Graham Harman (2002:§1) – império-utilitário global

The next major feature of equipment is its totality. The tool is never found in isolation, but belongs to a system: “Taken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment. To the being of any equipment there always belongs a totality of equipment, in which it can be this equipment that it is.” Here again, there is the danger of rushing into facile agreement with Heidegger. The crux of the matter does not lie in the observation that equipment is always found in conjunction with related items, a superficial claim easily snuffed by any master of counterexample. What is essential is that at the level of readiness-to-hand, the idea of a single tool reposing in its solitary effect is shown to be untenable. Instead, individual equipment is already dissolved into a global tool-empire.

Bolts and wires taken alone enjoy a rather minimal reality. In combination with thousands of other minutely engineered pieces, they blend into the composite visible equipment known as a bridge. But these tiny devices would bring about an utterly different state of affairs if reassigned elsewhere, whether as scrap metal or as segments of a bomb. The reality of the tool-pieces is different in each of these cases. Although we know ontically that most equipment has enduring substantial parts that can be separated and removed, we do not yet have a legitimate way of importing this fact into Heidegger’s ontology. On the level we have currently reached, there are no individual tool-pieces with discrete personalities, but only totalitarian machines that have already enslaved their pieces in the name of a more encompassing reality. Bolt and wire are the specific equipment that they are only within the system they currently happen to occupy: suspension-system, explosive-system. In the case now under discussion, the being of the individual pieces is swallowed into the larger framework of the bridge.

In turn, the bridge as a whole is not a self-evident, atomic finality; rather, it functions in numerous different equipmental ways, swept up into countless larger systems. Usually, it enacts an official plan of efficiency, shaving ten minutes from the drive around a bay. But in certain regions of the world, separating hostile factions, it is monitored by snipers. The bridge can be the unforgettable site of a fateful conversation (nostalgia-equipment), the location of a distant relative’s suicide (memorial-equipment), or perhaps it is simply stalked in a troubling insomnia. It is an object of study for architectural critics or material for sabotage by vandals. In the lives of seagulls and insects, it takes on altogether different aspects.

The key is not to argue that there are independent objects that mean different things “depending on the context,” which would be to slip once more into the naturalistic error we have encountered twice already. The crucial point is that at any given moment, every tool is plugged into certain limited systems of machinery while excluded from others: for Heidegger, equipment is its context. And furthermore, even this context is manifold, since bird and sniper encounter the bridge as different realities in precisely the same moment. Every implement exerts a determinate and limited range of effects in each instant, and is equally determined by the equipment that surrounds it. The tool gives birth to one particular world of unleashed forces, and no other—even if that world is mirrored in an indefinite number of perspectives. I might point out that even the most insignificant shard of metal is not without importance, since it at least enacts the effect of “harmlessness.” Placed elsewhere, it might take on a disastrous role: causing illness if ingested, ruining an engine when inserted at decisive temperatures.

The totality of equipment means that each tool occupies a thoroughly specific position in the system of forces that makes up the world. Or to be more precise, the totality of equipment is the world; not as a sum of ontic gears and levers, nor as an empty horizon in which tool-pieces are situated, but as that unitary execution in which the entire ontic realm is already dissolved . The action of individual tools has already receded from view, as it exerts its force against all other equipment, even if only by remaining at a safe enough distance so as not to impede or damage it. We cannot presuppose the notion of the tool as an impenetrable, self-sufficient unity that shifts between contexts, for this is already to view it from the standpoint that Heidegger has worked to discredit. This would be to offer an implicit theory of substance existing independently from the relations in which it is involved. Nothing could be more foreign to Heidegger’s philosophy, or indeed to any of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century, who as a rule earned their living with a thoroughly relational theory of reality. One of the unconventional claims of this book is that this relational theory has already performed its historical mission, and is now burdening us with its own excesses. A theory of substance is inevitably reborn from the ashes of Heidegger’s criticism, as I will argue in chapter 3. But first things first: it is impossible to understand Heidegger without seeing that he believes he is annihilating all possibility of independent objects existing in a vacuum outside the world of relations, functions, significations. For him, the tool in the reality of its labor belongs to a world-system, one that has swallowed up all individual components into a single world-effect. It is only from out of this system that specific beings can ever emerge. The world of tools is an invisible realm from which the visible structure of the universe emerges.