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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Heidegger: Technology#6 « Previous | |Next »
July 23, 2004

Heidegger describes the hydroelectric power station on the Rhine as his paradigm technological device because for him electricity is the paradigm technological stuff. He says:


"The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging-forth. That challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew."

SieversWHydro1.jpg
Wolfgang Sievers, Hydroelectric station, Tasmania 1959.

The problem is that electricity is turned on in a household in order to satisfy my desire for coldness in summer or warmth in winter. Yet Heidegger's account of the technological mode of being is presupposed on technology not depending on subject's understanding and using objects. So that would be a modernist understanding of technology:

SieversWHydro2.jpg
Wolfgang Sievers, E.T.S.A. power station, Mt Gambier, South Australia, 1979

Modern technology, Heidegger says, is "something completely different and therefore new." The goal of technology Heidegger tells us, is the more and more flexible and efficient ordering of resources, not as objects to satisfy our desires, but simply for the sake of ordering. He 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. Whatever is ordered about in this way ... we call ... standing-reserve.... Whatever stands by in the sense of standing reserve no longer stands over against us as object."

Is that a postmodern understanding of technology? One were objects and subjects are eliminated by this new mode of being.that treats everything as a standing reserve (resources) makes possible endless disaggregation, redistribution, and reaggregation for its own sake.

Is this not the postmodern world where information is truly endlessly transformable due to the computer manipulation of information as his paradigm.This is a rupture with the modern subject's controlling of objects and a disclosure of a new stage in the understanding of being.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 7:41 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (1)
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