reigned beforehand, so much so that it first of all lit up the region within which the invention of something like power-producing machines could at all be sought out and attempted.11
Consequently, we may describe ever so expertly the most modern machine and explain its construction with great precision, nevertheless we grasp the machine always only technologically. We never think the machine from out of the essence of technology. Yet the essence of technology is itself nothing technological. Every construction of every machine already moves within the essential space of technology. As technological construction, however, it is never capable of conceptualizing the essence of the machine. This is just as impossible an attempt as wishing to calculate the essence of the mathematical by mathematical means, or wishing to delineate the essence of history through historiological research.
Along our way it must suffice to show the essential place of the machine. The machine is nothing that separately presences for itself. It is by no means merely a more developed sort of tool and apparatus, merely a self-propelled wheel assembly, as distinct from the spinning wheel of the peasant woman or the bucket wheel in the rice fields of China. The machine does not at all merely step into the place of equipment and tools. The machine is just as little an object. It stands only insofar as it goes. It goes insofar as it runs. It runs in the drive of industry. The drive drives as the bustle of the requisitioning of the orderable. If the machine stands, then its standstill is a condition of the drive, of its cessation or disturbance. Machines are within a machinery. But this is no piling up of machines. The machinery runs from the plundering of the drive, as which positionality orders the standing reserve.
Even when not immediately and not instantly perceived, positionality has already from the outset abolished all those places where the spinning wheel and water mill previously stood. Through its machinery, positionality orders in advance another kind of positioning and its regime. In this there only comes to stand that which stands in place, uniformly at the ready as orderable.
11. an essential consequence of this illuminated clearing is modern physics—which rests in objectivity;—the sphere itself as discovery.