for the scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), and becomes, for the human—finally stepping forth in his true form as technologist, i.e., for the human who a priori sees the particular being in the horizon of usability – a “greenspace.” It can no longer appear in the objective neutrality of an over against [Gegenüber]. There is no longer anything other than standing reserves: stock, supplies, means.
The ontological determination of standing reserve (of the being as material supply) is not permanence (the steady persistence), but rather orderability, the constant possibility of being summoned and ordered, that is, the persistent standing-at-one’s-disposal. In orderability, the particular being is posited from the ground up and exclusively as disposable—disposable for consumption in the planning of the whole.
One of the essential moments in the way of being of contemporary beings (in disposability according to a plan-driven consumption) is replaceability, the fact that—in a game that has become universal and where anything can take the place of anything else—every being becomes essentially replaceable. The industry of “consumer” products and the predominance of the replacement make this empirically obvious.
Today being is being-replaceable. Already the idea of “repair” has become an “anti-economical” thought. It is essential for every being of consumption that it be already consumed and thus call for its replacement. We have here one of the forms of the atrophy of the traditional, of what is transmitted from generation to generation. Even in the phenomenon of fashion, what is essential is no longer embellishment and adornment (fashion as embellishment has thus become just as anachronistic as mending), but instead the replaceability of models from season to season. A piece of clothing is no longer changed as soon as and because it has become damaged, but rather because it has the essential character of being “the outfit of the moment in expectation of the next.”
In regards to time, this characteristic results in current affairs. Persistence [Dauer] is no longer the constancy of the traditional, but rather the continual novelty of incessant change. Did the slogans of May 1968 against consumer society go so far as to recognize in consumption the current countenance of being?
Only modern technology makes possible the production of all these economic standing-reserves. It is more than a fundamental condition, it is the ground itself and therefore its horizon; hence that artificial material which increasingly replaces the “natural” material. There, too, nature withdraws as nature . . .
It is not sufficient, however, to determine these realities ontically. What stands in question is that modern man finds himself henceforth in a fundamentally new relation to being—AND THAT HE KNOWS NOTHING OF IT.
In positionality, the human is challenged forth to comport himself in