Page 230 - Cyberculture and New Media

Alev Adil and Steve Kennedy 221
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former relates to an essential aspect of technology which draws on human
creativity to give form and function to material artefacts. This union of
human creativity and material production had, according to Heidegger,
become stretched as technology increasingly brought the world under control
as standing reserve, or as a resource waiting to be utilized. The result of this
has been a distancing between mankind, the natural world and technology.
The essence of technology instead of being present within poiesis then,
becomes characterised by what Heidegger called enframing: a mindset that
privileges instrumental logic and separates the creative arts from technical
production and material reality.
Thus technology, when exposed to an enquiry pertaining to its
essence, is not present in anything technological but must be viewed within
the context of its own discourse. The discursive practices which surround,
contextualise and bring technology forth are important and maybe even
primary. Within this context film can be seen as an instrument or a cause. But
it can also be seen as an end or effect in itself, as specific finished product.
When these two elements combine in films about technology or about film’s
relationship to other media/technologies, our analysis reveals something of
the essence of technology.
The relationship between discursive practice and the material or
‘real’ world was further developed by Michel Foucault. In The Order of
Things Foucault demonstrated how language and things became detached. He
said:
The Profound kinship of language with the world was thus
dissolved. The primacy of the written word went into
abeyance. And that uniform layer, in which the seen and
the read, the visible and the expressible, were endlessly
interwoven, vanished too. Things and words were to be
separated from one another. The eye was henceforth
destined to see and only to see, the ear to hear and only to
hear. Discourse was still to have the task of speaking that
which is, but it was no longer to be anything more than
4
what it said.

This dissolving does not mean however that there is no longer any
meaningful relationship between ‘reality’ and representation as argued by
Baudrillard and Žižek, but stresses the change in that relationship; a change
in the order. The position here is that rather than existing as pure simulacra or
representation, film as discourse has a serious role in informing the ‘real’ and
the material – stressing the correlative not the causal. In support of this a
better interpretation of Foucault’s position comes from Deleuze, who points
out: