Heidegger sees technology as itself metaphysically determined— its essence is given in the metaphysical appropriation of being that Heidegger names “das Gestell.” In ordinary German, “das Gestell” means a rack or a stand that is used to keep things together—say books or bottles of wine—it can also mean a frame or framework on which something hangs or that gives it its shape—as does the frame of an umbrella; “stellen,” from which the term is derived, means “to set” or “to put in place,” and “stellen” is itself related to “vorstellen,” often translated as “to represent,” but also as “to imagine,” and to “herstellen,” meaning “to produce.” In keeping with the common tendency to translate Heidegger’s own terms, which, in his later thinking especially, are almost always drawn from ordinary German (even if they stretch the ordinary meanings of those terms), by means of English neologisms, “das Gestell” has often been referred to as “Enframing” (this is the translation employed by William Lovitt in his translation of “The Question Concerning Technology”). Rather than “Enframing,” however, I will simply use “the Framework” (keeping the definite article since the Framework does indeed refer to something quite specific).
The distinction between technology and the essence of technology is a critical one in Heidegger’s thinking. It means that Heidegger’s critique of technology cannot be viewed as an attack on any particular instance of technology as such—although such instances may well be used to illustrate general features of technology’s essence. It also means that the fact that human beings have made use of a range of technologies and technological devices throughout history cannot, in itself, be taken to count against Heidegger’s claim that the contemporary world is characterized by the dominance of the technological (one might say that although, in the past, technological devices appeared within the world, the world did not itself appear as technological). Furthermore, Heidegger is not recommending the abandonment of any particular technological device or system. The problem of technology is not to be found in any of the particular deliverances of technology, but rather in that out of which technology itself comes and which determines it, that which is its essence: the Framework. The Framework is no device or mechanism, but is itself a mode of presencing or disclosedness. As such, it is less evident in particular technological devices such as the computer or the genetically modified organism as in much broader features of the contemporary world. The most obvious such feature is undoubtedly to be seen in the treatment of the natural world as a source of “raw material” for human production and as open to human manipulation and control, but it is also elsewhere: in the rise of generalized notions of efficiency and flexibility in organizational structure and planning; in the tendency to take as the primary determinant of all social interactions the abstract and rational decision making of individual actors; in the application of the rationality of the market to all domains of action; in the prioritization of quantitative indicators, often purely numerical or financial, in assessments of that which is “qualitative”—including human well-being; in the idea of the world as a single “globalized” network that transcends the boundaries of place and space.1 The Framework thus refers to a mode that allows the world and the beings within it to appear only insofar as they are available to an all-encompassing ordering, calculating, and controlling. It is a mode of revealing that allows beings to appear, not as things, nor even as objects, but as “Bestand”—as that which is available for sale (“stock”), or which is held “in reserve”—most broadly, that which is ready as “resource.”
Inasmuch as something is usually understood as a resource in relation to some other productive activity—as timber may be a resource for furniture production—so one might be led to understand Heidegger’s account of technology on the model of Being and Time’s account of the ordering of equipment in the context of work—in both cases, it would seem, things appear in terms of a larger system of instrumental relations. The ordering of the technological is all encompassing, however, in a way that the ordering of equipment is not; the technological organizes itself, not in terms of the places and regions that characterize the equipmental, but instead as a single leveled-out and interconnected “space” in which everything is reduced to the “same.” Moreover, while the equipmental stands always in relation to what is an essentially human projection, and so to human ends, the technological has no ends as such other than the ordering of things as available, as orderable, as resource. As Heidegger writes, “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.”2 This ordering is also essentially tied to the measurable and the calculable so that, in the ordering of things as resource, the technological “brings all beings into the business of calculation, which dominates most fiercely precisely where numbers are not needed.”3 The compass of the technological is so wide that even the human falls within it and is taken up as another resource to be transformed, stored, deployed, calculated, consumed—“The current talk about human resources, about the supply of patients for a clinic, gives evidence of this.”4 Technology is thus not something that stands at the disposal of humans, nor is technology to be understood merely as a form of instrumentalism, instead, as it is determined by the Framework, technology appropriates everything to a single ordered totality. The metaphysical disclosure of things as “objects” itself gives way to the technological ordering of things as resource so that “today there are no longer objects (no beings, insofar as these would stand against a subject taking them into view)—there are now only resources [Bestand] (beings that are held in readiness for being consumed).”5 There are thus no limits to technological ordering, nothing that stands outside its compass, nothing that is not taken into its global calculation.
Many of these features have been seen, of course, as hallmarks of the various forms of neo-liberalism that have been so dominant within both the public and private sectors over the last two decades. Yet it is not neo-liberal thinking that is at issue here, but rather a mode of revealing that, while it may be expressed in political ideology, is no mere “ideology” as such. Indeed, many of these features are no longer seen as being associated with any particular political orientation, but have become part of the way in which the contemporary world understands itself. Indeed, why would one oppose such obvious commonsense notions as the need for greater “rationality” in decision making or improved efficiency in organizations? Heidegger’s answer is not that one should not be concerned about such things, but that one should be concerned in a way that also understands the way in which such concerns are themselves grounded, and so the limits within which those concerns are properly set. The dominance of the technological consists, in large part, in the inability for the question of such a grounding, or of the question of boundedness that comes with it, to appear as a question. ↩
“The Question Concerning Technology,” p. 17 (GA7:17). ↩
“Why Poets?,” p. 219 (GA5:292). ↩
Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” p. 18 (GA7:18). Heidegger also emphasizes that the technological is “no merely human doing” (“The Question Concerning Technology,” p. 19 [GA7:20]). ↩
“Seminar in Le Thor 1969,” p. 61 (GA15:367-368). Translation modified. ↩