“ When the tool is most a tool, it recedes into a reliable background of subterranean machinery. Equipment is invisible. Furthermore, tools do not occur in isolation. Their meaning is determined by their definitive role in a referential contexture, their position in this reality. A single hammer can be magnificent against soft wood, useless against metallic surfaces, and a lethal horror to many insects. In this way, the tool is what it is only with respect to the system it inhabits; there is no such thing as ‘an’ equipment. Equipment is total, or contextural. What this tells us is that equipment, insofar as it is currently in use, is never something merely present-at-hand. Some part of the physical tool may stay in view, but its action necessarily withdraws into a totality that in principle can never become visible. The tool is the execution of a reality or effect that necessarily retreats behind the presence of any surface. But this reality is not merely negative, as though self-concealment were its most striking feature. The tool is a force that exists rather than not existing, a reality that has emerged into the world and set up shop. Of course, in the strict sense we should not speak here of tools, but rather of a single unitary world in action.”
- from Phenomenology and the Theory of
Equipment
By Graham Harman
© 1997
How does this passage relate to M/s? In a sense the slave is part of the equipmental totality of the Master’s world. As part of that sense the slave is a force that exists predominantly in self-concealment as part of the equipmental context. The slave, like the tool, is the execution of a reality that necessarily retreats.
What does this say about high vs low protocol M/s relationships? Indirectly the retiring nature of the slave as tool would tend to point to a more subtle enslavement that requires no overt protocol in order to maintain its sense of being.
