Essence of Technology? Additional knots in this labyrinths of meaning of technology and spirituality
And of course, Heidegger and his essence of technology...What is so enigmatic about Heidegger? Is it his charismatic way of writing, a combination of poetry and analytic philosophy? Anyway, essence is what needs to be taken into the account of meaning. As we move along the landscape of ideas, we tend to miss essential moments of technocultural intersections. And this is where Heidegger comes into play.so essence...of technology is enframing..something that orients humans towards their destiny, something that frames destiny into meaning..."as a destining, it banishes man into that kind of revealing which is an ordering" (p.27). Hmm, ordering is some ultimate goal as in Noble's analysis...Order is what we want. Predictability and Mastery. What about chaos theory?
Nevertheless, this illusion of the mastery has been so powerfully constructed that it becomes reality. Agamben would say that this reality is what closes humanity in perceptual worlds, it is what separates them from animality or the open space of relationships. This illusion has its roots in the biblical myths of man dominion over nature. This illusion makes technology. This is what rules the anthropological machine. "...the posture of lord of the earth..In this way the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists insofar as it his construct..This illusion gives rise in turn to one final delusion:it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself" (Heidegger 27). This mirrored reality makes us the machine more humane...becomes a reflection of our values and motivations...It is an illusory, yet, real construct that empowers humans as humans. Perhaps, we need some other than human entity (not nature) but something constructed or created to feel all the power of being humans. It is the other that makes the self, at the end of everything. The other can be a machine that represents self's ideas. So the self is perfected with this other's constructed reflection.
Yet, Heidegger, admits that "man never encounters his essence"....Essence is something slippery, something that is not easy to realize or understand. The problem is not technology, but the essence of technology. Human essence reveals itself in a human-constructed essence of technology. And here is where a potential danger hides. The danger "of enframing [that] 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.."(28). This is what frightens us. Perhaps, in order to manifest something, to create and to reveal, something always has to be destroyed first, concealed..destruction and creation are those two poles that are bind together beyond any dualistic constructions. This is why Heidegger quotes some poet: .."where danger is, grows the saving power also..."

Timeline of Ideas or Incarnation of Meanings of Technology
From Noble's The Religion of Technology to Heidegger, we travel through the landscape of ideas on technology. WHat is technology in relation to one's being, in relation to humans quest for knowledge? How do those ideas manifest themselves within the cultural discourse?
Noble illustrates a historical analysis of ideas, or rather ideological history of technology. Quest for knowledge to transcend the reality has been manifested by the means of technology. Religious underlying basis for this quest is a some sort of justification for technological development. Humans have been given this divine role to dominate nature in order to gain true knowledge of its laws to attain transcendence. As we can see they have been truly successful in its endeavor...windmills construction incarnated into aviation machinery, alchemy has been turned into chemistry, taxonomies into human genome project...secrets of the heart of matter into nuclear engineering..and the list goes on and on as we keep living on the planet, the global sacred.
As life changes with new technological tools, so does the culture and society. Once sacred becomes profane in this dynamic universe of meaning. But sacred attains new meanings. And these new meanings constitute new type of relationships. We move from spheres to globes as it says in Global Sacred, from reciprocal relations to abstracted communications. Digitization of human consciousness has occurred. The image of the globe as an object in empty space gives us a new meaning of life.Now we can look upon as opposed to look from within. Boundaries have been re-shaped and re-defined. We are now in,on, and above this new global sacred. Image of the planet is like a vaccine for altered states of mind and imagination. It is open for interpretation. Whatever we think life is, or life is about, we impose upon this image to gain entry into this global sacred. For example, corporations took this vaccine, Now they are able to move their commodities all over the world to gain efficiency and profit. Global Sacred is now a global sacred economical premise that rules globalization. Environmental movement has also taken this vaccine. Now we all care (or at least pretend to care) about global warming because we all share this global space and each of us is responsible for life per se. Global sacred has been put into a global agenda of environmental management, politics, education, economics...'modern consumer culture exploits the ambiguity of global images,completing the sign with its own, brand-specific signifers" (Szerszynski, 167).
Sacred is what defines boundaries of unknown, mysterious, and yet, familiar and domestic..It is not transcendence but empirical reality that needs to be taken into the account.
Indeed, global sacred is a new leap forward towards new consciousness. Harraway would call it an expansion of cybernetic, a hybrid of human and machine, nature and culture...Agamben would probably call it closed openness, where humans are faced with the reality of probability, yet, uncertain and finite. Noble would probably point out that the image of the globe does represent american missionary ideology, puts them in a position of a provider of meaning...a control base for justice...Nevertheless, it is sacred...Technology has brought sacred meaning to the whole notion of life.
We as members of a society also contribute to this meaning-making process, to the whole of cultural machine (or anthropoligcal machine). We participate in it, we get influenced by its constructed reality; we take part of its constructive processes, we become a part of it..we are it..I would like to end this blog with Donna Harraway's quote:
"The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate us or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries, we are they"..(in Cyborg Manifesto..)