Syn-thetic com-posit(ion)ing – in short, com-positioning – is “the gathering, the integration of all the modes of placing, positioning, and positing that impose themselves upon the human being to the extent that it ex-sists today” (GA15:388/FS 74).1
Syn-thetic com-posit(ion)ing – in short, com-positioning – is “the gathering, the integration of all the modes of placing, positioning, and positing that impose themselves upon the human being to the extent that it ex-sists today” (GA15:388/FS 74).1 There is a subtle ingenuity latent in Heidegger’s defining the essence of modern technology by a single hyphenated word, Ge-Stell. In the last two decades of his life, Heidegger repeatedly explains what Ge-Stell is, and repeatedly insists on sharply distinguishing this sense from the everyday senses of Gestell, as in Büchergestell (bookcase) and Brillengestell (eyeglasses frame). It must therefore be emphatically asserted that Ge-Stell is simply not “frame, framework or enframing,” the current English translations drawn from German–English dictionaries. What then is Ge-Stell in its global essentiality? It is, in Heidegger’s breakdown of this single word, “the gathering unity of all the ways of setting in place, positioning, positing [Stellens]” (GA15:366/FS 60).2 “The prefix Ge- [in Ge-Stell] speaks to the gathering, unification, bringing-together of all the kinds of positing and positioning” (GA15:391/FS 75).3
Against the current English favorite of “enframing,” I therefore propose an etymological translation of Ge-Stell from its Greek and Latin roots as “syn-thetic com-posit(ion)ing,” where the Greek-rooted adjective “synthetic” adds the note of artifactuality and even artificiality to the synthesis of positions and posits. For me, Ge-Stell as “syn-thetic composit( ion)ing” presciently portends the twenty-first-century globalizations of the interneted World Wide Web with its virtual infinity of websites in cyberspace, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), interconnecting air traffic control grids, world-embracing weather maps, the 24/7 world news coverage of cable TV networks like CNN, etc., etc., all of which are structured by complex programming based on the computerized and ultimately simple Leibnizian binary-digital logic generating an infinite number of combinations of the posit (1) and non-posit (0). The synthetic compositing of binary-digital logic thus maps out the grand artifact of the technological infrastructure that networks the entire globe of our planet Earth.
1 Citation from 1973 Zähringen seminar. The same point was already made in a rich note circa 1955, whose first sentence reads: “Im Wort ‘Gestell’ spricht die Versammlung des Stellens, in der ‘Versammlung’ spricht das Echo zum Logos, im‘Stellen’ spricht das Echo der Thesis (Poiêsis)” (GA76:320; see also 327, 365).
2 The citation is taken from the seminar at Le Thor in 1969.
3 Citation taken from the seminar at Zähringen in 1973.
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