Questions
Concerning Music Technology
What does "narrow focus on technology" mean? The notion that the
power of technology is an aid in our daily practical life and that it has
no influence on our being comes from and leads to the belief that technology
is a decontextualized, autonomous dimension. In other words, technological
progress would be independent of social and cultural processes, but would
still have a strongest impact on them. Society, then, would appear partially
dependent on extra-social factors, and the development of technology would
follow a sequence of refinement stages obeying only to technical necessity,
along a linear path from less to more efficient tools. This is what the
critical theory of technology proposed by Feenberg [1991] terms technological
determinism.
Decontextualizing technology validates the concept that technology is neutral
to the goals it can serve, and that the undesired consequences of technological
progress (e.g. the blind devastation of the natural environment, or, with
a musical parallel, the planetary diffusion and deaf consumerism of music)
are exclusively as the users' (ir)responsability. "Technological determinism
draws its force from this attitude" [Feenberg, 1995, p.8]. Speaking
of the essence of technology - rather than an anthropological, historical
concept of technology - Heidegger is speaking of something separate from
the cultural and social environment, contextless. Not by chance he sees
cybernetics (alias computer science, alias artificial intelligence) as the
final incarnation of a particular philosophical tradition, that of metaphysics
[Fabris, 1988; Dreyfus, 1979/1992, pp.72 and 212].
This can be seen as an attitude peculiar to the humanists' position, but
actually it turns out to be the same as the technocrats'. Decontextualising
technology is in the interest of those who rule the industrial business
of technology. Their job takes advantage of the blindness and the narrow
focus proper to the humanists' view. It also takes advantage of the bias
of technology to reinforce the particular knowledge and the particular purposes
it is put to serve: A specific technology always supports a specific hegemony
as it "offers a material validation of the cultural horizon to which
it has been preformed" [Feenberg, 1995, p.12; see also Feenberg, 1991,
p.14].
On the one hand Heidegger's position lends itself to a naÔve, romantic
rebellion against the primacy of technological rationality. On the other
it converges with the position supposed to be the enemies'. In actuality
the two parties (the humanists and the technocrats) equally contribute to
establish technological determinism as a form of ideology typical
of modern Western culture. To believe that we could let technology enter
our life and yet let it not penetrate our being is to neglect that the design
of workable tool captures and validates someone's knowledge and concerns
about how technology could or should enter our life. It is to neglect that
technology is more than means to an end (with Heidegger's own words)
and a way to adfirm a particular view or theory.
As far as artistic endeavors are concerned, that negligence prepares the
ground for the belief that the domain of tÈchne would not be the
artist's affair at all, but a catering of stockpiled resources meant to
give her/him the power to solve practical problems in creating pieces of
art. A composer, then, would turn to the computer just to overcome the problems
raised by her/his autonomous, creative imagination, in order to eventually
realize the musical ideas born in her/his mind with the maximum of efficiency
achievable. Although this may seem quite reasonable, I believe this is a
simplistic account and alternatives should be explored, as discussed below.
(4) I do not (only) mean political hegemony,
but more in general the establishement of a particular piece of knowledge
or theory and the related cultural implications. As an example, a computer
program which allows for writing music in common music notation reflects
and supports the hegemonic opinion that composing is writing; however, this
can be (and has been since the birth of musique concrete in the 1940s) a
questionable view.
