Technology, Causality, der Bestand, der Gegenstand

In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger shows that we fail in thinking of technology because we think of technology as an instrument (means) for our use. In order not merely to think of what technology does, but its essence (roughly speaking, what brings it to be what it is), Heidegger determines that we have to think about and question what is really meant by the word “cause” and the causal interpretation of occurrences under which we hastily try to view technology. Technology, then, precisely in its being adequately viewed, requires that “cause” be interpreted differently as something beyond causality in the common sense, as something more “originary” (ursprünglich). The result of this view will be a thinking of technology that considers it as being an instrument only in its derivativeness or deficiency.
Heidegger begins by asking what is common to the various ways causality can be understood, and determines that in each case something is responsible for something. This responsibility (Verschuldung) of something is misunderstood, according to Heidegger, either “moralistically as a lapse,” or through construing it “in terms of effecting” (9). Using his example of a silver chalice being caused by a silversmith, he determines that the sense in which causality is most causal lies not in the silversmith’s producing it, but in the more basic phenomenon of the silversmith’s being responsible for the appearance of the chalice there before us lying readily available (Bereitliegen) for our involvement with it. Causality understood as production or effectuation just makes something issue forth from something else, while in the more basic phenomenon of responsibility the accent is shifted onto how something is brought before us in its availability. Causation, then, really exists beyond commonly understood causality as a way (namely, a way of being responsible) that something can be brought into presence there before us. It is only in this way, as a “revealing” (Entbergung) or unconcealing of something such that its presence is brought forth, that technology can be understood (derivatively) as “an occasioning or an inducing to go forward”—i.e. as an instrument or means to an end that produces changes (9).
What all this means then is that “the possibility of all productive manufacturing”—if we understand this as a blanket-term for technology and for technological causation as responsibility—“lies in revealing” (12): that the essence of any thing that is deemed to be technology or technological (a coal mine, for example), does not lie in its production or effectuation of technologically manufactured material as such (processed coal), but in the way that anything it produces or effects possesses the possibility of revealing due to the technological process that it went through (the way the coal is processed rock able to be used as fuel). But of course if this definition of production as revealing characterizes technology, it would also characterize anything that is brought before us in its presence. This is why Heidegger does not specify the essence of technology specifically as revealing itself. Technology (techne) is a specific type of revealing, while revealing by itself is what Heidegger says is poiesis that is most proper to art. This is a letting into presence that lets something fully come into presence as itself.
If the essence of technology is a more specific type of revealing than poiesis, then, we can specify it as self-concealing or withdrawing in a particular way. For if poiesis is a revealing of something in its presence as itself, any other mode of revealing must somehow deflect or hinder the process of something’s coming into presence as itself. The material of technology must come to presence as other than itself, or, as Heidegger puts it, must be “set back” in its its being brought to presence of itself “with forgottenness” (“Die Kehre,” 68, my translation: “…mit der Vergessenheit nachstellt”). This process of self-concealing in presencing that will characterize technology specifically exists in how technology always brings something to presence (to its lying there ready before us) only as itself in its being regulated or ordered. Put differently, this means that what is revealed by technology cannot be brought forth as itself because its essence is seen to be in its readiness rather than in its being in presence in its lying before us. The technological is lying ready there before us as opposed to its lying ready there before us: the emphasis is placed on readiness, on its standing-ready, on its being a reserve, rather than on how it exists there. Indeed, the technological is so ready that this readiness is calculable and distributable—it is not just present somewhere or other, indeterminately. What is crucial to the essence of technology, however, is that this calculable readiness is all that the object is seen to be in its presence: as Heidegger puts it with the example of coal technologically extracted, “the coal that has been hauled out in some mining district has not been supplied in order that it may simply be present somewhere or other. It is stockpiled, that is, it is on call, ready to deliver the sun’s warmth that is stored in it” (15). In short, the coal is in its presence has its poeitic possibilities of revealing itself as belonging to a process foreclosed: it is never able even to seen as processed rock (as belonging to the process of its technological extraction from the mine) but always appears already as just a certain amount of fuel, as a reserve of energy. Similarly, The Rhine, as Heidegger says, comes to presence with its essence concealed, not as a river but as a “water power supplier” (15).
To put it a different way—a way to which we will have to return—even if what is created through poiesis is not determined as something that poesis effects (i.e. if it is not determined as issuing from causal instrumentality), it still “ends up” as something revealed. With technology, what gets revealed is, in a sense, the impossibility of ever fully revealing something—not because there will always be more to reveal about what gets revealed (here, coal as fuel), or that revealing always misses its proper end in the sense of purpose (Zweck), but because what is revealed by technology is always meant to be ready for further revealing or being brought into presence (mountain as fuel, fuel as energy, energy as light, etc.). This is what Heidegger means when he says that with revealing of technology, “revealing never simply comes to an end,” never expires, never runs off or peters out (16, “Dieses [entbergung] läuft jedoch nicht einfach ab”). What is revealed always lies there before us, not as something that has been revealed, but as what always has the possibility to further reveal how it can be newly unlocked, transformed, stored, distributed, or switched about—in short how many ways it can be brought again into presence (15). The interminable transformability characteristic of what technology reveals is like a stock of something always ready to be distributed somewhere. Heidegger accordingly calls what submits itself to technology and technological revealing “der Bestand,” the German word for a stock.
However, what is technological is not a stock in the sense that it is a stock of objects (Gegen-stände)—and it is here, by returning to objects, that we can see why Heidegger needed to go beyond causality as traditionally understood in order to define the essence of technology in terms of what it works on. A stock of objects is revealed not in its readiness at all, but precisely in how they conform to purposes or generate effects. If one looks at the technological as a set of objects, one does not look at it as a reserve for revealing, for further transformation and further presencing, but rather at its potential for further use for purposes. We may look at an airplane and see that it is a series of objects that cause the transportation of individuals, but does this really characterize the plane? Heidegger thinks these objects as objects do not reveal themselves as that transportation itself in its potentiality. The airplane, yes, is a series of pieces of metal. But these pieces of metal are not “used” for transportation, Heidegger thinks. The plane is more originally than any set of objects a people carrier, what just is there, on the runway, “ready for takeoff,” for bringing itself again into presence as a transporting (17). The “stock,” then, must be understood as something more like a resource, when we talk of coal or water or air as a “natural resource:” it is a reserve not of things but of a potential for converting itself into further presencing of itself, into fuel or energy. Put differently, for Heidegger what gets worked upon by technology cannot be looked at causally in the common understanding because we are dealing with a stock of stuff that is so destined for its particular effect that it cannot be said to be caused when it brings itself forth. What we are dealing with is a stock of objects that are always already their effect: to say that they are objects, then, or that something causes something to be brought about by means of them at bottom distorts the essence of this stock. We must give them a different type of being altogether: that which we designate by “resource.”

Derrida, and the sadness of not doing justice

Voulais prendre en compte: wanting to do justice to the text (and not work, and not author) requires "forms" that allow themselves to be "affected" (se laissent en... affecter), moved, touched, by the event (l’événement) of the text. It would be sad not to do this justice, not to demonstrate justice, by not demonstrating differently, demonstrating in another way, demonstrating the otherness in every way, demonstrating the other, by reducing justice to what demonstrably resists otherness and difference:

Interviewer: Of Spirit is taken from a lecture and its style is fairly demonstrative (démonstratif). But your preceding works,, such as Parages or Ulysse gramophone, tend to resemble literary studies of literary texts.
Jacques Derrida: I always try to be as demonstrative as possible. But it is true that the demonstrations are rendered in forms of writing that have their own rules, that are sometimes new, and most often produced and displayed. They are unable to completely satisfy traditional norms [normes traditionnelles], which these texts justifiably interrogate or displace.
Interviewer: Your book on Joyce is all the same a bit disconcerting [Votre livre sur Joyce était tout de même un peu déroutant].
Jacques Derrida: That has to do with Joyce. It would be sad to write in forms that didn't allow themselves to be affected by Joyce's languages, by his inventions, his irony, by the turbulence he introduces in the space of thought or literature. If one wants to do justice to the event called "Joyce," one must write, narrate, demonstrate in a different way [démontrer autrement], and thus risk a formal adventure.
-"Philosopher's Hell," in The Heidegger Controversy

The blindness of David Brooks

I usually enjoy David Brooks' remarks in the New York Times and on NewsHour, because he shows how conservatism can be at least somewhat sane. Comparing him to any other conservative commentator in the news in print or on television really shows you how ridiculous the party's public intellectuals have become.
This is because Brooks' conservatism is mostly grounded economically: social issues for him as well as the role of the government tend to be inflected through a relationship of governance to the requirements of a free market. In a column a few weeks ago, Brooks tried--unsuccessfully I think but better than any of the other conservative commentators out there now--to ground this view in the writings of Burke. But his view of things tends more to hearken back to a fiscal conservatism of the mid-twentieth century and tie in well now with many of the economic conservatives like Fukuyama and those in the law and economics crowd.
It is here, though, that Brooks becomes blind. Because he consistently is a conservative outlining critiques of values-based conservatism, he cannot successfully engage with questions of value except through economics or the role of the government engaging in economic issues. But what happens with this is not an inability to talk about questions of values, but rather a filtering of questions of values through economics so that they seem to fizzle away and not really be issues at all. This is what he does today in his column on Reagan's 1980 campaign speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been murdered sixteen years prior. Reagan got up and spoke of how he favored "states' rights"--insensitive to how that might sound to a group of people who used the issue of states' rights to oppose, sometimes through acts of murder, the federal attempt to bring civil rights to every state and especially those in the South.
Brooks says, after recounting the facts--which really did need to be done and he should be praised for it:

You can look back on this history in many ways. It’s callous, at least, to use the phrase “states’ rights” in any context in Philadelphia. Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair. He didn’t. And it’s obviously true that race played a role in the G.O.P.’s ascent.
Still, the agitprop version of this week — that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion, as honest investigators ranging from Bruce Bartlett, who worked for the Reagan administration and is the author of “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy,” to Kevin Drum, who writes for Washington Monthly, have concluded.
But still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.

It is true that the "agitprop version" of the event overlooks the complexity of what happened (which Brooks does recount with fidelity in the case of Bartlett and drum--though, notice he does not speak of his colleague Paul Krugman's column a few weeks ago that makes the much larger claim that conservatism is based upon racism in the South, and is particularly faithful to the complexity of what happened in Philadelphia), but Reagan isn't being slandered as Brooks says because this "complexity," according to him, takes the following form:

He spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”
The use of the phrase “states’ rights” didn’t spark any reaction in the crowd, but it led the coverage in The Times and The Post the next day.
Reagan flew to New York and delivered his address to the Urban League, in which he unveiled an urban agenda, including enterprise zones and an increase in the minimum wage. He was received warmly, but not effusively. Much of the commentary that week was about whether Reagan’s outreach to black voters would work.

That is, Reagan is being slandered according to Brooks because this event is set in a larger context that tries to economically help out African Americans by "increasing the minimum wage" and diverting more funds to schooling. Prior to this quote, Brooks also sets up the economic ways Reagan was trying to court voters.
I'm not saying that Brooks said that the economic program Reagan was outlining is really what he thinks contributes to the "misunderstanding" of Reagan here. I'm saying that throughout the article, the economic pops up as the tantilizing evidence to the contrary that Reagan wasn't a racist. Brooks underlying emphasis upon this is how he really persuades us that the situation was more complex, not by just recounting the events.
Look at how dismissively Brooks utters "Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair." What's more important to him by far is that Reagan "spoke mostly about inflation and the economy." The intention to help these people out is really there, its in the numbers, despite an insensitiveness that borders on racism. The question of values end up getting addressed in the long run by Reagan's fiscal conservatism: it would have been great if he would have encouraged brotherly love, but really he was encouraging it all along if we look at the complexity the right way--that is, economically. Questions of values really just reduce to this.
This is dangerous and what makes Brooks perhaps even more blind than the other conservative hacks out there. By not interrogating values as values and dissolving them into questions of economic policy, which is valueless, or at least safer, less heated, more rational, Books is able to get Reagan off from being a racist. The real question is what he never addresses: was this a racist act? In fact, this question should have been asked precisely because of the context of events. For Brooks, however, the context, because it is "complex" (read: economic), this question never needs to be pursued.