Let’s have a mind and raise flowers.

              Gestell as a framework is, as with other systems of control, concerned with boundaries, and the sites of difference. At the boundaries of objects, power exchange and maintenance can be overseen and moderated. Necessary for the systems of taxonomic and bodily control is an integrity or stability of the objects’ essence and the strict delimitation and division of that which is to be controlled. Human bodies, if given over to Gestell are partitioned into components of a machinated system of function where performance, production and reproduction, are allied with ontology. Under this rubric, individuals of a given pre-ordered body whose specifications align with another’s physiology, are conceptually and practically interchangeable. Donna Haraway however states that there “is no ground for ontologically opposing the organic, the technical, and the textual.”[1] Bodies, as gender and sex have been earlier also noted, are societal endeavors continually under construction whose integrity disappears into overlapping territories of biology, culture, technology, and myth. Haraway’s approach to bodies is located within feminist biosocial theories which have rendered strong boundaries of bodies and their technological artifacts obsolete. Here, bodies are shown to be mutually and co-dependently adapted along with the tools created long before the Homo sapiens, and bodies’ creative self-determination continues through the tools employed in relation to the shared social world and the beings in one’s environment.

            The ontological overlap depicted by Haraway is suggestive of Heidegger’s discourse on environment, equipmental structure, and others as primarily seen in Being and Time’s fifteenth paragraph. There Heidegger writes in an expression of the ontological overlap of environment, artifact, and social world; or the inextractible conjunction of primordial Umwelt and Mitwelt, “Any work with which one concerns oneself is ready-to-hand not only in the domestic world of the workshop but also in the public world.”[2] In our dealings [Umgang] we go about in within the purposeful Umwelt, the work world of “in-order-to” that is ‘closest’ to Dasein’s everydayness. Previously, the entities we encounter in the world had been posited as ‘things’ [res] and misconstrued as individual articles, and Heidegger proffers that each artifact involved in the ‘in-order-to’ exists within an equipmental totality, so that there is one structure of ‘equipment’ of which there are only various expressions. There is no isolated task, and all work points to further work; the goal of another goal, the ultimate of which is ‘the sake of Dasein’. Equipment [Zeug] is a collective noun for all of the gear and accoutrements we face and has two principal characteristics; first that all gear, tools, and labor point to Dasein as the end. Work and serviceability is always with the end of Dasein in sight, not the reverse. Secondly, Zeug includes our dealings with Nature, giving meaning and purpose to one’s surroundings so that the ‘natural’ is endowed with an ‘in order to’ that also points back to Dasein. Seeing the wind as ‘wind in the sails’ and a river as a source of power is a part of the valueless and morally neutral technological mode constitutive of Dasein and reveals that the ‘natural’ world is never met without being laden with meaning and culture. The sciences’ retreats from ‘Nature as Zeug’ results in the contextless abstraction [Vorhanden] of the present-at-hand where the “botanist’s plants are not the flowers of the hedgerow; the ‘source’ which the geographer establishes for a river is not the ‘springhead in the dale’”[3] which in Haraway’s warning is when the ‘objectively natural’ is privileged with the default cultural hegemonies.

            The artifacts and environing elements having shown themselves to be of a larger structural whole, and subject to Dasein’s influence and meaning making, so too does technology reveal itself to overlap with Being-with-others. Heidegger writes that Mitwelt, nature, and and shared cultural meaning are intimately correlated; the municipal utilities of water and electricity, the transportation infrastructure all bear the influence of Being-with-others complete with historical meanings and interpretations of culture-what Haraway would call the ‘mythical’. Again, as Heidegger writes, any task in the private workshop is inseparable from the ‘public world’; this is related to the everyday They-self for as an artifact within the equipmental structure is already given the meaning and direction which bears the past inscriptions of others. One introductory example of this phenomenon is the ‘south wind’ whose natural and presumably meaningless occurrence is in fact given cultural naming and history bearing significance in its humanly named southerly origin. The public orientation of history, meaning, and most significantly dating and time are bound into the heavenly bodies of sun and stars comprising what Heidegger calls the ‘sky’. It is necessary to note that for Heidegger, the environment is a non-spatial feature of the ontological concept of worldhood and all of the constitutive ontological features of worldhood are upon which equipment is founded. “That by which things are thus dated is available environmentally and yet not restricted to the world of equipment with which one currently concerns oneself. It is rather the case that in the world the environing Nature and the public environment are always discovered along with it.”[4] This is to say that by worldhood as an existentiale preceding the meanings of the ‘in-order-to’ gives them over to the thrownness, the weight of tradition in everyday discourse, and the possibility for an authentic modification.

            Two examples of artifacts can serve the purpose of illustrating Heidegger’s and Haraway’s existential description of the overlap of sociality, technology, and nature. First is that of the clock; factical Dasein finds itself in its everyday mode given to detemporalize itself through the natural clock of public signs in the sky, but has also the technological innovation of the clock in its own way mimicking the detemporalizing features inherent in time-keeping. “As time-reckoning is perfected and the use of clocks becomes more refined, this making-public gets enhanced and strengthened.”[5] Past innovations’ collaborative and cumulative effects have changed the world Dasein faces in terms of its own detemporalization. With the encounter of clocks, as well as other technologies in one’s world, one faces the Other, the das Man, possibilities for both further enframing and authenticity. The second is the image of a boat which Heidegger states brings Others to us, even if the boat, its owner, and creators are unknown to us. Being-in-the-world cannot support clear delineations of Others from artifacts whether we passively observe them, as a boat along a shore or utilize them ourselves, we are faced with the Other. Writes Heidegger: “along with the equipment to be found when one is at work [in Arbeit], those Others for whom the ‘work’ [“Werk”] is destined are ‘encountered too.’”[6] In terms of Levinas’ analysis, this expands the social and ethical determinations beyond merely the encounter of the face. Here, with the integration of Dasein, Others, and technologies, one’s ethical considerations for the other are just as present in our dealings and tasks regardless of the ‘presence’ of the Other; our artifacts and technologies are always with-Others, thoroughly blurring boundaries that biology and the sciences would construct.