This photo, which looks like might belong in a Harlan Ellison story, reflects Heidegger’s less-than-optimistic view of what Bernard Stiegler calls “technics.”
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), best known for Being and Time (1927), published his essay technology in 1954. According to a piece in The New Atlantis online by Mark Blitz, Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology” is “a revised version of part two of a four-part lecture series he delivered in Bremen in 1949 (his first public speaking appearance since the end of the war)” (Blitz, 2014, para. 14). By the way, Heidegger’s 1949 Bremen lectures, as well as his 1957 Freiberg lectures, have been published together in a book from Indiana University Press (translator: Andrew J. Mitchell) called Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking (2012). 1954 was an interesting year in science and technology: It was the year Alan Turing died; the first mass vaccination of children against polio; the first of the anti-psychotic phenothiazine drugs; first successful kidney transplant; the Soviet Union commissioned the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant; the US Navy commissioned the first atomic-powered submarine; Texas Instruments (famous for its calculators) sold the first commercial transistor radio that November; the first synthetic diamond was produced; and the book series The History of Technology released the first of its many volumes. In his essay, Heidegger explores the essence of technology. The essence of a tree, he tells us, is not another tree one encounters in the woods. He writes that this essence “pervades every tree” (p. 1). To figure out technology is almost like asking a fish to figure out water. The fish cannot, if you will, step back from it. Heidegger writes that “[e]verywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it” (p. 1). For Heidegger, there are two major ways of pondering technology: (1) technology “as a means to an end” and technology as “a human activity” (p. 1). The first way is instrumental, the second is anthropological. Neither of these paths is acceptable to Heidegger. The essence of technology has to do with “revealing,” a word Heidegger sees as close to “truth” (p. 4). Revealing, to use his interesting terminology, has to do with bringing forth something concealed into “unconcealment” (p. 4). Technology is the way of understanding the nature of the times we are living in. It reveals the world to us. “Only when we allow our attention to rest on this fundamental characteristic does that which is new in modern technology show itself to us” (p. 5). Heidegger does not dislike all technology, but he is concerned about technology that “challenges” nature by unrelentingly exploiting it (p. 5). The affects humans as well, of course: “In whatever way the destining of revealing may hold sway, the unconcealment in which everything that is shows itself at any given time harbors the danger that man may misconstrue the unconcealed and misinterpret it” (p. 9). If those with great power look at nature as just a “standing-reserve” to be used, what if they begin to look at people in the same way (p. 10)?
In Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age (2011), Adam J. Banks, a professor in Stanford’s Department of Education, discusses DJs (specifically those whose focus is Hip Hop music) as “digital griots,” a contemporary continuation of the oral historians, storytellers, and poets in West Africa called griots. Banks’s take on technology is enthusiastic, suggesting an almost natural evolution from ancient African griot figures to the highly skilled, creative, innovative African American DJs of today. The digital and the personal and the communal appear to flow into one another, with remixing as a key part of this seemingly techno-organic continuation. For Banks, DJs are also an example of what Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) calls “organic intellectuals,” meaning an “intellectual who is nurtured and sustained by local communities rather than professionalized in universities or think tanks or foundations” (p. 3). Banks adds that he “extend[s]” this “concept of the organic intellectual beyond the individual figure into collective organic intellectual work” by linking multimodal writing to the “everyday practices” and life experiences of African Americans (p. 3). Banks’s chief audience are those who work in the field of rhetoric and composition. But because so much writing today is digital and multimedia in nature, we must go outside the spheres of Gramscian traditional intellectuals. DJs, according to Banks, “are responsible for the conceptual framework that forms a response to the challenges of digital, multimedia writing” (p. 3). As with the record scratch of the stylus, DJs as digital griots interrupt older notions of what counts as writing.
In the General Introduction to his book Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (English translation, 1998), French philosopher Bernard Stiegler (who passed away in 2020), comments that Heidegger was of (at least) two minds when it comes to technics (technology). Stiegler writes that “the difficulty of an interpretation of the meaning of modern technics for Heidegger is on a par with the difficulty of his entire thought” (p. 7). In thinking about four of Heidegger’s essays in particular, Stiegler states that technology “appears simultaneously as the ultimate obstacle to and as the ultimate possibility of thought” (p. 7). “The Question Concerning Technology,” which Stiegler renders as “The Question of Technics” falls under the obstacle category. Stiegler writes that the “major argument [of the instrumental section this essay] is that the traditional view of thinking technics under the category of “means” deprives one of any access to the essence of technics” (p. 8). As we recall from the above post on Heidegger, the German philosopher also focused on technology and human activity. For Stiegler, “[i]n the case of the “anthropological” conception of technics, in contrast, the efficient cause and the final cause are confused” (p. 9). The advanced technology of today “inflects violence upon” nature, and the metaphor of growing something technological as if one were feeding and watering a plant in order to see it continue its growth, is not feasible any longer. The relentlessly calculative mind that worried Husserl has completely arrived, and nature is the victim of this mind’s use of technological might (p. 10). In the mid-1960s, Herbert Marcuse, of Frankfurt School fame, brought into this vision of technology the human being (Heidegger’s Dasein) as socially repressed under a wholly rationalized (in Weber’s sense of the term) capitalist system (p. 10). For this reason, we “need to develop a new science that would be in dialogue with nature . . . free from technics as a force of domination” (p. 11). Stiegler agrees with Marcuse that this interpretation is indeed Heideggerian, but that it is in error. He discussed Habermas’s communicative project as an alternative.
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