The human of this age, however, is positioned into positionality even when he does not stand immediately before machines or in the industry of a machinery. The forester, for example, who surveys the felled wood in the forest and who to all appearances still goes along the same paths in the same way as his grandfather is today positioned by the lumber industry. Whether he knows it or not, he is in his own way a piece of inventory in the cellulose stock and its orderability for the paper that is delivered to the newspapers and tabloids that impose themselves upon the public sphere so as to be devoured by it.
Radio and film belong to the standing reserve of this requisitioning through which the public sphere as such is positioned, challenged forth, and thereby first installed. Their machineries are pieces of inventory in the standing reserve, which bring everything into the public sphere and thus order the public sphere for anyone and everyone without distinction. For the installation and guidance of the public sphere, the pieces of inventory of this standing reserve are not only the machinery, but, in their way, the employees of this industry as well, up to the public broadcast advisory council. This is positioned by the standing reserve called the radio, i.e., challenged forth to the ordering of this industry. As a piece of inventory of this standing reserve, the council remains confined in it. Let us just for once posit the unlikely case that a public broadcast advisory council recommended the abolition of the radio. The council would be dismissed overnight and indeed because it only is what it is as something positioned of a standing reserve in the positionality of the ordering of the public sphere.
Every radio listener who turns its dial is isolated in the piece character of the pieces of the standing reserve, isolated as a piece of the standing reserve, in which he remains confined even if he still thinks he is entirely free to turn the device on and off. Indeed, he is only still free in the sense that each time he must free himself from the coercive insistence of the public sphere that nevertheless ineluctably persists.
Humans are not incidentally pieces of the standing reserve of the radio. They are in their essence already imposed upon with the character of having to be a piece of standing reserve. Let us again suppose, indeed, a more unlikely case, that suddenly everywhere across the earth the radio receivers were to