Gestell+(enframing)+(Boisvert)


 * Gestell (En/framing)**


 * Overview & Origins:**

//Gestell//, literally framing, was used by German philosopher Martin Heidegger to describe what lies beneath--the essence of--modern technology, which he perceived as not only all-encompassing and pervasive, but as a barrier to a more primordial encounter with poeisis (that which transforms, and continues the world).

In the “Question Concerning Technology” (1954), originally called “Framework,” Heiddegger defines //Gestell// rather obliquely as “the gathering together of that setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e. challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing reserve” (Heiddegger, 20). In short, enframing refers to a vital, unseen force that impels humans to reveal, or perhaps unconceal, the “actual” (the aletheia/veritas/truth) as ever-present and “on call,” “standing reserve” (//Bestand//), stock pile.

Heiddegger also refers to //poeisis// as a “bringing forth,” akin to a threshold occasion, a moment of “ecstasis” when something moves away from standing as one thing to become another. He compared //poeisis// to both the coming out of a butterfly from a cocoon, and the plummeting of a waterfall when the snow begins to melt. Though for Heiddegger, Gestell actually blocks access to this liminal moment, because technology “stands against the representing and experiencing subject,” (Heiddegger, 134) and disallows things (and persons) to simply “be in the world” (//Dasein//). Instead //Gestell// imposes a utilitarian value on objects, stripping them of a thicker, more meaningful context.

Yet with modern technology (by which he means machines emerging out of the rise of early industrial capitalism), Heiddegger equally believes a new stage in revealing is reached, one in which the subject-object, man and machine distinction is overcome. The essence of modern technology, he suggests, is the conversion of the whole universe of beings into an undifferentiated “standing reserve” of energy available for any use to which humans choose to put it. By thinning the description, Heiddeger fears that the act of enframing succeeds in reducing our “cosmology,” our world view (//Weltanschuanng//) to a “mechanization of the world picture (//Welted//),” thereby "simplifying all experience to utilitarian building blocks of masses and forces, a functionalist means to an end," (Dijksterhuis,?) denying the process of //poeisis//.

As Heiddegger reifies:

"The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture...In the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man, the subjectivism of man attains its acme, from which point it will descend to the level of organized uniformity and there firmly establish itself. This uniformity becomes the surest instrument of total, i.e. technological rule over the earth” (Heiddegger, 115).


 * Substituting Cosmic “Things” for En/framing:**

In his article, “Technological World Pictures: Cosmic Things and Cosmograms,” John Tresch attempts to combat Heiddeger’s positivist reductionism by providing a corrective to the “tendency by many to present modern technology in only the most dystopian, uniform and claustophonic terms” (Tresch, 86). He does this by substituting the thin description of enframing for the “thick” description of anthropology as a “shortcut in the hermeneutic circle.” Drawing from Heiddegger’s poetics of the “thing,” Tresch hones specifically in on the common jug, which is “more than a manifold of sensations, a physical object, a chunk of formed matter, a serviceable tool” (Tresch, 88). Instead, he claims the jug is an “event,” that “brings together and discloses a cosmos” through its history and shared use.

Through the art work, Cosmic Thing, by Mexican artist, Damian Ortega, Tresch suggests that technological devices possess a similar ontopoetics. The suspended, disassembled and seemingly de-worlded 1960s Volkswagon Beetle demonstrates the open-ended, often vacuous interpretative flexibility of technological objects. Such a “recognition of the partiality and fallibility” of what Tresh labels a “cosmogram” (the gap between its vision of unity and the refractory entities it assembles), he believes sets this approach apart from representational theories implied by internalized “worldviews” of Heiddegger, or the totalizing “cosmologies of cultures” by ethnographers.

Tresch’s alternative reading of “cosmic (technological) things” as imbued with thick, albeit always incomplete, description, rather than a unified accretion of power, attempts to undermine the totalizing assumptions Heiddegger asserts through the concept of //Gestell// whereby “man is now the being that enframes and represents the world to himself for his uses” (Heiddegger, 152). But what Tresch forgets, however, is that the pictures in our heads--the internal representations of the world--are an intractable part of our personal traditions. Thus, when the familiar is imperiled the homeostatic impulse often goes to extremes to preserve the script.


 * Power & Legacy:**

One cannot help but be reminded of the enduring power and legacy of Frederik Winslow Taylor’s “Principles of Scientific Management” (1911), so cleverly satirized by both Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936), as well as Fritz Lang in Metropolis (1927), which continues to play out in factories, prisons and educational institutions today. Both Sir Ken Robinson and Cathy Davidson have illustrated the stranglehold of industrial capitalism’s totalizing uniformity in the field of education in their respective Ted talks.

Tresch also neglects to mention the quite literal enframing of the world generated by optical devices emerging during the turn of the century to confer and move objective “truths” across great distances. Unlike cosmograms which “raise the possibility of an open holism, and offer the possibility of unification without requiring uniformity” (Tresch, 93), Oliver Wendell Holmes in his essay “Stereoscope and Stereograph” (1859) from Harper’s Monthly, observed a divesting, a thinning of local and empirical description:

“[f]orm is henceforth divorced from matter. Matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as a mould on which form is shared. Form is cheap and transportable. We have the fruits of our creation now, we have no need to trouble with the core. Every conceivable object of nature will soon scale off it’s surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful and grand objects for their skins, and leave their carcasses of little worth” (Holmes, 7).

A few years later, Walter Benjamin in the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) bemoaned a similar loss of authenticity of the “thing” itself, it’s aura due to photography and film’s uncanny ability to de-contextualize and cheaply transport enframed imagery. Reconsider the jug, stripped of it’s presence in time and place, it’s unique existence at the place where it accrued through use the “shared modes of relating.” (Tresch, 89) The instrumental nature of a technological object, like a camera, that carries the ability to frame, modify and exploit other “things,” representing them in an “as if” totality, therefore, disallows objects from remaining situated within the local and empirical realm of cosmograms.

Tresch concludes with a call to STS scholars to embrace “problematizing” anthropological methodologies, which disrupt unifying theories, and to instead approach technological objects as cosmic things by following the "contours of the world-pictures traced by cosmograms." In practice, this nonetheless remains a challenge.

cosmic thing cosmogram cosmology aura
 * Related Terms:**

Damian Ortega’s Cosmic Thing Daguerreotype (video of process) Zoom by Istvan Banyai PowerPoint on Visual Enframing Modern Times: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHdmaFJ6W6M Metropolis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j8Ba9rWhUg Changing Education Paradigms:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
 * Examples:**

Tresch, John. Technological World Pictures: Cosmic Things and Cosmograms. [|Benjamin, Walter. Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction]. [|Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Stereoscope and Stereograph]. Taylor, Frederik Winslow. Principles of Scientific Management
 * Additional Readings:**

Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper, 1977) Tresch, John. Technological World Pictures: Cosmic Things and Cosmograms Taylor, Frederick Winslow. Scientific Management, comprising Shop Management, The Principles of Scientific Management and Testimony Before the Special House Committee, by Frederick Winslow Taylor, Harper & Row, 1911; Dijksterhuis, E. J. The Mechanization of the World-Picture (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961).
 * References:**