Heidegger's technicity is an agent

Heidegger’s essay “Die Frage nach der Technik” (usually translated as “The Question Concerning Technology”) posits Ge-Stell (variously translated at “enframing,” “pos-ure,” or “positionality”) as the essence of Technik (translated as “technology” or “technicity”; see endnote). Heidegger’s (or his translators’?) pervasive use the passive voice sidesteps the question of whether technicity has agency. I believe this text implies that he believes it does, and that he’s not just using figures of speech.

My analysis is based on the William Lovitt translation published as “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Garland Publishing (1977) (pdf).

Enframing as agent

A key concept in the essay—the essence of modern technology for Heidegger—is Ge-Stell, translated by Lovitt as “enframing.” The term is defined by a cluster of related concepts: “Enframing means the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve.”

This definitional sentence contains several examples of action directed towards others, a requirement for agency: enframing gathers together; it sets upon “man”; it challenges “him” (scare quotes omitted in the sequel). In other passages, it orders in the sense of commanding, e.g., in “[What is it] is peculiar to that which results from this setting-upon that challenges? Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, . . . .”; and it reveals: “The revealing[-that-challenges, a paraphrase for enframing] reveals to itself its own manifoldly interlocking paths, through regulating their course.”

Enframing has goals, an important element of agency: “that expediting [referring to enframing] is always itself directed from the beginning toward furthering something else, . . . .” That sounds like intentionality to me.

For Heidegger, enframing certainly does work: “the way in which everything presences that is wrought upon by the revealing that challenges,” that is, by enframing. (Recall that wrought is the past participle of to work.) For example, “[enframing] thrusts man into a relation to . . . .”

In some cases Heidegger doesn’t name enframing as the agent, but it’s implied: “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.” (Aside: Everything—everything!—is ordered by this thing. Quite a potent agent!)

Other agents

Enframing isn’t the only non-human entity that Heidegger portrays as taking action.

Coal: “it is on call, ready to deliver the sun's warmth that is stored in it. The sun's warmth is challenged forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam . . . .”

Land: “The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit.”

Industries: “[The Rhine today is a river] as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry.”

Machines: “[An airliner on the runway] conceals itself as to what and how it is.”

Agency is attributed to technology in several passages:

“What technology is, when represented as a means, discloses itself when we trace instrumentality back to fourfold causality.”

“Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us.”

“Techne . . . reveals whatever does not bring itself forth . . . .”

Physics seems to have not only agency but emotions:

“Because physics . . . sets nature up to exhibit itself . . . , it orders its experiments precisely for the purpose . . . .”

“If modern physics must resign itself ever increasingly to the fact that . . . . Hence physics . . . , will never be able to renounce this one thing: . . . .”

And even more esoteric stuff is active: 

“All coming to presence, not only modern technology, keeps itself everywhere concealed to the last. . . . That which is primally early shows itself only ultimately to men.” (I think this means that both poiesis and its bête noire technicity/enframing keep themselves concealed.)

“[T]he actual reveals itself as standing-reserve.”

“But that which frees—the mystery—is concealed and always concealing itself.”

“Revealing . . . apportions itself into . . . .”

“everything will present itself only in the unconcealedness of standing-reserve”

“. . . the danger that in the technological age rather conceals than shows itself?”

Just a figure of speech?

Heidegger attributes agency so promiscuously that perhaps we should shouldn't take him literally. Could it all just be figures of speech?

Nothing is “just” a figure of speech—least of all to Heidegger! Metaphors carry meaning from one place to another, and their implications must be taken seriously even if not literally.

In some cases, it may well just be circumlocution. For example, one could plausibly read “The fact that it has been showing itself in the light of Ideas” to simply mean “the fact that people have been aware of” something. One could read “physics, . . . , sets nature up to exhibit itself . . . , it orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself . . .” to be referring to physicists by metonymy. 

I would argue, of course, that one should often social metonymy literally. I believe that social groups can have agency—see e.g., List & Pettit on group agency; Manuel DeLanda’s A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity; and my blog posts about ogregores). I don't know Heidegger's position on this matter but his language suggests that he agrees.

Most of the examples above are hard to explain away as metonymy. Even in the physics example, we have nature “report[ing] itself.” In all these cases the implication of agency is hard to avoid.

One could say that “Everest challenges us to climb it” should be understood as our human response to the mountain. It’s all in our mind, it’s not the mountain. The challenge is generates in and by us. However, Heidegger closes off this option by saying repeatedly that the action of technology/technicity—its essence, its “coming into presence”—is not just the result of human action:

“Modern technology, as a revealing which orders, is thus no mere human doing.”

“In enframing that unconcealment comes to pass in conformity with which the work of modern technology reveals the real as standing-reserve. This work is therefore neither only a human activity nor a mere means within such activity.”

“Does such revealing happen somewhere beyond all human doing? No. But neither does it happen exclusively in man, or definitively through man.”

To belabor the point: Heidegger uses action-words in this these three passages (“orders,” “work,” and “revealing,” respectively) to suggest the working of non-human agency.

Coda: A note on “Technik”

The German title of the essay is “Die Frage nach der Technik.” William Lovitt translates Technik as “technology” but William Richardson uses the word “technicity” in his translation of Heidegger’s 1966 interview with Der Spiegel.

The Cambridge Dictionary translates Technik as technology, engineering, technical equipment, or (importantly) technique. The sense of “technique” (connoting human abilities in action) links to the English word “technicity” which is defined as follows:

The efficacy, functionality, or experience of a particular technology (Wiktionary)

The prevalence of or reliance upon (a particular) technology by a specific group of people or by humanity as a whole (Wiktionary)

Technical quality or character, technicality (OED)

The extent to which a people, culture, etc., possesses technical skills or technology (OED)

Update 22 July, 2023

Changed title from “Is technicity an agent?” to “Heidegger's technicity is an agent.”