Notes after reading, The Question Concerning Technology by Martin Heidegger
Techne,
for Aristotle, meant doing something which nature alone could not accomplish,
like an art or craft. For Heidegger it meant unmasking the truth, something
ontological. The idea of technology should be addressed in its totality, ‘in
its technological, social, semiotic and axiological avatars’(1).Machines
have changed since Heidegger’s industrial times, the ontological consistency of
this object is essentially composite.
The technical object cannot be
limited to its materiality. Do machines have more than the material structure?
These machines are only effective, dependent on their technological, economic
and political assemblage(2).
One cannot deny the
presence of the ontogenetic (3)elements, construction, social relationships, knowledge, economic relations,
interfaces which support these technologies onto which the technical object
attaches itself. It is essential to recognize this mutative nature of the
technologies within space and time.
Can technologies engage
outside their own bodies? Technical machines are fit in the concept of autopoiesis and allopoiesis. Can there be an attempt to consider the agencements, a symbiotic exchange
between both. We use iPhone without the
knowledge of how it comes into being.
We need to think why we have technologies and what we use them for, rather than
just knowing their defined use value. Is there a possible escape from enframing? Can one experiment with
aggregation and their compositional forms?
1. Guattari Felix,
Rethinking Technologies, Machinic Heterogenesis- Looking at the complex totalities of machines
2.Assemblage – Dual Form – ‘Form of content’(matter) and ‘Form of expression’ (function)
3. Ontogenesis – The development of an individual organism or anatomical or behavioral feature from the earliest stage to maturity
