THE “INVENTORY” is the collection and reconfiguration of all entities, through which they are transformed into resources or STANDING RESERVE, and stored or placed in such a manner that they are on call and available to be used, combined, and reconfigured in whatever way we see fit. The German term Gestell, translated here as “inventory,” means in colloquial use a “shelf” or “rack.” For Heidegger, the term is meant to capture what is essential about TECHNOLOGY – namely the way that the technological understanding of being discloses everything as orderable into an inventory or reservoir of options, and strives to transform everything into a stock of goods:
Let us at long last stop conceiving technology as something purely technical, that is, in terms of the human being and its machines. Let us listen to the demand placed in our age not only upon human beings, but also upon all entities, nature and history, with regard to their being. What claim do we have in mind? Our whole human existence everywhere sees itself challenged – now playfully and now urgently, now breathlessly and now ponderously – to devote itself to the planning and calculating (and navigating) of everything. . . . Human beings are challenged, that is, ordered to secure all entities that matter to them as the stock for their planning and calculating. . . . “The inventory” [das Ge-Stell] is the name for the collection [effected by] this challenge which delivers the human being and being to each other in such a way that they alternately set each other in place. (GA11:43/ID 34–35)
The inventory is thus an artificial setting-everything-into-place that allows endless forms of combination and reconfiguration. For a more detailed discussion, and alternative translation, of Heidegger’s notion of das Ge-Stell, see the entry on SYN-THETIC COM-POSIT(ION)ING.
Mark A. Wrathall
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