File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2003/heidegger.0311, message 278


Date: Thu, 20 Nov 2003 00:09:46 +0800
Subject: Re: [fyi] What is Realism in Iraq?
From: Malcolm Riddoch <m.riddoch-AT-ecu.edu.au>



On Wednesday, November 19, 2003, at 09:54  PM, Anthony Crifasi wrote:

> Shedding light on Gestell also entails distinguishing it from what it 
> is not.

Gestell is you getting up in the morning and putting on your Gucci 
sunwear, traveling to your paid work using public transport on a 
Mercedes bus burning diesel distilled from Saudi oil, then sitting in 
front of a South Korean manufactured computer all day on the internet 
mailing lists, collecting pay from a teller machine, buying a frozen 
dinner from Wal Mart then watching a satellite tv broadcast on your 
Sony widescreen about the latest casualties in Iraq and willfully 
trying to make sense of the whole business of everydayness by thinking 
'Gestell means the physical rather than behavioural sciences' before 
slipping into your cheap Chinese made pyjamas, now subject to a tariff, 
setting the digital alarm to CST and getting a few Z's before the whole 
work cycle starts again in the morning. Over and over again.

Gestell is the historically constituted dynamic globalised framework of 
the will to will that constantly sets up everything you do and think 
about, it sets the stage for your own historical world understanding 
and its modern relation to truth. On the perceptual level it sets up 
your historically constituted understanding of material phenomena as 
something 'objectively real' standing over against your merely 
subjective perception. It sets up your self-consciousness as such, as 
the constant repetition of a willed objectification of the earth and 
its calculative thinking that belongs to the nihilistic essence of 
technology. Gestell is a problem of the will to will and scientific 
thinking is just one of its myriad consequences, whether that's 
physical or behavioural science. Everything you do and think about in 
your everyday life is already a part of the 'armament mechanism' of the 
globalised planning calculation of beings as a whole which gives 
historical form to your modernised everyday being in the world. It's 
the totalising cybernetic framework of our current and future global 
reality.

At least that's my reading of it.

Regards,

Malcolm



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