disappear from every room—who would be able to fathom the cluelessness, the boredom, the emptiness that would attack the human at a stroke and would completely dishevel their everyday affairs?
Note that here there is no passing of judgment on the radio listener or even on radio. It is only a matter of pointing out that in the standing reserve called the radio there reigns a requisitioning and positioning that has intervened in the essence of the human. Because this is so, and because the human does not decide about his essence on his own terms, and never by himself, for this reason the requisitioning of the standing reserve, for this reason positionality, the essence of technology, cannot be anything merely human. For this reason one ultimately errs in attempting to derive technology from human intelligence, even from artistic intelligence. The artistic presupposes the ars, the ars presupposes τέχνη, and this presupposes the essence of technology.
The standing reserve of positionality persists in the pieces of standing reserve and in the manner of their ordering. The pieces of standing reserve are what is constant in the standing reserve. For this reason, we must think their constancy from the essence of the standing reserve, i.e., from positionality.
One commonly conceives the constant as that which endures. This is something that presences lastingly. But what presences can concernfully approach the human in varying ways of presence. These varying ways determine the epochs of the Western history of beyng. What presences can essence as what here comes forth of its own accord, here from out of concealment, forth into unconcealment. We name what presences in this way in its presencing “that which stands here” [Herstand].
What presences can announce itself as something created by a maker, who himself is a constant and omnipresent presence in everything. What presences can offer itself as what is posed in human representation, for it and across from it. What presences is thus an oppositional object for representation; representation, as percipere, is the cogitare of the ego cogito, of the conscientia, of consciousness, of the self-consciousness of the subject. What stands over against [der Gegenstand] is the object [das Objekt] for the subject.
What is present, however, can also be something constant in the sense of the pieces of inventory of the standing reserve,