To try to bring this back to the present: I want to say quickly, and this will have to be just asserted, that the history of artistic modernism and the history of modern technology can both be seen as a kind of infinite approach to this regulative ideal of the intuitive intellect. Artistic modernism tends toward the erasure of content, of specific meaning, and the pursuit of pure form; there are various accounts of this but a representative one would be Michael Fried’s notion of absorption and modernism’s increasingly desperate battle against “theatricality.” Technological modernity, and we could take Heidegger’s account as representative here, tends toward the transmutation of nature into the instrumental, that which is “ready-to-hand” and always-already useful, in other words, purposive as such. These accounts stretch back to the beginnings of scientific modernity, but something happens in the middle of the 20th century, and it’s no accident that this narrative starts coming in to focus around then; Heideg…