Heidegger, Wordsworth, and the Anecological Nature of Technology

Heidegger’s essays about technology (“The Age of the World Picture” and “The Question Concerning Technology”) seem radical in the way they push the notion of technics not only beyond mere instrumentality but also beyond human agency and civilization. But they also seem to harbor a certain nostalgia when it comes to a historical division between premodern and modern paradigms. In a similar fashion, Wordsworth’s late sonnets on the impact of the railway (“On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway” and “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways”) seem to show signs of a thought-provoking ambivalence between an escapist attitude and a more radical thought of technology, conceived uncannily as an “offspring” of nature. The minute reading of these texts (both with and against their authors) might have far-reaching implications for the conceptualization of an “anecological” notion of both nature and technology, one which no longer relies on, and even precedes, the received notion of the “household” ( oikos ) as an economy based on balance, but allows for asymmetry, irreversibility, or incalculable mutation. (GYF)