File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0305, message 150


Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 12:05:51 +0200
From: artefact-AT-t-online.de (Michael Eldred)
Subject: Re: Gestell und Gewinnst


Cologne 12-May-2003

HealantHenry-AT-aol.com schrieb  Sun, 11 May 2003 11:19:05 EDT:

> Michael Eldred:  I see pre-calculative thinking as characterizing
> technological knowledge in the broadest sense and as being incorporated by
> capital into its striving to make profit, above all, by increasing
> productivity and thus profit. Marx's thinking on this is very well thought
> through, especially under the headings of relative surplus-value production
> and the increase in rate of turnover of capital. In other words,
> technological knowledge is a handmaiden of capital in its incessant quest for
> gain. As such, it is an aid in the competitive struggle against other
> capitals, i.e. it is a way of trying to keep ahead of the competitive game,
> on pain of falling behind and being extinguished in the capitalist
> competition -- which happens ALL the time, even to the BIGGEST capitalist
> corporations. So it is not a matter of big capitals becoming omnipotent and
> capitalist risk on the various markets tending to zero.
>
> Hen:  I propose that the capitalist game is the 'handmaiden' and technology
> is the driving force. Tech is the current metaphysical doctrine for the
> entire background, the undisclosed disclosedness...
>
> and in this interp, the technological development is less affected by
> capitalist risk/gain (staying on the cutting edge/the state of the art, and
> so forth) as these new tools/products/toys are pre-calculated to the extreme
> by as much force and control available to the corporation.  Microsoft is
> negligibly affected by slow moving or failed marketing ventures, due to its
> monopoly.  that monopoly consists of as wide a network of social controls as
> the corporation can sustain.  The whole package of corporate control cuts
> through governmental collusion & advertising to the hoi polloi, to
> pre-calculating the 'appropriateness' of the kinds of tools/products/toys
> that would be 'made available' at the right time. (How does a corporation
> rise to the level of this control?  Are there different identifiable ways
> it's done?  These are the kinds of questions one could ask about, say
> Microsoft, in relation to, say, Halliburton, and so on...)
>
> This is a technological valuation of the whole, the pre-planned, staged
> consumerism, much more advanced than a "state-run" market.
>
> Michael Eldred:  In those cases where we do observe capitalist risk being
> removed, namely, in state monopoly enterprises, the result is lethargic
> domestic enterprises which have lost the stimulating thorn of competition.
> One also should not underestimate the immense power of the consumer in the
> world capitalist economy. It is not simply a matter of huge capitalist
> corporations manipulating the guileless masses of consumers to 'swallow'
> their products, thus allowing them to make limitless profit. Rather, the
> consumer mass markets themselves decide whether what is offered on the
> markets is good for living, or not. This holds true even taking into account
> the millions of dollars which a capitalist corporation may put into
> advertising to promote a certain product. A recent example is Microsoft's
> X-Box. Despite a market launch budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, the
> product is not a success for Microsoft, which is still losing big money on
> the product. Consumers don't seem to particularly like the X-Box, despite all
> the vast amounts of product-development money put into it.
>
> Hen:  But I don't 'buy' this, as I hinted above.  there is a technological
> paradigm for capital now, that accomplishes the theory of Italian fascism,
> the merger of the corporations and the state.  In the US, the major domestic
> policy of the current regime and of the neo-conservative 'theory' of society
> (cf, Leo Strauss) is to disassemble gov't. to be only a mobilizing force for
> corporatism, a paid marketing sector of corporatism.  The neo-cons want the
> US gov to end all social programs, 'privatize' everything:  public education,
> health care, gov't pension programs (social security) and so forth.  in
> addition, the neo-con position is to utilize all values in order to reduce
> gov't to a marketing support system for corporatism: gov't welfare run by
> religious organizations (which are corporations, too), reduced legal
> liabilities for harm to consumers, environmental harm, monopolism (media,
> health care, finance, etc.).
>
> this is no Commissar maggie's farm no more, this is not 'state run' economy,
> this is corporate-run government.  the highly efficient activity of
> capitalism as economic system appears to be flourishing.  what is really
> happening is that pre-calc thinking has taken these distinct social arenas
> and merged them under technological values.
>
> A reminder on my view of the consumer:  what the consumer is allowed to
> choose to consume is predetermined.  the choices have already been
> preordained according to a determinism that reduces risk to the extreme.
>
> Michael Eldred:  There is an awareness worldwide that monopoly practices on
> any market are a bad thing for consumers and any economy, which have to be
> combated by competition authorities (antitrust authorities in US-speak). Such
> state authorities ensure that the capitalist game of profit-making remains
> competitive and therefore risky.
>
> Hen:  The competitiveness is enclosed, is what i am saying.  And the
> capability of the corporations to enclose the competitiveness and therefore
> the risk, is greatly determined by governmental compliance and collusion. (Am
> i only projecting, in all this, on what is happening daily in the United
> States, or is there any perception of these things elsewhere on the planet?
> certainly Berlusconi's recent dramatics are indicative of something going on
> elsewhere.)
>
> Michael:  The myriads and myriads of products and services offered on the
> world's markets are not subjected to the control of any single world state,
> nor to any single international organization such as the WTO (which rather
> has the task of ensuring rules on play on the world markets). The myriad
> markets do what they will, often in surprising, incalculable ways. Why? The
> reason is ontological, not ontic. Because the cell-form of markets, i.e. the
> elementary exchange relation between buyer and seller, depends on the
> valuation put on the product (including service-product) offered, which
> depends always -- inter alia -- on what that product is good for (Um-zu) in
> human living. Price can never be a certain precalculable magnitude this side
> of a totalitarian state set-up. At the very least, a market monopoly is
> required to dictate price.
>
> Hen:  this seems so strange, idealistic, and old fashioned to me, Michael. I
> suppose it is mainly since i see everything you have described with the word
> myriad(s) as simply not so, or not as so today as yesterday, nor tomorrow as
> much as today.  I suppose I do think the possibility of the technological
> totalitarianism to be impossible to attain, but we are trying.  It may be the
> impossibility of reaching absolute freezing, or of charting the universe with
> a map smaller than the universe, but my understanding of how the world has
> changed in the last 40 years is the continued, slow perhaps, but sustained
> domination of the incalculable to the calculated, and especially in the
> socio-economic planetary realm.  This is not to say that insecticide
> mesquito-netting is not a good thing...but I think it has been calculated as
> to whether it is good to make them available now... or later at a more
> appropriate time.  the determination is one according to technological values
> and not 'humanitarian' ones.
>
> Michael:  The riskiness of capitalist enterprise, despite all cybernetic
> tendencies, is the riskiness of markets, which is the riskiness of social
> life itself. Only totalitarian state control is in a position to tame such
> riskiness by means of total social repression -- which is the necessary
> tendency of all socialist and communist states.
>
> Hen:  This is an interesting idea:  that totalitarian control is essentially
> political, in the modern sense of 'political'.  As if economic institutions
> haven't, almost by definition, been the most brutal and oppressive elements
> of civilization.  I conceive that the merger of corporate power with
> collusion of gov't can be far more oppressive in the long run than any
> socialist-repressive-depressive regime of the last hundred years.  The
> technological skill of oppression is just getting started, and the false
> perceptions of freedom still abound, and bound us.
>
> Michael:  The 'nice' thing about capitalist markets, on the other hand, is
> their anarchy (which have the unfortunate 'side-effect' of boom and bust
> economic cycles). The individual is left to fend for him/herself -- under the
> driving motivating force of self-interest (which, as Nietzsche points out, is
> the most powerful of human motivating forces, which makes humans smart).
>
> Hen:  i dont see it.  Would that I had the ability to realize what you think
> is going on, and that the Gestell aint as encroaching on the social as i see
> it.  Would that you are proved correct.  But perhaps neither of us will live
> long enough to gain but glimmers more as to how this amazing Dasein unfolds.

Henry,

I don't think that much is left in your reply of the ontological intent of my
(ontic) examples in my last post. Your reply is concerned with a kind of
diagnosis and prognosis of the present-day state of affairs in the world, which
is an ontic enterprise about which we could debate endlessly with ever more
'facts'. You would point pessimistically to all that is wrong, and I could try to
point out that there is still some room for optimism.

The ontological intent of my example of Microsoft's failure with one of its
products, the X-Box game console, aimed simply at showing that even an extremely
powerful, money-rich, near-monopoly capitalist corporation like Microsoft cannot
precalculate its success on the market. It is essential that this be seen if the
differing ontological structures are to come to light. Even the near-monopoly
position of Microsoft's Windows operating system in the PC markets is
continurally contested. There is no guarantee that Microsoft will maintain this
near-monopoly market position even in this market forever. Why? Because the risky
competitive game is never over, and this competitive game for gain can lead to
different outcomes over time. Even today, one can see that MIcrosoft is being
forced to make concessions in this competitive struggle over operating systems
and is revealing parts of its source code, something unimaginable only a short
time ago. This has only come about because there is a competitor product on the
market, Linux. Far from being an omnipotent precalculating corporate entity, even
mighty Microsoft could get shipwrecked on the abysmal, dangerous play of the
world markets.

Again, I want to emphasize the ontological lesson of this example. I am not
arguing here in favour of the virtues of free enterprise capitalism (even though,
on the ontic political level as a necessary 'choice among evils', I unequivocally
defend the imperfect capitalist-democratic world-game vis-a-vis socialist schemes
or Islamic ayatollah-led caliphism).

There is a frequent tendency in discussions of this kind about capitalism and the
state to treat of those apparently omnipotent entities up there (capitalist
corporations, state apparatuses, party machines, etc. and the conniving and
colluding and machinating among them) and how they manipulate and oppress the
rest of us, who are somehow poor, innocent, impotent dupes. But if Gestell and
Gewinnst are constellations of the openness of being in which the world opens in
a totalizing way, then the way of thinking, which Gestell and Gewinnst are,
pervades also how we apparently innocent individuals think.

We innocent folk, too, are infected by wanting-to-have-more (_pleonexia_) and are
imbued with the striving to control as many aspects of our lives as possible.
Whether we are successful or not in this wanting and striving is another matter.
Put ontologically: the ontological casting of human being as striving for more
and as striving for control means that Gestell and Gewinnst are equiprimordial
and ubiquitous as world-openings.

The ontological totalization of a constellation of being has to be distinguished
from the ontic totalization of any given set-up of powerful, allegedly
all-powerful entities. I think that your assertion, "the false perceptions of
freedom still abound, and bound us" is an ontic totalization. What about the
ontological status of freedom? Are you, following Nietzsche, wanting to deny
freedom as simply an erroneous conception (Irrthum) and a human vanity
(Eitelkeit)? Or are you leaving the door ajar for a possible true "perception of
freedom"?

I see two very simple fundamental ontological paradigms come down to us from the
Greeks. The first is that of technological control first analyzed ontologically
by Aristotle (and Plato) under the heading of _technae_. Such _technae_ as
knowledge and know-how has the ontological structure of "being a point of origin
governing, i.e. controlling, change (_metabolae_) in another being" (cf. esp.
Book Theta of the Metaphysics). This ontological conception underlies also
Heidegger's casting of technology in the Gestell as totalized _technae_ and also
his thesis that being for Greek thinking is Hergestellsein (producedness).
(Adorno and Horkheimer called this "instrumental reason".)

The second simple, fundamental paradigm is that of exchange (_allagae_,
_metabolae_) as a relation between human individuals, exchange not only as the
exchange of commodities and trade, but exchange in the broadest sense as the give
and take between humans in exchanging views, words, greetings, insults, glances,
compliments, promises, honours, etc. in short, all the goods and not-so-goods of
human living-with-one-another. In contrast to his explicit ontological analysis
of _technae_, which paradigmatically provides the principal Aristotelean
metaphysical concepts of _dynamis_, _energeia_ and _entelecheia_, Aristotle never
provides an explicit, ontological analysis of the structure of exchange at the
same depth. (Marx is the next thinker in the line of Western thinkers to attempt
an ontological analysis of exchange in the value-form analysis in Das Kapital,
Volume I, Chapter 1.) Nevertheless, exchange is the paradigm for Aristotle's
consideration of justice in Book V of the Eth. Nic. I suggest that exchange among
human beings is a starting point for considering the possibility of social
freedom, i.e. human beings freely sharing the openness of the truth of being.

It seems highly significant that the term _metabolae_ (change, exchange) crops up
in both simple paradigms as a key, indispensable term. Why does this term occur
in both cases? Because _metabolae_ signifies the movement (_kinaesis_) of human
life itself. Such change takes place either as change of the other or as exchange
between two. Exchange is interchange as a reciprocal movement between two
individuals. It is the paradigm of human social being, i.e. Dasein as Mitsein.
Both individuals have the status of being points of origin in this interchange.
There is not just one _archae_, i.e. one governing point of origin, but at least
two. (Social power starts where one governing point of origin is subjugated to
the other -- the problem of social government.)

Heidegger's thinking focuses on the one paradigm of _technae_ as a paradigm of
control to the exclusion of seeing the other paradigm of movement of human
living, that of exchange and interchange in the broadest sense.

Michael
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