Heidegger’s Technology Essay and the Uncanniness of Τέχνη

In recent decades, Heidegger has become an increasingly marginal voice in technology studies, discredited by his supposed technological determinism, nostalgia and monolithic abstractness. While this assessment is not without textual basis, it can be shown that Heidegger’s position bucks against it in many respects. By situating the exoteric discourse of the 1954 essay “The Question Concerning Technology” in Heidegger’s decades-long interrogation of τέχνη as skill and knowledge, this article argues that the task the essay assigns to poetry involves a confrontation not simply with the industrial artefacts of modernity, but furthermore with ingrained habits of human cognition and practice. The uncanniness of technology is originally the uncanniness of τέχνη that Heidegger had earlier expounded in his exegeses of a choral ode from Sophocles’ Antigone. Underneath the conventional anti-modernist complaints regarding the alienation induced by power plants and jet aircraft is thus a more disturbing and idiosyncratic claim concerning the alienness of know-how and ethical judgement to what it means to be human at all for Heidegger.