| This is the story of Enframing as it appeared in Britain from 1660 to 1800. This word, Enframing, is the standard English translation of the German neologism Ge-stell, invented by Martin Heidegger in his 1954 essay, "The Question Concerning Technology." Heidegger calls Enframing the essence of technology: that which structures technology's myriad instantiations or "selfrevealings" as material objects (e.g., hydroelectric dams, personal computers, automobiles, and so on). Enframing also structures the way humans experience these objects and the raw materials they manipulate. Humans, machines, materials: Enframing orders all of these things as potential resources---a "standing reserve" of past, present, and future use. The motion of a river is captured by the turbines of the dam, the energy of the electron is routed by the computer, and the liquefied bones of ancient lizards lubricate motor engines. As a "challenging claim," Enframing goes further than merely revealing a thing's potential utility; it forecloses all other possibilities of a thing's self-revealing---its non-useful possibilities---as less "true," less close to the reality of what the thing is.;Other scholars have recognized the epistemological significance of this period as well. Economic historian Joel Mokyr calls this epoch the Industrial Enlightenment: "that part of the Enlightenment which believed that material progress and economic growth could be achieved through increasing human knowledge of natural phenomena and making this knowledge accessible to those who could make use of it in production. It was believed that social progress could be attained through the 'useful arts,' what we today call science and technology, which should inform and reinforce one another" (Mokyr 2009, 40). Following the methods of economic history, my historical archive includes documents which pertain directly to fields like legislation and industrial infrastructure. I examine letters patent, scientific experiments, and philosophical doctrines that I believe contribute to this conditioning work.;To focus only on those documents, however, would inevitably produce a teleological narrative of events: everyone knows how this story ends, and an examination of such "technical" documents is valuable only insofar as it details the means by which this story's telos was achieved. It is here that literature, particularly the advent of the European novel, enters the scene. As mimetic work, fiction contributes to the detailing of the modes of conditioning mentioned above. As aesthetic work, it can condense and frame these modes of conditioning in discrete, legible units. As political work, it can represent social resistance to or advocacy of this developing narrative of scientific and industrial progress. And finally, as fictional work, literature is capable of imagining alternative modes of ordering the relationships between humans and things.;It is this last capability that fascinates me most, for it raises the possibility of a proliferation of relationships between humans and things rather a singular dialectic between say, subject and object, user and tool, or owner and property, which might ultimately be synthesized or deconstructed. Fiction, I argue, allows us to consider all of these possible relationships; to hold them at once apart and together like specimens in a cabinet or pages in a book. It allows us to contemplate them; to think about them. It is my belief, as it was Heidegger's, that by way of thinking, we open ourselves to a more complete and more true picture of the relationships between humans and things. This ambition is not motivated by radical post-humanism or anti-technological anxiety. The work of Enframing---the revealing of the world as standing reserve---is not in itself good or bad, empowering or endangering. But if this work is indeed occurring, it is critical---if we are to form a more complete picture of historical conditions---to tell its story, and in so doing, to ackno.;The principle means of accomplishing this foreclosing, Heidegger claims, is modern physical science. It too is structured by Enframing, for the language of science---quantitative, categorical, atomistic---delimits the vocabulary by which a thing reveals itself to human beings. Heidegger's emphasis on the language of science also dictates the setting of the story I mean to tell. While Heidegger's discussion of technology is primarily aimed at the twentieth century, I turn to an earlier chapter in Enframing's history---the century and a half that falls between Europe's Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. It is during this period, I argue, that the work of Enframing came to be represented in a way which we might call modern. Thanks to the institutionalization, proliferation, and commodification of physical science, Enframing found its voice in the form of empirical fact. |
