After reading Heidegger (several times) and looking at all of the available secondary sources that attempt to simplify the dense style that he writes in, I began to appreciate the approach he takes to the concept of truth. Different objects create different truths to different people, and we as a society often limit truth to only what we understand at the time. As technology develops, it enhances our understanding of the world and what we believe to be true. This is especially true for non-renewable resources and how we have approached them as tools we can use in every day life.
The first resource that came to my mind that has certainly changed in our society is gasoline. When car companies discovered the effects that lead had as an additive in gasoline, everyone began to use it. Adding lead to gasoline boosts the octane rating in gas significantly, and also reduces knocking in older motors and allows them to run at much higher compression without overheating. This creates a much more efficient engine that produces more power from less space.
All of the car companies began to build their motors with the intent of running on leaded gasoline, and refineries began to add the lead compound into the gas before it was even delivered to consumers. It took until 1974 for the United States to acknowledge how much pollution and damage the lead was causing, and began a lead phase out program that ended in the late 1980s.
While technology only saw lead and the environment as a resource and focused on boosting efficiency, it took the human component to recognize the danger behind it. Lead is the most inexpensive way to make efficient gasoline engines, but there would probably be a hole in our o-zone right now if we had continued to use it. Our constructed truth of lead has changed completely since the early century.
I think this is very similar to the message that Sherry Turkle wanted to convey in her book Alone Together. We shouldn't limit technology or be afraid of it, but we do need to understand the effects that it can have on us. Used properly, we can benefit from technology and make our lives easier, but we need to evaluate all possible scenarios that could arise from the use of whatever we create.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Heidegger, Modern Technology and the Standing Reserve
In Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology," he takes a look at the ways that we understand technology and its essence. He describes technology as something that achieves an unconcealing, an ordering, a bringing about. Technology, in its essence as enframing, "orders revealing" that is done by man. Heidegger really has a way with his words when he talks about concealing, revealing, ordering, enframing, etc. but the way I understood it is that the common conception of technology and its function in revealing and ordering is that man acts upon technology as an instrument of causality, in the bringing about of knowledge or the unconcealing of the concealed. Heidegger challenges that understanding, particularly in the context of modern technology. While "technology" in general is a way of revealing (as instrument, from the traditional understanding of causality,) Heidegger sees modern technology as a challenging in the process of revealing. It is a "challenging revealing," a "setting upon," which becomes a way of oppression.
The way of helping us to understand this oppression is by talking about the "real as standing-reserve." The idea is that, under enframing, the real reveals itself (through technology?) only as standing-reserve, and nothing else. Everything comes to being, becomes unconcealed only as a form of energy, or as having the potential for that energy. Heidegger talks about the plane on the runway only being revealed as standing-reserve. It is only real in the sense that it has the potential for some utility. The idea of real as standing-reserve and this sort of revealing is dangerous according to Heidegger, because man himself becomes ordered as standing-reserve and not as subject; just as nature/things become ordered as standing-reserve and not object. In this type of an ordering, man sees himself as "lord of the earth," even while viewing/ordering himself and mankind as standing-reserve. When we look at not only things and nature and technology, but ourselves and others, exclusively in terms of their productive potential (or capacity to give energy, resources, etc.) this is a dangerous world indeed, and this point of view can perhaps help us understand many of the crises that currently take hold under modern technology.
For instance, various economic problems, poverty, etc. can be understood in a way when we see that man as lord-of-earth has viewed himself, money, resources, economies, industries as standing-reserve. In viewing things as such, they are only useful in their ability to produce or to give- but in ordering as standing-reserve, this oppressive act leads to exploitation, to the abuse of natural resources, to the wealth of some at the empoverishment of others. The issue of pollution can be understood when we see that mankind has oppressively demanded production out of both nature and industry. Slavery, to bring up an older topic, is a great example of ordering as standing-reserve, and the dangers of viewing man as such a resource. Perhaps that example best of all could demonstrate to us the dangers of this form of ordering in modern society. Nature, industry, etc. are all enslaved to mankind as resources, but mankind himself is also under this form of slavery. Looking at things like this makes one realize just how often we do tend to order things in their capacity to give- and ignore any other form of ordering, revealing, etc. As Heidegger says, this is the greatest danger, that we have given ourselves over to a form of ordering and revealing that disables us from any other form. We can no longer think of things themselves, we can no longer understand ourselves as humans (or what the essence of the thing or the human is) because we are given over to the Enframing which demands a revealing and ordering as standing-reserve. This paints a stark picture of modern society, but it also helps us understand why things are the way they are. With understanding, perhaps we can then see other options or explore other ways of thinking, other ways of revealing. I think this is the hope that Heidegger leaves us with at the end, and he mentions art as revealing as one potential way. This is a start, and I believe that the exploration of other ways of ordering/revealing are key to solving the problems to modern society, which is why I think this work by Heidegger is so important.
The way of helping us to understand this oppression is by talking about the "real as standing-reserve." The idea is that, under enframing, the real reveals itself (through technology?) only as standing-reserve, and nothing else. Everything comes to being, becomes unconcealed only as a form of energy, or as having the potential for that energy. Heidegger talks about the plane on the runway only being revealed as standing-reserve. It is only real in the sense that it has the potential for some utility. The idea of real as standing-reserve and this sort of revealing is dangerous according to Heidegger, because man himself becomes ordered as standing-reserve and not as subject; just as nature/things become ordered as standing-reserve and not object. In this type of an ordering, man sees himself as "lord of the earth," even while viewing/ordering himself and mankind as standing-reserve. When we look at not only things and nature and technology, but ourselves and others, exclusively in terms of their productive potential (or capacity to give energy, resources, etc.) this is a dangerous world indeed, and this point of view can perhaps help us understand many of the crises that currently take hold under modern technology.
For instance, various economic problems, poverty, etc. can be understood in a way when we see that man as lord-of-earth has viewed himself, money, resources, economies, industries as standing-reserve. In viewing things as such, they are only useful in their ability to produce or to give- but in ordering as standing-reserve, this oppressive act leads to exploitation, to the abuse of natural resources, to the wealth of some at the empoverishment of others. The issue of pollution can be understood when we see that mankind has oppressively demanded production out of both nature and industry. Slavery, to bring up an older topic, is a great example of ordering as standing-reserve, and the dangers of viewing man as such a resource. Perhaps that example best of all could demonstrate to us the dangers of this form of ordering in modern society. Nature, industry, etc. are all enslaved to mankind as resources, but mankind himself is also under this form of slavery. Looking at things like this makes one realize just how often we do tend to order things in their capacity to give- and ignore any other form of ordering, revealing, etc. As Heidegger says, this is the greatest danger, that we have given ourselves over to a form of ordering and revealing that disables us from any other form. We can no longer think of things themselves, we can no longer understand ourselves as humans (or what the essence of the thing or the human is) because we are given over to the Enframing which demands a revealing and ordering as standing-reserve. This paints a stark picture of modern society, but it also helps us understand why things are the way they are. With understanding, perhaps we can then see other options or explore other ways of thinking, other ways of revealing. I think this is the hope that Heidegger leaves us with at the end, and he mentions art as revealing as one potential way. This is a start, and I believe that the exploration of other ways of ordering/revealing are key to solving the problems to modern society, which is why I think this work by Heidegger is so important.
Revealing and the Punctum: Man’s Call to Action
In "The Question Concerning Technology," aside from the main argument Heidegger is making on the essence of technology and our relation to it, I noticed several times that he mentions that humans are called upon by the revealing he introduces. For example, he says “the unconcealment of the unconcealed has already come to pass whenever it calls man forth into the modes of revealing allotted to him” (19). Also, “man in the technological age is, in a particularly striking way, called forth into revealing” (21). In addition to these statements, throughout the piece Heidegger implies that man is not actively seeking out the act of revealing, but instead responding to its call. Therefore we are kind of hailed but it and prompted to do this act.
Also, Heidegger examines the essence of technology and humanity’s role of being with it. He argues that it is our understanding of technology prevents us from understanding more fully our relationship with technology. We are informed by our "instrumental conception" of what technology is and concerned with mastery of it. Therefore, in order to grasp a fuller understanding of humanity’s relation to technology, we need to consider this. He also mentions that enframing endangers man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is. He says “In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence” (27). Therefore man can never encounter only himself. By examining ourselves in relation to technology, we can get a better sense of our relationship to everything.
Heidegger’s illustration of this response to a call reminds me of a part of Gregory Ulmer’s book Electronic Monuments. Within it, Ulmer explains to the reader something he calls a “punctum.” The punctum is closely related to Lacan’s gaze. Both the gaze and the punctum encourage the viewer to look back at him or herself into interrogating what is seen (103). This punctum challenges a viewer to make sense of what is seen because they feel as if they are under scrutiny (102). The punctum can be related to a sting, or something that is bothersome. It can be irritating or troubling, yet ultimately memorable (118). It is often triggered by abject issues in society that the viewer feels compelled to address and call attention to. One does not seek out the punctum, but it instead calls out to them, hailing and interpellating them. However, once received, Ulmer encourages the viewer to use this punctum to construct a MEmorial in order to better understand one’s role in this issue and relation/contribution to it.
This relates to Heidegger for me because while he argues that we will better understand the essence of technology if we consider our role to it, Ulmer says we will better understand the ignored or abject issues in society if we consider our roles in them. Even further, we can get a better idea of our essence. Additionally, Heidegger describes revealing as something we are called out to do, not something we actively seek out to do. This is similar to how Ulmer describes the punctum. We do not seek out the punctum, but it calls out to us, urging us to act. Both the revealing and the punctum call us to act and help us better understand our place in the world in relation to other things.
Fourfold Technology
As I read this week's essays, Heidegger's writing style made the concept of the fourfold a bit confusing to me (e.g., "the thing things world"). The final essay by Jennifer Bay and Thomas Rickert, however, related Heidegger's fourfold to New Media. The authors use the fourfold (earth, sky, divinities, and mortals) to understand Heidegger's idea of dwelling as a way of "staying with things" (216). This concept is important because Heidegger is concerned with the complexity of our relationship to technological things. The end of such as relationship, dwelling, cannot exist through mere mastery (217).
The author's description of Heidegger's "dwelling" is then applied to both iLife and Facebook. Both of these examples, while perhaps not what Heidegger originally had in mind, show how our relationship with technology constitutes our modern existence and blurs the lines between "real" and "virtual" life. Our "responsive attunement" to these things brings about the fourfold and, by extension, our home (220).
This essay made me consider the role certain technological things play in my own life. Over Christmas break I am flying to MN to visit my parents for an extended weekend and will be traveling with a number of devices (Kindle, smartphone, laptop) to make my layovers easier (or, perhaps, more "home"-like). My dwelling within the place created by these things is its own reality where networks of relations are affected by the interaction and creation of technology.
In occupying this place, my relationship with these things reflect various components of the fourfold. I look to my things for finding information about flight times, traffic, news (earth); relaxing with music, movies, books (sky); prioritizing e-mails, itineraries, projects (divinities); and connecting through social networks, text messages, calls (mortals). The technological devices that I take with me "brings [me] into communication and relation, affords tremendous creative opportunities, spurs new forms of community, connects other technologies, manifests values and concern for the future, and places [me] in ways that secure a home" (227). Thus, although I will be occupying a no-man's land within Chicago Midway airport for three hours, I am able to negotiate new forms of being within the dwelling place of technology.
By extending our sense of dwelling to things, we form a complex relationship with the things that "open up and disclose" our world (237). This opportunity has vast and unexplored possibilities for networking, growth, and creation. However, this deepened relationship with things possesses potential dangers, as any relationship does. Hence, we must continue to rethink the ways we interact with and through new media as it continues to shape our modern existence.
If Heidigger had a Facebook...
In Heidigger's The Thing, he says on page 163,
I was transported back to earlier this semester as I was writing my Socratic Dialogue on Facebook as a false cure for loneliness. Heidigger pretty much sums up what I wish I could have been eloquent enough to express in my paper. He goes on to discuss the thingness of things and what constitutes this thingness. However, I was thinking of the above quote in reference to relationships and friendships.
The distance between you and a friend does not necessarily mean you are far removed from each other. You can keep in contact, perhaps using Facebook or other technology, and remain "un-remote" to each other. For "nearness [to a person] does not consist in shortness of distance." Nearness is more about your actual relationship to the person and a relationship can persist despite distance. However, I would not argue that Facebook, or any other form of communication over a distance, is ideal for remaining "near" to your friends. I was just intrigued by the idea that even though you might be far from something, it is not necessarily inaccessible, or remote, to you. And contrarily, something that is shown to you in a picture or in a video is not necessarily accessible to you; it can remain remote.
"Yet the frantic abolition of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in shortness of distance. What is the least remote from us in point of distance, by virtue of its picture on film or its sound on the radio, can remain far from us. What is incalculably far from us in point of distance can be near to us. Short distance is not in itself nearness. Nor is great distance remoteness."
The distance between you and a friend does not necessarily mean you are far removed from each other. You can keep in contact, perhaps using Facebook or other technology, and remain "un-remote" to each other. For "nearness [to a person] does not consist in shortness of distance." Nearness is more about your actual relationship to the person and a relationship can persist despite distance. However, I would not argue that Facebook, or any other form of communication over a distance, is ideal for remaining "near" to your friends. I was just intrigued by the idea that even though you might be far from something, it is not necessarily inaccessible, or remote, to you. And contrarily, something that is shown to you in a picture or in a video is not necessarily accessible to you; it can remain remote.
The thingness of the thing
In his article, "The Thing", Heidegger discusses how science conceals the "thingness of the thing" and essentially "annihilates" the thing, so that "they have never yet at all been able to appear to [be] thinking as things" (168). Science only manages to provide a representation of a thing, failing to reach the "reality of the thing" (168). Heidegger makes the point that if things are viewed not in terms of science, but instead, as tools embedded in nature and as fundamental parts of our lifestyles, then it can be shown how nature participates in the human process of making things.
He applies the example of the ceramic jug as a thing constituted not by its form or function, but by the void inside it and the gift that it offers in serving as a container. The void shapes the jug, just as the jug shapes the void. "The vessel's thingness [lies] in the void that holds," Heidegger claims (167). When one creates a jug and uses it, man and the divine forces of nature are being united. At this point, the jug's "thingness" is revealed through the interaction of what he calls the "fourfold", or four dimensions - "earth and sky, divinities and mortals" - that make up the contextual network of meaning in the world. Heidegger's fourfold brings together the thing and the world, so that its Being - its meaningful presence in the world - is apparent.
I've been trying to think of an example of what Heidegger would not consider a "thing". Instead, my mind keeps returning to the location-based social networking website, Foursquare, as a way to extend Bay and Rickert's discussion of how new technologies are "recompos[ing] our way of being in the world" (210) .
Users with a GPS device on their smartphone "check-in" when they enter specific venues or locations. This in turn can create a message on one's Twitter account, informing followers where you are. Each time a person "checks-in" he/she is awarded points, and can also become the "mayor" of the venue if that person has the most number of "check-ins" over the previous 60 days.
Users can also create venues, but from Heidegger's perspective, this form of technology limits "dwelling in the world" because people are less "mindful of the fourfold elements" (219). For instance, if an individual goes to a location simply to "check-in" on one's mobile device for the purpose of gaining points, he/she is attuning less to the folding-together of "thing" and world. It's not simply that the social app. distracts the user from experiencing a sense of place, but rather from experiencing the "interconnected" network of meaning of "thing" and world (222).
He applies the example of the ceramic jug as a thing constituted not by its form or function, but by the void inside it and the gift that it offers in serving as a container. The void shapes the jug, just as the jug shapes the void. "The vessel's thingness [lies] in the void that holds," Heidegger claims (167). When one creates a jug and uses it, man and the divine forces of nature are being united. At this point, the jug's "thingness" is revealed through the interaction of what he calls the "fourfold", or four dimensions - "earth and sky, divinities and mortals" - that make up the contextual network of meaning in the world. Heidegger's fourfold brings together the thing and the world, so that its Being - its meaningful presence in the world - is apparent.
I've been trying to think of an example of what Heidegger would not consider a "thing". Instead, my mind keeps returning to the location-based social networking website, Foursquare, as a way to extend Bay and Rickert's discussion of how new technologies are "recompos[ing] our way of being in the world" (210) .
Users with a GPS device on their smartphone "check-in" when they enter specific venues or locations. This in turn can create a message on one's Twitter account, informing followers where you are. Each time a person "checks-in" he/she is awarded points, and can also become the "mayor" of the venue if that person has the most number of "check-ins" over the previous 60 days.
Users can also create venues, but from Heidegger's perspective, this form of technology limits "dwelling in the world" because people are less "mindful of the fourfold elements" (219). For instance, if an individual goes to a location simply to "check-in" on one's mobile device for the purpose of gaining points, he/she is attuning less to the folding-together of "thing" and world. It's not simply that the social app. distracts the user from experiencing a sense of place, but rather from experiencing the "interconnected" network of meaning of "thing" and world (222).
Object Lesson VII: The Fourfold One
Heidegger’s fourfold, to me, encapsulates a concept towards which much of the rhetorical scholarship I’ve read this semester seems to be headings: the breaking down of distinctions and divisions; the acceptance of a holistic worldview. Jennifer Bay and Thomas Rickert also assert that “Seeing the world as a deep and interconnected stitchwork of things that lays claims on us…stands to recompose our way of being in the world,” going on to suggest that such a way of seeing will reshape humans’ relationship with the “things” they live with in an age of mass-technology. Despite the fourfold’s quadruplicity it is still referred to as a “one,” recognizing, as humans always have, the differences between “things” while simultaneously accepting their inextricability. This calls to mind Jenny Edbauer’s notion of an ecology of rhetoric; she formulates a notion of the rhetorical situation as “a mixture of processes and encounters,” which decentralizes human subjects by recognizing the interplay between they and the objects (or, more appropriately, “quasi-objects” ala Latour) which Heidegger designates as “things.” Edbauer goes on to prescribe a model for discussing this interplay; one such model, perhaps, is the Gaia hypothesis.
I first encountered the Gaia hypothesis in the book of the recently dearly-departed biologist Lynn Margulis (former wife of Carl Sagan), titled Dazzle Gradually. In one chapter she describes the Earth as an organism onto itself, one simultaneously sustained by and sustaining all the organisms and non-organic processes which constitute the world as we know it. The water and weather cycle is Earth’s circulatory system, ensuring that the water required by life is delivered where it is needed; the atmosphere is a skin, one which protects from numerous external hazards while ensuring the homeostasis of our internal environment; living creatures function just like the microscopic organisms and organelles which perform various tasks in the human body, each having a certain effect upon the ecosystem as a whole. Life evolved in response to the conditions on Earth, but Earth has also evolved in response to life.
James Lovelock used the model of Daisyworld to explain the Gaia hypothesis. The following videos give a good overview of the hypothesis—a description of Daisyworld can be found starting at about 5:00 on the second video and continuing into the third.
Essentially, this idea argues that Earth is the way it is because we are the way we are-- when the hypothetical planet achieves conditions conducive to growing daisies they begin to spread. Because the black daisies reflect energy from the Sun the planet itself begins to warm until the white daisies are able to thrive, causing the entire planet to be overtaken by white daisies-- then the temperature drops again until conditions are ideal for black daisies to begin thriving, and thus the organisms influence the planet and vice-versa.
This hypothesis may not seem directly related to rhetoric, but the whole idea of a holistic notion of mutual influence between all things ultimately comes down to elementary physics-- things governed by forces bounce around together in spheres, causing chains of reactions that can only be understood if all elements in the equation are accounted for. This is how I understand Heidegger's fourfold.
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