TECHNOLOGY
itself, what remains lies exposed. Beyng as relationality abandons beings to the world. Relationally opened by abandonment, the being is left exposed in a world of others. Beings are abandoned to themselves.
Beings are abandoned to the world, and this means they are abandoned into machination. As so abandoned, “the being then appears thus, it shows itself as object and present-at-hand, as if beyng did not essence” (GA 65: 115/91, tm). Machination names the constellation of forces that struggle for the objectification and presence of the world, performing the continual work of abandonment. As such, beings appear as objects present-at-hand and machination sets in place a whole support system to ensure that they be treated as such (“Machination and constant presence [beständige Anwesenheit]”; GA 65: 107/85). Machination names “an interpretation of beings in which their makeability comes to the fore, so much so that constancy and presence [Beständigkeit und Anwesenheit] become the specific determinations of beingness” (GA 65: 126/100).2
Despite appearances (“. . . as if beyng did not essence”), machination names “a type of essencing of beyng” (GA 65: 115/91; 126/99, tm). What appears under the aegis of machination comes forward as objective, but can never fully attain this. Beings ape objective presence in a denial of their condition, as if abandonment had not taken place, as if there were no withdrawal, no essencing, or, in other words, no world. The “as if” that Heidegger includes here points to the ineluctable fact of essencing, that even objectivity remains a way of being, a showing of beings, an exposure in contact with the beyond, and, thus, an openness and irrevocable exchange with world. In the epoch of abandonment, beings put on a performance of objectivity as though all the world were a stage, something duly noted by Heidegger: “Stage [Bühne]—the formation of the actual [des Wirklichen] as the task of stage-designers!” (GA 65: 347/275, tm). The world constructed by the stage-designers is a world of complete, actual, and objective presence. It is a world of objects readied for scientific investigation, and Heidegger does not fail to trace the role of “theory” in modern science back to its Greek source in thea, “the look, the outward appearance,” emphasizing the very staging of presence that concerns us: “Thea (cf. theater)” (GA 7: 46/QCT 163, tm).
But the “as if” in Heidegger’s claim (“. . . as if beyng did not essence”) entails that machination and objectivity nonetheless remain ways in which beyng essences. Objectification could be seen as the way in which the essencing of being is misconstrued, a way in which the abandoned character of beings is overlooked, but also a way in which this essential abandonment is left intact. Indeed, in this stage play where beings are paraded around as objects, machination can even be seen as a preservation of this essencing of being. In keeping with the theatrical
2 In these references to “constancy” (Beständigkeit) we find the first inklings of what will become the thinking of the standing reserve (das Bestand). The shift in the role of the term identifies the transformation in Heidegger’s thinking in a nutshell. At the time of the Contributions, the notion of Beständigkeit is still indiscernible from objectivity. With the thinking of positionality in the late 1940s, the Bestand is anything but objective; instead it undergoes an endless circulatory replacement.