Heidegger's Poiesis

Martin Heidegger's late-period work on the question concerning technology, introduced in Chapter four, has been influential in shaping the critique of modernity over the last 50 years. Of particular note are parallels Heidegger draws between seemingly unrelated aspects of modern society and culture, which cast technics, politics, and ethics in the same light.

Heidegger's controversial list forges connections between the banal and horrific so as to reveal what he sees as a common orientation to the world that unpins each technology, technique, or activity. He captures these connections with the concept das Gestell (‘enframing’ or ‘the frame’), which at a broad level describes the ‘transformative encounter’ between modern ‘man’ and what he calls ‘global technology’.

Heidegger's analysis engendered a sharp critique of the post-war industrial world. As previous chapters show, this analysis loses none of its diagnostic power as the world is re-calibrated around digital computation. What the analysis grasps is the logistical character of modernity common to its emergent, industrial, and digital periods. I characterized these connections earlier with the idea of a ‘logistical orientation’. But, however effective and cathartic Heidegger's concepts are in revealing, describing, or lamenting the dark side of the logistical orientation, the analysis was never intended to be solely diagnostic. In the last several pages of the famous essay on the question concerning technology, Heidegger comes to understand that concealed within the ‘constellation’ of Gestell we find the very force that can free humankind from its sway: the ‘saving power’ that he links to poetry and art with the concept poiesis. ‘[P]recisely the essence of technology must harbor in itself the growth of the saving power.’ The ‘saving power’ is related to Heidegger's later remark that ‘only a God can save us.’