Outtake: Utilizing Heideggerian Concepts: Freighting Anti-Semitism?

Writing any text can be fraught with challenges and consequences of the writing process. When writers are near completing that process, both appreciation and fear can become part of their culminating experience: appreciation for engaging in meaningful experiences, and fear of others not accepting or appreciating their work. However, what happens when a respected colleague challenges a group of committed scholars to reconsider one of their primary theoretical constructs? This is the question we, the authors of a soon-to-be-published text, confronted near the completion of our book.

As we came to the end of the long process of creating a critique, an unraveling of the Assessment Industrial Complex (Tenam-Zemach et al., 2021), a scholar we all admire and respect provided feedback that challenged us to reflect and look deeper at the conceptual grounding we had utilized. One central component of our analysis used the concept of enframing developed by Martin Heidegger in Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger, 1977). As a phenomenological tool, enframing has power. It provides a lens through which to consider phenomena as consciously experienced and as free as possible from common sense or the preconceptions that limit our understanding. Enframing, along with other tools including antiracism, commodity fetishism, symbolic violence, advanced capitalist markets, neoliberalism, and the political economy of powerlessness, all helped us to unravel the implications of the Assessment Industrial Complex (AIC) and its impact on education. Enframing took on a problematic aspect as we were encouraged by a respected colleague to abandon Heidegger’s work as a tool for our efforts.