From: "Anthony Crifasi" <crifasi-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: Gestell
Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2003 16:24:13 +0000


Malcolm Riddoch wrote:

>I think that there are many texts which support many interpretations of the 
>term 'Gestell' depending on how you read them. I personally think that your 
>account of Michael's apparent interpretation of Gestell as characterized by 
>mathematical control and lawlike determination to some specific outcome is 
>somewhat reductive, most especially if you insist that the social sciences 
>reliance on statistical methodologies does not come under this rigorous 
>notion of the mathematical and therefore isn't a form of Gestell. I think 
>you completely elide the fundamental meaning of Gestell as a globalising 
>framework of modern human understanding that orders humanity, from the 
>leaders to the led, into the constant ordering of our lives.

Three paragraphs before the Rhine example you cite below in QCT, Heidegger 
distinguishes the way modern technology challenges nature from the way an 
old windmill is powered by the wind:

"The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts 
to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be 
extracted and stored as such. But does this not hold true for the old 
windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left 
entirely to the wind’s blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from 
the air currents in order to store it."

So the turning of the windmill is "left entirely to the wind's blowing," 
whereas modern technology would order and store it as "air power" on call. 
Heidegger makes a similar distinction when he gives the Rhine example that 
you cite:

"In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly 
disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears to be 
something at our command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into the 
Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for 
hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. What 
the river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence 
of the power station."

So instead of being "built into" the river like the old bridge, the 
hydroelectric plant transforms the river into its own likeness as a 
water-power supplier. So let's take these characteristics - (1) being 
ordered and stored on call, and (2) transforming nature into the likeness of 
technology - and see whether capitalistic social relations must be 
interpreted like the hydroelectric plant instead of the windmill and bridge.

Take the largest corporation in the United States - Walmart. If the 
hydroelectric plant transforms the Rhine into a "water-power supplier," then 
for Walmart to be an equivalent case, it would have to transform its source 
into a "Walmart supplier." Now what supplies Walmart, and with what? I 
suppose we supply Walmart with our money by shopping there. So for Walmart 
to be a similar case, it would have had to transform us into "Walmart money 
suppliers".

Now, is that the case? Do we now exist "in no other way" (last sentence of 
Rhine paragraph) than as Walmart money suppliers? Even in Walmart's home 
country of the United States, this is hardly the case. Walmart is one of a 
myriad of places which I can supply with my money for the same products. 
Compare this to a company town - a town which was built around some 
corporation that located there, and therefore whose very identity is 
intimately linked with that corporation. Such towns can have company grocery 
stores, company hardware supply stores, company fitness facilities, etc. In 
such places, that company dominates and defines the entire town in its own 
likeness. But the vast majority of the United States is hardly like that. So 
I think Michael is right to point out that even the largest corporations 
today, like Walmart, hardly fulfill the characteristics of Gestell that 
Heidegger describes above - that of transforming the "landscape" in its own 
image as a mere supplier on call. I hardly exist "in no other way than as" a 
Walmart money supplier.

In fact, I would say that the inverse is far closer to the truth - that it 
is Walmart whose essence is defined in our likeness, as a hardware supplier, 
or a food supplier, etc. The hydroelectric plant doesn't supply the river 
with anything in return, so the relationship goes only one way. But since 
Walmart supplies us with products as much as we supply it with money, then 
it is at LEAST as much our supplier as we are its suppliers. In fact, 
whereas Walmart hardly defines my landscape, we definitely define Walmart's 
landscape, because without us, Walmart would cease to be what it is. We 
could be who we are without Walmart, but not vice versa.

And this is to leave aside the fact that Walmart is a publicly owned company 
in the first place, which really adds complications into the mix, since the 
average stockholder (which today in America is the average person) is then 
the supplied as much as the supplier inasmuch as the stockholder receives a 
share of the corporate profits. So if even the largest corporation in 
America hardly fulfills the requirements of Gestell, it don't see how one 
can philosophically subsume capitalistic social relations under Gestell 
according to the specific criteria Heidegger gives above.

Anthony Crifasi

_________________________________________________________________
Is there a gadget-lover on your gift list?  MSN Shopping has lined up some 
good bets!  http://shopping.msn.com



     --- from list heidegger-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---