[This has not been proofread or edited really at all as I wrote it in two hour-long fervours a few days apart, so hopefully, it is not too jumbled, nonsensical, or just an annoying rant]
Martin Heidegger, in his essay The Question
Concerning Technology, argues that man is conditioned by ‘modern
technology.’ Modern technology is the peculiarly calculating, exacting,
automated, mechanistic, nature of modern life – the quest to reveal all. It
“pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces.” It is the
difference between craftsmen, artisans, or tools of old who take what they need
and live somewhat reciprocally with nature and the factories, machinery, and modern
science that grabs nature by the balls and demands that it give up the goods.
In Heideggerian language modern technology is a
way of revealing. What he means by this is that modern technology is, to
put it simply, an entirely different way of seeing things – a historical epoch
that reveals the world in its terms. Heidegger uses the example of the
Rhine. It appears first as a part of nature, something to live with, as
something to marvel and respect. But under modern technology it is revealed in
a different way. A hydroelectric plant is built on it as a way of challenging
it, it demands of the river that it be instrumental in our wants. It literally
becomes a water-power supplier instead of a river. Sure, it is still there, it
is still part of the landscape, but it is not as a river, or even really as an
object, it is there as ‘standing-reserve.’
Standing-reserve, Heidegger argues, is the way
in which the world is revealed to us under modern technology. We challenge and
set-upon nature such that it is ordered to our liking. “Everywhere, everything,
is ordered to stand-by, to be immediately on hand…Whatever stands by in the
sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object.” That is
to say, a lot of things exist purely as tools or means to be used for some end.
It is important to note that neither me nor Heidegger think this is a reactionary
trumpet but a pondering or reflection upon our current mode of being. It cannot
be substantially resisted or changed – it is something to come to terms with. Modern
technology is “a destining that no way confines us to a stultified compulsion
to push on blindly with technology or, what comes to the same, to rebel helplessly
against it and curse it as the work of the devil. Quite to the contrary, when
we once open ourselves expressly to the essence of technology, we find
ourselves unexpectedly taken into a freeing claim.”
Part of this freeing claim is a consciousness of
modern technology and a holding onto the things that fall outside of its grip –
we have our relationships, our hobbies, and passions, that ground ourselves.
One of the escapes for Heidegger, or perhaps the escape necessary, is in
art (specifically the poetical). Art has always been one of the few things that
represents itself as not merely instrumentally good, but as intrinsically good.
“The poetical brings the true into the splendor of what Plato calls to ekphanestaton,
every revealing coming to presence into the beautiful.” Whether you buy the
whole account here, if you are a lover of any kind of art, this must resonate somewhat
– it certainly does with me. Art, the poetical in life (whatever that could
mean for you), is a refuge to shelter from the march of the world. In lieu of
this there seems to be something particularly repugnant about the creation of
art through what seems like algorithms, stakeholder confidence, pure
profiteering.
Disney, in the year of our lord 2019, remade Lion
King and Aladdin, two animated movies widely loved and regarded as some of the
best animated and/or kids movies ever to be made. They absolutely butchered
them. They are clearly not honest passion projects but shameless money grabs. In
2012 they purchased the Star Wars franchise, the most well-known, well-loved,
and most lucrative pop cultural phenomenon in modern history. What do they have
to show for it? Regardless of what you think of the original Star Wars movies
(I really do not like them that much) you have to give credit to George Lucas
as he clearly really cared about what he was doing (and obviously made a shit
load on the side). Disney on the other hand, edited the black man on The Last
Jedi (2017) poster to be much smaller for the Chinese release (a large part of
the market), and in The Rise of Skywalker (2019) they had a ~1 second lesbian kiss
– just enough for social activists in the US and Europe to celebrate diversity
and just short enough to keep the Asians in their seats (though apparently not
short enough for the Singapore cut, where it was edited out).
The making of movies by modern Disney can quite
easily be imagined as Adorno once described: “an omnipresent authority had
sifted the material and drawn up an official catalog of cultural commodities to
provide a smooth supply of available mass-produced lines. The ideas are written
in the cultural firmament where they had already been numbered by Plato”.
The way this relates to Heidegger, and what is
particularly offensive to me about their treatment is that Disney is trying to
make (and in doing so misunderstanding) art in the mode of modern technology.
They look at their back catalogue of IP’s and instead of being proud that they
were partially responsible for bringing about genuine revealing (in Heidegger’s
sense) they look at it and think “how can we use these resources and squeeze out
the absolute maximum yield at minimum expense?” They do not wish to guide the
viewer through anything, they do not wish to make great art, they do not wish
to expound great truth – they wish only to make great mountains of money. It is
a seizing, an expedition of resources in an attempt to unlock from them a
furthering of something else. There is no movie anymore, it is to them
simply another tool that must be standing-reserve to be released bi-annually
for the rest of time. Knowing this fact alone makes it hard for me to enjoy
these kinds of movies even considering them for what they are alone. Maybe that
is not fair to the ‘art’ or to the hard-working ‘artists’ but its hard not to
feel worn down – it begins to “obtrude and accumulate in a dry, monotonous, and
therefore oppressive way”.
This is in stark contrast to an artist I am deeply
fond of, David Lynch. Who in fact seems to have almost the perfect process that
parallels Heidegger’s pining about the ancient Greek conception of causation (I
have no idea if his interpretation is accurate to the Greeks of course, but it
sounds really nice). He argues that under modern technology causation has
shrunk (in the way we conceive of it) to mere efficient cause – the author of
the cause, here the filmmaker, causes the effect and that is all. In ancient Greece
(and most obviously in Aristotle) there are four causes. The causes themselves
are not important but the way they were conceived are. They are not mechanistic
A causes B relationships but relationships of responsibility or indebtedness.
It is a bringing-forth, a letting-occasion of elements that are already there that
we oversee – each individual cause owes its success to each other, co-responsibly.
This ‘bringing-forth’ is in stark contrast to modern technology’s setting-upon
and challenging as an attempt to unlock and demand new possibilities of nature
instead of being her curator.
David Lynch has a strikingly similar philosophy
of creativity, in his metaphor about ideas as fish. He says:
Everything that we do starts with an idea. We don't know what to do unless we have an idea. So, ideas are like fish. You don't make the fish you catch the fish…You can catch ideas from daydreaming, or you can catch ideas from places…If you think that maybe a place could conjure ideas, then you have to go out of the house and go traveling…More and more come in and pretty soon you might have a script. Or a chair. Or a painting. Or an idea for a painting.
The ideas are something already
in the world, he is indebted to them as much as they are indebted to him once his
art is brought about in the world. He lets them come forth into presence – he is
cultivating and overseeing the land’s flourishing, revealing a primal truth
found in great art, while Disney sends him a disciplinary letter demanding he
systematise its cultivation for mass production.
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