The standing reserve of the Modern World
More on your ceaseless striving for efficiency.
Last fall, during my series talking about maps, I wrote a piece called “The map lost its monsters.” You can find that one here:
In that piece, I noted:
So the once unknown and endless void becomes a resource, something to be used as a tool rather than marveled at.1
I mentioned how that notion, which comes out of the idea of Charles Taylor’s work on disenchantment, also intersects with the work of Martin Heidegger, a controversial philosopher from the middle of the 20th century. Heidegger's main work of interest for our purposes, The Question Concerning Technology, is a bit dense, so I’m going to skim over some of the finer points.
Mark Blitz notes in Understanding Heidegger on Technology,
Our ordinary use of things and our “concernful dealings” within the world are pathways to a more fundamental and more truthful understanding of man and being than the sciences provide; science flattens the richness of ordinary concern…
Heidegger applies this understanding of experience in later writings that are focused explicitly on technology, where he goes beyond the traditional view of technology as machines and technical procedures. He instead tries to think through the essence of technology as a way in which we encounter entities generally, including nature, ourselves, and, indeed, everything.2
Heidegger ultimately lands on the notion that the essence of technology can be thought of as an “enframing” process: technology is involved in bringing-forth, un-concealing, and revealing.3 All technologies are ultimately doing one of those things.
This is a very abstract notion for sure, but it gets at something else mentioned by Lance Strate, who himself was connecting the work of Edward Hall and Marshall McLuhan to the writings of Lewis Mumford.
If we throw way back, we recall a very early exploration we had about the nature of media as extensions:
Like most things in life, there’s more than one way to cut up the cake. Strate, discussing the benefits of thinking about media and technologies as containers rather than extensions, explains:
Viewing all technology as containers rather than extensions is useful in clarifying the idea that technologies are not simply objects that we use, or objects within our environment, or even objects that are a part of our environment, but that they constitute environments individually and collectively. Put another way, as an extension, a technology mediates between ourselves and our world, extending us in one sense, while in another sense, as an amputation, coming between us and our world.4
The notion of technology as containers, as “objects within our environment… that… constitute environments individually and collectively,” get’s right at the notion of technology as a thing that brings forth and reveals. By “coming between us and our world,” technology creates a distinction that shows a distilled and purified view of what is being revealed.
Heidegger, continuing through his progression of thought, comes to the idea that when technology reveals something and sets it apart, it never really stops there. Once we’ve separated something, we typically want to use it. We sift the wheat from the chaff so we can bake and separate different isotopes of uranium to make bombs and power our electrical grids. We then use what we brought order to. Bringing order is seldom the final step.
Heidegger explains this notion in terms of “challenging.” Blitz explains:
everything is imposed upon or “challenged” to be an orderly resource for technical application, which in turn we take as a resource for further use, and so on… we challenge the land to yield coal, treating the land as nothing but a coal reserve. The coal is then stored, “on call, ready to deliver the sun’s warmth that is stored in it,” which is then “challenged forth for heath, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a factory running.” The factories are themselves challenged to produce tools “through which once again machines are set to work and maintained."5
As a person who holds to a Christian anthropology, I'll be the first to point out that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with bringing order to the world; in fact, I think it’s commanded of us. The cultural mandate to “exercise dominion over the earth, subdue it, and develop its latent potential” invokes “challenging forth,” as Heidegger would put it.6
However, I think in the balance, frequently the notion of exercising dominion is taken to an extreme that is to the detriment of the whole system, which is where I think Heidegger becomes helpful. This notion of overutilization and ringing every last drop out of the resources available points back to the notion of efficiency that I wrote about last week and the tension I feel between the inhuman world we’ve built for ourselves and our needs as humans.
What’s more, it goes against the notion of leaving the edges of your field unharvested, found in Leviticus as a means of reducing efficiency as a way of generosity.7 Our world is not a standing reserve of resources to be stretched as far as possible; we are part of the world and should utilize it in a responsible manner that provides for others.
So, here are some questions to ponder from this for today:
Do you find anything wrong with the notion of treating the world solely or primarily as a standing reserve, a cache of resources waiting to be used?
Do you feel the tensions between our need to flourish as humans and society’s desire for greater and greater efficiency?
I don’t have a great answer to these questions, but I strongly feel that we should grapple with them and not just leave that to the elites and philosophers. These are notions that impact our day-to-day lives, and we should be willing to engage with them to see how we can make sense of them. As we talked about last week, part of the point in grappling with these ideas is to recognize that we can’t technology our way out of them, as that’s what got us to our current situation in the first place.
And with that, thanks for reading. See you again soon.
Notes and Further Reading
Here’s a few of YouTube overviews of the main points of Heidegger’s thesis in “The Question Concerning Technology:”