Postmodern Culture

Does cyberculture—along with its new forms of equipment and, consequently, its new modes of relating to equipment—constitute a distinct and different way of being in the world from ordinary everydayness? In other words, is there a distinct mode of being peculiar to the “cyber”? Is there cyberbeing? This paper sets out to investigate this possibility, beginning with an outline of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein and moving on to look at the changes and modifications to his account that might need to be made in order to distinguish something like cyberbeing.

For Heidegger (Being), what is fundamental to being-in-the-world is that we understand as. But this does not mean: objects exist primordially in themselves as pure presence and we, subsequent to that sheer presence, come along and, as it were, throw an understanding over them. Presence and understanding are not like this. What are they like?

The first given of what-is is that it is part of, roughly, human socio-cultural being (or Dasein). What can be in this respect is, initially, of two kinds. The first is what is ready-to-hand (Zuhanden) as opposed to the second, what is present-at-hand (Vorhanden). What is ready to hand is part of the everyday world of practical activity and consists of equipment (hammers and promises, for example—but also the familiar means of using them). It consists of tools and methods. These come first. What is present-at-hand comes later and is only one particular way of using what is ready-to-hand: it is what comes to count as natural, objective and beyond the field of human concerted actions. In fact it is what the picture in the paragraph above mistakenly thinks of as coming first: natural, primordial, independent entities subject to such things as scientific inquiry.

Two ways of being then: the ready-to-hand (cf. “culture”) and the present-at-hand (cf. “nature”). But prior to this, as we have seen, is another which Heidegger calls Dasein. Dasein is, loosely, human (as opposed to natural or equipmental) being. More precisely, it is “a being of the same ontological sort that we are” (Okrent 3). And it is ontologically prior to either Zuhandenheit or, naturally, Vorhandenheit. However, Dasein’s unique capacity is that it is the only kind of thing which is ontologically constituted such that it can work with what is ready-to-hand (in order to produce, for example, what counts as “natural” and apparently, therefore, primordial). The mistake in philosophy, or indeed in any kind of inquiry, is to begin with independent entities present-at-hand—with what might be called the merely “occurrent.” Adopting Dreyfus’s terms then, we can think of Dasein’s primordial concern with what is ready-to-hand as “availableness,” and its subsequent concern (on top of this primary layer) with what is present-at-hand as “occurrentness” (Dreyfus xi). According to this vocabulary, what is available (tools and methods) must always precede what is occurrent (apparently natural facts).

These then are the main categories of being (cf. Brandom). But we have already said that the involvement of Dasein in availableness is understanding and that understanding is always understanding as. Obviously, if availableness precedes occurrentness (and can perhaps be said to produce it), then understanding, as the first involvement of Dasein in the world, cannot be something, as it were, “naturally given” to it. It cannot have to do with a mind or a consciousness, or with subjective mental states. It must have to do with Dasein’s dealings with availableness: equipment.

To understand, then, is to have appropriate dealings with equipment, with tools and the methods of their use. These tools are part of the ordinary organized social fabric in which Dasein finds itself. Dasein always already finds itself amidst tools: communally sanctioned things for doing things, and ways of doing those things. When it uses equipment in the way that we all do and in the way that we all recognize as appropriate for the task in...