Heidegger On Ontology And Mass Communication.pdf

I DLE T ALK : O NTOLOGY AND M ASS

C OMMUNICATIONS IN H EIDEGGER

David Dwan

In Human all too Human Nietzsche outlined the philosophical challenge

presented by modern media systems. ‘The press, the machine, the railway,

the telegraph’, he opined, ‘are premises whose thousand-year conclusion

no one has yet dared to draw’. 1 All of these objects constitute a media circuit

which challenge old certainties about community, communication and

subjectivity. While others might have failed to syllogise upon the premises

of the press, Nietzsche did not hesitate to draw his own conclusions about

the brave new world of journalism. ‘Just look at these superfluous people’,

shouts Zarathustra, ‘they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour

one another and cannot even digest themselves’. 2 A similar rage appears

later in Zarathustra : ‘Do you not see the souls hanging like dirty, limp rags?

- And they also make newspapers from these rags!’ Under the influence of

newspapers, spirit has become ‘a repulsive verbal swill’ (196). In the Gay

Science , Nietzsche also equated journalism with the ‘prostitution of the spirit’. 3

This degeneracy of the spirit he also condemns in Beyond Good and Evil ,

when he focuses on ‘the newspaper-reading demi-monde of the spirit’. 4 Here

he also presents ‘parliamentary imbecility, including the obligation upon

everyone to read his newspaper at breakfast’, as examples of European

nihilism (138). In Human all too Human he sadly surveys ‘the press as it is

now, with its daily expenditure of lungpower on exclaiming, deafening,

inciting, shocking - is it anything more than the permanent false alarm that

leads ears and senses off in the wrong direction?’(287).

One might view Nietzsche’s anti-journalistic polemic as a set of local

prejudices that remain marginal to a more properly philosophical enterprise.

Nevertheless, the newspaper acts as a key metaphor in Nietzsche’s texts,

sustaining a series of substantial - if implicit - claims about the constitution

of subjectivity. Nietzsche suggests that newspapers remove the conditions

for authentic subjectivity, although it is a matter of some doubt whether any

subject which requires conditions anterior or extrinsic to itself is not already

doomed to heteronomy and inauthenticity in Nietzsche’s eyes. In criticising

newspapers, Nietzsche criticises a vulgar, expressive subject who requires

affirmation in the eyes of others. The clichéd vocabularies of ‘spirit’ in which

this expressivity is couched merely confirms a subjective lack; self-expression

is akin to vomit, while the hackneyed effusions of the expressive ‘soul’ merely

confirm the latter’s absence. Here the verbose self is comparable to ‘dirty

limp rags’; it is a radically heteronymous creature as fragmented as it is

soiled and second-hand. Those who consume such vomit also effect a turn

1. Nietzsche, Human

all too Human

( HTH) , R.J.

Hollingdale (trans),

Richard Schacht

(introd), Cambridge,

Cambridge

University Press,

1996, p378.

2. Friedrich

Nietzsche, Thus

Spoke Zarathustra

( TSZ ), R.J.

Hollingdale (trans),

London, Penguin,

1961, p77.

3. Friedrich

Nietzsche, The Gay

Science ( TGS ), Walter

Kaufmann (trans),

New York, Vintage,

1974, p103.

4. Friedrich

Nietzsche, Beyond

Good and Evil

( BG&E ), R.J.

Hollingdale (trans),

Michael Tanner

(introd), London,

Penguin, 1990,

p203.

I DLE T ALK 113

5. Martin Heidegger,

Nietzsche IV: Nihilism

( NIV ), David Farrell

Krell (ed), Joan

Stambaugh, David

Farrell Krell and

Frank A. Capuzzi

(trans), New York,

Harper & Row,

1982, p47.

from the self; they hungrily devour others but ‘cannot digest themselves’.

Newspapers, it would appear, constitute a network of heteronomy and

preside over a collective abdication of the self. Whatever the truth of these

comments, Nietzsche helped to introduce the newspaper as an object for

truth or philosophical reflection. In the genre of philosophy, Nietzsche

installs the newspaper as the basis of the philosophical aside, which is only

superficially viewed as an aside to philosophy.

Martin Heidegger takes his cue from Nietzsche in his use of a

philosophical vocabulary within which the newspaper features as a significant

metaphor. Indeed, in his lectures on Nietzsche Heidegger cites with approval

his precursor’s critique of a media-saturated age: ‘Around the year 1882 he

says regarding his times, ‘‘Our age is an agitated one, and precisely for this

reason, not an age of passion; it heats itself up continuously, because it feels

that it is not warm - basically it is freezing … In our time it is merely by

means of an echo that events acquire their ‘greatness’ - the echo of the

newspaper.”’ 5 Heidegger’s advocacy of Nietzsche’s anti-journalistic polemic

may seem relatively insignificant. His pronouncements on the press mark

perhaps a momentary abandonment of philosophical high seriousness and

should be interpreted in that spirit. Or we might conclude that the thorough

banality of these views removes any basis for a critical engagement with

them. According to Jürgen Habermas, ‘Heidegger’s critical judgements …

on the dictatorship of the public realm and the impotence of the private

sphere, on technocracy and mass civilisation, are without any originality

whatsoever because they belong to a repertoire of opinions typical of a certain

generation of German mandarins’. 6

Heidegger’s pronouncements about mass communications are, it seems,

banal in themselves and partake in the very idle talk he professes to despise.

However, I want to argue that when his local criticisms of media systems are

related to his philosophy as a whole, they succeed in raising some

fundamental questions about the nature and coherence of that enterprise.

Thus, while this essay is primarily concerned with Heidegger’s ontology

(and its engagement with mass communications largely incidental to this

more general concern), the decision to use Heidegger’s views on modern

media systems as an interpretative avenue into his philosophy is not an

arbitrary one. Heidegger’s pronouncements about mass communications

(and technology in general) reflect his wider commitment to being a

philosopher of our public life. According to his student, Hans-Georg

Gadamer, Heidegger radically overhauled academic philosophy after the

war; he challenged its position of disengaged transcendence and succeeded

in rendering philosophy meaningful to a disillu sioned generation. 7

Philosophy, it seemed, could once again contribute to the practical task of

living and could attempt solutions or, at the very least, lend a determination

to problems common to us all. The ‘problem of technology’, in particular,

exercised Heidegger and his entire generation. Moreover, he was intensely

concerned about the way technology, through the aegis of media systems,

6. Jürgen Habermas,

The Philosophical

Discourse of Modernity

( PDOM ), Frederick

Lawrence (trans),

Cambridge, Polity

Press, 1987, p140.

7. Hans-Georg

Gadamer,

Philosophical

Hermeneutics ( PH ),

David E. Linge

(trans and ed),

Berkeley, Los

Angeles and

London, University

of California Press,

pp229-230.

114 N EW F ORMATIONS

encroached upon our everyday speech-environments. In Heidegger’s eyes

technologies such as radios and newspapers distorted social interaction and

damaged the communicative tissue of our world. He had considerable

difficulty, however, in identifying with any precision the nature of this damage

or the agencies through which it might be addressed.

As we shall see in the course of this essay, Heidegger produces different

and often incompatible views of mass media throughout his career. These

shifting and contradictory attitudes record transitions in his overall thought.

They also reflect, I shall argue, Heidegger’s broader difficulty in lending

his ontology a critical function or a normative dimension. Not only does

Heidegger’s personal commitment to philosophy’s public vocation demand

this engagement, but it is a logical requirement of his own published

philosophical views. If Dasein is always concern-fully absorbed in its world,

if care is a primordial attitude from which all other dispositions derive,

then philosophy cannot coherently exempt itself from this attitude of care.

How we care about media systems, therefore, raises questions not simply

about the application of a philosophy to everyday life-issues, but also the

logical consistency of this philosophy. Heidegger’s difficulty in responding

to the problem of media systems or even identifying what kind of problem

it constitutes, reflects, I shall argue, a more general ambiguity in his work

concerning the status of problems as such. We shall explore the conceptual

nature of this difficulty in some detail later in the essay, but we can begin to

sketch out its lineaments by considering the rival interpretations he offers

of mass media in the modern world.

Heidegger arrived at two diametrically opposed accounts of the ‘problem’

of media systems. The first view, which he adopted in Being and Time , presents

newspapers and radios as symptoms of das Man or what is often translated

as ‘the they’. These technologies constitute a media circuit which connives

against identity. This circuit is neither a subject nor an object, but is a sort

of black hole in which these predicates lose all meaning. Oswald Spengler

described the press as ‘a monstrous intellectual Something’ and Heidegger’s

das Man is characterised by an equally sublime anonymity. 8 As the medium

in which das Man moves, newspapers are a site of indeterminacy and a radical

dispersal of meaning. This is inauthentic being. Many commentators have

disputed whether inauthenticity operates as a descriptive or normative

category, but since Heidegger challenges this very distinction in Being and

Time , it seems contrary to the spirit of the work to re-install it here. Within

this context Heidegger strikes a distinctly Nietzschean pose. Authenticity

can only be reclaimed when Dasein rescues itself from this anonymous verbal

drift and grounds itself as a self-determining and self-accountable entity.

Authentic Dasein distinguishes itself thereby from those newspaper readers,

who, as Nietzsche put it, cannot ‘digest themselves’. Heidegger returned to

this point in a later lecture and insisted that the ‘superman’s appearance is

. . . inaccessible to the teletypers and radios dispatches of the press’. 9

But Heidegger was also one of Nietzsche’s most formidable critics. Not

8. Oswald Spengler,

The Decline of the

West , Vol. II:

Perspectives of World-

History ( DOTW ),

Charles Francis

Atkinson (trans) ,

London, Allen &

Unwin Ltd., 1928,

p460.

9. Martin Heidegger,

What is Called

Thinking ? ( WICT ),

F.D. Wieck and J.

Glenn Gray (trans),

New York, Evanston,

and London, Harper

& Row, 1968, p72.

I DLE T ALK 115

only did he distance himself from Nietzsche, but he also produced alongside

this critique an assessment of media systems, which, although equally

scathing, was wholly at odds with his earlier views. If newspapers produce

the catastrophe of subjectivity and objectivity in Being and Time they constitute

their highest apotheosis and greatest triumph in Heidegger’s later work.

Newspapers, in other words, collude with the modern subject in its ruthless

objectification of the world – that is the reduction of the world to the status

of brute objecthood. To understand this claim, we need to contextualise

Heidegger’s later views on newspapers within his wider assessment of

modernity. ‘The period we call modern’, according to Heidegger, ‘is defined

by the fact that man becomes the centre and measure of all being. Man is

the subiectum , that which lies at the bottom of all beings, that is, in modern

terms at the bottom of all objectification and representation’( NIV 28).

Nietzsche, according to Heidegger, stands within this tradition as modernity’s

greatest and last metaphysician. Heidegger concedes that Nietzsche is one

of the most skilled critics of the metaphysics of subjectivism - a tradition

which predicates a subject and an object as the generative basis for its own

conversations. Nietzsche criticised subjectivism’s commitment to moral and

epistemological certainty, insisting that the will to certainty impedes the

will to power. He repudiated its model of truth convinced that the

hypostatisation of being as presence forecloses all possibilities of becoming.

But Heidegger remains convinced that Nietzsche’s critique is ultimately

conducted in the name of a higher-order subjectivity - a subjectivity that no

longer requires such metaphysical ballast in order to sustain itself. According

to Heidegger, the category of the subject is an illusion that presides over

the real domination of the earth. He does not offer modifications of the

subject; he does not choose to emphasise the more significant modalities of

subjectivity to which subjectivism, itself is blind, but aspires to exceed the

metaphysics of subjectivism tout court.

Now while Nietzsche presented newspapers as the antithesis of authentic

subjectivity and Heidegger tended to adopt a similar view in Being and Time ,

the later Heidegger often presents media systems as wholly complicit with

the metaphysics of subjectivism. If the ‘absolute objectification of … being

as such results from the self-fulfilling dominion of subjectivity’ then

newspapers extend this dominion ( NIV 242). As Heidegger put it in his

Nietzsche lectures, ‘“journalism” identifies the metaphysical securing and

establishment of the everydayness of our dawning age … through which

everyone is provided with the ever-useful objectivities of the day. At the

same time, it reflects the self-completing objectification of beings as a whole’

( NIV 241). Heidegger, in other words, enlists newspapers in his general

account of modernity as the reign of the Ge-Stell - a subjectivist ordering of

the world. Under the dominion of the Ge-Stell only those items which affirm

the subject’s pre-conceived categories and purposes are admitted to the

order of representation over which newspapers preside. Oswald Spengler

had already outlined the way newspapers ‘determine “the truth”’, insisting

116 N EW F ORMATIONS

that what it obtains is ‘just its truth ’; the later Heidegger adopts a similar

view but insists that the ‘truth’ of the newspaper is also the ‘truth’ of a

subjectivist metaphysics ( DOTW 461). By reducing truth to representation

newspapers collude in the positivistic reduction of the world to the present-

at-hand. The world is presented as an object prior to and independent of

language, in a way that depletes the world of its history and blinds us to the

world-disclosive properties of language. Language now becomes a simple

tool or a useful mediator between two ‘objective’ or present-at-hand entities.

The subject wields a tool-like language and fails to consider how the subject

is the instrument of language itself. Newspapers intensify this reification of

language and prepare the way for the conquest of the world as picture.

Congealed thus into an object from which the subject stands removed, the

world loses its history and historically variegated aspect:

Everything is levelled to one level. Our minds hold views on all and

everything, and view all things in the identical way. Today every

newspaper, every illustrated magazine, and every radio program offers

all things in the identical way to uniform views … The one-sided view…

has puffed itself up into an all-sidedness which in turn is masked so as to

look harmless and natural. But this all-sided view which deals in all and

everything with equal uniformity and mindlessness … reduces everything

to a univocity of concepts and specifications the precision of which not

only corresponds to, but has the same essential origin as, the precision

of technological process ( WISCT 33-34)

While the Heidegger of Being and Time had emphasised the indeterminacy

and vagueness of media, he now emphasises its ‘precision’ - the ‘precision

of technological process’. Mass communications are part of an expansive

industrial circuit which begins with the forester who produces the raw product

for paper and ends with ‘newspapers and illustrated magazines’. The latter,

according to Heidegger ‘set public opinion to swallowing what is printed,

so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand’. 10

Communicative interaction is now hypostatised to the level of object for the

purposes of mass consumption. According to Heidegger, modern cybernetics

typifies this kind of objectification. ‘Cybernetics’, as he put it, ‘transforms

language into an exchange of news. The arts become regulated-regulating

instruments of information’. 11 The notion of language, congealed into an

object and reduced to its function was already implicit in the concept of

‘information’ for some time. Walter Benjamin, for instance, noted a similar

reification of language, in his account of the decline of storytelling in an

age of information. 12 Heidegger suggests that information systems such as

newsp apers pre side over what he iden tified as the ‘epoch of the

unconditioned and complete objectification of everything that is’, which

begins with the ‘self-fulfilling metaphysics of subjectivity’( NIV 241).

Heidegger thus reduces the premises of the press, which Nietzsche had

10. Martin

Heidegger, The

Question Concerning

Technology and Other

Essays ( QCT ), New

York, Harper & Row,

1977, p18.

11. Martin

Heidegger, Basic

Writings ( BW ), David

Farrell Krell (ed),

revised edition,

London, Routledge,

1993, p434.

12. Walter Benjamin,

‘The Storyteller’, in

Illuminations ,

Hannah Arendt (ed.

and introd), Harry

Zohn (trans), New

York, Harcourt

Brace and World,

1968, pp83-107.

I DLE T ALK 117

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