Technology and the Gestell: is modern technology a way of revealing that orders all beings as standing-reserve, or is the Gestell analysis an overgeneralized cultural diagnosis with insufficient attention to differences within technological practice?

Martin Heidegger, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Modern technology is not first an instrumental matter — a collection of tools and machines used by humans for purposes — but a way of revealing. Ge-stell (enframing, positionality) is the name for this way of revealing: it orders all beings, including human beings themselves, as Bestand (standing-reserve) for calculative use.1 The river under the regime of enframing is not a river that flows; it is a hydroelectric resource ordered for energy production.

The forest is not a forest of trees; it is timber-stock ordered for the paper industry. The human being under the regime of enframing is not Dasein in its ownmost openness to Being; it is human resources, ordered for productive employment. The danger of enframing is not that machines will replace human beings or that ecological damage will result, though these are real consequences; the danger is ontological.

Enframing is the most extreme form of the metaphysical forgetting because it actively obscures every other mode of revealing — the poetic, the contemplative, the religious, the artistic — in favor of the calculative- productive. Where every other mode of disclosure has been reduced to enframing, beings cease to show up as anything other than standing-reserve, and the truth of Being as Aletheia is closed.

The saving power emerges from the confrontation with the danger: where the danger is, says Hölderlin, the saving power also grows. The free relation to technology is not the rejection of machines; it is the thinking-meditatively (besinnliches Denken) that preserves the question of Being against the calculative thinking that has come to dominate modernity. Technology itself is not the danger; the danger is the regime of revealing that technology, as enframing, has become.2345

Sources

  1. Caught up in this conception, one opines that tech nology would be merely the affair of humans, no claim of being would speak in it. Obsessed with this opinion, we still do not even attend just once to the togetherness of the human and being, much less do we attempt to listen for the belonging that first extends both of these, the human and being, another.
    Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, pp. 115–116
  2. What happens when distinction is suppressed? The human being is closed off from what is question-worthy and locked into what is common and into the pursuit of what is always newest in it. See above 76. Today, we are underway in thinking to more inceptual thinking.—Today, one encounters much thoughtful music, thoughtful painting, thoughtful poetry—but rarely a thoughtful thought.
    Vigils and Nocturne Black Notebooks 1952-1957, pp. 48–49
  3. During the summer semester of 1927 Heidegger commented at length on the problematic nature of the traditional distinction between essentia and existentia. See Martin Heidegger, Grundprobleme der Phiinomenologie (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1975), ch. 2, esp. pp.l69-71. In his 1935lecture course, "In- troduction to Metaphysics" (Einfiihrung in die Metaphysik, p.
    Nietzsche Vols III-IV, pp. 446–447
  4. En-framing is the essential occurring wherein the essence of "technology" in the modern sense and with it "nature" and the "economy" rests. En-framing—does not mean something like the mechanical in contrast to the dynamic.
    Vigils and Nocturne Black Notebooks 1952-1957, p. 49
  5. If we recollect how truth as unconcealedness of beings means The reference to page 49 is to the conception of doing, as given in the previous note. The passage on page 28 of Vorträge und Aufsitze appears in the essay "Die Frage nach der Technik." The "Stell" in "Ge-Stell" comes from the German "stellen," a transitive verb meaning to place, put, set, stand, arrange.
    Poetry Language Thought, pp. 84–85

Where the argument is made

  • Die Frage nach der Technik (The Question Concerning Technology, 1953, in Pathmarks)
  • the Bremen Lectures (1949) — especially 'Das Ding' (The Thing), 'Das Ge-stell' (Positionality, the proto-version of Die Frage nach der Technik), 'Die Gefahr' (The Danger), and 'Die Kehre' (The Turn)
  • Building Dwelling Thinking (1951, in Poetry, Language, Thought)
  • the Memorial Address from Discourse on Thinking (1959)

How the argument was received

One of Heidegger's most-discussed and most-applied doctrines, and the work that has had the greatest influence outside academic philosophy. The Question Concerning Technology (1953) and the Bremen Lectures (1949) have shaped fields from environmental philosophy to philosophy of technology to design theory to media studies. Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man (1964) developed a critical-theory version of the diagnosis. Borgmann's Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) is the major analytic-philosophy continuation, with the device-paradigm as the structural successor to enframing. The postphenomenologists (Ihde, Verbeek) have refined or partly rejected the totalizing framing while preserving the diagnostic of calculative-instrumental thinking. Bernard Stiegler's Technics and Time (1994-2001) is the major continental engagement that radicalizes the analysis while criticizing what Stiegler sees as Heidegger's insufficient attention to the constitutive role of technical objects. The contemporary debate is over scope: is enframing a single way of revealing applied to all of modernity, or are there distinguishable technological regimes within the modern that resist the totalizing diagnosis?