Enframing the window, and other thoughts

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About a year ago I was introduced to heidegger's 'question concerning technology' which was challenging to absorb. I'm happy to have gone through this piece again and it is highly appropriate for a media archaeology course.

Parallels can be drawn to Agamben's work as well, the latter of which draws comparison's to Heidegger's piece in his work. I understand that humans as a social being have this drive to uncover the world; grasp its essences, understand how it functions and how it can be employed. Technology at its essence is this process in practice. Technology is not its artifacts but how materials and conception are learned to be worked together in a particular way by humans. Through this 'revealing' we begin to see parts of the world not as things of nature but as standing-reserve. The ordering of human techne and standing-reserve constitutes 'enframing' This word I was taught to mean warehouse shelving. So our learned concepts of how to produce objects combined with our capacity to utilize worldly resources to produce them are stacked and ordered in a form of shelving. In other words, we might want to use the word apparatus here. Technology seems to be constituted by a conceptual apparatus of knowledge.


On Monday I attended Mark Deuze's lecture where he discussed some new media technologies and suggested how we could be becoming zombies in our use of them. It's interesting how we can apply the concept of Foucault's apparatus here. There seem to be non-physical laws that govern our approach to these media, like something that establishes how we use them everyday. The way we experience the world at times seems entirely through a screen. But it is not just this point that matters here. At one point in his lecture Deuze discussed how windows are soon to become interactive screens. If we think about the apparatus of the house, not the physical structure beneath the paint and drywall, but what we understand the 'essences of house' to be, we can think of certain components like rooms, floors, a roof, and even windows. Going beyond this there came a point when humans began seeing the beach not as a soft sand substance but as standing reserve- that the sands could become glass to make windows and function in a house.So when windows as screens become dominant as a component to the house apparatus, that one should see through to outside, but also further, to the whole world, our conception of window-ness changes too. That this glass has new possibilities as being an object to interact with, and our enframing of 'glass' and 'window' fall are slotted into new categories within computerized networks.

What also resonates is how the notion of standing-reserve applies to many things in the world that were revealed to us, and have taken new understandings. Think about all the mining ongoing to produce coltan for electronics? What about the mining for lithium so we can make them battery powered? The world transcends being an amazing collection of natural wonders to being merely resources to be used. They form part of the INFRASTRUCTURE to human production. interestingly, Heidegger discusses a runway as being standing-reserve, not used until a plane needs to take off or land. But we have an infrastructure roads too, they are conceptualized, planned based on particular apparatuses of how they should be laid out, constructucted, their width, etc. Comparing the industry of electronic technologies with road systems, we can at least identify how their infrastructures are formed from components of standing reserve and governed by an enframing of these and knowledge.

 

I've hammered off a number of points here to expand my thinking. I am still working hard to understanding Heidegger more, but I think he makes some compelling points about how technology is an enframing or an apparatus of certain knowledge.

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