Rethinking Human-Smartphone Interaction with Deleuze, Guattari, and Polanyi

Abstract

An inbuilt theoretical deficiency of any cybernetic or phenomenological accounts of human-smartphone interaction is that their inherited frameworks suffer from lopsided explanatory proficiencies. Neither can explicate one ‘side’ of the interaction without inappropriately foisting those logics onto its dyadic counterpart. In this paper, both Michael Polanyi’s bio-philosophy and a Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophy of brain seek to remedy this conceptual deficit by positing a conceptual toolkit that incorporates pertinent cybernetic and phenomenological revelations while abjuring their dogmatizing propensities. This conjoined reading of Polanyi with Deleuze and Guattari asserts that temporary, bounded structures of interference between mind and machine – rooted in asymmetry, inertia, and labile planes of cognition – are the grounding dimension of human-smartphone interaction, which is itself taken as emblematic of our wider relations to smart technologies.