TECHNOLOGY

excoriates in “Positionality,” cf. GA 79: 43/40). To think positionality as a frame casts it as something extractable from all that presences around us, and this is simply not the case. Positionality is no framework or scaffolding, whether as an external casing (a bookcase), a surrounding apparatus (a waterwell), or even an internally erected structure (a skeleton). More, it cannot be conceived as a collection of devices, like the rod and piston assemblies that Heidegger repeatedly mentions. Positionality is not something distinct from the presencing of beings, but rather is their very way of presencing in a post-modern era of circulative replacement.

a. Circulation, Rotation, Recurrence

“Positionality” is what enables the standing reserve to circulate, “positionality is in itself the reaping, impulsive circulation of the requisitioning of the orderable in the ordering” (GA 79: 33/32, em). But positionality “does not name something constant in the ordered standing reserve,” rather, “the circuit of ordering takes place in positionality and as positionality” (GA 79: 32/31). Positionality is not a structure, but a way of being; “positionality is the being of beings itself” (GA 79: 51/49). As such it forms the “essence” of the standing reserve. Where will to power is the essence, what exists does so as eternally recurrent, just as where positionality is the essence, what exists does so as standing reserve, which is to say, as circulative.

Positionality is consequently impulsive. Positionality “never merely piles up inventory. Much more, it reaps away what is ordered into the circuit of orderability. Within the circuit, the one positions the other. The one drives [treibt] the other ahead, but ahead and away into requisitioning” (GA 79: 33/31). Positionality drives the standing reserve ahead through the circuit of orderability. Heidegger goes so far as to define positionality itself in terms of this circular impulsion: “The collected positioning of positionality is the gathering of self-circulating impulse [Treibens]” (GA 79: 33/31).

Given this “essential” character of positionality, it comes as no surprise that the standing reserve depends on the circulatory system of positionality for its very existence. The pieces of the standing reserve are “loaded into and confined in a circuit of orderability” (GA 79: 36/34). They could not exist apart from this. Heidegger envisions what would happen if someone tried to remove the standing reserve from its circuits of orderability when considering a fleet of automobiles:

If one wanted to take away, piece by piece and all together, the pieces of inventory in a fleet [Bestand] of automobiles and put them somewhere