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April 4, 2006
Technological enframing is a 'way of revealing', or mode of world-disclosure that tHeidegger argues defines the ethos, or way of being, that characterizes the modern age.
According to Heidegger in "The Age of the World Picture," essay in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (trs. William Lovitt, Harper and Row, New York, 1977) there is a specific is a relationship between technological enframing and the objectification of the real in modernity. We see the first signs of the emergence of this way of beginng the mid-seventeenth century, when the real as such was first defined as something essentially amenable to the representation of human beings.
With Descartes, Heidegger argues '[w]hat is, in its entirety, is...taken in such a way that it first is in being and onlyis in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth'. This does not mean that in modernity the world becomes 'subjective'. Far from it. Modernity, Heidegger claims, does usher in a new 'subjectivism', but also an unprecedented 'objectivism'. This subjectivism and objectivism condition one another in a reciprocal interplay.
In order to posit something as a determinate object, the modern subject of representation must first project a 'groundplan' of what is to count as an element within the governing sphere of objectivity. Precisely how a thing is understood in its objectivity will depend on the groundplan thus projected. But for there to be a subject at all, the subject of representation must also be 'set up' relative to a sphere of objectivity.
So the subject of modernity not only re-presents the world as picture----that is to say, as an objective realm set out before him, but he simultaneously 'puts himself into the picture'...puts himself into the scene, i.e., into the open sphere of that which is generally and publicly represented.
What then is the content of this picture? What is the mode of being that is disclosed?
It is a technological one; one in which the world is ceaselessly objectified, qualified, quantified, and systematized-- and reduced to the level of stock, or resource. What cannot be objectified cannot be put to use, and what cannot be put to use is useless, and thus redundant. The human being is no exception.
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So the implication, then, of the subject putting itself into the world-picture frame, as representing its representation to itself, is that it is itself a reflex of its conception of objectivity, which it projects or is projected by, such that such a "subject" only exists through suppression of authentic being-in-the-world, as constituted throught its relation to Being? Subjectivity as self-suppressing domination?