Questions
Concerning Music Technology
How could a composer never ever interrogate her/himself about her/his own
tÈchne and still presume to get her/himself and her/his followers
any kind of relationship to technology (whether free, in Heidegger's sense,
or else)? A reasonable answer would seem to be that the work of art reflects
a particular view of technology and a more general worldview in its aesthetic,
expressive qualities, independently of the processes by which it has
been created. However, this answer can be regarded as an obvious manifestation
of the assumptions implicated in a standard notion of technology. To subscribing
to it would be to disregard a novel criterion available in evaluating and
undersanding eletronic art: the observable coherence between the worldview
emerging in the objects the artist creates and the worldview embodied
in the process of making those objects, i.e. in the artist's tÈchne.
The making and the existing of a work are both bearers of
meanings, visions and (socially, culturally, politically relevant) stances.
It is hoped that the visions and stances born by the former and the visions
and stances born by the latter are mutually consistent.
Composers who leave the realm of their own tÈchne untouched and unquestioned
implicitly support technological determinism as they accept and publically
state - albeit silently and perhaps unconsciously - that technology is a
decontextualized entity or process to be exploited in the service of autonomous
artistic purposes. I've tried to show that doing so they actually let a
wrongly presumed extra-social factor transform their - and our - life and
being.
Finally, the very claim that the domain of tÈchne is and should be
external to the domain of artistic creation is suspect. "If we choose
to leave something untouched by technology, is that not a subtler kind of
technical determination?" [Feenberg, 1991, p.10 (his emphasis)]. If
we choose to consider art as an enrichment of our overly technologized and
impoverished life (like Heidegger, the humanists and the technocrats propose)
are we not using art as a kind of supertechnology? Can we bound the technical
sphere of art making and leave it unquestioned, if this bounding is itself
an instrumental act? As a matter of fact this would be a way to
solve a problem - the problem of preserving human creativity and spontaneity
from the evils of technological understanding. And yet it could only reinforce
technological undestanding and contributes to the marginalization of artistic
endeavors in the social context.
