Technique and capital: a brief criticismo of the heideggerian gestell from Baudrillard

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to compare the approaches on technological processes of two philosophers: Jean Baudrillard and Martin Heidegger. The thread of the analysis is the intersection between technology and capital, through the forms of production and goods. The notion of Gestell in Heidegger is presented as the essence of technique, and seeks to understand its particular mode of unveiling. The Heideggerian approach also highlights the way in which technique summons us, and our impossibility of seeing it as a means to ends. Baudrillard investigates not only the production of instrumentality itself, but traces in political economy the commodity-form as a model by which objects are produced in relation to the very materiality of each sociohistorical context. Baudrillard's approach makes the technical-capital relation interdependent, and to some extent indiscernible, and thus allows for adeeper understanding of the way in which we constitute meaning in dealing with this instrumentality.