VLVL2 (15): A Frame around 'Em ..

[monroe at mpm.edu]

"The smartest kid Justin ever met, back in kindergarten, had told him to
pretend his parents were characters in a television sitcom.  'Pretend
there's a frame around 'em like the Tube, pretend they're a show you're
watching.  You can go into if it you want, or you can just watch, and not go
into it.'  The advice came in especially handy when they go to McCarran
International and found some service workers out on strike, and a picket
line.  'Uh-oh,' said Frenesi.  Uh-oh, went Justin to himself.  His mom
didn't cross picket lines--she told him someday he'd understand." (VL, Ch.
15, p. 351)


"a frame around 'em"

p. 351 "Pretend there's a frame around [your parents], pretend they're a
show you're watching..."   Once again, TV is America's common reference
point.

http://www.mindspring.com/~shadow88/chapter15.htm

Cf. ...

Heidegger, Martin.  The Question Concerning
   Technology and Other Essays.

http://www.harperacademic.com/catalog/book_xml.asp?isbn=0061319694

Heidegger ... chases the word techne and the concept of technology into
their ancient origins in hopes of cornering them there, of revealing
something about our relation to nature as manifest in one of our principal
human activities.

Specifically, Heidegger is investigating the essence of modern technology
and whether the malady of modernity he presumes in this essay is a function
of some modern perversion of the technological essence he locates in the
Greek culture, or something inherently dangerous and denaturing. He attempts
to outline what technology is, and then to determine whether modern
technology isn't some perversion of this original, more basic enterprise.

Once he has established technology as a revealing that humans do, a sort of
bringing-out of nature, he goes on to suggest that the particularly modern
type of revealing, which he calls Gestell, from "frame", has as its goal a
more perverse form of revealing; the kind of revealing that modern
technology does of nature is a "challenging"; Nature is not revealed as to
its essence but is instead "ordered", or interrogated for its concealed
energy. Only that part of Nature that is revealed as "standing reserve", as
energy that can be appropriated, is revealed, and in this way the
unconcealedness of Nature itself is mitigated, or blocked, by being directed
in these narrow aims....

The result of this different sort of revealing embodied in modern
technology, this challenging, is what Heidegger calls in one of his central
metaphors, an "enframing", or "Gestell." 

Enframing means the gathering together of that setting-upon that sets upon
man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of
ordering, as standing-reserve. Enframing means that way of revealing that
holds sway in the essence of modern technology and that is itself nothing
technological.

Heidegger asks whether this technological stance comes from man or in some
way precedes man, and concludes that this spirit of gestell -- or revealing
of Nature only in its standing reserve in a way that almost totally obviates
the possibility that Nature will be unconcealed in its full, manifold forms
-- is something people do only when they are themselves challenged in this
same way. In other words, Heidegger says, our talk of "human resources" and
an adequate "supply of patients" testifies to the way in which we humans
have already been subordinated to Technology's revelation of things in their
orderliness, as "standing-reserve."

http://www.brownhen.com/2002_10_27_backhen.html

And see also, e.g., ...

http://maven.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/heidegger/terms/gestell.html

http://maven.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/heidegger/guide6.html

http://maven.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/heidegger/index.html


McCarran International

http://www.mccarran.com/


"Uh-oh"

p. 351 "'Uh-oh,' said Frenesi."    Frenesi refuses to cross the airport
picket line. This is a bit on the too-little-too-late side for a
professional class-traitor, but it's also quite believable

http://www.mindspring.com/~shadow88/chapter15.htm