Trish Glazebrook
‘It’s the economy, stupid.’
Clinton 1992 campaign slogan (Kelly 1992)
It is surprising how little has been written about Heidegger and economics by scholars in philosophy compared to the mountains of material on technology, considering that much of what has been written diagnoses economics as central for modernist metaphysics, as well as responsible for the forgetting of being, the Gestell of technology, and a host of other Heideggerian horrors. Production is a self-assertion that dissolves the humanity of humans and the thingness of things into a calculation of market value in a market that is not just global but also enters, argues Heidegger in 1946, ‘the essence of being and so brings all beings into the business of calculation, which dominates most fiercely precisely where numbers are not needed.’ (Heidegger 1994, 292/2002, 219) Heidegger’s critical history of productionist metaphysics begins with Aristotle’s τέχνη, and Heidegger pushes back against such naturally excessive meta-φύσις with art – a sensible move given that technology and art are twins whose birth tore τέχνη in two with the bigger brother (technology) inheriting function and the runtish sister (art) inheriting beauty. No wonder the protagonist in this now mythified history (that is, Heidegger’s story) of productionist metaphysics is technology.
I argue, however, that though numbers are not needed, they are essential to this history. That is, the Gestell of technology can only enable global capital because, using Heidegger’s account of mathematics, economics is already embedded in the origin of the history of metaphysics. If standing-reserve is the Gestell of technology, then capital is the Gestell of economics. Accordingly, post-Marxist analysis of the implications of Heidegger’s thinking for economics is long overdue. Call it payback; or, timely.
Marxism: A blind spot in an old dream of metaphysics
Given the deficit of economics, a large amount of ink has been dedicated by philosophers to the question of Heidegger and Marx. This extensive attention is especially surprising in that these scholars primarily note that Heidegger is dismissive of Marx and his reading appears superficial. (Stahl 2017, 37) He calls Marx and Kierkegaard ‘the greatest of Hegelians’ but they ‘are this against their will’. (Heidegger 1996, 432-33/1998, 327) He lumps Marx in with Nietzsche in ‘Letter on Humanism’ when saying that ‘Absolute metaphysics, with its Marxian and Nietzschean inversions, belongs to the history of the truth of being.’ (Heidegger 1996, 336/1998, 256) Nietzsche is given over a thousand pages in Heidegger’s corpus, and his ‘inversion’ of metaphysics is the subject of two tomes that declare Nietzsche’s reevaluation of all values to be the end of metaphysics. Marx receives no such thematic treatment. In the Letter, Heidegger has already, by the time he mentions his inversion, reduced Marx to a humanism (Petrovic 1970; Heidegger 1996, 319 usw./1998, 244ff.) that ‘impedes the question [of metaphysics] by neither recognizing nor understanding it.’ (Heidegger 1996, 321/1998, 245)
This reduction has, however, also been identified as when he first takes Marx seriously. (Stahl 2017, 42) Heidegger is accused by Lukács of being limited in his thinking because of his bourgeois privilege. For Lukács, Heidegger ‘lodges the entire problem [of essence] in the fetishized structure of the bourgeois mind.’ (Lukács 1973) As Feenberg notes, ‘the validation of bourgeois society requires demonstration that the entire universe is rational, reified and controllable in principle.’ (Feenberg 1981, 101) Heidegger’s critique of technology is, however, not a critique of capital, presumably because he sees technology through a bourgeois lens. For the early Marcuse, Heidegger’s idealist categories are a counterweight for Marx’s objectivist self-understanding that had caused a ‘crisis of historical materialism.’ He reads Sein und Zeit as turning point where bourgeois philosophy transcends itself from within insofar as using Dasein, i.e. embodied subjectivity, as the book’s point of departure emphasizes the primacy of practical reason, thereby providing a ‘micro-philosophical complement to the socio-historical analyses of Marxism.’ (Wolin 1993, 155) Heidegger seems then both to write from bourgeois privilege, and to enable an Aufhebung of idealism and materialism in history.
Accordingly, Marx must be too proletarian insofar as he is committedly materialist and not adequately metaphysical at all for Heidegger. Rather, he is too deeply embedded in ὕλη, in the ‘bad metaphysics’ of Aristotle’s distinction between μορφή and ὕλη that so egregiously sends the history (or at least Heidegger’s story) of the West barreling toward the Gestell of technology. Heidegger’s criticisms of materialism have been called ‘unrelated to Marx except as ignorant caricature.’ (Stahl 2017, 43) When unrelated to Marx, i.e. as analysis rather of Aristotle’s distinction between form and matter in the art essay, Heidegger’s criticism of materialism is crucially significant because it points to the ἀρχή, i.e. origin and driving factor, of the history of metaphysics in the Aristotelian distinction. ‘The essence of materialism,’ Heidegger says in the ‘Letter on Humanism,’ ‘does not consist of the assertion that everything is merely matter, but rather of a metaphysical determination according to which all beings appear as the material of labor.’ (Heidegger 1996, 340/1998, 259) This does not sound, in the text where Heidegger talks more about Marx than anywhere else, like ‘ignorant caricature’ but fundamental agreement that the Gestell of technology reduces all it encounters to the material forces of production.
Herbert Marcuse notes that it is still an open question whether Heidegger even read Marx, and he tends to believe that he did not. (Marcuse 2005, 166) Nonetheless, Being and Time represented ‘the point at which bourgeois philosophy unmakes itself from the inside’ (Marcuse 2005, 11) insofar as it makes ‘a practical-needful making provision [into] the first and genuine … encounter with the world.’ (Marcuse 2005, 12) Heidegger is the first philosopher to see that ‘Dasein first creates the possibilities of its existence as possibilities of production and reproduction.’ (Marcuse 2005, 27) Yet his analysis of historicality ‘fails to achieve or even gesture toward’ a breakthrough by means of confrontation with ‘the question of the material constitution of historicity.’ (Marcuse 2005, 16) Such confrontation requires analysis of concrete historical circumstances and ‘is therefore not accessible to a phenomenology of historicity as the fundamental structure of Dasein.’ (Marcuse 2005, 30) Idealism elevated the a priori above experience, but historical materialism was forced, according to Marcuse, by necessity, because existence had become unbearable, to reject this elevation not in order to pose a philosophical problem but ‘to comprehend anew that which happens.’ (Marcuse 2005, 33) The philosophical advances Heidegger makes possible by tempering materialism with idealism are not for the sake of philosophy but for the sake of making sense of experience.
For Marcuse, Heidegger’s ontology accordingly contains ‘a decisive abandonment of the traditional categories of bourgeois thought’ (Marcuse 2005, 160-61) that Heidegger himself could not see. Rather, his thinking is a reification. In his existential analytic, the very idea of phenomenology and ontology necessitates ‘a transcendental trajectory… that distorts concrete man and orients itself toward human existence in general.’ His philosophy was accordingly ‘abstract,’ ‘removed from reality, even avoiding reality.’ (Marcuse 2005, 166) In an interview with Frederick Olafson, Marcuse says that ‘Heidegger’s concreteness was to a great extent a phony, his principal concepts, Dasein, das Man, Sein, Seinedes, Existenz … ‘are “bad” abstracts.’ (Marcuse 2005, 166-7) His concepts of technology and technics are ‘the last in a long series of neutralizations: they are treated as “forces in-themselves,” removed from the context of power relations … reified, hypostatized as Fate.’ (Marcuse 2005, 168) Heidegger’s pervasive abstraction renders his philosophy for Marcuse ‘a rather dry brand of neo-Kantianism, neo-Hegelianism, neo-Idealism, but also positivism.’ (Marcuse 2005, 166), that is, simply business-as-usual in the history of German philosophy.
Even worse, Heidegger’s abstraction transforms existential analytic ‘into a politics of heroic, racist realism.’ (Marcuse 2005, 161) His statement in November 1933 that ‘only the Fuhrer himself is German reality and its law’ (qtd. in Marcuse 2005, 170) is not an error or mistake but ‘a betrayal of philosophy as such, and of everything that philosophy stands for.’ (Marcuse 2005, 170) Marcuse is disappointed that Heidegger betrays history intellectually in its moment of decision by remaining loyal to the history of philosophy despite the promise of revolutionary thinking, but then betrays philosophy itself when as the self-professed ‘heir of the great tradition of Western philosophy’ he discards that history and makes it obsolete by handing law and reality over to Hitler in what immediately can only be a ‘philosophy of abdication and surrender.’ (Marcuse 2005, 170-71) Asked why he thinks Heidegger later withdrew from Nazism, Marcuse answers that the thoroughly existential ‘struggle between capitalism and socialism, waged almost daily on the streets, at the workplace, with violence and with the intellect … lies outside his existentialism.’ (Marcuse 2005, 171) In essence, Marcuse’s critique of Heidegger boils down to the insight that Heidegger, despite an early-in-life recognition that Dasein’s is essentially historical, failed – in fact refused – to grasp what is historically determinative for his time.
Withdrawal of Being
One of the limitations of Heidegger’s critique of technology is indeed that he is focused on industrial technology, while the world has moved on to other technologies, e.g. information technologies, for which his analysis may not be adequate. The case could be made that information technologies also operate as the logic of domination that is Gestell insofar as knowledge, albeit reduced to information, is still power manifest through logics of domination. I don’t have time for that here, but rather suggest that is it not the technology at issue but the critique of technology itself that is anachronistic. Clearly technology is an absolutely necessary enabler, a ‘force-multiplier,’ for ‘the organized global conquest of the earth,’ (Heidegger 1997a, 358/1982, 248) but the logic of domination that provides the force that technology multiplies into global domination is essentially, i.e. as holding-sway in the current historical epoch, capital. Irigaray has shown that the conceptual ‘blind spot’ at the root of radical thinking – ‘radical’ as in the Latin radix, radices – is not just oversight but a power-play, a secret insistence that must be vigilantly enforced. (Irigaray 1974/1985)
It is indeed odd that Heidegger has so little time for Marx, when it could be said that all Heidegger really has philosophically, which is to say properly, as his ownmost, is in fact time – as existential temporality but also as historicality, which is of course Marx’s forté. Indeed, ‘Marx,’ says Heidegger, because he experiences estrangement, ‘attains an essential dimension of history, [so] the Marxist view of history is superior to that of other historical accounts.’ (Heidegger 1996, 340/1998, 259) Moreover, because Husserl and Sartre do not recognize the importance of the historical in being, neither phenomenology nor existentialism is capable of productive dialogue with Marxism. Heidegger’s blind spot concerning Marx may indicate that Heidegger understood the limitations of his own thinking: as a practitioner of existential philosophy and phenomenological method, he had no time for Marx’s untimely meditations. He was unready.
Accordingly, it is not that Heidegger didn’t read Marx but that he couldn’t read Marx, even if he read him. Thus Heidegger dismisses Marx, as Gerry Stahl laid out in his 1975 PhD dissertation at Northwestern University through head-scratching, detailed examination of the few – almost parenthetical (Stahl 2017, 38) – mentions of Marx in Heidegger’s works. Stahl calls Heidegger’s failure to delve deeply into Marx ‘an important failing in his work’ that is ‘at odds with [his] carefully cultured reputation as a thorough historian of philosophy.’ (Stahl 2017, 37) I argue rather that Heidegger’s Marxian blind spot is the withdrawal (and refusal) of being into capital.
The paradox here in Marcuse’s critique of Heidegger is that the Marxist struggle that Marcuse accuses Heidegger of not being on board with is the socialist struggle against capital, while the Nazism Heidegger did support is of course explicitly, in this case nominatively, socialism. It is not enough to respond that Nazism is not really socialism. If one holds that swans are white, but then meets a black swan, it is not enough to say, ‘that’s not a swan.’ To do so is to commit not to the claim that swans are white, but that all swans are white – a kind of cheating based an appeal to an abstract universal in the face of concrete evidence that precisely, without prejudice, and unequivocally overthrows the universal. Analogously, when Marcuse criticizes Heidegger’s non-engagement with the struggle between socialism and capitalism, and I say but you are also criticizing him for being a National Socialist, responding that Nazism isn’t really socialism is an abstraction to a universally good socialism. This is the problem of universalization, of totalizing by means of the ‘-ism’ that so upset the Frankfurt School, Marcuse’s school.
If Heidegger had responded to Marcuse not by saying that he ‘misjudged’ Hitler and Nazism, but by pointing out that Marcuse too was socialist, then the question of overcoming the global conquest that is Gestell would have been laid bare not as Heidegger’s refusal of socialism but of his acceptance of national socialism, i.e. as a question of nationalism. Heidegger’s blind spot with respect to the Gestell of capital is made possible by his nationalism, while any critique of capital must have always already rejected nationalism. Indeed, contemporary fights against capital have one thing in common: international solidarity. For example, solidarity between Ogoni women in the Niger Delta and activists in London, who occupied Shell’s head office in London at the same time the Ogoni women occupied a transfer station in Nigeria, succeeded in getting Shell out of Ogoniland. (Glazebrook and Kola-Olusanya 2011) The Palestinian contingent that traveled to Standing Rock in the US to support water-protectors in the Oceti Sakowin camp from the threat of Dakota Access were less successful, but international solidarity with Palestinians through boycotting is really the Palestinians’ only defense against Israeli persecution, while Standing Rock continues as a movement against capital through its divestment campaign. (Glazebrook and Gessas, in press)
Mathematicians, Utilitarians, and the ones who walk away from Omelas
Aristotle explained natural entities as things that grow and develop of their own accord on the basis of an inner teleology: for example, puppies become dogs, acorns become oak trees. In contrast, artifacts are, said Aristotle, created by a human artist who envisions them in advance based on their intended purpose. (Aristotle 1941, 640a32; cf. 1934, 1140a13) In the subsequent Judeo-Christian account, nature is a divinely created artifact: what was driven by inner purpose for Aristotle is now driven by divine intent. In modern science, however, God is – as LaPlace is reported to have told Napoleon – an unnecessary hypothesis. (Ball 2003, 388) The ontological domination of modern science accordingly reduces beings to objects – purposeless, spatiotemporally extended bodies subject to forces. Nature has in this history been stripped first of its own purpose and then of divine intent, rendering it nothing more than material readily available in modernity for technological appropriation to human needs. Modern technology thus ‘sets upon nature’ (Heidegger 1997b, 18/1977, 15) that is no longer understood as what grows of its own accord, but as material for human production. (Heidegger 1997b, 36/1977, 32) The whole inter-related play of balance that allows ecosystems to endure is lost, and technoscience is unrestrained in its mobilization of ‘the organized global conquest of the earth.’ (Heidegger 1997a, 358/1982, 248) What Heidegger has neglected to note is how the Gestell of technology can only be mobilized because nature has first been reduced mathematically, i.e. in human projection, to the reckonable in numbers. Yet Heidegger does not take this last step into critique of capital, despite having the conceptual resources.
In his analysis, the mathematization of beings is already embedded in Western metaphysics, long before Galileo unconceals it in the claim that the universe ‘is written in the language of mathematics.’ (Drake 1957, 258) Heidegger traces the mathematical back to the (unspecified) Greek concept of τὰ μαθήματα in Die Frage nach dem Ding. For the Greeks, τὰ μαθήματα meant not just numbers but the fore-structure of understanding, i.e. what is already known in advance of experience: ‘The μαθήματα are things insofar as we take cognizance of them as what we already know them to be in advance, the body as bodily, the plant-like of the plant, the animal-like of the animal, the thingness of the thing, and so on.’ (Heidegger 1987, 56/1993, 251) Numbers do not exhaust the mathematical but are one case of it that, as an idealization of what is encountered in experience, is especially amenable to the fore-structure of understanding. Numbers are found in things not because they are already there, but because the understanding brings them to things. They therefore carry epistemic certainty insofar as they are found in experience by being first projected there, and reason is certain of its own creation. Heidegger’s phrase in Being and Time, ‘the mathematical projection of nature,’ (Heidegger 1986/1962, §69) can be read as ‘the epistemically certain projection of nature.’ He is interested in Being and Time in showing how nature is projected in modern physics as something about which certainty can be had. Later, in ‘The Age of the World Picture,’ he calls this projection of certainty ‘rigor [Strenge]’ (Heidegger 1994, 76/1977, 118) and once more appeals to what τὰ μαθήματα meant to ‘the Greeks.’ The rigor of science is its exactitude and mathematical precision.
This precision is excellent in the messy world of τὰ πράγματα, and as modern science holds sway essentially in the modern epoch, utilitarianism provides a convenient mathematization of ethics. A utilitarian calculus undertaken by establishing the many according to whatever you wish to define as the good (as long as it can be reckoned) becomes a basis for ethics. Of course, the simplest, most straight-forward reckoning to populate the utilitarian calculus is exchange value reckoned in currency. Cost-benefit analysis rules the ethical day, whether in managing capital itself, or in determining, for example, what health insurance premiums are in the US.
This is an ontological point: beings are projected as cash-value. Marilyn Waring has written extensively about the invisibility of women’s unpaid labor. Indeed, the women’s labor that provides at least 70 percent of Ghana’s national food basket is not accounted for nationally or internationally as these women grow subsistence crops that are not taken to market. (Glazebrook 2011) Their work has no ontological force, but the national economy would collapse and a massive humanitarian crisis in starvation would ensue in Ghana if these women stopped growing these crops. These women make up pockets in global capital where capital does not reign. They grow for subsistence in a labor of care for their dependents, where ‘care’ does not intend (though it may also entail) emotional attachment so much as the praxes of daily reproduction of the material conditions of living.
Utilitarianism is, however, not an ethical system of care. Care cannot be a calculation, though it involves calculation and reckonings, because it cannot be an abstraction. It is a relational ‘here-and-now,’ for this person, this tree, this child, this crop. It is a balancing rather than a reckoning. A balance that is not a reckoning is demonstrated by a gymnast, and the tight-rope walker Zarathustra must carry after its fallenness out-of-time. The first and foremost world of lived experience is not reckoning but doing. Heidegger’s pragmatism in Being and Time fails to get further than tool use. Tools can assist in doing, but they are not a substitute for doing. Doing is primary. A calculator does not make one a better tight-rope walker. In the constant δύναμις of life, technology is unable to keep up. Tools can only be in the present, while Dasein flies into the future. Utilitarian toolish thinking accordingly cannot open an ethos, a practice of sustaining enduring community
Yet it is often the first thing taught in an ethics course. It allows discussion of the good and of value, so is a step close to ethics than scientific standards of objectivity, impartiality and distance. But the utilitarian calculus is indifferent to the individual and governs by reckoning rather than care. So, for example, the US health care system is oriented to serve those who can pay rather than those who are sick – it treats people who are sick, but not necessarily the sick who are people. Utilitarianism cannot ground communities; it is homelessness.
Ursula Le Guin’s story ‘The ones who walk away from Omelas’ describes a perfect city of happiness, Omelas. It is made possible by a single child, kept in a small, dark room sitting in its own filth, with no human contact except an occasional kick. This city runs a utilitarian calculus of the greatest good for all except one against the absolute suffering of that one. Some who go to see this child then leave Omelas, Le Guin writes, ‘they do not come back. The place they go toward is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.’ (Le Guin 1977, 477) No-one understands them. They are unheimliche.
das Unheimliche: Homelessness
Derrida says that the subtitle of his address, published as Specters of Marx, could have been: ‘Marx – das Unheimliche.’ For Marx remains ‘a clandestine immigrant … [who] belongs to a time of disjunction, to that “time out of joint” in which is inaugurated, laboriously, painfully, tragically, a new thinking of borders, a new experience of the house, the home, and the economy.’ (Derrida 1994, 219) Heidegger comes to this idea of ‘out-of-jointness’ while reading Anaximander on justice. Derrida says that Heidegger ‘insists on the necessity of thinking Δίκη … at a distance from [its] juridical-moral determinations,’ whereby he finds in ἀ-δικία – injustice, the absence of justice’ that something is ‘out of joint (aus den Fugen).’ (Derrida 1994, 27; Heidegger 1994, 330-31/1975a, 41).
In ‘Letter on Humanism,’ Heidegger says that ‘Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world’ (Heidegger 1996, 339/1998, 258) that must be thought in terms of the history of being. What Marx ‘derived from Hegel as the estrangement of the human being has its roots in the homelessness of modern human being.’ (Heidegger 1996, 339/1998, 258) Heidegger’s account not only gets at the essential homelessness of modern human being but also attributes recognition of this homelessness to Marx. To displace the story of Aristotle on form and matter leading to the materialism at the heart of the Gestell of technology discussed above – that is catastrophic if not apocalyptic for modernity, Heidegger appeals to Marx’s understanding of the history of being.
In the technology essay, Heidegger suggests that there is an alternative to Gestell, a saving power that he discusses as in terms of rescue, recovery, securing, and harboring. (1977, 11, note 10) In Gelassenheit, the title translated as Discourse on Thinking and the word as releasement towards things, Heidegger argues that this releasement makes the human relation to technology ‘wonderfully simple and relaxed.’ (Heidegger 1992, 23/1966, 54) Indeed, in consumer culture, technology allegedly frees through its ‘labor-saving’ devices. This is false: the vacuum cleaner, for example, must be used weekly, but before vacuum cleaners, the rug could be taken out twice a year and beaten; similarly, instead of spending an hour each day walking to work, commuters spend an hour driving because the car allows remote living; likewise, dishwashers save from hand washing, so more dishes are used and dishwashers are packed, run and emptied using more resources and at least as much time and labor as hand-washing would entail. Technology does not save labor but rather diverts it toward the technology. The Gestell of technology is accordingly not just ‘man’ over nature, including human others, but capital’s driving of technology’s control, domination and enslavement of human labor. A substantial proportion of salaries goes to purchasing, powering, and maintaining devices and things that take attention away from what and who are present in shared space. If science is always already the essence of technology, then technology is always already the essence of capital. Capital is an event of being, not as money but as the way of thinking that is the essence of capital. It is homelessness in the face of destroyed habitats, dissolved cultures, unintentional communities, and abject, disposable, fungible, interchangeable others. In capital Ereignis, there can be being-alongside, but it is impossible to know if there can be being-with if it is already lost.
Event
There is no new beginning. One can’t just wander in and out of events of being as one wishes. ‘We’ moderns, ‘we’ of the global North, ‘we’ wage-earning, voting consumers, citizen bearers of rights, are free to aim ourselves at fulfillment through the individual accumulation of private wealth, as capital projects our τέλος. Events are given with no take-backs. As long as capital mobilizes technology to run ‘us,’ every ‘last man’ is trapped in the exchange of economics – not νόμοι of the οἶκος (laws of the household) or λόγος of the οἶκος – there can be no household laws or logic of the home in the event of global capital that is aus den Fugen, out of joint, out of time, as in the Hopi word Koyaanisquatsi, life out of balance, homelessness. After Heidegger’s Hölderlinian promise sixty-some years ago, the saving power has not there too grown with the danger of Gestell.
Post-Marxist analysis of the implications of Heidegger’s thinking for economics is long overdue. Perhaps it should stay that way, δίκη best not paid, outstanding ἀ-δικία. Not even a god can save ‘us’ from the logic of capital. All ‘we’ can do is wait. Lucky for ‘us,’ ‘we’ are near the top of capital, globally speaking: of the 795 million people on the planet today who don’t get enough to eat, 780 million (over 98%) are in the global South. (FAO 2015, 8-9) 220 million (27%) are in sub-Saharan Africa. (FAO 2015, 10) By the end of 2016, the number of displaced persons on the planet was the highest ever – 65.6 million. (UNHCR 2017) We are all homeless, but some are more homeless than others.
And yet… against this nihilism, looking into a future that cannot be imagined, a new beginning that cannot be chosen, an unknown post-Omelas, post-utilitarian economics….
Heidegger’s analysis of Gestell has always been focally addressed at energy: from the damming of the Rhine for hydroelectric power to the planet becoming one giant gas station. The Gestell of technology requires an energy source to drive its global assault, its ‘unreasonable demand … that [nature] supply energy that can be extracted and stored. (Heidegger 1997b, 18; 1977, 14) The ‘resource curse’ of oil wealth in Nigeria’s Niger delta led to corruption and violence against the peoples of the Delta, who had access to less than 5 per cent of the USD $340 billion in oil revenues generated in the Delta in the last four decades of the 20th century (Gary and Karl 2003, 25). In Darfur, Sudan, oil revenues financed genocide, but also Talisman Oil for example provided practical supports of fuels and runways for the planes and helicopters that firebombed villages. (Glazebrook and Story 2012) It is fossil fuels that powered the Gestell of technology, and oil drives the Gestell of capital.
Against that, however, things are changing. On every inhabited continent, there have been and continue to be ongoing resistance against fracking and pipelines. In the most recent round in Canada, the leader of Canada’s Green Party, a Member of Parliament, was arrested. The World Bank announced in December 2017 that it will no longer finance coal development, will make greenhouse gas emissions resulting from World Bank financing transparent, and proactively finance mitigation and adaptation. (World Bank 2018) A global peasant movement, Via Campesina, but also indigenous groups everywhere, fight oil and land loss to hydroelectric. Standing Rock is an anomalous ‘event’ that did not end with the clearing of the camp. In fact, a focal activity is an attack on capital through its corporate lobby for divestment against banks that fund fossil fuels. Gelassenheit’s releasement takes place in the daily context of the ‘soil upon which we live and die,’ (Heidegger 1997, 16-17/1968, 41) soil protected by for example the Deccan Development Society in India against the ravages of commercial farming. It has always been typically been indigenous groups connected to the land who have protected the land, and its water and forest life-sustaining poiesis. ‘We’ suffer ‘loss of rootedness … the loss of autochthony that springs from the spirit of the age into which all of us were born.’ (Heidegger 1992, 16/1966, 49); yet the Lakota way of life offers Heidegger’s ‘possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way’ (Heidegger 1992, 23; 1966, 54) from the Western, Eurocentric, technoscientific, militarized culture of capital. It’s the economy, stupid! It goes much deeper than stock markets and the Gestell of capital can see. If some are more homeless than others, then (in and amongst and at the heart of capital on the land), others are also more at home.
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Patricia Glazebrook - Heidegger and Economics: Withdrawal of Being in Capital