“…the posture of village idiocy…” (AR, 39)
Nicholas Hanford
September 26, 2013
Unethical Readings
“…our ordinary language.” (MH, 24)
“Heidegger concedes fright, alarm…” (AR, 40)
“…run on rumorological grounds…” (AR, 19)
“There is no demonry…” or “…demonry of technology…” (MH, 28)
“So the telephone is ringing in the rector’s office. ‘I don’t think it is. …’” (AR, 39)
“…possible houses…” (MH, 30)
“—appears to confirm…” (AR, 30)
“Questioning builds a way.” (MH, 3)
“Maybe they didn’t hear the sentence…” (AR, 38)
“…destined for circulation after-my-death…” (AR, 41)
“Because physics…” (MH, 21)
“…the umbilical of the telephone.” (AR, 19)
“…fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics.” (MH, 3)
“…the moon or the command post…” (AR, 41)
“Perhaps we have been reading the wrong text.” (AR, 38)
“…there reigns causality.” (MH, 6)
“…haunts the ear that will never again close…” (AR, 28)
“Replay Hamlet:” (AR, 41)
“…indebted to the aspect…” (MH, 7)
“…a call from, let us say provisionally, a telephone.” (AR, 38)
“…occasioning play?” (MH, 10)
Ethical Readings
Heidegger:
“Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology.” (4)
“According to ancient doctrine, the essence of a thing is considered to be what the thing is.” (4)
- Can we spend some time discussing this idea of essence? What is the essence of essence? How do we deal with essences in traditions and disciplines that steer us toward nonessentialism? How can we even use Heidegger when ‘essence’ appears so often within his work? How do we say ‘essence’ anywhere without being called a fascist?
“The current conception of technology, according to which it is a means and a human activity, can therefore be called the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology.” (5)
“The will to mastery becomes all the more urgent the more technology threatens to slip from human control.” (5)
- Skynet.
“Only at the point where such an uncovering happens does the true come to pass. For that reason the merely correct is not yet the true.” (6)
“A means is that whereby something is effected and thus attained. Whatever has an effect as its consequence is called a cause.” (6)
“Circumscribing gives bounds to the thing. With the bounds the thing does not stop; rather from out of them it begins to be what, after production, it will be.” (8)
- The earliest critique of cultural studies’ lack of disciplinary identity came before cultural studies was even established.
“The telos is responsible for what as matter and for what as aspect are together co-responsible for the sacrificial vessel.” (8)
“They set it free to that place and so start it on its way, namely, into its complete arrival.” (9)
“What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer: everything. For every bringing-forth is grounded in revealing.” (12)
“Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing.” (12)
“Both words are names for knowing in the widest sense.” (13, on techne and episteme)
- Can we say that they are names for knowing in the widest essence? What is this circumference that we are drawing and what are we using as its center?
“The decisive question remains: Of what essence is modern technology that it happens to think of putting exact science to use?” (14)
“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.” (17)
- More like a Fuhrer ordering.
“Man can indeed conceive, fashion, and carry through this or that in one way or another. But man does not have control over unconcealment itself, in which at any given time the real shows itself or withdraws.” (18)
“Since man drives technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing. But the unconcealment itself, within which ordering unfolds, is never a human handiwork, any more than is the realm through which man is already passing every time he as a subject relates to an object.” (18)
“Thus when man, investigating, observing, ensnares nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve.” (19)
“Aspect (idea) names and is, also, that which constitutes the essence in the audible, the tasteable, the tactile, in everything that is in any way accessible.” (20)
- Are only senses accessible? Are senses the only screen for aspects? What about that which is memorable? Inventible? Speakable?
“Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing which holds sway in the essence of modern technology and which is itself nothing technological.” (20)
“That revealing concerns nature, above all, as the chief storehouse of that standing energy reserve.” (21)
- I’m not looking to get into the culture/nature discussion that we had before, but would like to know what happens if we substitute ‘culture’ or ‘culture/nature’ for ‘nature’ here. Do we get something different? Are Heidegger’s ideas within this essay limited to their base of nature? Or do they span that culture/nature divide?
“Therefore, in the realm of thinking, a painstaking effort to think through still more primally what was primally thought is not the absurd wish to revive what is past, but rather the sober readiness to be astounded before the coming of what is early.” (22)
“It is challenged forth by the rule of Enframing, which demands that nature be orderable as standing-reserve.” (23)
~and, on 24~
“Again we ask: Does this revealing happen somewhere beyond all human doing? No. But neither does it happen exclusively in man, or decisively through man.”
- Isn’t an orderable nature culture? Is human doing culture? Do these lines exist for Heidegger? Should I care?
“History is neither simply the object of written chronicle nor simply the fulfillment of human activity. That activity first becomes history as something destined. And it is only the destining into objectifying representation that makes the historical accessible as an object for historiography, i.e., for a science, and on this basis makes possible the current equating of the historical with that which is chronicled.” (24)
“All revealing comes out of the open, goes into the open, and brings into the open.” (25).
- That doesn’t make any fucking sense to me.
“Since destining at any given time starts man on a way of revealing, man, thus under way, is continually approaching the brink of the possibility of pursuing and pushing forward nothing but what is revealed in ordering, and of deriving all his standards on this basis.” (26)
“The rule of Enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.” (28)
“’To save’ is to fetch something home into its essence, in order to bring the essence for the first time into its genuine appearing.” (28)
“Only what is granted endures. That which endures primally out of the earliest beginning is what grants.” (31)
“For the saving power lets man see and enter into the highest dignity of his essence.” (32)
“Thus questioning, we bear witness to the crisis that in our sheer preoccupation with technology we do not yet experience the coming to presence of technology, that in our sheer aesthetic-mindedness we no longer guard and preserve the coming to presence of art.” (35)
“For questioning is the piety of thought.” (35)
Ronell:
“Simply asked, what is the status of a philosophy, or rather a thinking, that doesn’t permit one to distinguish with surety between the call of conscience and the call of the Storm Trooper?” (19)
“The mother will of course fade on the line, put on eternal hold, to be replaced in the same paragraph by Nietzsche…” (27)
“He will wait for a message, a revealing, but not a lecture.” (27)
“The genesis of a tainted and partially rumored history is traced back by him to this call; a telephonic command, in the absence by definition of a material image, or recognizable subject, that Heidegger is asked to obey.” (29)
“…Heidegger’s telephone will always be more perverse that it seems…” (30)
“A question whose answer is to be taken on good faith.” (36)
“On the contrary, Heidegger’s unsaid was not unthought but merely undelivered, since the audience already knew, he felt he knew, what he was going to say.” (37)
“Does the one who picks up the call of a telephone become an extension of the apparatus, or is the converse conceivable; is one speaking through a severed limb or organ, as Freud will suggest, and Marshall McLuhan after him?” (39)
“He takes the phone in hand and, covering the mouthpiece, says to Speigel: the essential thing about technology is that man of himself cannot control it.” (39)
“Technology is no tool and it no longer has anything to do with tools…” (39)
“While Zarathustra teaches the Overman, Heidegger, considerably less jubilant, places thinking in the direction of the Overphilosophy.” (40)
“Overcome by the state, they take a tool in hand which is no longer a tool but a moment in the structure of a general relatedness.” (41)