Data Revealed by Technology Is Inherently Used for Calculative Purposes

Heidegger Supplement

***LINKS

link: data

Data revealed by technology is inherently used for calculative purposes.

Antolick 2 [Matthew Anolick; August 20, 2002; Deep Ecology and Heideggerian Phenomenology; MV]

“What technology is,” says Heidegger, “when represented as a means, discloses itself when we trace instrumentality back to fourfold causality.”8 Of fourfold causality, he states “they differ from one another, yet they belong together.”9 We are questioning concerning technology, and we have arrived now at aletheia, at revealing. What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer: everything. For every bringing-forth is grounded in revealing. Bringing- forth, indeed, gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning – causality – and rules them throughout. Within its domain belong ends and means, belong instrumentality. Instrumentality is considered to be the fundamental characteristic of technology. If we inquire step by step, into what technology, represented as means, actually is, then we shall arrive at revealing. The possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in revealing…Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing.Technology, as instrumental (and causal) is a bringing-forth. That is, technology is a way of bringing things to presence in an instrumental (means-ends) manner. But such bringing-forth is not merely instrumental. All bringing-forth, says Heidegger, is “poiesis,”11 through which “the growing things of nature as well as whatever is completed through the crafts and the arts come at any given time to their appearance.” Within the questioning span between causality and revealing [aletheia], Heidegger progresses through a trail of concepts: 1) Legein – “to consider carefully,” which, he claims13, has its roots in aphophainesthai – “to bring forward into appearance”14; 2) Hypokeisthai – “lying before and lying ready” – as that for which the four causes, as four ways of being responsible, are responsible, insofar as such characterizes “the presencing of something that presences”15; 3) Ver-an-lassen – “an occasioning or inducing to go forward” of something “into its complete arrival”16; which leads to 4) Physis – “the arising of something from out of itself” which is also a “bringin

link: empiricism

Mistaking empiricism for truth embodies the technological thought that reduces all of humanity to standing reserve.

Spanos, 93 – Heideggerian literary critic, Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at Binghamton University, completed his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison [1993, William V. Spanos, Heidegger and Criticism: Retrieving the Cultural Politics of Destruction,University of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 9780816684427, pg. 174-7, Accessed through Ebrary]

I have in the foregoing reading of Heidegger with Foucault suggested the weakness of Heidegger's discourse as an instrument of sociopolitical critique: its tendency, despite its essence, to separate theory from practice, thinking from politics, or, at worst, to distort the representation of the latter. It will be the purpose of this concluding section, then, to suggest the weakness of Foucault's discourse disclosed by a reading of Foucault with Heidegger. To put it provisionally, what is missing or underdeveloped in Foucault's genealogy of modern power relations is explicit and sustained reference to the ultimate ontotheological origins of "panopticism" or "the regime of truth": this historically specific and concrete technology of discreet power in which the subject (the individual) is constituted in order to better serve a privileged sociopolitical identity. To thematize and thus bring to bear on the critique of modernity what his discourse more or less leaves unsaid in what I take to be a disabling way, it will be necessary to repeat Heidegger's more inclusive, if rarefied, but finally not radically different thematization of the metaphorics of the centered circle informing the philosophical discourse of the ontotheological tradition. This time, however, I will emphasize the consequences of this inscribed figural complex for the modern age, which, after all, no less than Foucault's genealogy, is the primary concern of Heidegger's destruction of the ontotheological tradition. According to Heidegger, we recall, the metaphysical mode of inquiry decisively inaugurated by the Roman translation of the Greek a-letheia to veritas extends through the Patristic theologians and exegetes not only to modern empirical philosophers like Descartes, Locke, and Bentham but also to idealists like Leibnitz, Kant, and Hegel. In the process of this history, it eventually hardened into a derivative or secondary discursive practice, a viciously circular thinking about temporal phenomena, that reduced being, including Da-sein, being-in-the-world, to the status of a thing that is present-to-hand (vorhanden). What this process of reification means in terms of Western history is that the hardening culminates— has its fulfillment and end (in both senses of the word)—in the complete "technologization" (understood in a broader sense than merely the empirical scientific) of the continuum of being: not only the earth but also human being in its individual and social capacity. Put figuratively, it ends in the re-presentation of being as totally spatialized object in the modern period. For Heidegger, in other words, the triumph of humanism— or alternatively, of "anthropology"—in the post-Enlightenment (what Foucault analogously refers to as the triumph of "panopticism") precipitates "the age of the world picture" (die Zeit des Weltbildes): The interweaving of these two events, which for the modern age is decisive— that the world is transformed into a picture and man into subjectum— throws light at the same time on the grounding event of modern history.... Namely, the more extensively and the more effectually the world stands at man's disposal as conquered, and the more objectively the object appears, all the more subjectively, i.e., the more importunately, does the subjectum rise up, and all the more impetuously, too, do observation of and teaching about the world change into a doctrine of man, into anthropology. It is no wonder that humanism first arises where the world becomes picture. . . . Humanism, therefore, in the more strict historiographical sense, is nothing but a moral-aesthetic anthropology. The name "anthropology" as used here . . . designates that philosophical interpretation of man which explains and evaluates whatever is, in its entirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation to man. . . . The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word "picture" [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild] that is the creature of man's producing which represents and sets before [des vorstellenden Herstellens]. In such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is.52 Like Foucault's analysis of the panopticism of the disciplinary society, Heidegger's analysis of the "age of the world picture" exposes the "calculative thinking" (rechnende Denken) of anthropological representation (Vorstellung) to be a problematic that constitutes ("produces") the subject as "technological" consciousness. In turn, this subject, as Heidegger puts it elsewhere, "enframes" (Ge-stell) the temporality of being in its own (anthropological) image. And by thus achieving such a deceptive representational technique of mastery over physis in the modern age, this subjected subject has come perilously close to reducing "its" dynamic and "proliferating"—its differential— processes, including human being, into not simply knowable objects, but objects as "standing reserve" (Bestand), as "docile and useful bodies," as it were. This technological "achievement" of humanistic retro-spection or, what is the same thing, re-collection, is not simply the blindness of the anthropological version of metaphysical oversight.It is a forgetting of the be-ing of being (the ontological difference) with a vengeance: an amnesia, no less repressive than the super-vision that, according to Foucault, is the essential agent of discipline in the "regime of truth."This retrieval of Heidegger's version of the origins of the modern age of the world picture suggests that Foucault's limitation of his genealogy of the disciplinary society to the site of a historically specific politics obscures and minimizes what in Heidegger's interrogation of the ontotheological tradition constitutes a persuasive enabling disclosure, however limited in the opposite direction, about the essence of modernity. I mean the prominence of the ideal figure of the centered circle and its discreetly repressive operations in the discursive practices of modernity at large. The disclosure of the complicity between knowledge and power enabled by Heidegger's interrogation of the ontotheological tradition, that is, is not finally limited to the site of the positive sciences precipitated in and by the Enlightenment as the predominant documentary evidence Foucault brings to bear on the question in Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality, Vol. I seems to suggest. It also includes the site of the so-called litterae humaniores— philosophy, literature, the arts, and so on— privileged by the cultural memory of modern humanism.

link: democracy promotion

Terrorism is a manifestation of the American project to homogenize Being through democracy promotion.

Mitchell, 05 (Andrew J Mitchell.Research in Phenomenology.Pittsburgh: 2005.Vol.35pg.181,38pgs,

Proquest, HEIDEGGER AND TERRORISM, (Philosophy Fellow, Stanford)).

Terrorism will take place in the withdrawal of being, in the unworld of machination. The modern configuration of war is surpassed by the technological plan of homogenized circulation, and the distinction between war and peace falls away in their mutual commitment to furthering the cycle of production and consumption.The abandonment of being that forms this unworld by draining the world of its being does not occur without a trace, however, and terror in its trembling corresponds to that trace. Terrorism necessarily results from such a devastation-or, "becoming-desert," Verwüstung-of the world; terrorism is always born in the desert. Terrorism is metaphysical because it touches everything, every particular being, all of which may be attacked and annihilated. The circulation of the standing-reserve sets an equivalence of value among things with a resulting worldlessness where existence is another name for exchangeability. The exchanged and replaceable things are already replaced and exchanged, not serially, but essentially. They are not fully present when here. Terrorism names this absence, or rather is the effect of this absence, which is to say it is that absence itself, since here we are not dealing with an absence that could be the effect of any loss of presence. The absence in question is not an absence of presence, but an absence in and through presence. It would be ridiculous to think that such a change in being would lack a corresponding change in beings. This change in the nature of being shows itself in the fact that all beings today are terrorized. They all stand under a very real threat of destruction via terrorist acts. There would be no terrorist threat were it not for these terrorists, yet there would be no possibility of a threat were it not for being. Certainly terrorism is not the only "effect" of this absence in presence; Heidegger frequently refers to the atomic bomb in precisely this regard. Terrorism's claim, however, is distinct from that of atomic war. Like the atomic bomb, terrorism operates at the level of threat. Insofar as it calls into question all beings, terrorism is itself a metaphysical determination of bang. Terrorism makes everything a possible object of terrorist attack, and this is the very terror of it. Everything is a possible target, and this now means that all beings exist as possible targets, as possibly destroyed. But this should not be taken to mean that there are discrete beings, fully present, now threatened with destruction. The ineradicable threat of destruction transforms the nature of the being itself. The being can no longer exist as indifferent to its destruction; this destruction does not reside outside of the being. Instead, destruction inhabits the being and does so, not as something superadded to the being, but as the essence of the being itself. Beings are henceforth as though destroyed. Terror brings about an alteration in the very mode of being of reality, the real is now the terrorized. Reality is already terrorized; the change has already taken place, and this regardless of whether an attack comes or not. Beings exist as endangered, as terrorized, and this means as no longer purely self-present. It means that, in terms of pure presence, beings exist as already destroyed.Destruction is not something that comes at a later date, nor is it something that may or may not already have taken place. Destruction exists now as threat.

Positing democracy as the system that will end all conflict makes alternative modes of thinking impossible. If only one mode of Being is correct—that of the liberal capitalist manager—then all of humanity becomes a disposable standing reserve.

Spanos, (Professor of English at SUNY–Binghamton) 03 (The Question of Philosophy and Poiesis in the Posthistorical Age: Thinking/Imagining the Shadow of Metaphysics, WilliamV. Spanos, boundary 2 30.3 (2003) 29-66).

WhatI want to underscore, in other words, is that the dominant liberal democratic/capitalist culture’s representation of the post–cold war as the advent of the peace of the new world order must be understood not simply as the global triumph of an economic-political system. Equally, if not more, important for the present historical conjuncture, though more difficult to perceive, it must also be understood, as the alignment of this end-of-history discourse with the new (political) world order clearly suggests, as the global triumph of an indissolubly related ontology and its banalizing instrumentalist language. It must be understood, that is, not simply as the Pax Americana but also, and perhaps above all, as the Pax Metaphysica: that teleological representation of being which, unlike all other past representations, now, at the end of the dialectical historical process, claims to be noncontradictory, that is, devoid of conflict, and which, therefore, renders any alternative representation of truth—and of the truth of history—in the future impossible. In short, it should be understood as the completion of the perennial Occidental project that is and, however unevenly in any historically specific moment, always has been simultaneously and indissolubly an imperial political practice and an imperial practice of thinking as such, a polyvalent praxis, in other words, the end of which is the enframement, colonization, and reduction of thedifferential human mind as well as the differential human community to disposable reserve. In his late essays, Heidegger insistently called for the rethinking of thinking itself as the first praxis in a “destitute time,”14 because “it lies under a double lack and a double Not: the No-more of the gods that have fled and the Not-yet of the god that is coming.”15 In the process, Heidegger proleptically referred to this representation of being in modernity as the planetary triumph of technology in the “age of the world picture.” By “world picture,” he meant the global triumph of a mode of knowledge production—and the language, the saying, inherent in it—inaugurated by the imperial Romans that reduces the differential force of the being about which it is inquiring into an inclusive and naturalized spatial trope: a “world picture” (Weltbild), or, to invoke an undeveloped but extremely suggestive motif in Foucault’s thought, a “domain,” an “area,” a “region,” a “field,” a “territory” to be conquered and colonized, as the (Roman/Latin) etymologies of these metaphors make forcefully clear. “Region” (of knowledge), for example, derives from the Latin regere, “to command”; “domain,” from dominus, “master” or “lord”; “province,” from vincere, “to conquer.”17 This is what Heidegger meant when, in response to his Japanese interlocutor’s reference to the East’s increasing temptation “to rely on European ways of representation,” he said that this “temptation is reinforced by a process which I would call the complete Europeanization of the earth and man.”18 It is this fulfillment, or, rather, consummation, of the logical economy of metaphysics that, despite the failure of the opposition to hear its claims—not to say the haunting silence on which they are based—announces itself at the end of the cold war as the end of the dialectical historical process and the advent of the end of history. And it is this consummation—this “end of philosophy,” as it were—that calls for the retrieval of Heidegger’s project, or, at any rate, the retrieval of the de-structive or deconstructive initiative instigated by his interrogation of instrumental thinking, the anthropological or post-Enlightenment modality of the end-oriented or retro-spective calculative thinking privileged by the Occidental tradition. This time around, however, the deconstructive initiative should be undertaken with fuller awareness than in the 1960s and 1970s of the indissoluble relationship between being and “the world,” between thinking/language and praxis. For it is not simply that the triumph of metaphysical/technological thought in the post–cold war era has “universalized” thinking from above or after the-things-themselves—which, say, with Heidegger, has demonized “as unreason” “any thinking which rejects the claim of reason as not originary.”19In thus delegitimizing every other kind of thinking, actual or imaginable, than the dialectical/instrumental—and inexorably reductive—thinking allegedly precipitated by History itself, or, to invoke a language usually and disablingly restricted to geopolitics, in thus “totally” colonizing thinking in general, this metaphysical/technological thought has also, as Antonio Gramsci anticipated in thinking the political defeat of his antifascist emancipatory movement in the early part of this century as the interregnum, made it virtually impossible for an adversarial constituency to oppose the imperial discourse in other than the latter’s terms. To be recognized, an adversarial discourse and practice must be answerable to the triumphant imperial mode of instrumental thinking.

link: reading a 1AC

The affirmative’s snapshot of the world poses them as the subjects and the world as their object. This enframing mission makes the world the standing reserve and every part of it replaceable.

Mitchell, 5 - , Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University(Andrew J, “Heidegger and Terrorism”, Research in Phenomenology, 35,

Opposition is no longer an operative concept for Heidegger, since technology has served to eradicate the distance that would separate the supposedly opposed parties. The analysis of technology in Heidegger’s work is guided by the (phenomenological) insight that “All distances in time and space are shrinking” (GA 79: 3; cf. GA 7: 157/PLT, 165). 13 Airplanes, microwaves, e-mail, these serve to abbreviate the world, to be sure, but there is a metaphysical distance that has likewise been reduced, that between subject and object. This modern dualism has been surpassed by what Heidegger terms the standing-reserve (Bestand), the eerie companion of technological dominance and “enframing.” Insofar as an object (Gegenstand) would stand over against (Gegen) a subject, objects can no longer be found. “What stands by in the sense of standing-reserve, no longer stands over against us as object” (GA 7: 20/QCT, 17). A present object could stand over against another; the standing-reserve, however, precisely does not stand; instead, it circulates, and in this circulation it eludes the modern determination of thinghood. It is simply not present to be cast as a thing. With enframing, which names the dominance of position, positing, and posing (stellen) in all of its modes, things are no longer what they were. Everything becomes an item for ordering (bestellen) and delivering (zustellen); everything is “ready in place” (auf der Stelle zur Stelle), constantly available and replaceable (GA 79: 28). The standing-reserve “exists” within this cycle of order and delivery, exchange and replacement. This is not merely a development external to modern objects, but a change in their being. The standing-reserve is found only in its circulation along these supply channels, where one item is just as good as any other, where, in fact, one item is identical to any other. Replaceability is the being of things today. “Today being is being-replaceable” (VS, 107/62), Heidegger claims in 1969. The transformation is such that what is here now is not really here now, since there is an item identical to it somewhere else ready for delivery. This cycle of ordering and delivery does not operate serially, since we are no longer dealing with discrete, individual objects. Instead, there is only a steady circulation of the standing-reserve, which is here now just as much as it is there in storage. The standing-reserve spreads itself throughout the entirety of its replacement cycle, without being fully present at any point along the circuit. But it is not merely a matter of mass produced products being replaceable. To complete Heidegger’s view of the enframed standing reserve, we have to take into consideration the global role of value, a complementary determination of being: “Being has become value” (GA 5: 258/192). The Nietzschean legacy for the era of technology (Nietzsche as a thinker of values) is evident here. But the preponderance of value is so far from preserving differences and establishing order of rank, that it only serves to further level the ranks and establish the identity of everything with its replacement. When everything has a value, an exchangeability and replaceability operates laterally across continents, languages, and difference, with great homogenizing and globalizing effect. The standing-reserve collapses opposition.