradition (Ihde), use of technologies always
involves the body. And to use technologies well one has to get skilled at
using them. Performing with technologies requires technique. Like play-
ing the guitar, performing and “playing” (with) a smartphone requires
that one learns and embodies specific gestures, that one finds one’s way
“with the instrument”, i.e., “in” the interface and “in” the software, so
that one knows how to handle the phone while walking, that one knows
what to do when the phone does not respond, and so on. It is only by
neglecting and abstracting from concrete performances with technology
that one can speak about “technology” in general or that one can make a
claim such as “everything is information”. The use of technology, under-
stood as performance (here musical performance), always involves inti-
mate material-bodily couplings that can be expressed by the terms “skill”
and “technique”.
Finally, the previous discussion shows that when one considers the
case of playing musical instruments as a technological practice, what we
do with technologies and the metaphor we use to describe this (musi-
cal performance) merge. Use of the performance metaphor changes into
discussing actual instances of music performance. We can understand
playing musical instruments as a technological performance and we can
understand technological performance by means of the metaphor of
playing musical instruments. In both cases (or perhaps one should say:
in this case) we can apply all the previous features, and, keeping in mind
the overview in the previous section, we can stress the materiality and
the social construction of technological artefacts used in performances
with technology. Even so-called digital technologies are not “virtual” or
removed from the concrete materiality and embodiment in its use and
performance, and the artefacts used in performances should not be seen
as given or as merely technical but as linked to social processes. Moreo-
ver, the performance metaphor can be used in a way that stresses the
human/technology couplings, as with the use of the notion of skill, or it
can be used in the spirit of Latour and others to talk about a network of
human and non-human elements of the performative space (or performa-
tive environment or performance ecology)—or perhaps one should say:
human and non-human performers.
This leads us to the following questions: Who performs with technol-
ogy? What if technology also performs? Keeping in mind Godlovitch’s
question: Is it necessary that there is human intentional agency for it to
count as a performance? And in what sense can technology play us and
conduct us?
Technology as Performer in Our Lives With Technology

I already mentioned that technology can be more than just an instru-
ment for music: it gains more agency and can also play and create music.
But it was doubtful if it can also perform or at least if it can perform
in the way(s) humans perform. Now, what does it mean to use this as
a metaphor for our lives with technology more generally? Clearly all
kinds of technologies have agency or can have agency in our lives: think
about the bots on the internet or the intelligent machines in our homes.
In STS and in postphenomenology, this is often conceptualized in terms
of “actants” or “mediators”. This is partly helpful since it highlights the
non-instrumental role of technology but may also be misleading or at
least sketch an incomplete picture, since—at least as part of a Latou-
rian or mediation theory framework and using performative metaphors
unreflectively—it is not sensitive enough to the differences between

humans and non-humans. If we take the metaphor of musical perfor-
mance, however, we can have this discussion.
Consider again Godlovitch’s view that human performers can properly
be called performers since they perform not only the music but at the
same time always their own humanity and person. Whether or not we
agree with this particular (personalist) answer, we can ask the same ques-
tion for performances by technology in general, not only in music. For
example, if a bot were to perform my social media profile for me after
my death, then what would be the difference between the “performance”
of that bot and my (past) performances with the technology as a living
person? An answer à la Godlovitch would stress my vulnerability as a
living person and the fact that, when I am engaged in social interaction
via the technology, something is at stake for me, whereas in the case of
the bot it does not have human vulnerability and nothing is at stake for
it, since it is not a person. Hence the latter would not count as a perfor-
mance at all. The bot can pick up patterns and learn from it, and it can
follow this as a rule to make new postings, but these imitations of me will
not be the same as me performing me on social media. According to his
personalist view, the reason why it is not the same is that performance is
not only about performing a specific content (a piece of music, something
that I say on social media) but is also always about performing me as a
person. The bot necessarily fails at this, since—on this view—what I am
as a person cannot be captured by what the algorithm can learn from my
previous posts. One could also say that the algorithm can communicate
something but it cannot communicate somebody. The fallibility and the
mortality—indeed the embodiment—are not there. Furthermore, because
of the lack of (human) embodiment, one could ask if the bot does have
“skill” or is as skilled as I am when using social media. It can have the
“skill” to compose and send postings, make likes, etc., if such actions
are abstracted from embodied performance. It can have the “skill” to
use the program, if use is reduced to a non-performative abstraction.
But if skill is necessarily related to embodiment and if use is about per-
formance, then one could say that this is not really “skill” in the human
sense of the word, since human skill is always related to the human body-
mind (non-dualistic view). This is another reason to conclude that the bot
cannot really perform (me).
Whatever the right answer to this question may be, and as in the case
of theatre, the (musical) performance metaphor enables us to discuss
questions regarding technological agency from a different angle, and in
particular it enables us to ask new and interesting questions about differ-
ences between human and non-human agency.
What Technology Does With Us: Technology as Composer

of Our Lives and as Playing and Conducting Us
We learned from sociological and anthropological approaches that music
has an effect on our (social) lives: it shapes our experience and the tempo-
ral structure of what we do, and it shapes our identities and our lives as a
whole. Hence composers and creators of music (to extend the metaphor
beyond classical music, which tends to dominate philosophical accounts
of music) are not only composers and creators of something called “a
work of music”. As composers and creators of performances, they (co-)
shape musical performances but also our experiences, our identities, and
our performances in and of our lives.
If we use this as a metaphor for what technology does to our lives,
then, we can say that technologies do not only do what they are supposed
to do (have a specific function, are a means to a particular end) but also
compose our lives, in the sense that they co-shape our experiences, shape
the temporal structure of our lives, and compose our identities and the
meanings we give to our lives. This can be expressed by using a metaphor
from text and theatre, as in the previous chapter and in the work on
narrative technologies I did with Wessel Reijers, but the musical perfor-
mance metaphor gives us some extra metaphors that further unpack the
temporality and movement aspects. Consider the metaphor of tempo, for
example: many people feel that modern technology has created a higher
tempo of life. Or the metaphor of harmony, which was already used in
the discussion about the meaning of a narrative: Does technology man-
age to create a harmonious daily life? And what kind of style does the
technology give to the music of our life and identity? For example, use
of social media for work purposes might be said to increase the tempo of
work or use of a particular computer game might give style and identity
to the life of its users. They use the game to construct their identity, but
at the same time the game constructs and uses them.
If we must use another metaphor from classical music, we can also say
that technology conducts our lives. Even if it does not always tell us what
to do, it tells us when to do things and how to do them, it directs the
tempo of our lives, co-interprets the tradition, and organizes us. There
may be a “score”; there is already a way of life given in our social lives
and social environments. But technology shapes how we perform. For
example, the smartphone “gestures” that and when we have to look at
our messages and social media “interprets” how we communicate inter-
personally and its corresponding rules and traditions. Games may also
shape so-called “real-life” performances of their gamers.
In all these cases it is not just technology that composes and conducts;
humans always have a hand in it too. We are of course also the com-
posers and conductors of our lives, and others are also players and co-
composers and co-conductors. In social media and games, for example,
other human beings also influence us and the way we lead our lives. But
to the extent that technologies take on the same role, the metaphor can
also be applied to them. Like the technologies used for music, they are
not neutral tools; they co-create the music. Not only music technologies
but also all technologies co-compose and co-create the performances of
our daily lives. They co-shape its tempos, harmonies, and styles. They
co-create the ways we live and deal with one another. Using the meta-
phor of music as performance and its related metaphors, we thus have a
larger conceptual/semantic toolbox available to understand what tech-
nology does to us.
In the next chapter I will further discuss the issues of simulation and
deception in and through the design of new technologies by drawing on
the metaphor of stage magic.
Note
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conducting
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5 The Magic of Technology
How Machines Create and
Manage Our Illusions
5.1. Introduction
The British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote that
“any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
(Clarke 1973, 21). Clarke meant that many technologies that now appear
impossible may be possible in the future, considering that current tech-
nologies would be incomprehensible to people from the past—or indeed
to anyone who is ignorant of its workings. “Magic” then means “some-
thing I cannot understand” and Clarke uses the term to encourage us to
transcend the limits of our imagination about the future. But there are
also other ways in which the phrase can be understood. For example,
Gell (1994) has argued that technology enchants, and I have argued that
current advanced technologies cater to our desire for the wondrous, mys-
terious, and magic, thus continuing the tradition of Romantic thinking
and practices (Coeckelbergh 2017). Moreover, one could make compari-
sons between magic practices of the past and today’s scientific practices,
or point to historical links between magic and the emergence of mod-
ern science (e.g., alchemy and chemistry). One could compare the design
and use of contemporary technologies to stage magic, interpreted as a
performative practice. This is what I will do in this chapter. Again my
purpose is not to theorize stage magic itself but to use it as a metaphor
to understand technology in a performative way and to explore what can
be gained thereby for thinking about technology. In terms of technolo-
gies, the focus will be on contemporary information and communication
technologies, particularly machines such as robots and smart assistive
devices.
First, I will need to say more about stage magic. What kind of practice
and experience is it for the stage magician and for the audience? How
can it be understood epistemologically? What happens when someone
watches a stage magic show? For example, what does it mean to say
that there is a “suspension of disbelief”? And are there potential ethi-
cal problems? I make a link to the social life. Do we create illusions for
each other? Do we deceive each other? In what way(s)? What happens
in such a case? Is role playing a form of deception, or not? Is deception
always problematic? If not, when is it problematic? I then explore how
the design and use of technology, understood as performative practices,
can be compared with stage magic. What happens when technology cre-
ates illusions and is that necessarily ethically problematic? Do we deceive
ourselves or are we deceived? Who deceives whom? And is technology a
mere means that is used by designers and users to create illusions, or does
it also take on a more autonomous role? In what sense can technology
itself act like a stage magician? Are we still in control of the show, and, if
not, (why) is that always bad?
I will show that the metaphor can be applied but also has its limits,
and that the epistemic and ethical problems get more complex as we
move from the Platonic puppet theatre interpretation of stage magic (and
indeed from the Platonic interpretation of puppet theatre) to a more com-
plex situation in which it is no longer so clear if we are deceived or if we
do not want to be deceived and if there is still something like appearance
versus reality. It turns out that stage magic is already more complex than
expected—it is a performance involving real emotions and two experi-
ential realities—and that, in social life, role playing and the stage blend
with what is usually understood as non-performative: personal identity
(see also Chapter 3 on theatre). Our performances shape us as much as
we control the performance. Moreover, the ethics of illusion in the social
life is also not so clear as in (a simple interpretation of) a stage magic
show. I will show that in our lives with technology the ethical and episte-
mological lines are blurred. It is not so clear if we are deceived and who
is deceiving whom (and who animates whom). And, whereas at first sight
virtual reality, virtual worlds, films, robot pets, etc. are part of a Pla-
tonic theatre, on closer inspection the line between stage and non-stage,
between performance and non-performance, is blurred. Technological
experiences and practices are real, embodied, and social-performative.
Moreover, technology is not a mere means used by the designer-magician;
technology itself takes on the role of magician and co-shapes the show.
We are no longer in full control, as magicians or as spectators. But can
we be in full control at all? Have we ever been in full control? And do we
always want to be in control? Thus, I will show that the Platonic model
breaks down—already when we take a closer look at stage magic or pup-
pet theatre itself—and that the Platonic and modern (design) interpreta-
tion of the stage magic metaphor has its limitations for understanding
our living with technology once we take a more performance-centred
approach.
In terms of technologies, I will focus especially on the magic of contem-
porary information and communication technologies, thus further devel-
oping previous work on magic and technologies (Coeckelbergh 2017,
2018). Consider, for instance, the magic of social robots or smart assis-
tive devices such as Alexa. I will argue that these technologies do not only
The Magic of Technology 107
tend to escape our understanding and exceed our expectations and imagi-
nation, as Clarke already suggested—think, for example, about artifi-
cial intelligence and in particular machine learning applications, which
act as magical devices that exceed our understanding. The technologies
also play a key role in our contemporary performative experiences and
practices and arguably even run much of the (social) show. Perhaps they
even co-define what illusion and deception are, what we mean by these
terms (and the same for honesty). Perhaps they also shape our epistemo-
logical and ethical thinking. (This thought already takes us to the next
chapter on philosophical performances and how technology shapes those
performances.)
In the course of the chapter I will continue to critically engage with the
Platonic metaphor (see Chapter 3 on theatre). I will also refer to Flusser’s
thinking about design, which uses theatre and dance metaphors, and
respond to Tognazzini’s seminal work on stage magic and design of ICTs.
5.2. From Stage Magic to the Ethics of Technology:

Platonic Epistemology and Ethics Against
Technology That Make Us the Victims of Magic
Stage magic is a performance art that entertains people by using tricks
and illusions. So, deception and illusion are not a side effect but are the
main aim. What is happing in stage magic seems remarkably close to
what Plato described using a theatrical metaphor. The audience mem-
bers in stage magic are like Plato’s prisoners or indeed Plato’s theatre
audience: while the magician knows what is really happening, knows the
truth, the audience members only see appearances. At least during the
performance, they live in illusion. They do not see reality. Thus, there is
a clear separation between the world of reality and the world of illusion
and between the theatre stage and the non-stage, real world.
Yet we must already note a significant difference between Plato’s nor-
mative evaluation of this situation and that of audiences in stage magic:
for Plato, people should be liberated from the world of appearances and
ascend to the truth. The philosopher can and should help with this escape
plan. This is the attitude of the Platonic philosopher and the modern
scientist; it is also the attitude of audience members in stage magic in
so far as they want to know what is going on. But at the same time
audiences of stage magic like to be deceived since it entertains them. As
Plato already said in Book III of the Republic (Plato 1997), what deceives
also enchants, it casts a spell (413c). And audience members love to be
enchanted. They want the spell. During the time of the performance, they
don’t want to know what is really going on. This would spoil the illusion.
They want illusion. Moreover, usually they also know that what they
see is an illusion. They know that they are being deceived. They are not
Plato’s ignorant prisoners, nor do they fully know the truth. They know
that there is a reality that is different from the appearances they see, even
if they don’t know what this reality is.
Thus, on the one hand there is the stage, where there is deception, on
the other hand there is reality: the reality of the magician, who knows
what she is doing and what is going on (which is not known to the audi-
ence) and the reality the audience lives (in) outside of the theatre, which is
assumed to be known to the audience and which is assumed to be a non-
performative reality. There is a reality that can be known independently
or objectively, and there can be trickery and deceit in social life, but it is
not supposed to be like that. You’re not supposed to act. You’re supposed
to be authentic, be yourself, etc. And you’re not supposed to let yourself
be deceived by others. In the Republic, Plato demands that guardians are
put to the test: they are asked to perform tasks that are likely to make
them be deceived, and those who do not let themselves be deceived and
who recollect the truth are selected, they are the best guardians (413b-d).
The others are “victims of magic” (413b) and should not rule the city.
This takes us to the ethics of stage magic, at least an ethics within this
(post-)Platonic model: in contrast to the real world outside magic, on the
stage of the magician it is allowed if not mandatory to deceive and to cre-
ate illusion. The clear epistemological divide between appearances and
reality is also a divide between two kinds of ethical spaces: in stage magic
deception is allowed, in real life it is not. In real life, to be ethical includes
not deceiving people. Magicians, or anyone else for that matter, should
not deceive, should render people the victims of magic. The ethical magi-
cian confirms this divide: while on the stage she will do everything to sup-
port illusion and perhaps even refer to supernatural magic if that helps,
in general—I mean: outside the theatre, not on stage—she does not claim
that what she does is supernatural. She claims that she is a skilled magi-
cian whose profession is to create illusions. She tricks and deceives on
the stage, but if she is ethical she does not deceive at a meta-level, she
does not deceive in the sense of making people believe that she really has
supernatural powers. If she is ethical, she frames her act as a stage magic
performance. In other words, it is framed as theatre, in the sense that it is
claimed that what happens is not real. Audiences understand that. After
all, that is what they want. They want to see something extraordinary,
they want to be taken out of the real world. In the real world they might
be critical. They might have a scientific attitude or long for philosophi-
cal truth. But for the duration of the show they are willing to suspend
disbelief for the sake of entertainment. A Platonic-Socratic questioner
or modern scientist would spoil the fun. The world of appearances and
the world of reality have to be kept separated and the one should not
pollute the other. In the real world, it is forbidden to deceive. On the
magician’s stage, it is a categorical imperative. The audience should be
wondering and be amazed but should not really embark on an inquiry to
find out how it works. They should enjoy the show! For this purpose, it
is part of the magician’s ethic to not reveal her tricks. This would spoil
the fun and cross the illusion/reality divide, cross the border between the
world of appearances and the real world, between performance and non-
performance. The ethics of stage magic, and Platonic ethics in general,
demands that this border is protected and maintained.
It is not difficult to see a parallel between what happens in stage magic
and what happens in and with contemporary information and commu-
nication technologies. Of course, on stage technologies have always been
used to deceive. Magicians use technological artefacts, often simple ones
such as a handkerchief and sometimes more complex ones. In the 18th
and 19th century automata were used to deceive audiences. For example,
in the mid-19th century, the French clockmaker and stage magic pioneer
Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin performed with automata that appeared
to be alive. But today it seems that technologically supported deception
and illusion have left the stage and are to be found everywhere and are
available for everyone. Consider virtual reality technology and computer
games, designed to deceive you into experiencing that you are in a dif-
ferent world, social robots that appear to be alive, and digital assistants
such as Alexa or Google Assistant that trick users into thinking that the
former have a personality. More generally, computers, smartphones, and
the internet take you to different worlds (or so it is often interpreted).
And earlier, film, radio, and television already performed their magic on
audiences. We are put under a spell, and we love it.
Like in stage magic, these illusions are not side effects but are often the
very aim of the technology. These technologies and media are designed
to deceive and to create illusion. And usually we like it. In the 1990s,
software designer Tognazzini (1993) argued that the design of human-
computer interfaces can learn from the principles of magic. Similarly,
Marshall, Benford, and Pridmore (2010) argue that creating illusion is
needed to entertain and engage users (567) and that users also may want
to deceive each other. Thus, designers are a kind of magician but with a
stage that is everywhere. As Vilém Flusser reminds us, the term “design”
is often related to cunning and deception (and techne as ars even to
“sleight of hand”), and etymologically a “machine” (Greek: mechos) is a
device designed to trap and deceive:
The word occurs in contexts associated with cunning and deceit.

A designer is a cunning plotter laying his traps. Falling into the same
category are other vary significant words: in particular, mechanics and
machine. The Greek mechos means a device designed to deceive—i.e.
a trap—and the Trojan Horse is one example of this. Ulysses is called
polymechanikos, which schoolchildren translate as ‘the crafty one’.
The word mechos itself derives from the ancient MAGH, which we
recognize in the German Macht and mögen, the English ‘might’ and
‘may’. Consequently, a machine is a device designed to deceive; a
lever, for instance, cheats gravity, and ‘mechanics’ is the trick of fool-
ing heavy bodies.
(Flusser 1999, 17)
According to Flusser, the modern bourgeois distinction between the world

of arts and the world of technology is bridged by design, but this is only
possible because both are already connected (Flusser 1999, 18). He thus
links technology to the art of deception. It is a way to deceive nature (19)
and each other. Contemporary devices such as social robots and assis-
tive devices, then, we could conclude, are new ways to trick and deceive.
Designers and the people they work for, it seems, want to deceive us, also
in the sense of exercising power over us. (See later in this chapter.)
Seen from the point of view of a Platonic ethics, this magic by means
of technologies is fine if it happens on stage and if it is clear that it is illu-
sion. But it is seen as very problematic if and in so far it crosses the bor-
der between virtual and real, between appearances and truth—in other
words: if it makes victims of magic. Whereas stage magic (and film) were
confined to the theatre, it seems that new technologies and media bring
deception into the everyday life, that is, into the real world. This goes
against the (Platonic) ethics of stage magic, since it is no longer clear
where the stage ends and real life starts. The stage is everywhere, appear-
ances and reality mix. Consider, for example, augmented reality, which
deliberately tries to mix up appearance and reality. Within a (post-)Pla-
tonic framework, this is deception and is strictly forbidden. It is the great-
est sin.
Indeed, several criticisms of contemporary information and commu-
nication technologies have understandably been formulated in terms of
deception and illusion. For example, robot ethicists have warned about
the danger of deception by robots. Users are tricked into believing that
robots are companions or carers, but they are not (Sparrow and Spar-
row 2006, 148). And while in the theatre deception is unproblematic,
like when a puppeteer does her show, it is problematic when children
are deceived with robot nannies (Sharkey and Sharkey 2010). Accord-
ing to Turkle, robots are designed to make us “fool ourselves” (Turkle
2011, 20). We believe that there is meaning, love, and emotion, but there
is none of this. There is only illusion and performances: performances
of love (138) and emotion (286). Perhaps the same could be said about
devices such as Alexa. There is a performance of personality, but this is a
dangerous deception: there is no such thing. The device does not have a
personality, does not have a soul, does not have a mind, etc.
Ethically speaking, then, designers should avoid such deceptions and
illusions. Or at least they should be honest about what the device does.
Similar to the stage magician who is honest about her act in the sense that
she makes clear that it is an act, designers should make clear to users that
the device creates an illusion. Tognazzini therefore proposes an ethics
of honesty. We can interpret this ethics as one that aims at maintaining
or restoring the borders between appearances and reality, between stage
and non-stage, between performance and non-performance. Tognazzini
writes about the computer:
The magician is not supernatural; the character he plays is. The com-
puter is not capable of human intelligence and warmth; the character
we create is. People will not end up feeling deceived and used when
they discover, as they must ultimately, that the computer is nothing
but a very fast idiot.
(Tognazzini 1993, 361)
Similarly, one could demand that designers be honest about social robots
and assistive devices and perhaps design them in such a way that it is
clear to users that their intelligence, personality, mind, emotions, friend-
ship, love, etc., are an illusion, that they are not real, that they are noth-
ing but machines.
More generally, one could demand that technologies do not cross the
border to the real world and, if they produce illusions and trick us, at
least make clear that they are producing illusions. To the extent that they
fail to do this, they deceive us and we become victims of magic. One
could argue, like Turkle, that new technologies and media distract us
from real love, real friendship, and indeed (in the vein of Sparrow and
Sparrow) from reality as it is. Or one could argue, like Tognazzini, for an
ethics of honesty. Designers should be honest about what they and their
technological artefacts do and create. Users could demand from design-
ers: If with your robot or smart device you’re making a Trojan Horse that
is designed to invade the privacy of our homes in order to capture data
for commercial purposes, then say it clearly and make clear in the design
of the technology that you’re doing a trick, that you’re giving us the
pleasure of magic in return for our data. Don’t pretend to do something
supernatural, like creating a robot that is “alive” or that is “conscious”,
or that is a “friend”. Be honest that you want to entertain and create
illusion, but that it is a mere illusion, that the robot is a machine. Be
honest that what you’re doing is a kind of (puppet) theatre, stage magic.
Perhaps you are not obliged to “reveal your tricks”, that is, explain how
everything works. One could argue that in commercial contexts, like in
magician communities, secrets have to be guarded. One could question
this and argue that this should not be absolute and that consumers have
the right to be better informed. But whatever the outcome of that discus-
sion, the ethical and legal demand towards designers and their compa-
nies, governments, and organizations is: you are obliged to reveal that
you are tricking us (e.g., by selling our data obtained by means of a
Trojan Horse interface).
However, things are not that clear, not at all.
5.3. From the Platonic Theatre to Real Performances
With and by Technology
The previous section assumed a relatively simple and Platonic model of
stage magic, according to which there is appearance (on the part of the
spectator, who is deceived) and reality (on the part of the magician, who
knows what is real). But as in stage magic, things are not what they seem
at first sight. The so-called “appearance” on the side of the spectator is
more real than thus far assumed. The spectator really experiences that,
for example, a person disappears or a table levitates. The spectator feels
real emotions and really perceives the “illusions”. So why call it “appear-
ance”? It seems more appropriate to speak of two realities. Tognazzini,
albeit still using the Platonic language of appearance, writes:
Actually, there are two simultaneous acts performed in magic: the

one the magician actually does—the magician’s reality—and the one
the spectators perceive—the spectators’ reality: The magician’s real-
ity consists of all the sleights of hand and manipulation of gimmicked
devices that make up the prosaic reality of magic. The spectators’
reality, given a sufficiently competent magician, is entirely different:
an alternate reality in which the normal laws of nature are repeat-
edly defied, a reality where the magician, as well as his or her tricks,
appear supernatural.
(Tognazzini 1993, 357)
As Tognazzini argues, time and timing are important in creating these dif-
ferent realities: the magician does something at a time 1, which then has
effects at a time 2. The two realities correspond to two different temporal
points. There is the time of the magician and the time of the spectator.
The magician uses time in order to create the illusion. The spectator might
think that the trick happens at time 2, whereas it has already happened
at time 1, for example (Tognazzini 1993, 359). Like the metaphor of
music, this temporal dimension of magic shows us that performance is a
process: acts take place in space but also in time, and this time dimension
is very important for the performance to work. Moreover, the spectator
should not be assumed to be entirely passive, epistemologically speaking.
In line with insights from contemporary cognitive science (enactivism)
and philosophy of mind, we must submit that perception is something
we actively do, rather than that it just happens to us (Noë 2005). It can
thus be said that the spectator actively co-constructs the performance—
co-performs, as it were. Hence one could even speak of two acts or two
performances, one by the spectator and one by the magician. One per-
forms in order to create a spectator reality; the other performs the role of
spectator and co-constructs the spectator reality. Moreover, the percep-
tion by the spectators does not happen in a purely symbolic or ethereal
world of appearances but is rather a matter of embodied perception and
performance. Without the real presence and work of real people and
their very real bodies (and hence their embodied knowledge of how it
is to be situated in space, etc.), the magic does not work. Finally, stage
magic is a social performance, in which both the magician and the specta-
tor play a role. The magician is not more “authentic” than the spectators,
or vice versa. Both find themselves in a social setting in which the mask
and the person cannot easily be disentangled. (And Flusser even suggests
that there is no “I” behind the mask (1999, 106).)
This means that we have to question the Platonic interpretation of
Plato’s own metaphor; we can offer an alternative, non-Platonic account
of what happens in the cave and, more generally, a non-Platonic account
of philosophy. In Plato’s cave, the prisoners are chained, but all the same
they are part of the performance and their perception is more active than
assumed: they co-construct the so-called appearances. Without them,
theatre or stage magic does not work. There is always co-performance.
And what they experience and know may well differ from what the
philosopher experiences and knows, but it is also a reality. It may then
still be argued that the prisoners should be released on the grounds, for
example, that they have a limited and incomplete view since there are
more realities, and that they should also be helped to find their way to
see another reality. It may even be argued that the philosopher’s real-
ity outside of the cave is more meaningful and valuable than the reality
inside. And one could examine how the artefact-mediated reality of the
prisoners differs from that of the non-mediated reality outside. But in this
non-Platonic view, the reality and experience of the prisoners’ experience
can and should no longer be dismissed as amounting to “mere appear-
ance”. The prisoners are also living and experiencing a reality. This real-
ity is also a social reality. In contrast to Plato, we must emphasize that
the prisoners are not mute puppets but can talk and can talk with one
another. They are not atomistic minds. They communicate. They think
and, together, actively make and construct their reality. Furthermore, the
prisoners also have bodies. They are not disembodied perceivers. And
just as the philosopher plays the role of liberator, the prisoners also play
the role of prisoner. Moreover, the philosopher’s experience is also not
one of “pure mind” but requires embodied performance. The ascent to
the truth requires walking up. It is not an ascent towards pure spirit;
body and mind remain connected and (inter)fused. A magician uses her
body, as do philosophers. Finally, philosophy is also a technological
practice. Like the magician, the philosopher needs techniques and skill.
The magician knows reality, or rather: knows her reality. But that reality
is also constructed and is learned by means of skilful engagement with
things and technologies. To become a magician it is not enough to know
in theory or to recollect an a priori truth, as Plato argued. One has to
acquire know-how and make knowledge. Similarly, the philosopher also
needs to learn by doing, in practice. I will say more about philosophy as a
performative practice in the next chapter. For now it suffices to conclude
that, once we take a performative turn, things get more complicated and
the Platonic model breaks down.
This also happens when we reinterpret contemporary experience of
technologies and media in this light. It might be tempting to dismiss
“online” experience and “game” experience as less real, as “virtual”
reality as opposed to “real” reality. But this Platonic approach fails once
we consider technological experiences as performances and as embodied
practices. So-called “online experience” does not take place in a different
world but is also a kind of reality, and one that is actively constructed by
means of embodied performance by the user. When I use the internet to
work, communicate, or game (e.g., on a computer or on a smartphone)
I do not enter a different, “virtual” world, if that implies a world of
“appearances” as opposed to “reality”. When I interact with a robot,
I do not enter a world of “illusion” as opposed to “reality”. Instead,
there is one world or one reality, or, as I suggested in the previous para-
graphs, different worlds and different realities—all of which, however,
are equally real. Online and offline worlds may be different, but there
is not hierarchy in terms of how real they are. And even if one were to
hesitate in saying that there is one reality or one world, in any case the
realities and worlds overlap and merge. For example, my role, personal-
ity, appearance, and indeed performances on online social media are not
totally different from my other roles, personality, appearances, and per-
formances, and there is mutual influence. The same can be said for games
and virtual worlds, even if there the differences might be larger.
Furthermore, like stage magic, technological practices such as social
media use and virtual worlds are also deeply social performances. Episte-
mologically and practically, both parties are required: the user-spectator
and the designer-magician. But in contemporary digital experience and
practice, the line between user-spectator and designer-magician blurs as
users get more active in terms of providing content and adapting the
stage and the tricks provided by the designers. Contemporary social
media and games cross the line between spectators and magicians. When
we use a social medium like Facebook or Twitter, we are co-magicians;
without users, the magic of the medium would not work. We are not just
tricked; we are not just victims of magic. We also trick ourselves, contrib-
ute to the spell. Sometimes designers do not even intend a trick but the
users trick themselves. For example, some owners of Roomba vacuum
cleaners—not designed to create a social illusion—develop social emo-
tions towards their machine: they feel gratitude or treat it as their baby
(Scheutz 2011). Users are then both magicians and spectators. Further-
more, these technologies and practices are also social performances in the
sense that, like in stage magic, both users and designers play roles. And
users play roles and communicate among themselves. Even if they are
alone with their phone or in front of their computer screen, users inter-
act with one another, for example, when they use social media or play
MMORPGs. It is a social and communicative setting. And this is what
the theatre has always been. In origin it might have even been a lot more
social; if we follow Nietzsche’s (post)Romantic imagination, the Greek
theatre was more like having a party (and possibly orgy) than going to
a modern Western theatre or a modern cinema, in which technologies
and architectures maintain the divide between a Platonic passive specta-
tor and active performer. Plato’s metaphor is closer to modern Western
theatre or cinema (and indeed puppet theatre) than it is to the Greek trag-
edy he criticized. The latter seems a better metaphor for describing what
we do on and with “the internet” or “digital” technologies. The reality
or different realities of contemporary technological experience is or are
social realities. They are not different from social reality at large or from
other social realities.
Furthermore, like people at a party, users of “online” services and par-
ticipants in “virtual” worlds and “computer” games do not leave their
body at home when they engage in their technological practice. Their
actions (e.g., clicks), thinking, and perceptions involve the body and are
made possible by their embodied experience. Not only do the design-
ers perform; the users are also performers, and this is always an active,
social, and embodied performance.
Thus, both what users do and what designers do are technology-mediated
performances. Not only the designer has machines and tricks; users, too,
employ technologies and techniques to do something with whatever the
designer offers. They are not like Plato’s passive spectators chained to
their chairs. They co-perform rather than passively consume “the inter-
net”, social media, etc. Their experience is designed, but in their use they
co-design the experience. They are co-magicians. The metaphor of stage
magic, or rather the simple interpretation of stage magic, breaks down.
And so does Plato’s theatrical metaphor, that is, the Platonic view and
version of theatre. A performance-oriented approach enables us to revise
the Platonic interpretation and construction of theatre and magic, and it
thereby offers us not only a critique of how he uses his theatre and magic
metaphors but also an alternative way of understanding what goes on in
and with contemporary information and communication technologies.
Let me give another example to further show the implications of this
performative turn for thinking about contemporary technologies and to
return to the ethical question: social robotics. According to the Platonic
interpretation, what happens when social robots such as companion
robots, care robots, or nanny robots are used is that users are deceived,
are given an illusion. They are taken to a world of appearances. This is
done by the designer-magician (and we could add: those who employ
the robot such as parents, care workers, managers, etc.—the partners in
crime), who tricks the users into thinking that this robot is alive, is a real
companion, has emotions, and so on. If it is a good designer-magician,
the illusion works. The users are entertained and the robot performs
its function (e.g., monitoring an ill user). This model supposes that the
designer is the performer who knows reality, whereas the user is a pas-
sive recipient of whatever the designer cooks up and that the user lives in
a different world, a world of illusion. Only the designer knows that the
robot is really just a machine, that is, a device for tricking. (The same can
be said for the parents, the care workers, and so on.)
This then raises the ethical worry that the designer and those who
employ the robot deceive the user and are not honest about what they
are doing. The children, elderly people, and so on, are seen as the vic-
tims of magic. They are imprisoned in appearances. According to the
non-Platonic, performative interpretation of what happens here, how-
ever, there are different realities: the reality of the user and that of the
designer, and the reality of the user cannot be dismissed by calling it
“appearance”. In and during the performance, there is a lot of real-
ity. The user has real emotions and real experience. The robot really
seems alive, for example. Or the robot really seems to care. In practice,
robotics researchers are not such good magicians (yet). The illusion may
last very briefly or may not be complete. But there are sufficient “magi-
cal” effects. And sometimes very little is needed to create a spell. This
is so because, again, the users are not passive perceivers but active co-
constructors and co-performers of the reality. Yet regardless how skilled
the magician-designer and his accomplices are and however successful
the performance is, my point is that the experience of the user is real.
It does not belong to a different world of appearances, a virtual world.
It belongs to the same world we all live in, or at least it is one of the
worlds—all of which are equally real.
Furthermore, this response is still formulated in terms of a discussion
about “reality” and “realities”, but once we move beyond a Platonic
and metaphysical approach towards a performative approach, different
questions can be asked. It becomes clear that what happens here is not
adequately described by the Platonic metaphor, which suggests that real-
ity can be known independently of users’ (inter)subjectivity and which
assumes passivity on the part of the users. Instead, the users are active,
as performers and as perceivers. The human-robot interaction and the
experience of the robot are actively constructed and co-performed by the
users. The designer is not the only one who performs. The designer is
not in complete control of the “appearance” or “illusion”. The users co-
perform their real experience of the robot and their real practical engage-
ment with the robot. This also involves them as embodied and social
beings. They perceive the robot on the basis of their own embodied and
social-emotional experience, e.g., they can interpret the robot as being
“sad” because they know how it is to be sad and they have experience
seeing other people being sad. They also communicate with one another
about the robot (directly) or indirectly find themselves in a social context
in which things are said about the robot (e.g., in the room they are, dis-
cussions in society, ideas about robots in their culture, etc.), which also
co-constructs their experience and performance. What the robot “is” or
how it “appears”, then, is not only the result of the designer-magician.
Rather, the robot and its magic effects emerge in social-performative
processes, which include the performances of the designer but also the
performances of advertising people, business people, scientists, all kinds
of users, people who comment on the robot on social media, etc. This
creates very real performative experiences and practices of and with the
robot. Questions can then be asked about knowledge, communication,
sociality, and values in these performative experiences and practices
rather than discussing what is real.
Adopting this approach does not mean that robot ethicists should stop
asking ethical questions, but rather that they have to reframe their argu-
ments and concerns. For example, it may well be ethically problematic to
use robot nannies that monitor and entertain young children. But instead
of arguing in general and Platonically that it is bad because it deceives
children, gives them a world of illusion, etc., one has to be more precise
about why exactly the reality (not the “appearance” or “illusion”) expe-
rienced and co-performed by the child is not good for the child—why and
when that particular kind of experience and that kind of performance
are bad. For example, one may argue that it creates, at that point in time
and in that context, a social reality and social-interactive patterns that
do not prepare the child for a different, more complex social context
at a different and later time, when the child goes to school and has to
perform and deal with other people (its peers) rather than with a robot,
(the use of) which is not successful (enough) in constructing and perform-
ing such a human to human social interaction. Or one may argue that
it creates social-emotional interactions and performances which are not
as good and not as rich as can be provided when the child interacts and
co-performs with its parents rather than the robot, perhaps leading to a
poor emotional interaction and performance of the child and problems in
the child-parents relation. I don’t know if this is the case. Such arguments
would need further support. It is also likely that things are not as simple
as that. Perhaps some (kinds of) interactions with a robot are absolutely
fine and beneficial to the child in some ways. Maybe some performances
help the child develop. Maybe this also depends on how the performances
of the child with the robot are connected to other performances, e.g., of
the parents, peers, etc. In addition, one can also ask questions about how
designers of robots shape these performances and how they frame their
role. I don’t know the answer to these questions. My point is that such
questions about the right kind of interactions and the right kind of per-
formances (and the role of the designer in shaping these performances),
rather than a general accusation of deception, lead us to a more precise
and arguably more interesting discussion about robot ethics and, more
generally, about the ethics of technology.
To conclude, using the metaphor of stage magic has helped me to con-
ceptualize technological experience and practice in terms of performance,
which contributes to developing a novel way of thinking about technol-
ogy. We can now ask different questions about technology: about what
kind of experience and knowledge is involved when we use technology
and about what good technology is and should do. Unpacking and criti-
cally discussing the stage magic metaphor has helped me to move the
discussion from a simpler and Platonic way of thinking about techno-
logical experience and practice to one which makes things more complex
but also more interesting and useful, as it forces us to think harder about
what exactly goes on when we humans, as active, embodied, social, and
skilled beings, perform with technology.
To end this section, let me reflect more on the ethical, social, and politi-
cal aspects of technological performances. In this context I will also ask,
as in other chapters, what it would mean to say that technologies, instead
of, or alongside, humans, move, organize, direct, and play (with) us—i.e.,
become the master-magicians.
5.4. Who (or What) Deceives Whom? More Ethical,

Social, and Political Questions
Metaphors help us by means of similarities but also by means of differ-
ences. In this way we learn more about the phenomenon we wanted to
understand. In this case, the metaphor of stage magic helped us to see
more clearly what a performative approach to contemporary technolo-
gies means. There were similarities but also differences, especially when
the limitations of the Platonic framing of the metaphor became clear.
And, interestingly, using a metaphor always goes both ways: as we learn
more about our object of study (technological experience and practice),
we also learn something about the metaphor itself (stage magic) and pos-
sibly change our view of it. In this case, it turns out that we usually have
a too simple and too Platonic view of what is going on in stage magic.
It turned out, for example, that a simple interpretation of stage magic
almost entirely left out the social aspect. The simple model included
spectators, which suggests a social setting. But what does it mean to
really conceptualize performances, including stage magic and (other)
technological practices, as intrinsically social? And what does this imply
for technology? What role does technology play in these social per-
formances? I already made some suggestions about these issues in the
previous sections, but it is helpful to consider some other elements that
further support the performative-oriented view that is being developed
here. More can also be said about the ethical and especially the political
implications. My ethical discussion started with the charge of deception
and then I questioned this way of formulating the problem, which led to
a more performance-oriented approach. This section continues to chal-
lenge the Platonic approach and changes the initial question from “Is
it really deception?” to “Who deceives whom?” This is an ethical and
social but also a political question.
Social
In the previous chapters, the theatre metaphor was especially helpful to
elaborate the social aspect, and this is also the case here. I already men-
tioned role playing: whereas in the simple, Platonic model there is a strict
conceptual distinction (and spatial separation) between stage and non-
stage, between performance and non-performance, between the magi-
cian’s theatre and the non-theatre of normal social life, if we take into
account insights from Goffman, then the normal social life is also all
about role playing and, more generally, is already performative. And if
all social life is performative, then the distinction between stage and non-
stage cannot be maintained.
Next to role playing one can also use other elements from the theatre
to support this point. Flusser, who also uses dance and theatre meta-
phors, writes about masks (Flusser 1999, 105). According to him, there
are masks rather than persons and masks instead of an “I” that is sup-
posed to be behind the mask. “Mask” is an interesting metaphor as it
refers to social role playing and to trickery and deceit but also to tech-
nology, since it is an artefact—one that is designed. And technological
artefacts are always more than tools. As Flusser suggests (106), the mask
is not just an outcome of social relations; it also creates these social rela-
tions. One could say that the mask is the outcome of social performances
and at the same time creates and makes possible social performances.
This metaphor thus leads us to consider the more-than-instrumental
social-performative role of technology itself: as we will also see later in
this chapter, the mask is not only a metaphor for social roles but also for
technology, which co-creates the performance. But let me start with the
insight that performance is everywhere, that the mask is everywhere.
For thinking about technology, to say that “the mask is everywhere”
means that if technology can be compared to stage magic at all, its per-
formative dimension is not something that is present only in specific
contexts. Instead, technology is always already embedded in a social-
performative whole. There is not only the specific performance of “trick-
ery” and “illusion” by the designer; performance is a dimension of the
everyday life, and technologies are part of that. There are already all
kinds of “machinations” and tricks in social life; technology is used all
over the place to socially perform. Of course there are new “social” tech-
nologies. For example, social robots are used in social performances and
social media such as Facebook provide a theatre stage for performance of
the self (a self which is only created and emerges in and by performance).
But older technologies such as phones but also clothes or rooms with
tables and chairs that are not called social are also technologies for social
performances. They play a role in the performance of relationships, in
eating performances, work performances, and so on. They enable peo-
ple to play their roles and create their masks in everyday social life. The
social magic and trickery also goes on in social life in general, and tech-
nologies often mediate these performances. Consider for example the
clothes of the physician, the table in the family home, or the phones of
the lovers: these artefacts are used by the doctor, parents, and lovers to
play their roles and support their social masks and help to construct their
social personas. The white coat of the physician contributes to the spell
of the doctor’s role. The table magically gathers the family and confirms
its roles and social bonds. And the phones of the lovers enable them to
shape their mask and personas in the relationship. Design of technology
has always been “tricky” in the sense that it has always had social effects
and has intervened in social-performative settings. In this sense, design
was never only about artefacts; it has always been a social enterprise. In
the information age it is also literally about non-things, as Flusser argued
(1999, 86), in the sense that there might be a more immaterial aspect to
the new technologies. But my point here is that technologies and techno-
logical design are especially about people and what they do with and to
one another. Design is a social affair that takes place in social settings.
And, as I already suggested and will argue next, in these settings not only
designers but also users are performative agents.
Politics: Power
A more social angle also invites the question: if and in so far as technol-
ogy and design are about deception at all (I have questioned this in the
previous sections), then who deceives whom? In a simple model it is the
designer-magician who deceives the users. But things are not that simple.
First, and as I argued previously, it is not clear that what goes on is
really deception. Taken to the social dimension this means asking: Is
playing a role deception? If my doctor plays the role of doctor, she is not
deceiving me. Yet she is performing her role. And I am performing my
role as patient. Similarly, the designer also plays her role in the techno-
performative theatre. There is no need to speak of deception. Or at least
usually there is no need for that. Of course there can be performances
that are deceptive (for example, the doctor turns out to be a fake doc-
tor, the app gives us the illusion that it only records when we press a
button but is actually all the time recording what we say), but the com-
parison is then not between, on the one hand, a performative situation
which is supposed to be deceptive by definition and, on the other hand,
a non-performative situation which is supposed to be non-deceptive by
definition. Instead, there is one performative space (or many performative
spaces, if you like) in which deception can happen or not. But “decep-
tion” is then not defined in a way that links it performance as such.
Second, designers are not the only ones who shape the technology;
designers are usually a part of companies and related to other actors.
These act as co-magicians or as organizers of the stage magic by means
of technology. For example, who is the designer of “Facebook”? There
are many people involved. This means that responsibility for the “magic”
and “tricks” is difficult to ascribe. Moreover, and as suggested previ-
ously, it is also difficult to call for the revealing of the magician’s secrets:
while computer scientists and engineers might be happy to be open about
their technology, when they work for a company, they are asked not to
reveal their tricks. This raises ethical questions: is it really ok that the
tricks are not revealed at all? If an AI is deciding about my job applica-
tion, don’t I have the right to know how it works? An ethics of honesty
seems to require transparency. But what if, for example, in the case of
some machine learning applications, no one can explain how it reached
its decision? Is the technology in this case the magician, and what hap-
pens to an ethics of honesty then? (See also the next section.)
More generally, the question “who deceives whom” raises the question
of power. To act as a magician is always a way of exercising power over
people. Exercise of power is not necessarily bad. As Foucault (1980) has
argued, there is power everywhere in social life. This does not always
mean that there are performances of coercion and punishment. But there
are micro-mechanisms of power. Little tricks, like disciplining tricks in
the prison and the hospital. In schools. In companies. In bureaucra-
cies like universities. These tricks often include the use of technologies;
think of the magic of the panopticon, which means that prisoners can be
observed without their knowing that they are being observed. Some of
the tricks are secret; they are not revealed to everyone. There are secrets
everywhere in social life, secrets and machinery to exercise power over
others, as in bureaucracies.
Third, acknowledging that there is trickery and power everywhere in
social life, in all social relations, also implies that we cannot just assume
the simple model of one-sided exercise of power by one person or author-
ity. Instead, there is the possibility of resistance and, more importantly,
there are many magicians who exercise power. We all exercise power in
social relations. We all perform. We all wear masks. And perhaps we all
manipulate and deceive, sometimes and to some extent. Of course, some
actors (persons, organizations, companies, etc.) have more power than
others, including more power to deceive.
For thinking about technology, in particular contemporary ICTs, this
means that we all contribute to the show, as “spectators” but also as
“magicians” who exercise power over each other. Users are not only vic-
tims of magic but, if there is deception at all, they also deceive each other,
for example on social media. The model of the all-powerful, potentially
evil designer breaks down. Our complaints against, and fascinations
with, the trickery and magic of the new technologies should not only be
directed at the designers and their companies. Companies like Facebook
or Google might trick and perhaps deceive us, in some ways (such a
claim would have to be specified, if one makes such an accusation), and
such companies have a lot more power than individual users, but we
are co-performers and, if there is deception, then we are also deceiving
ourselves and we are deceiving each other. We are Google. We are part of
the show. Both designers and users perform and, potentially, deceive. As
users of ICTs, we are part of a social-performative environment created
and mediated by technology and its designers (and companies). And, as
in any social-performative trickery and magic going on, we often per-
form by means of technologies and often in order to exercise power over
others (intentionally or not). We all perform and, in this way, exercise
some power and magic. Sometimes we trick others. As Flusser suggested,
machines are etymologically connected to Macht, the German word for
power (Flusser 1999, 17). Using machines, designers have the power
(capacity) to perform and have the power to have others perform (act)
in a specific way. But not only designers: users also exercise that power.
As co-performers and sometimes counter-performers (e.g., performances
of resistance), users may not have as much power as designers and their
companies. But they are not powerless.
The question regarding technology, then, if understood as a social-
performative one, is also always a political question. Who has the power
to shape the performance of others? Who has the power to define their
role, mask, and identity? As Flusser says, if society is about masks and if
as social beings we always design masks for others (106), the design of
masks is a political matter (105). Who has more power than others? And
who shapes the power structures?
Technology and Its Agency

As is known in contemporary philosophy of technology, however, one
could also consider non-human agents that have power and exercise
power: technologies and media also have some agency and power them-
selves. There is also a politics of technologies. Machines also have Macht
(power). Shifting to a performative approach, we can now re-conceptualize
this general point as follows: technologies and media are not only instru-
ments used by the many magicians involved (designers, but also users,
managers, etc.); to some extent they are also magicians themselves as
they play a major, more-than-instrumental role in creating and managing
our trickeries and (self-)illusions and in shaping our performances and
our masks. For example, if we use Facebook, then the way we perform
towards others is not independent of the medium. The medium is not a
mere means for such performances but also shapes what we do into a
particular kind of performance, for example one that is directed at get-
ting “likes” from people within this medium. There is not only direct
influence on a particular performance; often the influence is more like
directing and organizing the magic, setting the stage for the magic but
also shaping the magic. Facebook does not tell its users what to write in
a post. But it shapes and structures the environment of our social media
performances. It influences what kind of posts are written and the way
they are written, in a way that seeks maximum effect by including a
personal photo, for example. And more deeply: the medium influences
the structure of how we live and experience our lives, for example when
it encourages its users to live-in-order-to-post or to experience an event
as a potential Facebook post. Perhaps this is the most dangerous or, in
any case, the most deep and pervasive consequence of these media. It
is the ultimate trick, the ultimate magic that those who try to monetize
our technological experience can dream of: to enchant not only on the
stage of the application but also on the stage of life—or on all kinds of
stages of life. To make us see and live through the medium. Of course,
getting social approval has always been part of the social life. But using
the tricks of the medium, this goal itself is shaped in a particular way
and is arguably amplified (in order to make money). Thus, the medium
is not a neutral means. The magic and indeed the magician are shaped
by the instruments used. Furthermore, the technologies and media also
have effects that are not intended by the designer-magician or the user-
magician. Fake news, for example, was and is not intended by most
social media companies and its developers. But its emergence in its cur-
rent form cannot be disconnected from the medium and its development
as a social-technological performative whole. The users are not in con-
trol but neither is a company like Google or Facebook. Design is often
associated with intention, as Flusser remarks. But here the design act is
only one intervention within a wider social-performative field, a field of
magic and power.
Often we—users and designers—like the effects, even if they are not
intended. We want the illusions; we want the magic. But sometimes we
don’t like the effects. And, generally, we might have the feeling not only
that we don’t know what is going on (as in the case of contemporary
social media or artificial intelligence sometimes) but also that we lack
agency and power. To what extent are we still in control of the show?
We (users, designers, companies, etc.) wanted to use these instruments
to create magic, to create illusions, to trick, to exercise power, to control
our lives, to manipulate others, to make money, and so on, but what has
happened is that we now feel that our technologies have begun to control
us, to trick us, to give and manage our illusions. To use the simple version
of the metaphor: instead of being the master-magician, as designer or as
user, we risk becoming members of the audience. This feeling is especially
pertinent in the case of more autonomous and intelligent technologies
such as robots and artificial intelligence, but when we use various social
media we may also get this feeling. It seems that we have become puppets
in the hands of the machine-magician.
However, to state the (political) problem in this way assumes again a
simplicity and a dualism that is both unnecessary and inaccurate. The
simple version of the metaphor does not get it right. People still design
and use technologies. Humans are still co-magicians. They did not lose
all the power. They can influence what kind of trickery happens. And it is
not true that, as it is sometimes said, “resistance is futile”. Everyone exer-
cises power and everyone can exercise power. Not only designers but also
users have agency and power as co-magicians, over the technology and
the tricks. That being said, it is best to be aware that some people and
some technologies have more performative power than others, and that
there are non-intended effects. It is also important to critically reflect on
this and perhaps take action: performances of protest and performances
of resistance, for example. Developing counter-technologies, counter-
tricks. Hacking as a performance.
Once we take a performative turn, we can frame issues concerning
robotics, artificial intelligence, smart algorithms, data sciences, etc., as
a performative issue and hence as a social problem. In particular, with
contemporary ICTs we find ourselves in a social space where there are
(in line with Latour’s thinking) actors and actants. But, as I have argued
in the theatre chapter, technologies are not just quasi-actors. They also
direct and organize. They “do” things in so far as they sometimes have
direct agency and take over tasks from humans but also in the sense
that they have social and other effects that go beyond their instrumen-
tal role. Consider, for example, an algorithm that buys and sells. When
performances are done by machines, this raises its own ethical problems,
for example, since responsibility is difficult to ascribe (see Coeckelbergh
2015 but also Flusser 1999, 67). But there are also less obvious social-
performative effects: even if they lack full autonomous agency, technolo-
gies and media also organize and shape how we do things, how humans
do things. They shape how we perform. They shape the performative
stage. We act and we decide, but we do so within a program (Flusser
1999, 93; see also Latour again). Taking up the theatre metaphor again
one could say that they direct or, like Latour, one could use the metaphor
of script. Our magic and trickery are also scripted, just like the magic
of the stage magician. And in both cases the technology co-writes that
script, has intended and unintended effects. Such effects are difficult to
detect, describe, and interpret, and more work is needed to do so; I just
gave some examples of potential claims about social media. The point
here is not to make specific claims and arguments about the technologies
but to construe a performance-oriented conceptual framework that uses
metaphors from the performative arts.
This framework includes an evaluative element, especially when it is
formulated as addressing a political problem or an ethical problem. Let
us now return to the question regarding the ethics of technology and ask
again what kind of ethics we need, given the performative approach out-
lined in the previous sections. What does it mean to formulate an ethics
of technology as an ethics of performance? I will not formulate a general
performance-oriented ethics of technology here but will focus instead on
virtue ethics and in particular the virtue of honesty, which seems highly
relevant in the context of discussions about the magic, deception, and
illusion of contemporary technologies. (In my concluding chapter I say
more about a general performance-oriented ethics of technology.)
An Ethics of Honesty? Yes, Please, But a Performative One

Tognazzini asked for an ethics of honesty. One could frame this request
as part of a virtue ethics, perhaps even a more general virtue ethics of
technology (consider, for example, Vallor’s work). However, there is a
problem with the way it is formulated and it is not clear what honesty
means with regard to ICTs. Honesty is of course an important virtue;
this cannot and should not be doubted. But if we adopt a performative
approach, the ethical demand for honesty and indeed the virtue itself needs
to be reformulated. Instead of defining honesty in terms of reality versus
appearance, a performative virtue ethics calls for honest performance. It
abandons the stage/non-stage distinction and instead tries to make a dis-
tinction between honest performances and dishonest performances. This
distinction then applies everywhere, that is, it applies in so-called “vir-
tual” worlds and others, in so-called “online” environments and others.
Then it is no longer possible to oppose ICTs for being all about illusion
as opposed to the real world. Instead, one needs to be more precise about
which performance is dishonest and why exactly that performance is dis-
honest, ultimately: what honesty means with regard to that performance
and that practice. Moreover, it might be that some ICT environments and
applications such as contemporary social media stimulate dishonest per-
formances. That might be part of its intended or unintended effects. But
within a performative approach one can no longer claim that these media
are a stage of magic, trickery, and illusion as opposed to the rest of “real”
life, which is not supposed to be about magic and illusion. Instead, the
discussion should be about which technologies and machinery encourage
more trickery and dishonesty, about the performative-ethical effects of
the different media and technologies—here: the effects on honesty. Con-
temporary social media are just one of the machineries used in the social
life and are not a priori more tricky than others; their effects have to be
studied and compared to other (e.g., older) technologies and media.
Moreover, in the light of the previous discussion it is nonsense to discuss
these technologies and media on their own, as if they are unconnected to
humans and their performances. It is also not right to frame designers as
the only magicians and users as innocent and helpless victims of magic.
In their performative acts and practices, users co-create the magic and
the illusions, potentially co-trick others and exercise power in relation
to them. Using a performative approach, we find ourselves in a complex
field of social relations and forces, the messy social world of everyday
life. In that social world, technologies sometimes play the role of the
magician’s tool, and sometimes they are even co-magicians or co-write
the script of the show. But their role is always connected to humans, and
their effects cannot be adequately described and evaluated independent
from the human-technological performances and performative settings
they are part of.
Furthermore, to demand honesty is good and necessary, but a more
complete social-performative analysis is needed to figure out what counts
as dishonest and why with regard to specific performances, practices,
and their contexts, i.e., it is necessary to investigate how the (dis)hon-
esty is created in a performative field of humans and technologies/media.
This cannot be done from an unsituated, distant, and theoretical point
view alone, like, for example when a philosopher defines a list of virtues
or calls for respecting a virtue without taking into account what goes
on socially and performatively. Virtue, in my view, is not a thing or an
essence (as a kind of starting point, as it were) but is always performed
and is the result of social performances, is the outcome rather than the
starting point. Virtue needs to be performed. Honesty needs to be per-
formed. We need to move towards a social-performative virtue ethics,
which sees virtue as the outcome of technologically mediated and social-
performative processes and practices in power-pervaded performative
fields.
Note that here the focus is on the virtue of honesty, but the same could
be said about other virtues and indeed about other ethical values and
goods. For example, and keeping in mind Turkle’s worries, one could
say that values and goods such as love and friendship are of course very
important but are in practice dependent on, and the outcome of, perfor-
mances. Love and friendship are not really love and friendship if they are
not performed and experienced, sometimes with the help of technologies
and media which co-shape the performance and experience. A performa-
tive ethics places ethics right in the middle of our daily human perfor-
mances: performances with others and performances with and through
technologies and media. A non-performative ethics is a dead ethics, one
that may please the Platonic philosopher’s mind but is impotent and irrel-
evant to human lives.
In the concluding chapter I will say more about a performative-oriented
ethics of technology. But let us first turn to the last performative practice
that will be discussed in this book: philosophy. In the next chapter we
will see how, in spite of Plato’s purification efforts to separate philosophy
from the theatre and its magic, “even” philosophers need to be situated
in performative fields and their practices need to be seen as performative.
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6 Thinking With Technology
How Machines Stage Our Thinking
6.1. Introduction
The previous chapters were based on metaphors from a range of per-
forming arts practices. But as this book is concerned with thinking about
technology, we should not forget a performative practice that is very
close to philosophers of technology, so close that they don’t usually see it
as such: philosophy, and, more generally, thinking.
This move may surprise some readers, since most people tend to make
strict distinctions between thinking and doing, and between academic
pursuits and the arts. Thinking is supposed to be something “cognitive”
or “mental” that has nothing to do with performance, which is usually
seen as being about “the body”. The first is seen as something that can be
done privately; the second is by definition something public. Often think-
ing and also philosophy and science are also seen as “serious” endeav-
ours, whereas the arts—especially the performing arts—are seen as
forms of entertainment. And, even if the arts are taken seriously, artistic
“practices” and academic “thinking” are seen as very distinct activities.
But contemporary science, philosophy, and the arts are questioning and
crossing these borders all the time. Cognitive science shows that think-
ing is embodied, philosophy has taken a keen interest in the body, the
idea of private language and thought has been questioned at least since
Wittgenstein, some philosophers reach out to the arts and some artists
stage philosophy, there are many practices that merge art and science,
and interdisciplinary fields such as performance studies and, as we will
see, even the emerging transdisciplinary area “performance philosophy”,
bring together performing arts and philosophy.
Unfortunately, philosophy of technology has not yet benefitted much
from these border crossings, mergers, and this hybridity. As mentioned
earlier, there has been some work on body and embodiment (e.g., Ihde)
and some people in STS such as Pickering have used the term performance.
But both in their topics and their methods, philosophers of technology
have generally continued in a non-transdisciplinary way and ignored the
performing arts as a topic and as a potential source of inspiration.
Thinking With Technology 129
This book has been closing this gap by using metaphors from the per-
forming arts for thinking about technology, in particular philosophy
of technology. But now the next, ultimate step is to turn to the terms
thinking and philosophy themselves. It may be relatively easy to see per-
formance in daily embodied technological practices such as opening a
door and using a phone—the previous chapters include exercises that
show how this can be done. But in what sense is thinking and philosophy
itself performative? And how can this help us complete the project of this
book: to take (or complete) a performative turn in philosophy of technol-
ogy by using metaphors from the performing arts?
This chapter discusses what it means to understand philosophy as per-
formance and then explores the implications for thinking about technol-
ogy. On the way, I continue my critical engagement with Plato, a central
figure in discussions about the relations between philosophy and theatre
(see, for example, Puchner 2010). Some of the dualisms just mentioned
can be credited to his deep and continuing influence on Western think-
ing. I also use contemporary literature from the emerging field of perfor-
mance philosophy. As stated, this field is usually neglected in philosophy
of technology. Rare exceptions are Parviainen (used in Chapter 2) and
D’Arcy; the latter refers to theatre when gesturing towards a “pragmatic
performance approach” to the politics of technology, which enables him
to discuss the issue of visibility and technology (D’Arcy 2017). However,
in this chapter my source of metaphor is not only situated in what is usu-
ally considered performing arts, but I also explore the idea of philosophy
as performance.
First, I elaborate the idea of philosophy as performance, which as
in the previous chapters delivers a number of metaphorical elements—
rhetoric, participation, rhythm, and so on—that help me to construct the
metaphor of philosophy as performance. Then, I discuss what this meta-
phor implies for understanding technology. I end with a discussion of the
role of the philosopher (of technology) in relation to other practices, for
example (other) technological practices.
6.2. Philosophy as Performance
Plato on Rhetoric
I already noted in Chapter 3 that most Western philosophy from Plato
onwards has not been very positive about theatre, and perhaps this is
true for Western thinking about the performing arts in general. Let me
say more on Plato’s view of rhetoric in order to further confirm but also
nuance the view that Plato was against performance. This will get us
started in bridging the gap between performance and philosophy.
Next to Plato’s comments on poetry and theatre, we may also consider
his view on rhetoric: rhetoric (or sophistry) was opposed to philosophy.
According to Plato, rhetoric is used for deception rather than for discov-
ering the truth. Socrates was killed because he was accused of being a
sophist, of misleading the youth. Rhetoric was thus seen as very negative,
and this interpretation of rhetoric has been very influential in the history
of ideas. As Griswold (2016) rightly remarks, the term still has a negative
connotation today.
In Plato’s dialogues Protagoras and Gorgias, we find a strong opposi-
tion between rhetoric and philosophy. Let me focus on Gorgias (Plato
1997a) here. Gorgias is a teacher of oratory, the art of speaking or rheto-
ric. According to Socrates, the rhetorician does not give us true knowl-
edge. There is only the appearance of knowledge; there is only pretending:
Oratory doesn’t need to have any knowledge of the state of their sub-
ject matters; it only needs to have discovered some device to produce
persuasion in order to make itself appear to those who don’t have
knowledge that it knows more than those who actually do have it.
(459b-c)
One could also call it opinion, “being convinced without knowing”

(454e). Compare this with another Platonic dialogue: Ion (Plato 1997b).
Here the view is that those reciting poetry do not really know what they
are talking about. Ion, a rhapsode or professional reciter of the poetry of
Homer, speaks not from knowledge (532c) but from inspiration: it is a
divine gift (534c). Socrates argues that Ion is not in his right mind when
he recites these poems at festivals and celebrations (535d). And the Gor-
gias continues that rhetoric aims at pleasure (in the audience and in the
speaker) instead of good. It aims at producing “gratification and pleas-
ure” (262c). It is a means to do what you want. A trick to gain pleasure
and power. The pursuit of pleasure, power and glory is contrasted with
the life of philosophy (Griswold 2016). As usual, Plato, via Socrates,
argues against the life of pleasure, defending the virtue of self-control and
discipline. The Gorgias distinguishes not only between the appearance of
knowledge and real knowledge but also between “seeming to be good”
and “being good” (527b). And rhetoric is, once again, put on the side of
appearances.
The Phaedrus (Plato 1997c), however, is more positive about rhetoric.
First, it is said that speech is much better than writing. This is the famous
argument against writing (274–76), which is also sometimes referred to
in philosophy of technology (for example by Stiegler). By means of a
story, Plato warns that writing can “introduce forgetfulness into the soul
of those who learn it” (275a). He argues that writing only produces a
dream image (277d) and defends “the living, breathing discourse of the
man who knows, of which the written one can be fairly called an image”
(276a). This argument could be used for a defence of performance,
understood as a living, breathing practice. Philosophical thinking, in this
view, only contains (or recollects) true knowledge if it is spoken. This is
still a refreshing and challenging thought today, given that philosophy is
often equated with philosophy texts and writing(s), also by academics.
Second, the dialogue remains critical of rhetoric but opens up the pos-
sibility that there is a kind of rhetoric that is based on philosophy or that
is at least beneficial to philosophy. At first it seems that Socrates con-
demns rhetoric again for being about resemblances of the truth, about
disguise. It is compared to calling a horse a donkey (260b). But then
there is a change of view, or at least a different view is taken seriously.
Socrates asks: “But could it be, my friend, that we have mocked the art
of speaking more rudely than it deserves?” (260d) Rhetoric is needed to
convince people: “even someone who knows the truth couldn’t produce
conviction without [the art of speaking]” (260d). Truth still needs to be
communicated. Thus, according to this view, once we have true knowl-
edge, obtained by non-rhetorical means, we can use rhetoric to spread
the word. Moreover, now it is said that rhetoric is not entirely opposed
to knowledge: the art of speaking needs “a grasp of the truth” (260e).
Whereas first the thought was that rhetoricians need no knowledge of
the truth about the “just or good” (272d), now Socrates becomes a lot
more positive about the relation between rhetoric and knowledge: if one
practices rhetoric, one must know the truth regarding that about which
one is speaking, know the soul, and know which speech is appropriate
to which kind of soul (277b-c). He also says that if one writes speeches,
poetry, etc. with knowledge of the truth and if one is able to defend what
one writes but argues that the writing is of little worth, then one is a phi-
losopher, a lover of wisdom (278c-d). Thus, the difference between poets
and philosophers is not that the one makes uses of rhetoric, writing, etc.,
whereas the other does not, but rather that the philosopher knows and
pursues the truth and can defend his claims, whereas the poet and rheto-
rician does not and cannot. Moreover, apparently Socrates thinks that
philosophers are able to reflect on, and argue about, the medium they
use, since if they really love wisdom, they have to question the medium
of writing. (This claim is often overlooked in interpretations, but it is
obviously of interest to philosophers, including philosophers of technol-
ogy and media.)
To conclude, the view articulated in Phaedrus (rather than Gorgias)
suggests that philosophy and performance are not necessarily opposed.
Philosophy is linked to the living, breathing performance of speaking,
and if one knows the truth, rhetorical performances can help to com-
municate the truth.
Moreover, we should not forget that even if the Platonic dialogues
come to us in written form, the dialogues themselves contain a rhetori-
cal aspect (and elements of poetry and myth, as Griswold rightly notes)
and are written in the form of drama. They are fictional dramas that
stage various characters (fictional or not) for the sake of philosophy.
Paradoxically, Plato’s own critique of drama, poetry, and rhetoric took
the form of a performance, with Socrates as the main character/actor. He
used his skills as a playwright to try to move beyond theatre.
Yet it took most of Western history to further purify philosophy of
its dramatic, performative dimension. Oral traditions were strong. Only
millennia after the invention of writing, we live in a predominantly text-
centred culture. But that culture seems here to stay. For example, in spite
of McLuhan’s prediction that with new technologies and media we are
moving to a more oral culture (again), most interfaces of our digital
technologies are text-based. Only relatively recently has the tide turned
against what can be characterized as an obsession with the medium of
text and the technology of writing. There is a growing interest in perfor-
mance. But in what way is philosophy performative? What is the relation
between the two? And what does that mean for philosophy, in particular
for philosophy of technology?
Performance and Philosophy

Today, a new and interesting research area, “performance philosophy”,
aims to research and strengthen the links between performance and phi-
losophy (e.g., Cull and Lagaay 2014). Roughly speaking, this can be done
by starting from performance, for example by emphasizing the philo-
sophical value of theatre or by bringing philosophy into theatre practice
or by starting from philosophy, emphasizing the performative dimension
of philosophy and perhaps even rethinking the very term “philosophy”.
But wherever one starts, the point is to bring the two together, to bridge
the gap.
A good example of starting from philosophy is Andrew Bowie’s argu-
ment: if philosophy, especially metaphysics, is about sense making and
about making sense of making sense (he follows A.W. Moore here), then
making and arguing for propositional claims may not always the best
way to do that (Bowie 2015, 51). Against what he sees as analytic philos-
ophy’s focus on abstract issues and its simplification of a complex world,
and abandoning the idea that we can take a neutral stance, Bowie con-
nects another, continental tradition in philosophy, phenomenology, that
sees art as essential to philosophy (53). This opens up ways to consider
various sense-making practices in which meaning is embedded. Discur-
sive means are then only one means to reveal these meanings. Performing
arts are other means.
But Bowie also makes a stronger claim: he sees philosophy itself as per-
formance when he asks us to think about “the performativity of philoso-
phy” (54). First, he broadens the definition of what is “philosophical”:
The contentious point here is that in this view anything can be ‘philo-
sophical’, if it makes the kind of sense that enables us or compels us
to orient and conduct our lives in new ways. By making new sense
or making sense where there was none, any cultural practice may do
what we ask of philosophy in this respect.
(Bowie 2015, 54)
But Bowie’s focus is not on “any” cultural practice but on art. Using Hei-
deggerian language, Bowie argues that art can also unconceal the truth
and disclose the world. Inspired by Heidegger and Dewey, he arrives at
the idea that practices that are not cognitively oriented can also achieve
the philosophical task. Then he claims that performance can do this and
can help us to take a more participative approach to (making sense of)
making sense. One way of revealing the “horizon of sense” is by actually
participating in it (55). We need not only discursive rationality but also
ritual, for example ritual in an artistic performance.
Performance and other arts are then not only optional, which may be
added to philosophy as we know it (a discursive practice). If “perfor-
mance can open up philosophical space which discursive philosophical
approaches cannot” (Bowie 2015, 55), then philosophy itself, broadly
understood under influence of the tradition of phenomenology, needs
performance, includes performance, and indeed is also performance. For
example, the performance of rhythm in music, dance, and theatre can be
world disclosing, since rhythm is not only something that happens in the
arts but is a crucial element of human lives (56). More generally, perfor-
mance also means participation in the world. It thus helps us to question
and replace the epistemological model and its subject/object problem. In
(classic) epistemology, the problem is how the subject can (re)connect to
the object, how the gap between the two can be bridged. How can we
know? But in performance, subject and object are already connected;
the split is overcome. Our connection to the world is no longer a huge
(modern) problem. Inhabiting the world and participating in the world
(through performance for example) always “involves the possibility of
freeing oneself from distorted relationships to one’s world”; important is
not what we know but participation in sense-making practices (57). In
other words, the question then is no longer “How can we know?” but
rather “How can we participate?”
Bowie’s argument is part of a larger, relatively recent effort to bring
together philosophy and performance, which involves a redefinition of
both terms and which counters what it understands as an anti-performance
bias in the history of philosophy (Cull and Lagaay 2014, ix).
Laura Cull, coming from the side of theatre and performance stud-
ies, has argued for understanding performance as philosophy. Instead of
doing philosophy of performance (philosophy applied to performance)
or using performance to illustrate philosophy, she proposes to do per-
formance philosophy. The idea is that performance itself can provide
philosophical insight, that it does “its own kind of philosophical work”
(Cull 2014, 24), that “performance thinks” (Cull 2018). This approach
contributes to expanding the definition of what counts as philosophy
(Cull 2014, 24–25) and questions disciplinary divisions. Performance
itself “philosophizes” (25). It is a new (and arguably old) way of doing
philosophy. What the idea that performance “thinks” means does not
become very clear in her chapter, which is more introductory (Bowie
provides more specific, Heideggerian arguments why). But interestingly,
and in accordance with the central claim of performance philosophy
itself, Cull argues that the philosophical power of performance has to
be shown (30), that is, in and through performance. She suggests that
the future of philosophy may lie in “feeling how music means or move-
ment speaks in new ways as a performative expansion of the meaning
of philosophy itself” (33). Yet at other places she sees performance still
as non-philosophical (31), which seems to maintain the separation of
both fields—even if there might be a productive interaction and agonism
between them.
By contrast, inspired by Nietzsche, Arno Böhler—situated in a philos-
ophy department but also based in the arts—has argued for a “philoso-
phy on stage” (Böhler 2014) that intimately connects to artistic practices:
he affirms philosophy as a bodily and situated practice and argues that
philosophy is and should be performed. In what way? He starts from a
metaphysics and philosophy of mind that stresses that minds are embod-
ied and situated in space. Bodily existence is prior to thinking (Böhler
2014, 175); mind is always linked to matter (176) and one has to be in
space in order to be related to it (177). This view about mind implies
that philosophy, too, is always linked to embodiment, is situated. It is
not only a discursive but also a bodily practice (188). Against the phil-
osophical tradition, Böhler argues that philosophy needs to be staged
(187) and that an artistic way of doing philosophy means to recognize
the pre-individual (188), i.e., the bodily and the immanent, including
one’s own physis (189) and embodiment. Philosophers also breathe and
digest (192). Scepticism is only possible on a material basis, and the
meaning of an idea does not exist “independently of the spatial context
of its expression”: instead, ideas occur within a “dramatic space” (191).
Plato recognized this when he staged philosophy in a dramatic way.
Böhler argues for a “philosophy on stage” which inverts Plato but at
the same time recollects and reanimates this tradition of doing philoso-
phy in a dramatic way (192) by bringing people from philosophy and
art together to stage ideas: a transdisciplinary effort to perform phi-
losophy. To conclude, philosophy is already performative and should
become (more) performative. This goes way beyond seeing the theatre
as a place for thought (as for example Jean-Luc Nancy has argued) or
beyond understanding performance as a philosophically interesting but
fundamentally different kind of practice; instead, philosophy itself is
recast as performance.
Böhler argues that ideas need to be staged. But in a number of senses
this has always happened, even if it did not take the form Plato chose
and even if philosophers are usually not aware of it. Martin Puchner
has proposed a dramatic understanding of Plato (Plato as a playwright)
and has argued that this has influenced modern theatre—even that it is
Platonic. Moreover, philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche did
a form of dramatic philosophy (Puchner 2010). Like Böhler, he assumes
a distinction between non-dramatic and dramatic philosophy. But can
such a strict distinction be maintained? Starting from a broad definition
of performance and philosophy (e.g., as proposed by Bowie or Cull) one
could also see philosophy as fundamentally performative and rewrite the
history of philosophy in general as a “drama of ideas” (to use Puchner’s
term): a drama of characters, ideas, arguments, interpretations, and so
on, which as a metanarrative (or metanarratives) has a temporal struc-
ture, plot, and rhythm. This also makes sense of Noë’s claim that “Philos-
ophy is the choreography of ideas and concepts and beliefs” (Noë 2015,
17). Whether we use the metaphor of drama or that of choreography, the
history (or histories) of philosophy itself are performative—even if those
performances often took place in the medium of writing and text.
I say “often”, since, those histories are not entirely abstract and are
not only represented in writing and text (e.g., books): they depend on
embodied and situated human beings, beings called “philosophers”. Phi-
losophers speak and spoke, that is, they use(d) their voice. They breathe.
They even digest, as Böhler remarks. Having and using one’s voice
means: to be embodied and to perform as a lived body. It also means to
perform a persona. This is also what philosophers do when they speak.
With Plato, we could stress the value of embodied, social, and indeed
performed dialogue for philosophy. Today, discussing and talking is still
an important part of philosophical practice. Against Plato, however, we
can also understand writing as a kind of performance. Writing, too, is
embodied and social. When I write on this computer, for example, I am
not a disembodied mind, but I am engaging with the text and through the
technology of writing as an embodied, living, and social being. Writing
is a form of embodied and social performance. Reading, too, needs to be
performed. Perhaps text itself is performance, as Kornhaber argues: if
every text is changed in the moment of its enactment, then every text is a
performance (Kornhaber 2015, 31).
Technologies and Media

Ironically, philosophers question almost everything but usually do not
question their own medium. This is true even for many people calling
themselves philosophers of technology. I already said that philosophers
write. I am writing now. This is an important technology and medium
for philosophers. As Kornhaber remarks, philosophers became attached
to this technology (Kornhaber 2015, 30). But writing is only one kind
of technology and medium. Philosophers can and do also perform with
(other) technologies and media. These are sometimes but not necessar-
ily related to writing and text: for example, in academia, philosophers
use images, power point presentations, and so on. Philosophers also use
computers and related technologies and media. And if we follow Cull,
Bowie, and Böhler, they could and should also use technologies from
performance practices and indeed other artistic practices. But whatever
the medium philosophers (should) choose, the point is that philosophy
is not only an embodied, social, and performative but also a techno-
logically mediated practice. And this is so because philosophy is a per-
formative practice and because all performances can be technologically
mediated and are often technologically mediated, also when they do not
put technology or media in the foreground or in the centre of attention.
Moreover, to see philosophy as performance is also to recognize that it
is always situated, including spatially situated. Performance is always an
“earthly”, immanent practice and depends on whatever the “stage” is,
and so is philosophy and hence also philosophy of technology, even if it
talks about non-earthly or very abstract things. Philosophy is done some-
where. It takes place somewhere. It is performed on a stage, for example
the stage of academia, the stage of a specific philosophical sub-discipline,
or even the stage of discussions about a specific topic. And we may add:
the ideas are not entirely independent of their embodied and situated
performative generation and expression. (I will return to this thought
later in this chapter.)
Moreover, keeping in mind the aim and approach of this book, we
can ask: Could rhetoric and philosophy themselves, if understood as per-
formative practices, be used as metaphors to better understand our expe-
rience and use of technologies and media?
6.3. Implications for Thinking About Technology
The Rhetoric of Technology

Starting from my reading of some of Plato’s dialogues, we can apply
the metaphors of rhetoric and philosophy to technology: technology is
then not only a “thing” or “tool” but also a means to persuade. Now
is that always bad, or can it also be a means to the truth and the good
life? Keeping in mind the two positions concerning rhetoric we found in
Plato, there are the following two positions concerning technology and
its relation to persuasion.
One position is closer to Gorgias: technology is necessarily on the side
of persuasion and falsity. So-called “persuasive technologies”, which aim
to change the attitudes or behaviours of its users, are often seen as such:
they mislead the user. Misleading can be done through words but also
through other means. Consider also the metaphor of stage magic: things
are not what they seem, and the appearance is created by words but also
by performing with things. To give an example in an economic context:
we think we make a free choice when we choose a particular food at the
checkout, and in a moral and metaphysical sense we do, perhaps, but the
food has been placed there in a particular way and location in order to
influence our behaviour (e.g., to make us buy a piece of chocolate); our
choice architecture has been changed, we have been “nudged” (Thaler
and Sunstein 2008). This can be seen as misleading and manipulation, as
tricking people. Technologies can indeed be devices of persuasion, under-
stood as manipulation. For example, robots can influence behaviour of
children by means of peer pressure, as a recent article shows (Vollmer
et al. 2018). They can be called “persuasive” in the sense of “mislead-
ing”, “appearance”, “false”, “tricky”, and so on. Now, according to this
position, this is always bad. Technology is then on the side of appear-
ance, trickery, and deceit.
But another position (Phaedrus) is that persuasion is not necessarily
bad: there are different kinds of persuasion, some of which can lead to
the good life. Technology can contribute to this; it can include devices
for such “good persuasion”. In the latter case, technology is part of the
technai and arts available to us to find the true and the good, to find
wisdom, to achieve the good life. It is thus part of the technai or devices
available to philosophy and philosophers, to the love and lovers of wis-
dom. Writing may be such a technology, and a technology Plato used
in spite of his warnings against writing and in favour of speech. Thus,
based on this position, one can imagine that designers of technology try
to design for “good persuasion”. Then they are like the rhetorician who
knows the truth, has the knowledge and wisdom, but wants to com-
municate this knowledge and does so by influencing through rhetoric—
here: (persuasive) technologies. Such designers, then, play the role of the
good magicians. They mislead for the sake of good, to give people a
better life, for example make them healthier. Moreover, in order to per-
suade and mislead, the designer needs to have some real knowledge, for
example about human psychology (Socrates would say: about the soul).
Like in the Phaedrus, apparently knowledge and persuasion are not that
opposed.
But technology, understood by means of the metaphors of rhetoric and
philosophy, is also more than a mere means: it also has persuasive and
epistemological and ethical effects that no one intended. As designers or
users, we are not in (full) control of our effects. Designers and their com-
panies may “speak” and try to “persuade” by means of their technolo-
gies in order to achieve some effects, but they may fail. There may be no
effect or the effect is different than expected. For example, a speed bump
in a residential area intended to reduce speed may achieve that goal, but
at the same time lead to frustrated drivers accelerating aggressively and
loudly after the speed bump. And as users we may be encouraged to trick
and persuade ourselves by using a technology (e.g., a health app), but
once we understand how it works we may trick the device instead of the
other way around.
And maybe the metaphor can be turned around: the orator or orator-
philosopher was also never in full control of the effects of his arts. Perfor-
mances are always risky; there is no guarantee of success. As embodied
and vulnerable human beings, orators and philosophers depend on their
voice, for instance. Their voice may fail them. And they don’t know the
effects of their use of voice and use of words. Maybe people are per-
suaded, maybe not. Maybe pleasure and power are the result, maybe
not. Maybe truth and wisdom are achieved, maybe not. Persuasion and
wisdom-seeking, including wisdom-seeking by means of using the per-
suasive arts and other technai, have always been risky businesses. The
outcome has always been uncertain. Consider Socrates’s rhetoric against
rhetoric: the effect of his words against rhetoric was not that we all
became wise and that he was praised for that; the short-term effect was
that he was accused of sophism and killed, and the long-term effect was
not wisdom but Western academic philosophy. (Or: how to move from
breathing to non-breathing.) Very unintended effects indeed.
Thus, technologies can be persuasive in these various senses. And as
machines become more social, intelligent, and autonomous, their “rheto-
ric” and persuasive effects may increase. They can shape our attitudes
and behaviours. Think about the robot again: the robot has influence
because through its more autonomous and intelligent appearance (homa-
noid) and behaviour (appears like a social peer) it manages to enter our
social world. In that sense, there is a “rhetoric” of technologies.
There may even be a sense in which machines shape our thinking:
in the sense of changing our opinion (e.g., political tweets sent by a bot
that try to influence how we vote) but also in the sense of co-creating
the stage, the arguments, etc. on which and with which we perform
our thinking. Maybe technology is sometimes a bit like Plato the
philosopher-playwright: the one who writes the dialogues and sets the
stage for our thinking. For example, computing has given us metaphors
by which we understand ourselves. We have started to think of the brain
as a computer. And perhaps social media like Facebook and Twitter are
already influencing how we think about others (also offline) and how
we behave (offline) towards others. Maybe the way we talk and write
and interact with others offline comes to be shaped by these media.
To the extent that this happens, there is indeed a “rhetoric”—and one
could add: a “grammar”—of technology (Coeckelbergh 2017), which
refers to less visible, structural influence. Technology shapes our lives
and thinking in tricky, persuasive ways, ways that are not always visible
to us. And ways that can be good or bad. Let me say more about the
grammar of technology.
The Participation, Embodiment, Rhythm, Situatedness,
and Immanence of Technology Use and Users
So far, I used the “rhetoric” metaphor to say something about technolo-
gies. But this is still a metaphor based on the use of (natural) language;
there are also other types of performance such as music and dance. Based
on my discussion of performance philosophy, let’s now explore what
can be done with philosophy-as-performance: what happens to our con-
ception of technology and its use when we use elements like rhythm,
participation (Bowie), embodiment, and spatial situatedness (Böhler) as
metaphors for (thinking about) technology?
Let me start with participation. We could see technology as an instru-
ment that mediates our participation in the world, understood as an
active, performative relation to things and to others. But it is not just a
neutral means; it shapes how we participate in the world. When we want
to explain why, we have to rely again on the metaphors provided by the
performing arts, as elaborated in the previous chapters. For example, we
could say that technology shapes the rhythm of our lives. It may well
speed up things. It may speed us up. But rhythm is not only about speed:
it is also about when we do what. For example, as I suggested in the chap-
ter on music, our devices and apps also shape what we do when. They
co-write our score (if we use the metaphor of classical music) and they
co-shape our improvisations (if we use the metaphor of jazz or blues).
For example, a social media app “attempts” and “intends” to shape my
time in such a way that I regularly check for messages. It tries to orches-
trate, direct, and choreograph in time. It tries to orchestrate, direct, and
choreograph my time. I also suspect that technology influences how we
tackle problems. Not only literally, in the sense that many people now
use apps and YouTube videos to repair something, for instance, but also,
as I will argue in what follows, that it influences how we think about the
problem and how we think to solve it.
Postphenomenology acknowledged the embodied nature of technology
use and its user, but only partly and somewhat misleadingly conceptual-
ized this embodiment since it did not sufficiently take into account the
performative and temporal dimension of our engagements with technol-
ogy. Like most philosophers, in epistemology, aesthetics, and elsewhere,
perhaps Ihde was too much under the spell of the metaphor of looking
at a painting or other art object. The “mediation” of technology is too
much imagined as an “in between” that is situated between an immobile
perceiver and an external world. Even if in Verbeek (2005) the material
artefact “acts” in between that perceiver and world, the user does not
seem to act or at least her acting and that performance is not concep-
tualized; the theatre metaphor is only applied to the medium, the tech-
nology. Verbeek tries to think the relation between subject and object
non-dualistically by saying that object and subject mutually constitute
one another (Verbeek 2005, 129). The “things” shape the subject. But
in this description of the human-world relation that human subject is
still too much assumed to be an immobile perceiver, watching the world.
The metaphor remains that of the museum spectator. Even if, in Ihde,
technology is said to be “embodied”, that embodiment is imagined with
the help of a metaphor derived from looking at artworks: I “see” the
technology or not. This is also how Heidegger imagined the famous ham-
mer user in Being and Time: the technology is visible (when I don’t use it
but look at it) or not (when I use it). But what is happening when I wear
glasses, for example, is that I perceive through glasses as I participate in
the world and as I perform, and it is in that performative-perceptive and
performative-active process that the technology (glasses) co-shapes my
perception and subjectivity understood as embodied participation and
embodied and situated performance. For example, when I hike I wear
glasses, and these glasses do not mediate my looking at the world as an
immobile perceiver but shape my active perceptual relation to the world
(I am not a passive screen that receives images of nature from outside,
I co-construct what I see) and shape the walking I perform as an embod-
ied and moving human being. Both my embodiment as a human being
in general and the embodied relation I have to the technology (as identi-
fied by Heidegger and Ihde) are better understood with the metaphor of
performance than the metaphor of looking at a painting. If technology
mediates and shapes, then it does so within a performative relation. (And
indeed looking at a painting itself should be understood as a performative
act.) In general, we can try to replace the epistemology of seeing, which is
so popular among philosophers since Plato, by a more performative and
participatory way of framing experiencing and knowing. For philosophy
of technology, this performative turn implies, metaphorically speaking,
that we have to mobilize the user, so to speak kick him on the stage. This
is also a social stage, as I will soon argue. But let me first further clarify
again the shift in approach by replying to D’Arcy.
A participatory and performative approach to the relation between
humans and technology (and between humans and the world) in use and
experience goes beyond the question concerning visibility (D’Arcy 2017),
since understanding performance with technology is then no longer a
question about how we relate to an external object, understood in a
quasi-aesthetical, detached way (D’Arcy refers to Foucault’s metaphor of
painting); instead, the moment we use technology we are already related
and we are actively relating and participating in the world. The technol-
ogy user is a performer in the senses explained. Technology intervenes,
perhaps “acts” as Latour and Verbeek claim, but this is always an inter-
vention in that active performative and participatory relation. It is also
a temporal matter: rather than with a static painting metaphor (I look
at technology, which is visible or not—see D’Arcy but also Heidegger
and Ihde again), use and experience of technology should be understood
performatively as something that happens in time and that is part of what
goes on as we actively participate in the world. Technology shapes this
active and temporal relation to the world. If we need a pragmatic per-
formance approach, as D’Arcy argues, then we need to take into account
this temporal dimension of the performance metaphor.
Furthermore, the performance metaphor can help us to add a social
dimension to technological experience and use. If the user and experi-
encer (of technology and via technology) is a performer, then instead of
focusing on the individual I-world relation as in Ihde and Verbeek, we
put the user on the social stage. The epistemological relation is replaced
by a performative and participatory one not only in the sense of an active
and involved relation to the world but also in the sense of an active and
involved relation to others, which is also always already there. We always
already participate in the world, and this is also a social world and a
social participation. Technology also mediates that relation and that par-
ticipation. Taking a non-modern approach, one could even say that the
concept of performance enables us to bring the two together: on stage
and like in so-called “real life” (the theatre is also real) there is not on
the one hand a physical world and on the other hand a social world; as
we perform and participate in the world, we relate to that world in a
way that is at the same time physical-embodied and social-performative,
and technology shapes those active, embodied, and social performances.
Consider again social media and games: these uses of technology and
these technological practices are not isolated activities; they are differ-
ent forms of performing and participating in the world as embodied and
social beings.
Finally, if it is true that our thinking depends on this relation and par-
ticipation, indeed on our active, embodied, and social use-performances
and experience-performances, and if technologies such as machines inter-
vene and participate in these performances in a more-than-instrumental
way, then this also means again that technologies such as machines may
choreograph, direct, and stage our thinking. (Consider also again Chap-
ter 2 on the dance metaphor.) But this “thinking” should be adequately
understood. Performing with technology is never merely “cognitive” or a
matter of abstract “perception” or isolated “thinking”: before and when
one uses technology, one is already embodied and situated on an imma-
nent plane. Users are not disembodied “subjects”; they breathe and digest.
They are also situated in space. Thus, users of internet and participants
in virtual worlds always remain embodied and situated. There is always
a stage. And on that stage machines can be more than neutral means:
as “co-performers” but also as “directors”, “choreographers”, “magi-
cians”, etc., they shape our performances, our acts, our lived bodies, and
even the stage itself. They are part of, and at the same time also shape,
the plane of immanence and the performances we stage. Not only our
acts but also the physical and social world in which we find ourselves and
“on” which we act and perform is shaped by the technologies and media
we use and experience. In other words, the “world of social media” is
not a separate world; there is one social media world and, in a sense, we
always already found ourselves in a world of social media. We are, and
always have been, performers in a social media theatre—a theatre with
different stages perhaps, but a theatre nevertheless and a theatre without
an outside. The social theatre is real.
6.4. Two Roles and Choreographies for Philosophers

(of Technology)
Thinking about philosophy as performance also delivers a metaphor for
asking and answering the question what the task of philosophers and
philosophy is. This question can now be framed as: what role(s) can and
should philosophers play, specifically what role(s) in relation to other
practices and wider society. I see at least two roles or characters, cor-
responding to two different plays and choreographies: a Socratic inter-
ruptive one and a non-Socratic participative one. My purpose here is not
so much to defend the second and argue against the first but rather to
articulate the two roles/characters and their corresponding choreogra-
phies. (In other words, here I perform an essay and inquiry rather than a
fight, competition, court case, etc.)
The first role is the one who interrupts, the often welcome but also
sometimes annoying person who stops the conversations and asks ques-
tions, the one who is at that moment and in that role alienated from the
communicative and social practice. The spoilsport, the one who takes
part in conversations at the symposium but then breaks its spell, the one
who interrupts people on the market. This is the Platonic/Socratic model:
the philosopher knows the truth or at least tries to “help” others to find
the “truth” while these others are unthinkingly going on with their busi-
ness and live in the world of appearances. The philosopher takes the
role of the liberator and saviour. Or the role of the midwife, but then a
Socratic one: the midwife who knows better what is going on than the
woman who gives birth.
The corresponding choreography is one in which the movements of a
group of dancers are stopped or interrupted when an additional dancer
enters the stage. The interrupting dancer goes in “dialogue” with them
by imitating the movements the other dancers were making to show them
(mirror) what they were doing and by making different moves. In this
way, the dancer-interrupter helps the other dancers to create a different,
better choreography. Perhaps the “dialogue” goes on until they all move
in the same direction. The Socratic choreography is one of moves and
counter-moves, until all dancers move closer to the truth, together. Alter-
natively, one could also imagine the interrupter to be a choreographer
who enters the stage and stops the dance altogether, asks questions, and
teaches a different dance. Afterwards, the interrupter is thanked. Or there
is a different result: everyone thinks that the interrupter is such an annoy-
ing spoilsport that they act to expel him from the stage.
Playing this kind of role as a philosopher can be very revealing and
useful to people from practices outside philosophy. It provides a mirror
to people. Mirroring is important, in all embodied performative prac-
tices, including philosophy. Both the arts and philosophy can play this
Socratic role. For example, Noë has argued that both art and philosophy
are preoccupied with the ways we organize ourselves and with “the pos-
sibility of reorganizing ourselves” (Noë 2015, xiii). If this is true, then the
Socratic philosopher can show how we organize ourselves (metaphors:
holding up a mirror, mirroring in dance) and can make us aware that we
could do it differently. Furthermore, Socratic philosophy provides mid-
wifery services, helps us with recollection, because maybe we already
know the truth but we don’t know yet that we know it. Noë uses the
metaphor of choreography:
Choreography is philosophy. What the choreographer does, if this

analysis is right, is find a way of bringing into the open, to use an
image from Heidegger, something that is concealed, hidden, implicit,
or left in the background, namely, the place of dancing in our lives,
or our place in the activity, the self-organized complex that is danc-
ing. . . . Gaining knowledge is recollecting, Plato said. And what this
statement means, here, is that it is not a matter of gather new data;
it’s a matter of seeing how the data you already have—your own
experiences, observations, beliefs, etc.—hang together. Plato puts our
thinking, asking, arguing—the fact that we are lost in the complexity
of our own activities of thinking—on display.
(Noë 2015, 16)
The Socratic philosopher helps those who are lost to find the way. She
knows her way around. She has sorted things out. She knows where we
should be heading. When philosophers take this role, they can be incred-
ibly useful to others, to non-philosophers.
But the Socratic mirroring and midwifery role is not only revealing
and helpful; it is also a very critical and confrontational one. As said,
this can be annoying. It annoys because we don’t always want to hear
the truth. But it also annoys since it stops conversations and movements
that are already going on. It breaks the flow of the performance. And
it annoys since it is the act of the one who always knows better and
who takes a superior and outsider position. Some more metaphors: the
Socratic philosopher plays the role of the master-organizer, the CEO or
consultant who is paid to reorganize the company, the director who lis-
tens but already knows the outcome (an outcome that she has in mind
and desires), the authoritarian choreographer, or the magician who is
totally in control. There is a hierarchical divide between the initially igno-
rant insiders who live in illusion and the all-knowing Socratic outsider
who helps them to find or recollect the truth, to act and move in the right
way—that is, out of the cave, out of the stage, and out of the theatre.
A very different role, which I articulate influenced by Dewey’s prag-
matism but now given a performative twist, is to be one of the actors on
stage from the beginning. The philosopher is part of the practice and tries
to change the practice from within. Here criticism is still possible, but
the philosopher does not interrupt and is part of the conversation. She
sees herself as equal to the others. Nobody knows the (full) truth. All are
searching for the truth together. This truth is not to be found in a differ-
ent world; it has to be an immanent rather than a transcendent truth. The
play never ends, because there is no ultimate truth or because the actors
will never find the full truth.
In the corresponding choreography, there is no outsider entering the
stage. All are insiders and all are outsiders. There is dialogue among
the dancers-participants but not a Socratic one. Nobody knows what
the dance will become or should become, because the dance is not a
priori given and cannot be remembered or recollected. The dancers cre-
ate the dance together by dancing. The dance is never finished. There is
no perfect dance, or if there is one, nobody knows what it is. There is
trial and error. There is improvisation. There is no ultimate truth; there
is only experience and performance, which lead to practical wisdom, that
is, wisdom rooted in experience and performative practice.
This non-Platonic, non-Socratic approach questions the borders
between cave and non-cave, stage and non-stage, philosophy and non-
philosophy, philosophy and performance, philosophy and art, and
academia and art. It does not question philosophy and the value of phi-
losophy, but questions the Socratic definition of philosophy’s role and
asks if it is a practice that should be kept separate from other practices. It
moves towards a transdisciplinary understanding of philosophy, under-
stood as a performative quest for wisdom.
In philosophy of technology, like elsewhere in philosophy, often the
first role is taken up or indeed is expected: the philosopher is seen as
the Socratic expert who knows. For example, she is expected to know
the ethics of (a particular) technology and tells those who develop, use,
and decide about technology what that ethics is, or at least helps them to
find that ethics (and in order to play that midwife role she already knows
where the people should be heading). She shows how we do things with
technology now and opens up the possibility of reorganizing it, perhaps
also opens up the possibility of different technologies and corresponding
ways of doing. This is a critical and constructive role, which is sometimes
appreciated and sometimes experienced as annoying, for example by
researchers who develop new technologies. For example, a philosopher
of technology may be asked as an expert in ethics of artificial intelligence
and is expected to play the role of knowing the ethical way(s) of dealing
with, and developing, this technology.
Note that this role—whatever its merits or problems may be—is not
played very well by many philosophers or is not played at all, since many
do not enter those other stages and remain within academia. The latter
philosophers, under the spell of (academic) language and the technol-
ogy of writing, imagine that writing texts is sufficient as an interrupting
Socratic intervention to change things. But it is not. Usually the (other)
actors and the dancers at other stages don’t see the text. If it enters a stage
at all, it only enters a small stage elsewhere: the academic stage or even
just a small corner of academia. There is also little embodied performance
except writing, and little actual interruption in the practices. One should
ask if texts are necessarily the best tools for the Socratic philosopher. Are
they very performative tools? Asking this is especially important in phi-
losophy of technology, which is specialized in thinking about tools. But
also more generally, philosophers do not sufficiently think about their
own technologies and media, or indeed about their role and the stage on
which they play and want to play.
But there is also another role possible for philosophers of technology:
a more participatory one and one that avoids what could be perceived as
Socratic arrogance. Here the philosopher of technology does not claim
that she knows the truth about technology and about what should be
done. She does not so much enter the stage as an “expert”, if that means
she already knows the truth. Instead, she participates in ongoing con-
versations. She works with, and participates in, the movements that are
already going on, in her own field but also in other fields. In academia
but also outside academia. Everywhere people discuss about technology,
think about technology, and indeed perform technology. She participates
in these conversations in ways that do not so much confront but rather
try to contribute and learn from what is already there. She is part of the
flow, rather than an interrupter. She is a co-dancer. Initially she is less
critical, perhaps, if “critical” is understood in the Socratic sense, but also
considerably less annoying. Or rather, the critical work is done together.
Instead of Socratic questioning, which in a sense is not real questioning
since Socrates already knows the answers, here a real dialogue can take
place and real questions can be asked. Including critical questions. But
they are asked both ways; it is a common project. A conversation among
equals. Potential interruption of flow or pause is a common act and is
organized together. Both philosophers and non-philosophers have knowl-
edge, based on their experience and their performances, and are recog-
nized for this. Together a play or dance is created, that is, together the
actors and dancers try to understand technology and try to find out what
should be done. Without the illusion of a final play that ends the play
(an Endspiel which Socrates always wins) or without the illusion that it
is possible to create a perfect dance, philosophers and non-philosophers
talk and try out responses and movements to technology. For example,
philosophers and developers of artificial intelligence could sit together
and think together about the future of AI, without supposing that the
philosopher (or the developer, for that matter) knows beforehand where
they will end up.
However, next to the philosopher and other humans, we should not
forget another performer (e.g., actor or dancer): technology. Technology
is also on stage. New technology can be an interrupter that asks for a
response or it can be incorporated in the dance. It can be a tool, as most
people think. It can be an actor, as Latour and Verbeek have argued. But
it can also be a director and a choreographer. And this applies not only
to performative life and practice in general, but also to philosophy and
philosophy of technology. When we think about technology, technol-
ogy does not only confront us as an object (e.g., an object of study) but
also as a co-actor, co-dancer, co-performer. It invites us to think. It influ-
ences our thinking. It “demands” things from us. It “responds” to our
performances. For example, an autonomous and intelligent humanoid
robot may challenge our beliefs about the moral status of things or our
belief that humans are by definition the most intelligent entities around.
Technology is a very performative tool, or at least it has the potential to
be very performative. Perhaps the new technologies that are coming to us
will provide such enormous challenges to our societies and cultures that
a purely Socratic role will be rightly seen as neither sufficient nor accept-
able: maybe there will be the insight that the only way we can cope with
these challenges is by dancing, acting, playing, and doing magic together
in order to understand and evaluate what is going on—without knowing
the outcome.
Maybe this “together” means: together with others but also together
with technology, as co-performer and co-director—in a sense also: co-
thinker. The point here is not that machines “think” if that means “think
like humans”. It is not about the capacities of machines. It is about how
our human thinking, understood as performance, is shaped by the tech-
nologies we use. Let me end the chapter by saying more about this.
6.5. Technology Thinks
What does it mean to say that technology “thinks” or “co-thinks”, or
that it “shapes our thinking”? This is not so clear yet.
One way to understand this is to start from contemporary cognitive
science’s insight that concepts are always related to our embodiment and
then enter technology into the picture. Consider for example the work of
Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991), Lakoff and Johnson (1980), and
more recently work on the role of the sensory-motor system in concep-
tual knowledge: for example, our ability to imagine the concept grasping
makes use of the same neural substrate as performing grasping (Gallese
and Lakoff 2005). If thinking is an embodied performance and depends
on embodiment, then if technology is involved in our embodied per-
formances and connected to our embodied experience and practices, it
seems plausible that technology also shapes our thinking. For example,
many metaphors we use when we think seem to be based on technologi-
cally mediated embodied performances: consider for example “hammer-
ing down a point”. In this sense, technology shapes our thinking.
Another way to understand the idea that technology “thinks” is to
further draw on metaphors from the performing arts. Throughout this
book I already used metaphors such as “acting”, “directing”, and “cho-
reographing”. These metaphors could now help again to further develop
the thought that technology is not a mere instrument but shapes what we
do and what and how we think. I already made some suggestions earlier
in the chapter: let me now say more by using and responding to Alva
Noë’s Strange Tools.
It is clear that technology shapes how we do things and how we live;
this is a central idea in philosophy of technology, which emphasizes
the more-than-instrumental role of technology and the various ways in
which being human has always been entangled with technology. We are
technological beings and humans are technological. Nöe, coming from
outside philosophy of technology, puts it in terms of organization:
Our mode of being—how our lives are organized—is constituted

in part by the technology. Take away the technology and you are
left not with us, but with, at most, something like distant cousins of
ourselves.
(Noë 2015, 23)
Technology thus organizes and changes our lives; this is clear, especially
today, when new information and communication technologies have so
much influence. But in what sense does technology also change our think-
ing? Perhaps it is easier to understand this if we look at historical exam-
ples. Noë gives the example of arithmetical notation, which has made us
think arithmetically (26), and claims that language has made it possible
for us to imagine things that are far away in space and time (27). But for
making his general point, he uses a metaphor from the performing arts:
dance. He argues that technology shapes our thinking, because thinking
is, like dancing, an organized activity and technologies shape our organ-
ized activities or are themselves patterns of organization (27). The role
of technology is then indeed more than that of a mere instrument, in
the sense that it shapes the patters of organization. And if organization
is given “before” we perform (one could also use language as a meta-
phor and say that there is already a “grammar” (Coeckelbergh 2017)),
technology also contributes to the condition that we are not in full control
of how we organize ourselves. Noë makes a comparison with language:
We are lost in schemes of organization of which we are not the author

and about which we command no clear understanding. It is the same
with writing and language.
(Noë 2015, 200)
It is the same with writing and language because they are also technolo-
gies, and we never fully author and control what technologies do to us
and how they shape and shaped our world. They co-choreograph our
lives (see also Chapter 2) and they set the stage for our performances.
Similarly, one could say that technologies choreograph our thinking and
shape the patterns that are already there before we think.
Again a performance metaphor (dance) helps us to reflect on technol-
ogy. Like in the previous chapters, this was done by going “outside”
philosophy of technology, by moving to the performing arts and back to
philosophy of technology. For philosophy of technology, which is also
a thinking, this link between technology and thinking means again that
one should be very aware of the media and technologies one uses. These
technologies and media do not only organize our lives, they also shape
how we—as philosophers of technology—think about technologies and
media.
But in what sense could it be said that technologies also “choreo-
graph” and “organize” our thinking? I have used these metaphors, but
what they imply exactly is still unclear. Maybe a contemporary example
of how a technology changes our thinking would help. We could ask, for
instance, how social media or artificial intelligence changes our thinking.
I have made some suggestions about social media throughout this book.
But there is a methodological problem. While it is easy to see how for
example arithmetic and arithmetic technologies have changed our think-
ing in the past, it is a lot harder to understand how contemporary media
and technologies shape our thinking, since it means that we have to think
about them as and while they shape and change our thinking. We have
to perform our thinking while at the same time that very thinking per-
formance is shaped and pre-organized by the technologies and media we
think about. On the one hand, it seems that we have to acknowledge that
we can never really step outside of that performative flow; on the other
hand, we have to allow for the possibility to research that flow and per-
haps direct it. We have to make sense of, and allow for the possibility of,
being choreographers and dancers at the same time. How is this possible?
Luckily using a metaphor from art (visual and performing arts) pro-
vides a solution: taking inspiration from Noë, we could say that tech-
nologies such as writing can disrupt the performative process, or rather,
that they offer additional performances that put the first performances
on display. Using technologies such as writing, we can show our think-
ing performances. Both thinking and writing are performances. However,
the first is not “primary” and the second “secondary”. Thinking about
thinking (e.g., by means of writing) is not a meta-performance. Both per-
formances are taking place on the same plane of immanence. There is
no hierarchy. The one is not “above” or “on top” of the other. Both are
and remain performative processes. There is no outside to performance.
Thinking-by-writing is not an outside; it is also a performance. (This is
why I think Noë’s language of “levels” (29) is not so appropriate.) Hence
in this way it is possible to think about technologies while they actually
shape our thinking, for example to think about how computers, word
processing software, and social media are shaping our thinking (as we
use them). When we do so, we are engaged in two performances.
How is that possible? The technology of writing seems to do the trick.
Philosophy (and hence also philosophy of technology) it is a particular
kind of performance, which often uses writing (40) as a “strange tool”
in Noë’s sense, as a technology to look at other performances. Suddenly
our daily dealings with technology become “strange”. We take distance
in this sense. However, this taking distance and this thinking remain a
(technologically mediated) performance itself, and, in that sense, there
is no distance. Our own thinking as philosophers of technology about
technological performances is also itself performative and is also shaped
by technologies and media. And this is not a problem, thanks to the tech-
nology of writing. Luckily it is possible to dance and choreograph at the
same time, and luckily a technology such as writing helps to make that
possible.
Philosophy of technology, then, can be understood as a kind of per-
formance, which reveals other technologically mediated performances—
including philosophy of technology itself—as technologically mediated,
reveals that these are mediated and how they are mediated. It offers the
possibility to look at our technological performances while we are danc-
ing them, for example by means of writing technologies, which estrange
our other performances. And, in this book, with the help of metaphors
from the performing arts, philosophy of technology also reveals all tech-
nological performances as performances. To use a Hegelian twist, here
philosophy of technology “becomes aware of itself” as performance.
First, the project of this book seemed to be only about technology: it
moved beyond the focus on “the artefact” or “object” to a more holis-
tic, less dualistic, and more process-oriented understanding of technology
and its relation to humans, one which can helpfully be described by using
the metaphors from the performing arts. But then, in and through its per-
formances, it also applied the performative turn to itself, to philosophy
of technology. Yet in contrast to Hegel, it is not a move to spirit. It is a
non-Hegelian move to performance, which goes beyond the spirit-matter
or mind-body dualisms of modern philosophy.
A performative move is also a move towards a more social under-
standing of technology: we always perform before others. There is an
audience. But there is no clear border between stage and non-stage. We
are co-actors, co-dancers, audience members, directors, choreographers,
and so on. We have to take into account the moves of others and are
influenced and shaped by them. Sometimes this can be experienced as
liberating and good, sometimes as limiting and problematic. Performance
metaphors help us to place technology within a social world, that is, a
world of roles, norms, and power.
For philosophy, taking a performative turn then also means that it
has to reflect on its own social nature. For example, it means realizing
that philosophy, understood as performance, cannot take place outside
social relations or outside power relations. It can also mean realizing
that the power of philosophical performances is limited and that there
are always other actors to whom we have to respond. We might want
a voice. We might have a voice. But we have to talk and compete with
others who also want and have a voice. And we have to compete with
technologies. Technologies also have performative power in a social con-
text. In a sense, technologies also “speak”. They scream for attention.
They dominate the stage. There is a sense in which they also “intervene”,
shape the discourse, and run the show. Philosophers also find themselves
on that stage. They might be outperformed by some technologies. The
AI or the robot becomes more interesting than the philosopher. But there
is not only competition; philosophy as a social enterprise also means
that there is the possibility of doing philosophy as a cooperative project,
both within philosophy and between philosophy and other disciplines
and non-academic practices. Consider again the more participative role
articulated before. And it is a performance not only against but also with
technology, in the sense that, as a philosopher of technology, one also
learns about and from the technology and collaborates with those who
develop it.
Thus, as social performers, philosophers of technology unavoidably
will enter the social world, including its opportunities for competition
and cooperation. Whether or not a Socratic role is assumed, any interven-
tion and performance will be a social one, which touches and takes place
in the fabric of roles, norms, relationships, and power—inside philosophy
and outside philosophy, inside academia and outside academia. Philoso-
phers of technology, like other philosophers, can neither escape the social
nor is it desirable that they do so. Philosophers, like all human beings,
are condemned to perform. Or one might say, more positively: they have
received the gift of being able to engage in lived, social performance. To
stop such performing means to die. And like all of us, philosophers of
technology have to perform with and against technologies. That includes:
with and against writing, which choreographs and organizes our think-
ing and exercises power over us. Plato’s complaint is still relevant today,
also for philosophers of technology. What media do we want to use?
What do they want from us? And what is our performative response?
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7 Conclusion
7.1. Summary of Results: Towards a Performance-

Oriented (Post)Phenomenology and
Critical Theory of Technology
Using metaphors from the performing arts, I have moved from a rather
static, asocial (not anti-social), and Platonic phenomenology and ethics
of technology to one in which use and users of technology are revealed as
not only embodied but also moving, social, temporal, situated, immanent,
narrative, and, indeed, performing. This gives us a more holistic, active,
and process-oriented view of human-technology relations. We deal not
just with technologies in a way that uses and perceives them as external
things (artefacts), which is often understood by means of the metaphor
of looking at a work of art; instead we engage in technoperformances.
The metaphors also enabled me to raise and re-conceptualize some nor-
mative issues concerning technology, including ethical and political ones.
Furthermore, the metaphors helped me to reformulate an understanding
of technology as more than a tool: I have argued that technology is not
just an instrument we use in the performances of our (social) lives and
also not merely a co-actor; it can also take the role of co-choreographer,
co-director, co-playwright, co-conductor, and co-magician, perhaps even
co-thinker.
Thinking about new information and communication technologies as
“agents” of their own, then, should not only be understood in the sense
of what they do and what they do by themselves, instead of human (tech-
nology as co-performer, co-actor, co-dancer, co-musician—think about
robots and AI, for instance). Technologies such as smartphones, social
media, and computer games are also agents in the sense that they shape
our performances and ultimately the entire performative field and its
grammars: technologies co-write and direct how we move, act, sound,
and play out our lives, including how we move, interact, sound, and
play together. Technologies do not only act but also set the stage for
these acts, and maybe even for our thinking. These roles of technology
are no longer only about what things do in the sense of a mediation
154 Conclusion
between an individual perceiver and the world (as in Ihde); they concern
technology in what Heidegger called its “ontological” roles and in what
we, after a performative turn and going beyond Heidegger’s visual art
metaphors, must understand in more processual and social-performative
terms. Technologies mediate our performance, but they also shape and
create the conditions of possibility for our performances—with “our”
understood in a social sense, relevant to various levels of sociality.
In this sense, then, we do not only perform with technology; technol-
ogy also performs with us. This is not the case so much because we are
its mere instruments, but because we are co-actors and co-directors in
plays and choreographies that are not only written by us, humans. In
response to this condition, an ethics and politics of technology can be
about regaining some more agency, of becoming stronger directors and
choreographers of our lives, as opposed to letting technologies or their
designers do that. But beyond competition, ethical and political ques-
tions can also ask which choreographies, plays, music, and shows we
want to create together with technology and who and/or what should be
allowed to participate in this co-creation and co-design. Whether or not
one wants to go all the way towards a posthumanist view in which there
is a symmetry between humans and non-humans (I have not argued for
this; I actually believe humans are the main performers and are still the
only performers in a strict sense since only humans are embodied, situ-
ated, immanent, etc., in an existential sense related to their specific way
of embodiment), I have shown that using and reflecting on performance
art metaphors enables precise, interesting, and rich conceptualizations of
the various roles of technology, the users of technology, the designers of
technology, and philosophers and others who think about technology,
and that some of these roles of technology question the idea that human
users are in full control of their performances and its grammars and
scripts. The philosophical performances of this book revealed aspects of
technological experience and practice, such as movement, rhythm, and
magic, that deserve more attention in contemporary discourse about
technology and offer a performance-oriented vocabulary to conceptual-
ize the way technology shapes us—indeed how technology moves us.
Furthermore, these performances also touch thinking about technol-
ogy. I have argued that what may be called “a performative turn in phi-
losophy of technology” also has implications for thinking about what it
means to do philosophy, including philosophy of technology. Ultimately
such reflections may lead to different, perhaps transdisciplinary ways of
doing philosophy, as argued for by performance philosophy advocates.
This is not only about philosophers collaborating with (performance)
artists, if that means philosophers staying entirely within their traditional
roles. It can also imply changing and reinterpreting one’s role. It is, more
fundamentally, a question about how to do philosophy—sometimes mis-
leadingly and non-performatively framed as being about what philosophy
Conclusion 155
“is”. From the reflections presented here one could conclude that philos-
ophy as the love of wisdom is something that is performed and, like all
love, has to be performed in order to be complete. Consequently, it is not
sufficient to “be” a philosopher of technology (if that makes sense at all);
one has to “do” philosophy of technology. Thinking about technology is
a performance. Not only on the theatre and dance stages in so-called cul-
tural institutions, or in the lecture halls and other stages of academic life,
but everywhere and publicly where there is experience of technology and
where there are performances with technology. Against Plato and with,
for example, Dewey, one could argue that it is only on the basis of this
experience and these performances can we develop wisdom (understood
as know-how) about technology and how to live with it. Living well with
technology, the good life with technology, is an art, a performative art.
And an art can only be learned by doing. Philosophers of technology,
understood in the broad sense as lovers of wisdom concerning technol-
ogy, can only acquire their beloved and desired wisdom by doing, by
performing. This need not be limited to one kind of performance. Experi-
ence of, and performance with, all kinds of media and technologies can
help and is perhaps even necessary. Writing is only one technology and
text is only one medium. It cannot and should not be the only source for
developing wisdom and indeed for metaphors used for thinking about
technology.
For contemporary theory of technology such as (post)phenomenology
and critical theory of technology, these results and conclusions can be
seen and performed as criticisms, but also as constructive input for fur-
ther development of theory in these fields. If some dimensions of technol-
ogy use and experience are missing in existing accounts, then one could
try to add them and revise one’s framework. For example, postphenom-
enology could frame its users and perceivers in more performative terms
and could understand the mediations of technology as a shaping of tech-
nological performances. This would enable the theory to address more
social aspects and to integrate temporal elements such as movement,
rhythm, and narrative, all of which now seem to be missing. Another
example is critical theory: while in general of course this direction in
thinking about technology is sufficiently aware of social aspects of tech-
nology use and design, it could integrate performative-sociological con-
cepts such as role and choreography in its account of what happens when
we use technology. In particular, it could benefit from a more elaborate
account of the use and hacking of technology as embodied-performative,
moving, and narrative. If users can resist and regain agency at all (say,
within a capitalist system and in the face of very powerful technologies
and actors such as multinational corporations), they can only do so as
embodied human beings that move and are moved, act and are acted
upon, playing and being played, creating illusions and being deceived,
and so on. The metaphor of performance can thus help to say more about
156 Conclusion
how it is to use and hack technologies in the lifeworld, about the experi-
ence side of the “reason and experience” Feenberg believes is involved
in technology. Secondary instrumentalization requires performances,
including collective performances. There are already plays, scripts, and
choreographies linked to technologies, all of which contain power rela-
tions. The critical task is then to rewrite, revise, play, and perform differ-
ent political choreographies of technology (choreographies of resistance
or acts of consensus-making, for example), all of which probably and
perhaps desirably involve improvisation. Like all performance, politi-
cal performance is never fully scripted and determined; it is also a mat-
ter of rehearsing and trying things out. And neither the success nor the
performative power of a performance is ever guaranteed. As vulnerable
human beings in complex social-natural environments, we have to per-
form in the face of risk and uncertainty.
7.2. Finale/Last Movement: Thinking and Ethics

of Technology as Improvised Performances
Writing and publishing a book is itself a performative act (or series of
performative acts) mediated and shaped by technologies. It is a technop-
erformance, an intervention in a performative field. A risky intervention.
It aims to do something and to have others do something. Here the aim
was to help to move thinking in philosophy of technology into a more
performance-oriented direction, to contribute to a “performative turn”.
(And note that this use of the language of “turn” is itself only mean-
ingful and made possible by our embodied, performative existence. We
understand what turning means because we know-how to turn our body.
Philosophers also have bodies and have experience and know-how of
their bodies. Without that, they could not think and they could not use
metaphors. Books are not written by disembodied minds; the writing of
a book is always an embodied performance.)
Asking and arguing for a turn as a philosopher, then, is comparable
to taking the role of the choreographer who helps others turn in a par-
ticular direction (by using hands) or asks others to turn into a particular
direction (using the performative power of the word). Or, to put it in
more Socratic terms: the philosopher is then one who lets others under-
stand that they want or need to turn into a particular direction. One
could also call this Socratic intervention a kinesitherapy or kinésithéra-
pie (the French word for physiotherapy, see also the term kinesitherapie
used in Belgium): a therapeutic intervention that helps people move dif-
ferently, a re-education of the philosophical motor apparatus (French:
l’appareil locomoteur; Dutch: bewegingsapparaat) using specific tech-
niques. If thinking is understood as performance, then we could say that
the philosopher performs the writing of a text as a specific technique in
order to help the thinking of people move differently, thus attempting a
Conclusion 157
re-education of the thinking apparatus. This book can thus be seen as a
tool used in a therapeutic intervention that aims at a performative turn
and that aims to move philosophy of technology and the all-too-immobile
human subjects, users, and experiencers it presupposes in its theories.
Moreover, stressing the normative dimension of this kinesitherapy and
moving from this general intervention in thinking about technology to a
specific ethics of technology, one could say that the Socratic philosopher
tries to have people move differently with technology—and perhaps also
tries to have technology move people in different ways. Moving towards
the good life with technology then requires specific Socratic, kinesithera-
peutic practical interventions in how people move, act, play, and make
magic with technology. It is about trying to make people understand, by
means of words, writing but potentially also by showing, performing in
different ways, that they can and need to move, act, etc. differently with
technology. Alongside philosophers, artists can do that, too. By using
technology in a very different way than intended, for example, they may
open up different kine-aesthethic (kinaesthethic) and kine-technological
possibilities, different ways of moving with technology (and indeed of
moving together). Philosophers and artists who take up this kine-Socratic
role can help us to find (or re-discover and re-collect, as it were) different
ways of moving, including different ways of moving together and differ-
ent ways of moving with technology.
However, in the previous chapter I have also pointed to a different,
non-Socratic role philosophers could take. The Platonic/Socratic model
presupposes that the philosopher, as master kinetherapist or master kiné-
sist, perfectly knows what the good way of moving is. Or at least it pre-
supposes that the people she treats can in principle know and re-find,
recollect, indeed, re-animate, re-enact, and re-dance, the good way of
moving. But what if the philosopher does not really know the good way
of moving, acting, etc.? And what if nobody knows, in the sense that
there is no perfect or “original” and “authentic” way of moving that
is given to us or that we can recollect and reanimate? What if there is
no master choreography and no master choreographer who knows in
advance the perfect dance? If this is the case, mastery in choreography
and kinesitherapy means something else, something more relational and
perhaps something more communal and collective. It means that we all
have to find out together, by means of trial and error, what the best way
of moving is, including how to best move with technology and how to
best have technology move us. Maybe the level of mastery can be reached
but only on the basis of that common experience, together.
When it comes to dealing with new technologies, it seems that we find
ourselves in a situation that requires the latter kind of move. Although
many claim to be a Socratic therapist (consider the many popular books
about the future of technologies such as the internet of things, social
media, blockchain, robotics, and AI), nobody really knows where the
158 Conclusion
technology is moving and nobody knows the best way to move forward.
The philosopher can perhaps propose a reorganization of our thinking,
can attempt to choreograph thinking about technology, just as I have
tried in this book using the usual technique and tools (although here, too,
one may question the Socratic attitude and indeed whether the medium
and technologies used, language and writing, are adequate or sufficient).
But when it comes to the more practical challenge of how to move, act,
and play with technology in a way that leads to the good life, when it
comes to acquiring wisdom and know-how concerning the design and
use of technologies, the philosopher seems to have no choice but to leave
the Socratic position. She finds herself on the same plane as everyone
else. She may use writing as a technique to take distance from daily uses
and experiences of technology, which helps to reflect on them, but true
wisdom in these matters can only be based on these uses and experi-
ences and, in the end, can only be performed in and by these uses and
experiences. Hence the metaphor also has to change: we move from the
metaphor of the master choreographer and master kinesitherapist to that
of participants in a choreography that is continuously in the making and
that is a communal or collective, in any case more radically social mat-
ter. Philosophical interventions by means of the use of words and writ-
ing can help this common improvised performance aimed at trying to
find out how to move together. But if they help at all, it is not because
the philosopher knows the perfect movement, knows the ultimate ethical
truth, but because the philosopher has achieved some mastery in particu-
lar techniques and technologies to take distance, which helps others to
see what they are doing (how they are moving) and figure out (by means
of improvisation) what they could be doing (how they could be moving).
However, (a) it has to be stressed again that this mirroring and distanc-
ing exercise (or performance) has to happen without the philosopher hav-
ing pre-knowledge of what the best way of moving is, that such knowledge
can only be acquired through experience with technology (which in prin-
ciple everyone can acquire), and that the taking distance remains itself
a performance, usually mediated by technologies. Furthermore, (b) this
taking distance can also be done by artists, who can also master specific
techniques and media—different from those used by the philosopher—in
order to hold up a mirror and open up different choreographic-ethical
possibilities. Yet, (c) seeing is not enough, the mirror metaphor does not
get it right. What is learned by reading or by looking at art (and at our-
selves), even if based on experience, is not yet full knowledge. An ethics
can never be just applied theory. Everyone needs to try out the move-
ments, achieve know-how and wisdom. Every person and every soci-
ety have to find their way of moving and their way of moving together,
including their way of moving with technology. An ethics, understood in
a practical and performative sense, is not only and not mainly a matter
of theory but rather a matter of trying out, of improvisation. Finding
Conclusion 159
out the good life, including the good life with technology, is a matter of
performance and improvisation. It is about finding a good tune together,
about finding a good way of moving together. It is about trying things out
and about performatively responding to one another while performing.
Maybe what philosophers and artists do, using their specific techniques
and technologies, can help. But these are also a kind of improvisation.
And even if they are sometimes presented as individual insights, they are
based on common experiences and indeed common performances (in-
performances and co-performances). If they are relevant at all, they are
parasitic on, and responsive to, the movements of others and on common
choreographies. Or one could say: philosophical performances (concern-
ing ethics or other matters of wisdom) do not really stand outside the
performative whole but are part of the whole of performances and cho-
reographies that are going on and that try to move towards wisdom and
the good life in the way of improvisation.
More generally, thinking is always both performative and social, and
as such thinking is one of the performances that is going on and partici-
pates in (other) performances. In these common performances, philoso-
phers, artists, designers, etc. are co-dancers, co-actors, co-musicians, and
co-magicians. Their gestures and performances respond to, contribute to,
and co-constitute the moving whole. Thinking performances participate
in an ecology of performances—a moving, kinetic ecology.
Finally, as performance and improvisation, thinking is always a tran-
sient matter or, rather: a transient process. The technologies and media
of writing, text, and books create the magical illusion that thinking can
be captured and stored. We are under the spell of writing. Of course, like
all performances, thinking can be “recorded” in the form of text. But the
text is not the thinking. The recording is not the music. The video is not
the dance. When it comes to books, for example, the reader encountering
the text has to perform her own thinking based on the text, has to think,
dance, and live the text, performatively respond to it. In the best case,
she can do something with it in her thinking and in other performances.
But a tool is dead and meaningless if it is not used. Life is movement, and
human life and thinking are performances. The best thing that can hap-
pen to a text, therefore, is that it helps to move a few things; not in the
“mind” of the “reader”, but in the thinking and in other movements of
the performers that we all are: performers moving with technology and
moved by technology.
Index
actant 10, 33 – 4, 36 – 7, 69 – 71, 73, 78, Böhler, Arno 6, 12, 134 – 6, 139
101, 124 books 135, 156 – 7, 159
acting 5, 9, 17, 49, 56, 61, 65, 68 – 74, bot 101, 138
77 – 8, 139, 146 – 7, 157; with Bowie, Andrew 6, 12, 132 – 4,
technology 9, 48 – 78 136, 139
actor 10, 12, 34, 49, 52, 57 – 61, Butler, Judith 5, 10, 41, 48, 56, 61 – 2,
65 – 72, 74, 76 – 8, 92, 121, 124, 64 – 5, 68
132, 144 – 6, 150, 153 – 5, 159
aesthetics 2 – 5, 17, 30, 84, 87, 95, 139 Cartesian 16, 19, 53, 89 – 90
agency iii, 1 – 2, 5, 12, 27 – 8, 31, 33, child 29, 110, 116 – 17, 137
35, 48, 70, 74, 87, 94 – 5, 100, 102, choreography 6, 8 – 10, 13, 15, 20,
122 – 4, 154 – 5 23 – 6, 29, 33 – 5, 37 – 40, 42 – 4, 78,
Akrich, Madeleine 3, 48, 69 – 70 85, 90, 135, 142 – 4, 155, 157 – 8;
Alexa 12, 106, 109 – 10 political 10, 42 – 3, 154, 156
algorithms 33, 35, 74 – 5, 101, 124 Clarke, Arthur C. 105, 107
anthropology 48, 57, 60, 68, 88 composing 9, 24, 98
Apollonian 53 – 4, 66, 66n1 computer 27 – 9, 64, 71 – 2, 75,
appearance 4, 50, 52 – 3, 57, 59, 62 – 4, 77, 87, 91 – 2, 94 – 7, 109, 111,
72, 74, 106 – 17, 125, 130, 137 – 8, 114 – 15, 121, 135 – 6, 138, 149;
142 animation 12; games 7, 10 – 11, 29,
Aristotle 10, 39, 51 – 6, 63 – 4, 67 – 8; 32, 63, 65 – 6, 68 – 9, 71, 74 – 5, 99,
Poetics 51 – 2, 55 – 6; Rhetoric 102, 109, 115, 153; software 71,
52, 56 75, 94
artificial intelligence (AI) iii, 1, 5, 11, conducting 9, 83, 90, 96, 102
49, 72 – 4, 78, 107, 121, 123 – 4, creation 10, 23, 25 – 6, 63 – 4, 76, 84,
144, 146, 148, 150, 153, 157 92, 95; co-creation 154
assemblage 26, 37 Cull, Laura 6, 12, 132 – 6
audience 22, 24 – 5, 30, 49, 57 – 60, 63,
65 – 6, 73, 85, 87, 98, 105, 107 – 9, dance iii, 1, 5 – 10, 15, 18 – 33, 39 – 40,
123, 130, 150 42 – 4, 50 – 3, 61 – 2, 70, 77, 84, 90,
Austin, John 5, 10, 30 – 1, 48, 56, 133, 139, 143 – 7, 149, 155, 157,
65, 67 159; dancing with technology 146;
metaphor 5, 10, 15, 28, 32, 37, 39,
backstage (vs. frontstage) 34, 58, 68 43, 48, 83, 85, 107, 119, 141, 148;
body 15 – 26, 29, 31, 36, 39, 42 – 3, as technological practice 44
52 – 3, 61 – 2, 68 – 9, 77, 77n2, 86, DAW software 93 – 4
88, 89 – 91, 93, 97, 101, 113, 115, deception iii, 1 – 2, 12, 50, 52 – 3, 63,
128, 135, 149, 156; moving 10, 66, 72, 78, 103, 106 – 10, 117 – 22,
15 – 19, 21 – 5, 29, 31 – 2, 36, 44, 49, 125, 130
52, 68, 77; techniques 91, 93 declaration 55 – 6
Index 161
Deleuze, Gilles 38 – 9 Gallagher, Shaun 16 – 17, 20
design 1 – 2, 7, 11 – 12, 25 – 6, 32 – 3, games 8, 30 – 1, 34, 40, 53, 60, 64 – 9,
36, 41, 78, 95, 97 – 8, 103, 105 – 7, 72, 77, 92, 98 – 9, 102 – 3, 114,
109 – 11, 120; co-design 115 141; computer games 7, 10 – 11,
designer 11 – 12, 29, 32 – 6, 72, 78, 29, 63 – 9, 71, 74, 99, 109, 115,
95, 97, 106, 109 – 11, 114 – 17, 153; gameplay 65 – 6, 69; massively
119 – 20; as choreographer 33, 35; multiplayer online role-playing
as stage magician 2, 106, 109 – 11, games (MMORPGs) 65 – 6
114 – 17 gender 5, 10, 24, 42, 48, 55, 61 – 2
digital technologies 2, 8, 26 – 8, 30 – 1, Godlovitch, Stan 83 – 5, 87, 91 – 5,
34, 36 – 7, 41, 93 – 4, 99 – 100, 100 – 1
115, 132 Goffman, Erving 5, 10, 48, 57 – 62,
Dionysian 20, 53, 60, 66, 66n1, 64, 66 – 8, 70, 119
77n2, 83 good life 10, 13 – 14, 39, 41, 136 – 7,
directing 9, 26, 34 – 5, 41, 49, 77, 96, 155, 157 – 9
123, 147 Google 109, 122 – 3
director 34, 49, 66, 68 – 9, 76, 78, Greimas, Algirdas Julien 70
141, 143, 150; technology as
10 – 12, 49, 74 – 6, 78, 146, 153 – 4 Hegelian 149
drama 3 – 4, 7, 9, 51, 54, 57, 61, Heidegger, Martin 4, 17, 27, 29, 32,
131 – 2, 135; of ideas 135; see also 97, 133, 140, 143, 154
theatre honesty 12, 107, 111, 121, 125 – 6
Dreyfus, Hubert 11, 18, 20 – 1, 23
Ihde, Don 3 – 4, 10, 18, 28 – 9, 67, 71,
embodiment 10, 12, 15, 18 – 19, 21, 77, 99, 128, 139, 140 – 1, 154
30, 68 – 9, 77, 84, 89 – 91, 93, illusion 2, 9, 11 – 12, 22 – 3, 50,
97, 100 – 1, 128, 134, 139 – 40, 52 – 3, 59, 61, 63 – 4, 66, 66n1, 78,
146 – 7, 154 105 – 12, 114 – 17, 119 – 20, 122 – 3,
emotions 25, 38, 42 – 3, 51, 84, 91, 125 – 6, 144 – 5, 155, 159; ethics of
106, 111 – 12, 114, 116 106
emplotment 55, 64, 75 imitation 28, 50 – 2, 54 – 6, 64, 68,
ethics 2 – 3, 11 – 12, 24, 27, 39, 51, 72, 101
53, 87, 108, 126, 144, 158 – 9; improvisation 7, 11, 20 – 1, 26 – 7,
of honesty 12, 110 – 11, 121; of 50 – 1, 61, 72, 83 – 9, 97 – 9, 139,
illusion 106; of performance 125 – 6; 144, 156, 158 – 9
Platonic 53, 109 – 10; of technology instruments 11, 87, 94 – 6, 122 – 3,
1 – 2, 10, 12 – 13, 39 – 40, 107, 118, 154; musical instruments 18, 86,
125 – 6, 144, 153 – 4, 156 – 7; virtue 91 – 2, 94 – 6, 100
39, 125 – 6 Internet, the 29, 31, 63, 67, 73, 92,
experience iii, 1 – 3, 5 – 8, 10 – 13, 101, 109, 114 – 15, 141, 157
15 – 17, 19 – 30, 43, 55, 58, 66n1,
73, 78, 88 – 91, 96, 102, 105 – 7, kinaesthetic 21, 29, 42 – 3
112 – 18, 123, 126, 136, 140 – 5, kinesitherapy 13, 156 – 7
147, 150, 154 – 9 kinetic iii, 1, 10, 22, 30 – 1, 34 – 5,
39 – 41, 44, 62, 89, 159
Facebook 63, 67, 74, 99, 114, 119, know-how 19 – 21, 23, 27, 86 – 7, 113,
121 – 3, 138 155 – 6, 158
Fesmire, Steven 87 – 9, 98 knowledge iii, 1, 3 – 6, 8, 11 – 12,
first-person 21 – 2, 24, 59, 90 15 – 25, 27 – 9, 32, 68, 77, 86 – 9,
Flusser, Vilém 12, 107, 109 – 10, 113, 91, 93, 113, 117 – 18, 130 – 1,
119 – 20, 122 – 4 137, 139, 143, 145 – 6, 148, 158;
Foucault, Michel 7, 10, 38 – 41, 65, propositional vs. tacit 20, 89
121, 140 Kozel, Susan 15, 19 – 21, 24, 27 – 8,
Fraleigh, Sondra 7, 19 – 20, 25 38, 44
162 Index
language 4, 5, 11, 24 – 5, 27, 30 – 1, 83 – 103, 112, 133 – 4, 139, 154,
40, 48, 52, 54 – 8, 62 – 3, 65 – 8, 159; classical 7, 85 – 7, 94, 96 – 7,
70 – 1, 76 – 7, 88, 91, 112, 128, 133, 102, 139; composition 86, 95, 102;
139, 145, 147 – 9, 156, 158; as digital 83, 92 – 4; instruments 18,
technology 31 86 – 7, 89, 91 – 5, 100; recording 83,
Latour, Bruno 3 – 5, 10 – 11, 26, 33 – 4, 85, 91, 93 – 4, 159; rock 85, 86, 92,
37 – 8, 48 – 9, 69 – 71, 78, 92, 100 – 1, 95 – 6, 99; score 18, 50, 85 – 6, 96 – 8,
124, 140, 146 102, 139; as technological practice
linguistic 70, 76, 78, 90, 98 85 – 6, 91 – 5, 100
machines iii, 1 – 3, 7 – 9, 27, 31, 75, narrative iii, 1, 9, 13, 38, 48, 51 – 6,
86, 94 – 6, 101, 111, 115, 122, 62, 64 – 6, 66, 68, 70, 74 – 6, 84, 99,
124, 146; as actors 70, 141; 102, 135, 153, 155
as choreographers 35, 141; as Nietzsche, Friedrich 10, 20, 51 – 4, 60,
conductors 11; as magicians 105, 63 – 4, 66, 66n1, 77n2, 78n3, 115,
122, 141; as staging our thinking 134 – 5
13, 128, 138, 141 Noë, Alva 5 – 6, 10, 13, 17, 44, 112,
magic iii, 1, 5, 9, 11 – 12, 23, 73, 134, 143, 147 – 9
105 – 17, 120 – 7, 146, 154, 157; normative 1 – 2, 11 – 3, 33, 49, 57, 73,
stage magic 1, 6 – 7, 9, 11, 78, 103, 75, 78, 107, 153, 157
105 – 15, 118 – 19, 121, 125, 137; normativities 10
victims of 107 – 8, 110 – 11, 114,
116, 121, 126 organization 44, 55, 75, 83, 111, 121,
magician 2, 11 – 13, 78, 106 – 9, 147, 148, 158
111 – 24, 126, 137, 141, 143, 153, other 24, 27, 30 – 2, 55, 58, 65 – 6,
159; stage magician 11, 52, 105 – 8, 87 – 8, 96, 98, 107 – 8, 122 – 4, 138,
110 – 16, 121, 124 142, 150, 156
mask 78n3, 113, 119 – 22
mechos 109 participation 12, 129, 133, 139 – 41
media 2, 9, 13, 27, 65 – 6, 73 – 4, Parviainen, Jaana x, 10, 19, 21, 26,
99, 109 – 11, 114, 122 – 6, 131 – 2, 33, 36 – 8, 40, 42 – 4, 129
135 – 6, 138, 142, 145, 148 – 9, 151, Penny, Simon 5, 17, 28
153, 155, 158 – 9; digital 31, 92, perception 3 – 5, 15, 17, 19, 53, 92,
94; social 8, 10 – 11, 30 – 2, 38, 41, 112 – 13, 115, 140
49, 60, 63 – 8, 73 – 4, 76 – 8, 98 – 9, performance iii, 1 – 2, 4 – 14, 15 – 19,
101 – 3, 114 – 15, 117, 119, 122 – 5, 22 – 4, 26 – 30, 33 – 4, 41 – 2, 48,
138 – 9, 141 – 2, 148 – 9, 157 50, 52, 56 – 62, 64 – 7, 69 – 74, 78,
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 15 – 21, 83 – 103, 106 – 26, 128 – 36, 138 – 50,
23, 28 153 – 9; co-performance 112 – 13,
metaphor iii, 1 – 13, 15 – 18, 28, 32 – 4, 122, 159; human (vs. machines)
37, 39 – 41, 43, 48 – 51, 53 – 7, 60 – 5, 27, 71 – 3, 78, 95, 101, 124, 146;
67 – 78, 83 – 5, 87, 91 – 2, 96 – 103, as a metaphor 1, 5 – 6, 8, 10 – 13,
105 – 7, 112, 115, 118 – 19, 123 – 4, 16, 49 – 50, 56, 72, 78, 97, 100 – 3,
128 – 9, 135 – 43, 147 – 50, 153 – 6, 124, 140 – 1, 148 – 50, 155; moral
158; more than a metaphor 12, 59 – 61; philosophy 6, 9, 12, 128 – 9,
28, 39 132 – 6, 139, 154; philosophy as
mirror(ing) 42 – 3, 158 6, 9, 12, 129, 132 – 6, 139, 142,
movement iii, 1 – 4, 10, 15 – 43, 52, 144, 149 – 50, 154 – 9; risky 138;
62, 68 – 9, 77 – 8, 89 – 91, 102, 134, social 30, 65 – 6, 73, 87 – 8, 93, 98,
142 – 3, 145 – 6, 154 – 6, 158 – 9 113 – 14, 119, 126, 135, 141, 150,
moving body 10, 15, 17, 19, 21, 23, 153 – 5; theory 8, 56
31 – 2, 36, 44, 49, 52, 68, 77 performative 2, 4 – 5, 9, 12 – 14, 17,
music iii, 1, 5 – 7, 9, 11, 18, 24, 19, 22 – 3, 29 – 30, 38 – 9, 41, 44, 56,
28, 48, 50, 52 – 3, 66n1, 73, 78, 58, 60 – 1, 64 – 6, 69 – 70, 76, 85, 94,
Index 163
98, 100 – 1, 105 – 8, 114, 116 – 22, 74, 76, 78, 88 – 9, 92, 106 – 7, 111,
124 – 9, 132, 134 – 6, 139 – 41, 113 – 14, 118 – 20, 122, 126, 137,
143 – 6, 148 – 51, 154 – 6, 158 – 9; act 142 – 5
5, 41, 48, 126, 140, 156; turn 1 – 2, politics 1 – 3, 10 – 11, 38 – 42, 88, 122,
4 – 5, 13, 40, 56, 61, 114 – 15, 124, 129, 154
129, 140, 149 – 50, 154, 156 – 7 postphenomenology 3 – 4, 18, 67, 71,
performative field 126 – 7, 153, 156 76 – 7, 101, 155
performing arts iii, 1 – 2, 5 – 9, 13, 27, power iii, 1 – 3, 7 – 8, 10, 12, 17, 25,
49 – 50, 60, 85, 89, 128 – 9, 132, 38 – 42, 57, 59, 63, 72, 76 – 7, 86,
139, 147 – 9, 153 98, 108, 110, 121 – 4, 126, 130,
persona 59, 91, 96, 120, 135 134, 136, 138, 150, 155 – 6
phenomenology iii, 1 – 3, 5, 13, 15, 19, puppet 12, 50, 106, 110 – 11, 113,
24, 27 – 8, 30, 36, 42, 61, 69, 71, 115, 124
77, 132 – 3, 153, 155; of dance 15,
19, 21 resistance 38, 42, 121 – 2, 124, 156
philosopher 1 – 4, 6, 9, 13, 15, 18, 21, rhetoric 11 – 12, 129 – 32, 136 – 9
27 – 8, 31, 39 – 40, 44, 49, 51 – 4, rhythm 10 – 12, 23 – 4, 32, 35, 38, 40,
56, 59, 63, 76, 85, 87 – 8, 107, 98, 129, 133, 135, 139, 154 – 5
113, 126 – 9, 131, 134 – 40, 142 – 6, Ricoeur, Paul 11, 48, 53 – 7, 63 – 4,
148 – 51, 154 – 9; as performer 6, 9, 67 – 8, 75 – 6
13, 113, 126 – 7, 134 – 40, 155 – 9; ritual 56, 60 – 1, 64 – 5, 74, 83, 85, 88,
role of 13, 63, 113, 129, 142 – 5, 133; Dionysian 20, 53, 60
149 – 50, 154 – 9 robots iii, 1 – 3, 8, 32, 49, 53, 63,
philosophy iii, 1, 3 – 7, 9 – 10, 12 – 13, 72 – 4, 78, 105 – 6, 109 – 11, 115,
17, 30, 40, 43 – 4, 49 – 54, 60, 67, 117, 119, 124, 137; as co-dancer
77, 83 – 5, 91, 95, 112 – 14, 126, 32, 153; as co-mover 32; as
128 – 39, 142 – 4, 146, 149 – 50, co-performer 32, 153
154 – 5; of dance 10, 15, 18, 21,
27 – 8; of technology iii, 1 – 7, 9 – 13, Schechner, Richard 10, 28, 48, 57,
18, 21, 28, 33, 37, 48 – 9, 53, 62, 59 – 61
67, 69, 71, 76, 78, 122, 128 – 9, script 2, 10, 11 – 12, 49, 61, 66 – 7,
132, 140, 144 – 9, 154 – 7 69 – 72, 74 – 6, 78, 85, 97, 124, 126,
physis 134 154, 156
Pickering, Andrew 5, 10, 17, 28, 31, Searle, John 10, 30 – 1, 48, 56 – 7,
34, 48, 70, 128 65, 67 – 8
picture 4, 28, 84, 101, 146 Shakespeare, William 54
Plato 1, 3, 6 – 7, 12 – 13, 50 – 3, 63, 68, Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine 15, 21 – 4
107 – 8, 113, 115, 126, 129 – 30, situatedness 10, 12, 42, 139
132, 134 – 8, 140, 143, 150, 155; skill 7, 11, 18, 20 – 1, 27, 29, 39, 83,
cave metaphor 4, 50, 63, 113, 85 – 7, 89, 93 – 5, 98 – 101, 108, 113,
115 – 16, 144; Gorgias 130 – 1, 136; 116, 118, 132
Ion 130; Phaedrus 130 – 1, 137; smart devices iii, 1, 92, 111
Protagoras 130; Republic 50 – 1, smartphone 10, 28 – 9, 32, 35 – 6,
107 – 8; Timaeus 51 38, 40 – 1, 77, 92, 99, 102, 109,
Platonic 12, 31, 51, 53 – 4, 57 – 8, 114, 153
72 – 3, 83 – 4, 89, 106 – 10, 112 – 16, social: interaction 10, 62, 65, 75, 88,
118 – 19, 126, 130 – 1, 135, 142, 98, 101, 117; life 2, 5, 48 – 9, 54,
153, 157; vs. non-Platonic 12, 64, 56 – 62, 64 – 9, 71, 73, 75 – 6, 77n2,
72, 97, 113, 116, 144 83, 88, 98, 105 – 6, 108, 119 – 21,
play 2, 9 – 13, 18 – 19, 32, 38, 49, 123, 125; media 8, 10 – 11, 30 – 2,
51 – 2, 54, 57, 59 – 62, 64 – 6, 69, 38, 41, 49, 60, 63 – 8, 73 – 4, 76 – 8,
74, 77, 83, 85 – 100, 115, 118, 142, 98 – 9, 101 – 3, 114, 117, 119,
144 – 6, 153 – 8; role play 10 – 12, 122 – 5, 138 – 9, 141 – 2, 148 – 9,
39, 51, 53, 57, 59 – 66, 68, 70, 72, 153, 157
164 Index
Socrates 39, 130 – 2, 137 – 8, 145 119, 124, 139; social 11, 62, 64 – 6,
Socratic 13, 108, 142 – 6, 150, 156 – 8 69, 76, 142
space 10, 15 – 17, 19, 21, 23, 27, 29, third-person 22, 24, 59, 90
36, 40, 42 – 3, 51, 60 – 1, 65 – 6, time 6, 10, 12, 15 – 17, 19 – 21, 23, 25,
68 – 9, 76, 88, 99 – 100, 108, 27, 29, 33, 40, 43 – 4, 48, 54 – 5, 57,
112 – 13, 121, 124, 133 – 4, 141, 147 60, 65, 67, 75 – 6, 85, 88, 98, 112,
spectators 24, 52, 69, 106, 112 – 15, 139, 147
118, 121 Tognazzini, Bruce 12, 107, 109 – 12,
speech act 5, 30, 42, 48, 56 125
stage 2, 12 – 13, 22 – 6, 28, 34, 43 – 4, transdisciplinary 13, 128, 134, 144, 154
49, 51 – 4, 56 – 60, 62, 64, 66, trickery 11, 108, 119 – 22, 124 – 5, 137
68 – 71, 73 – 6, 78, 106 – 11, 114, Trojan Horse 109, 111
119, 123 – 5, 128, 131, 134 – 6, 138, truth 3, 13 – 14, 50, 52 – 4, 58, 63,
140 – 6, 148, 150, 153, 155 66n1, 107 – 8, 110, 113, 130 – 1,
stage magic iii, 1, 6 – 7, 11, 52, 78, 133, 136 – 8, 142 – 5, 158
103, 105 – 15, 118 – 19, 121, Turner, Victor 10, 48, 57, 60 – 1
124 – 5, 137 Twitter 74, 98 – 9, 114, 138
technologies of the self 41 Verbeek, Peter-Paul 3 – 4, 10, 18,

technology: acting with 9, 49; as actor 33 – 4, 48 – 9, 67, 70 – 1, 77 – 8,
12, 49, 67, 74, 76, 78, 92, 124, 139 – 41, 146
146, 153; as choreographer 8, 10, virtual 10, 29, 31, 34, 63 – 6, 69, 73,
34 – 6, 78, 146, 153 – 4; as composer 100, 106, 109 – 10, 114 – 16; vs.
102; creating illusion with 155; reality 63 – 4, 100, 110, 114 – 16;
dancing with 15 – 45; as magician worlds 10, 34, 106, 114 – 15,
11 – 12, 106, 118, 122, 153; making 125, 141
music with 83 – 103; normative virtue 39, 125 – 6, 130
role of 78; as organizer 9, 67, 121; vision iii, 1, 5, 21, 30, 40
persuasive 12, 136 – 8; rhetoric of voice 15, 31, 38, 68, 72, 83, 86, 91,
136 – 8; as script writer 49, 66, 96, 135, 138, 150
75 – 6, 78; thinks 146 – 51
technoperformances iii, 2, 13, wisdom 39, 41, 131, 137 – 8, 144,
153, 156 155, 158 – 9
temporal iii, 1, 3, 6, 10 – 11, 13, 19, Wittgenstein, Ludwig 8, 44, 63, 69,
22 – 3, 55, 66, 75, 88, 96, 102, 112, 91 – 2, 99, 128
135, 139 – 41, 153, 155 writing 7, 9, 13, 28 – 9, 35, 41, 44, 55,
theatre iii, 1 – 3, 5 – 7, 9; ancient Greek 67, 69, 77n2, 85, 88, 97 – 8, 130 – 2,
7, 51, 55, 115; as metaphor 3, 10, 135 – 7, 145, 148 – 50, 155 – 9
17, 33 – 4, 41, 48 – 9, 51, 53, 55 – 7,
60 – 2, 64 – 5, 67 – 71, 73, 75 – 8, 92, Young, Iris 41 – 2, 62

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(Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy) Mark Coeckelbergh - Moved by Machines - Performance Metaphors and Philosophy of Technology-Routledge (2019)

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This unique and innovative book changes the very framework for doing

philosophy of technology by introducing and developing a performance-

Given the rapid development of new technologies such as smart devices,

Mark Coeckelbergh is full Professor of Philosophy (Philosophy of Media

The Act and Object of Judgment

Perception, Cognition and Aesthetics

Philosophical Perspectives on Moral and Civic Education

Explanation in Action Theory and Historiography

Transhumanism and Nature

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

2 Dancing With Technology: How Machines Move

3 Acting With Technology: How Machines Act

4 Making Music With Technology: How Machines

5 The Magic of Technology: How Machines Create

6 Thinking With Technology: How Machines Stage

Thanks are due to the editor from Routledge, Andrew Weckenmann,

1.1. What This Book Is About

1.2. What This Book Does and What It Responds

1.3. Method and Structure of the Book

Table 1.1 Overview of the Chapters

Chapter 2 Dancing With Dance Dancing

As is clear from this table, I distinguish between performing (e.g., danc-

2.1. Phenomenology of Dance and the Moving Body

Body and Embodiment

Thus experience of one’s body runs counter to the reflective proce-

We do not first become aware of the body and subsequently use it

Merleau-Ponty also writes about the body in movement. Considering

Bodily space can be distinguished from external space and envelop

Then Merleau-Ponty turns to action and movement: he considers the

Dance as a Happening, Flow, Know-How, and Skill

The dancing-danced, or chiasm between moving actively and let-

Mastery in dance does not rest on wilful domination of ourselves in

In such a state there is what in psychology is known as “flow”: when the

Movement, Time, Space, and Rhythm

Force is projected and a space is created, and this is made possible by an

Social Aspect, Audience, and Choreography

2.2. How We Move With Technology and

Although running with wearables mobilizes a new type of assem-

However, it is not necessary to use the term “assemblages” or “act-

Moving bodies, monitoring their health informatics on the screen,

Although the micro-macro distinction is maybe not so helpful here (I pro-

Choreographing the flow of data involves being aware of what it

A macro perspective on choreography as proposed by Parviainen and as

2.3. Ethical and Political Questions

to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain

Here the emphasis is not on the exercise of power by others but in

Instead of focusing on ‘kinaesthetic experiences’ in the body, Husserl

2.4. Choreography, Philosophy, and Technology

Technologies organize our lives in ways that make it impossible to

Choreographers, Noë writes, show us that dancing is not a special activ-

3.2. Philosophy of Theatre and Theatre Theory:

3.3. The Social as Theatre

All the world’s a stage,

Or, in The Merchant of Venice:

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano;

Ricoeur: From Greek Theatre to Narrative Theory

Austin and Searle: Speech Acts

Goffman, Turner, and Schechner: Sociological and

By means of roles people enacted their personal and social realities

And we could add: people also enact and perform morality.

This broad interpretation of theatre, which continues its life in contem-

Butler: Performing Our (Gender) Identities

3.4. Using the Metaphor of Theatre for Thinking

1.1. What This Book Is About

1.2. What This Book Does and What It Responds

1.3. Method and Structure of the Book

Table 1.1 Overview of the Chapters

2.1. Phenomenology of Dance and the Moving Body

2.2. How We Move With Technology and

2.3. Ethical and Political Questions

2.4. Choreography, Philosophy, and Technology

3.2. Philosophy of Theatre and Theatre Theory:

3.3. The Social as Theatre

3.4. Using the Metaphor of Theatre for Thinking

4.2. Some Philosophy of Music: Music as Performance

4.3. Playing and Improvising (With) Technology

5.2. From Stage Magic to the Ethics of Technology:

5.4. Who (or What) Deceives Whom? More Ethical,

6.3. Implications for Thinking About Technology

6.4. Two Roles and Choreographies for Philosophers

7.1. Summary of Results: Towards a Performance-

7.2. Finale/Last Movement: Thinking and Ethics