‘The university as a hackerspace’: Can interventions in teaching and learning drive university strategy?

I have been invited to the Jisc Digital Festival this year as an ‘expert speaker’. Here is the abstract of my talk. It reflects on Jisc-funded projects I have led at Lincoln and introduces a new initiative I am working on to develop a Masters level research degree, codenamed: ‘The university as a hackerspace’.

The University of Lincoln has explored opportunities as diverse as the potential of open data, developed a research data infrastructure, nurtured student developers and developed a research-led approach to teaching known as the student as producer, to name a few. However, these projects and initiatives have not been throw away experiments. Rather, they have helped inform the University’s new Digital Education Strategy aimed at meeting the needs and improving the experience of its students and researchers at a time when the idea and purpose of the university is being challenged. This session will provide an overview of some of the innovative projects and initiatives the University of Lincoln has undertaken in the past few years and how universities can explore approaches to teaching and research support, while helping inform the institutional mission and strategy. It will also provide an opportunity for managers, learning technologists and teachers to discuss the potential for such an approach at their institution and to share relevant experiences and ideas.

Reserve army of labour

The Machine and Unemployment by Paul Herzel c.1935
The Machine and Unemployment by Paul Herzel c.1935

“…it is capitalistic accumulation itself that constantly produces, and produces in the direct ratio of its own energy and extent, a relativity redundant population of labourers, i.e., a population of greater extent than suffices for the average needs of the self-expansion of capital, and therefore a surplus population… It is the absolute interest of every capitalist to press a given quantity of labour out of a smaller, rather than a greater number of labourers, if the cost is about the same. In the latter case, the outlay of constant capital increases in proportion to the mass of labour set in action; in the former that increase is much smaller. The more extended the scale of production, the stronger this motive. Its force increases with the accumulation of capital.” (Marx, Capital Vol. 1)

Wikipedia: Reserve army of labour

“…to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time…” (Marx, Grundrisse, 705)

“Marx contrasts value, a form of wealth bound to human labor time expenditure, to the gigantic wealth-producing potential of modern science and technology. Value becomes anachronistic in terms of the system of production to which it gives rise; the realization of that potential would entail the abolition of value.” (Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, 1993, 26)

A co-operative university

The Social Science Centre

In 2011, I helped set up a co-operative for higher education. It began as an idea that my colleague, Mike Neary, and I had been discussing the previous summer, and was partly influenced by the network of social centres that exist across the UK and elsewhere. In May this year, the co-operative had its second AGM and we are currently running a Social Science Imagination course for the second year, two arts-based community projects, as well as regular public talks. You can read more about the Social Science Centre (SSC) in a recent article published in Radical Philosophy. The SSC remains an experiment – on our own terms a successful one – that has allowed its members to not only teach and learn at the level of higher education, but also, reflect on, discuss and critique alternative and utopian forms of higher education. In academia, we might formally describe the SSC as an ‘action research‘ project:

Action research is simply a form of self-reflective enquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own practices, their understanding of these practices, and the situations in which the practices are carried out (Carr and Kemmis 1986: 162).

I shall return to this in a moment.

Free software, free society?

Since 2007, I have worked at my local university where I focus on the role of technology in higher education. My work is a mixture of technical, theoretical and historical research, as well as some teaching and supporting staff and students in their use of technology. For many years, I have been interested in and an advocate for free and open source software and consequently, in 2008, I established and continue to run a large WordPress network at the university, too. Despite my advocacy for free and open source software, I am also quite critical of the technological determinism, cyber-utopianism and rampant liberalism that often characterises the discourse in this area. Nevertheless, the practice of collectively producing, owning and controlling the means of production remains a very important objective for me and any criticism I have of the free and open source software movement(s) and free culture movement in general, are so as to develop the purpose and practice of common ownership and collective production, and help defend it from being subsumed by the dominant mode of production i.e. capitalism: a highly productive form of social coercion for the private accumulation of value.

The WordPress network that I maintain at my university appears to be an example of the means of production being collectively produced, owned and controlled. It is used freely by staff and students across the university for publishing and communicating their work and providing services to other people. WordPress is ‘free software’ developed and shared under the General Public License (GPL). It has a large number of people from around the world contributing to the development of the software who mutually recognise the ‘copyleft’ terms and conditions of the license. As such, we can say that it is collectively produced and having installed WordPress at the university without the need for recurrent license agreements, we can say that my university owns the software that we run. The software runs on university servers and a small number of people at the university, including me, control our WordPress installation on behalf of all other users. Using this example of WordPress, we might say that the university reproduces, owns and controls a means of production (i.e., web publishing).

This is the aspiration for many free and open source advocates: to campaign for and promote the use of free and open source software among their friends, family, in public services and in their workplace. Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, campaigns for schools and universities to use free software. I think this is both necessary and good.

However, my aspirations go beyond the installation of free software in my workplace. Through my work and my involvement with the Social Science Centre, I have come to see that freedom in the use, study of, re-use, and distribution of technologies can co-exist with institutional, political and social structures that do not guarantee control over the means of production. In other words, a university might run nothing but free and open source software, but ownership and control over the means of knowledge production can remain unaffected. Committee structures, hierarchies among staff and students, ownership of the university’s capital, sources of funding, and institutional governance, can all function the same regardless of whether free and open source software is in widespread use.  Free software does not necessarily lead to a free society or a free university. It is in this sense, that we can observe that technology does not determine society, but that society shapes technology. The ‘freedoms’ offered by free software are clearly limited (only the wildest techno-utopian would disagree) and as Lawrence Lessig notes in his introduction to Stallman’s book, Free Software, Free Society, free software is as much an attempt to preserve existing freedoms, as it is to extend them: ““Free software” would assure that the world governed by code is as “free” as our tradition that built the world before code.” According to this statement, the free software movement aims to preserve the liberal status quo established before the early 1980s when “free software” emerged.

By contrast, as I’ve noted before, Christopher Kelty’s idea of a ‘recursive public’, appeals to me because it acknowledges that by defending something that we might value, such as free and open source software, we often find ourselves ‘recursively’ campaigning for underlying freedoms, such as open standards, open hardware, etc. and campaigning against that which threatens these objectives such as SOPA and PRISM. In this way, free software may actually, recursively, lead to a free society in that it politicises people who otherwise might not have questioned broader social and political forces. The contingent nature of this is important. Perhaps this is free software’s revolutionary potential. My point is though, that without more fundamental freedoms in society, free software does not offer freedom. Social, political and institutional structures can remain the same.

A co-operatively owned and governed university

This brings me back to the Social Science Centre and the idea of a ‘co-operative university’.

Thought of as an ‘action research project’, some members, including myself, are looking to take the next step in Lewin’s research cycle.

Lewin's action research steps

While not wishing to disrupt the continuation of the Social Science Centre in Lincoln, some of us are embarking on a second phase of research and action focusing on the idea of a ‘co-operative university’. The SSC is not a university but rather a co-operative model of free, higher education. It is a free association of people who come together to collectively produce knowledge. It is also a political project. We always intended that the SSC remains small and sustainable in recognition of our existing commitments of work and family, etc. However, the ideas and ambitions that our work on the SSC has produced are now more ambitious and have led to discussions among some of us around the idea of a ‘co-operative university’. We spoke with people about this at the ‘Co-operative Education Against the Crisis‘ conference organised with the Co-operative College in May and, as time allows, we have been reading and writing about the idea (e.g. here and here).

We are not the only people considering this. In August, the Times Higher Education magazine published a feature article about co-operative universities, focusing on Mondragon in Spain (and acknowledging the SSC). They ran a leading article about the idea, too. They referenced a field trip by Wright, S. et al (2011), who also visited Mondragon to study the university.

Unfortunately, there does not appear to have been very much written about co-operative universities over the years. Yesterday, I spent some time doing cross-catalogue and Google Scholar searches but it didn’t turn up very much (<< I will publish references I find via that link). There is, of course, a great deal of research into various forms of co-operatives, co-operative governance, co-operative history, education within the co-operative movement, etc. There was a special issue of the Journal for Co-operative Studies (2011, 44:3) which focused on co-operative education, though mostly schooling. A number of articles have been written about co-operative education in the state school system. Most recently, this reflects the growth of co-operative schooling as a real alternative to academy schools in the UK. A number of articles have also been written about ‘co-operative learning’, but do not appear to touch upon co-operative ownership and governance of higher education institutions, which I consider key to the idea of a co-operative university. Pedagogy based on the idea of co-operation is not enough. In my view, a co-operative university must encompass (1) co-operative ownership of the institution’s capital in common; (2) co-operative, flat and fully democratic governance; as well as (3) co-operative practices in research, teaching and learning.

My past work on ‘openness’ in higher education relates directly to collaborative (though not specifically co-operative) practices in research, teaching and learning, but as I have explained above, my interest is now shifting (recursively??) to academic labour and its role in co-operative ownership and governance within higher education. I see this as a direct and natural outcome of my work on the role of technology in higher education as we cannot fully critique and develop the role of technology without understanding the dialectical role of labour. I am certain that this will become more apparent to advocates of open education and open science as we all reflect on the affordances of open technologies and open practices in contrast to the limitations and constraints of existing  institutional and organisational models, themselves expressions of embedded social relations and political economy.

This was my reason for critiquing the work of Egan and Jossa, and, despite my reservations of Jossa in particular, I still regard a focus on co-operative production (i.e. ‘worker co-operatives’), to be the best way to “attack the groundwork” of the present political and economic system that higher education is part of.

If you are also working in this area or are interested in working with us on this project, please do get in touch. Co-operation cannot occur in isolation!

Student as Producer is hacking the university

With Dean Lockwood

This chapter discusses the Student as Producer project at the University of Lincoln and provides two case studies of how Student as Producer is infiltrating quite different areas of university life. The first discusses Student as Producer in the context of Deleuze and rhizomatic curriculum design, while the second looks at how the project is being applied to the development of an open institutional infrastructure, in which Computer Science students are redesigning and developing the tools used for research, teaching and learning.

Published in Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age

Download a pre-print of this chapter. It is partly based on a case study I wrote for JISC.

Notes on Heidegger’s ‘The Question Concerning Technology’

I absorb ideas better when I take notes. Here are my notes on Heidegger’s essay, The Question Concerning Technology 1. Elsewhere, there’s also a comprehensive guide to the essay and a useful blogged summary.

I’ve got to say, it’s one of the most difficult texts I’ve ever read, despite going between two translations in the hope of a little clarity. However, while he seems to spin a syntax of his own at times, Heidegger’s overall message is pretty clear and simple: The poetic roots of technology have been obscured by mechanisation that has compelled us to harness nature’s energy into an accumulated homogeneous reserve that conceals the true nature of things. In this world, humans too, have become resources, slaves to a process that constructs an appearance of truth rather than a revelation of the real. The solution is to question and confront technology through its forgotten roots in the arts.

Heidegger’s 32 page essay was originally a series of lectures he gave in 1949, entitled: The Thing, Enframing, The Danger, and The Turning. He begins by setting out the reasons for his questioning:

Questioning builds a way. We would be advised, therefore, above all to pay heed to the way, and not to fix our attention on isolated sentences and topics. The way is one of thinking. All ways of thinking, more or less perceptibly, lead through language in a manner that is extraordinary. We shall be questioning concerning technology, and in so doing we should like to prepare a free relationship to it. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology. When we can respond to this essence, we shall be able to experience the technological within its own bounds.

Heidegger is concerned with questioning the essence of technology and in particular, modern technology, which he understands as something different to older, pre-industrialised forms of technology. The difference, to put it crudely, is that our technological relationship with nature was once as one of steward but now is one of both master and slave. The purpose of questioning technology is therefore to break the chains of technology and be free, not in the absence of technology but through a better understanding of its essence and meaning. He suggests that there are two dominant ways of understanding technology. One is instrumental, to view it as a means to an end, while the other is to see it as human activity. He thinks they belong together.

For to posit ends and procure and utilize the means to them is a human activity. The manufacture and utilization of equipment, tools, and machines, the manufactured and used things themselves, and the needs and ends that they serve, all belong to what technology is. The whole complex of these contrivances is technology. Technology itself is a contrivance—in Latin, an instrumentum.

The current conception of technology, according to which it is a means and a human activity, can therefore be called the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology.

The instrumental view rests on a view of causality, which he breaks down into four Aristotelian causes: the material, the form, the end, and the effect. These four aspects of causality are in fact four aspects of ‘being responsible for bringing something into appearance’. They reveal that which was concealed. They are different but united by their revealing.

What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer: everything. For every bringing-forth is grounded in revealing. Bringing-forth, indeed, gathers within itself the four modes of occasioning— causality—and rules them throughout. Within its domain belong end and means as well as instrumentality. Instrumentality is considered to be the fundamental characteristic of technology. If we inquire step by step into what technology, represented as means, actually is, then we shall arrive at revealing. The possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in revealing.

Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth.

Discussing techné, the root of ‘technology’, he observes that it encompasses both the activities and skills of the craftsman but also the arts of the mind and fine arts and concludes that techné “belongs to bringing-forth, to poiésis; it is something poetic.” Techné is also linked with the word epistémé and Heidegger states that both words “are names for knowing in the widest sense. They mean to be entirely at home in something, to understand and be expert in it.”

Such knowing provides an opening up. As an opening up it is a revealing. Aristotle, in a discussion of special importance (Nicomacheun Ethics, Bk. VI, chaps. 3 and 4), distinguishes between epistémé and techné and indeed with respect to what and how they reveal. Techné is a mode of alethéuein. It reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie here before us, whatever can look and turn out now one way and now another. Whoever builds a house or a ship or forges a sacrificial chalice reveals what is to be brought forth, according to the terms of the four modes of occasioning. This revealing gathers together in advance the form and the matter of ship or house, with a view to the finished thing envisaged as completed, and from this gathering determines the manner of its construction. Thus what is decisive in techné does not at all lie in making and manipulating, nor in the using of means, but rather in the revealing mentioned before. It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techné is a bringing-forth.

Thus the clue to what the word techné means and to how the Greeks defined it leads us into the same context that opened itself to us when we pursued the question of what instrumentality as such in truth might be.

Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where alétheia, truth, happens.

Heidegger pre-empts the accusation that this view no longer holds true for modern, machine-powered technology.  In defence, he argues that modern technology, in its mutual relationship of dependency with modern physics, is also ‘revealing’.

Modern physics, as experimental, is dependent upon technical apparatus and upon progress in the building of apparatus. The establishing of this mutual relationship between technology and physics is correct. But it remains a merely historiological establishing of facts and says nothing about that in which this mutual relationship is grounded. The decisive question still remains: Of what essence is modem technology that it thinks of putting exact science to use?

What is modern technology? It too is a revealing. Only when we allow our attention to rest on this fundamental characteristic does that which is new in modern technology show itself to us.

However, the revealing of modern technology differs from that of earlier, non-machine-powered technology, in a fundamental way. It is not a revealing, an unfolding in the sense of poiésis, “the revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such.” He then leaps into some illustrative examples:

But does this not hold true for the old windmill as well? No. Its sails do indeed turn in the wind; they are left entirely to the wind’s blowing. But the windmill does not unlock energy from the air currents in order to store it.

In contrast, a tract of land is challenged in the hauling out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In sowing grain it places seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. It sets upon it in the sense of challenging it. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry. Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium, for example; uranium is set up to yield atomic energy, which can be unleashed either for destructive or for peaceful purposes.

This setting-upon that challenges the energies of nature is an expediting, and in two ways. It expedites in that it unlocks and exposes. Yet that expediting is always itself directed from the beginning toward furthering something else, i.e., toward driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense. The coal that has been hauled out in some mining district has not been produced in order that it may simply be at hand somewhere or other. It is being stored; that is, it is on call, ready to deliver the sun’s warmth that is stored in it. The sun’s warmth is challenged forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a factory running.

All technology reveals, but modern technology reveals not in the unfolding poetic sense but as a challenge; it sets upon nature and expedites its energy by unlocking it.

The revealing that rules throughout modern technology has the character of a setting-upon, in the sense of a challenging–forth. Such challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is in turn distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing. But the revealing never simply comes to an end. Neither does it run off into the indeterminate. The revealing reveals to itself its own manifoldly interlocking paths, through regulating their course. This regulating itself is, for its part, everywhere secured. Regulating and securing even become the chief characteristics of the revealing that challenges.

Once unlocked, this energy (raw or in the form of machine-powered technology) is held captive as a standing reserve. The airliner standing on the runway is a stationary object ordered to be ready for take-off. However, this apparent mastery over nature’s energy is no such thing because we are challenged, ordered, to act this way. We, in fact, like the airliner on the runway, are situated in the ‘standing reserve’ as human resources.

The forester who measures the felled timber in the woods and who to all appearances walks the forest path in the same way his grandfather did is today ordered by the industry that produces commercial woods, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose, which for its part is challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines. The latter, in their turn, set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand. Yet precisely because man is challenged more originally than are the energies of nature, i.e., into the process of ordering, he never is transformed into mere standing-reserve. Since man drives technology forward, he takes part in ordering as a way of revealing. 2

In this way, we are challenged by modern technology to approach nature “as an object of research” to  reveal or “order the real as standing reserve”. Heidegger refers to this as enframing. Enframing is the essence of modern technology.

Enframing means the gathering together of the setting-upon that sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the actual, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means the way of revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern technology and that is itself nothing technological. On the other hand, all those things that are so familiar to us and are standard parts of assembly, such as rods, pistons, and chassis, belong to the technological. The assembly itself, however, together with the aforementioned stockparts, fall within the sphere of technological activity. Such activity always merely responds to the challenge of enframing, but it never comprises enframing itself or brings it about.

There then follows a couple of pages which reflect on the relationship between physics and modern technology. As a 17th c. precursor to 18th c. modern technology, physics is a theory which sets up nature in a way that orders it in a coherent, self-serving manner. It is not experimental because “it applies apparatus to the questioning of nature.” The physical theory of nature is the herald of modern technology, which conceals the essence of modern technology. Technology then, in its essence as enframing, precedes physics.

Modern physics… is challenged forth by the rule of enframing, which demands that nature be orderable as standing-reserve. Hence physics, in its retreat from the kind of representation that turns only to objects, which has been the sole standard until recently, will never be able to renounce this one thing: that nature report itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and that it remain orderable as a system of information. This system is then determined by a causality that has changed once again. Causality now displays neither the character of the occasioning that brings forth nor the nature of the causa efficiens, let alone that of the causa formalis. It seems as though causality is shrinking into a reporting—a reporting challenged forth—of standing-reserves that must be guaranteed either simultaneously or in sequence… Because the essence of modern technology lies in enframing, modern technology must employ exact physical science. Through its so doing the deceptive appearance arises that modern technology is applied physical science. This illusion can maintain itself precisely insofar as neither the essential provenance of modern science nor indeed the essence of modern technology is adequately sought in our questioning.

Heidegger’s use of language (or rather the way it is expressed in English translation) can be difficult at times. In the remaining few pages he discusses what enframing actually is, building upon the idea that as the essence of technology, it is therefore that which reveals the real through ordering as standing reserve. As discussed above, we humans are challenged forth (compelled) by enframing to reveal the real in a seemingly deterministic way (Heidegger refers to this as destining) that holds complete sway over us. However, technology is not our fate, we are not necessarily compelled along an unaltered and inevitable course because “enframing belongs within the destining of revealing” and destining is “an open space” where man can “listen and hear” to that which is revealed. Freedom is in “intimate kinship” with the revealed as “all revealing comes out of the open, goes into the open, and brings into the open… Freedom is the realm of the destining that at any given time starts a revealing upon its way.” Freedom then, is to be found in the essence of technology but we are continually caused to believe that the brink of possibility is that which is revealed in the ordering processes of modern technology to create the standing reserve, deriving all our standards from this basis. Freedom is continually blocked by this process of the destining of revealing which obscures the real. This is a danger.

It is a danger because when the real is concealed it may be misinterpreted. When something is unconcealed it no longer concerns us as an object but, rather, as standing reserve “and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing reserve”. When the object is lost to the standing reserve, we ourselves become standing reserve and see everything as our construct, seeing not objects everywhere but the illusion and delusion of encountering ourselves everywhere.

In truth, however, precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself, i.e., his essence. Man stands so decisively in subservience to on the challenging-forth of enframing that he does not grasp enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, in terms of his essence, in a realm where he is addressed, so that he can never encounter only himself.

But enframing does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is. As a destining, it banishes man into the kind of revealing that is an ordering. Where this ordering holds sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing. Above all, enframing conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiésis, lets what presences come forth into appearance.

Enframing blocks the truth and destining compels us to create order out of nature which we believe is the truth. This is the danger, not of technology, which itself cannot be dangerous, but rather of the destining of revealing itself. Enframing, the essence of technology then, is the danger.

The threat to man does not come in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence. The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primal truth.

Drawing on Holderlin, Heidegger believes that technology’s essence contains both the danger (enframing) and its saving power. How is this so? Enframing is not the essence of technology in the sense of a genus, “enframing is a way of revealing having the character of destining, namely, the way that challenges forth.” Recall that the revealing that “brings forth” (poiésis) is also a way with the character of destining. By contrast, enframing blocks poiésis.

Thus enframing, as a destining of revealing, is indeed the essence of technology, but never in the sense of genus and essentia. If we pay heed to this, something astounding strikes us: it is technology itself that makes the demand on us to think in another way what is usually understood by “essence.”

As we have seen, the essence of modern technology for Heidegger is enframing and as its essence, enframing is that which endures. Enframing is “a destining that gathers together into the revealing that challenges forth.” But Heidegger also states that “only what is granted endures” and “challenging is anything but a granting.” So how can the challenging of modern technology be resolved into that which is granted and endures? What is the saving power “that let’s man see and enter into the highest dignity of his essence”? The answer is to recall that enframing need not only challenge forth but can also bring forth the revealing of nature.” The essential unfolding of technology harbors in itself what we least suspect, the possible rise of the saving power.”

Heidegger argues that “everything depends” on our ability and willingness to cast a critical eye over “the essential unfolding” of technology. That instead of “gaping” at technology, we try to catch sight of what unfolds in technology. Instead of falling for the “irresistibility of ordering”, we opt for the “restraint of the saving power”, always aware of the danger of technology which threatens us with the possibility that its revealing, saving power might be “consumed in ordering  and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealedness of standing reserve.”

So long as we represent technology as an instrument, we remain transfixed in the will to master it. We press on past the essence of technology… The essence of technology is ambiguous. Such ambiguity points to the mystery of all revealing, i.e., of truth.

Now at the end of his essay, we can see there are two possible direction one might take with technology:

On the one hand, enframing challenges forth into the frenziedness of ordering that blocks every view into the propriative event of revealing and so radically endangers the relation to the essence of truth.

On the other hand, enframing propriates for its part in the granting that lets man endure—as yet inexperienced, but perhaps more experienced in the future—that he may be. the one who is needed and used for the safekeeping of the essence of truth. Thus the rising of the saving power appears.

Heidegger concludes that technology once shared the root techné with a broader practice of poiésis. Technology (techné) brought forth and revealed that which was true and beautiful through the poetics of the fine arts. It is in the realm of the arts, therefore, that we can practice the questioning of technology in the hope of revealing the truth, which modern technology habitually conceals through the order it imposes on the world.

Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it.

Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection upon art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth, concerning which we are questioning.