Page 237 - Cyberculture and New Media

228 Technology on Screen
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extent that the aestheticization of life to which film has contributed, has now
moved us beyond enframing.
“Thus, for Heidegger , the mode of representation involved in the Greek
techne is a mode of unsecuring that is non-instrumental , and thus more
closely related to artistic production (poeisis) than to the production of
modern technology, which regulates and secures the world in instrumental
terms. The world is thus set in place (gestellt), which is why Heidegger
figures the essence of modern technology, its mode of representation as a kind
of Enframing [Ge-stell]. Thus, while Enframing stresses setting in place,
regulating, and securing, the emphasis in techne is on setting free, on
unsecuring, on allowing the world to be brought forth in non instrumental
terms... In a high-tech world, then, the proliferation of technological
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reproducibility begins to outstrip the ability to resecure it.”
Rutsky’s argument suggests that the distance between poiesis and
techne as set out by Heidegger has been breached within a postmodern
setting that is characterized by the re-adoption of technology into the artistic
process. Technology is viewed as having slipped its leash - its constant
renewal and reinvention making it impossible to secure within a bureaucratic
discourse of the kind which characterised modernism.
The film texts considered here acknowledge the possibility of film
as a discursive practice that is characterised neither by enframing nor poiesis,
but a movement between the two. This fluidity operates in a manner that
exposes relations of cause and effect to perpetual critique wherein the real
and symbolic are seen as confluent and not divergent.

Notes

1
Michel Foucault, 2004b: 120
2
Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2001) and Baudrillard, J
The Precession of the Simulucra in Simulations (1983)
3
The four causes are (1) causa materialis (2) causa formalis (3) causa finalis
(4) causa efficiens Heidegger, (1977): 6
4
Michel Foucault, 2004a: 48.
5
Gilles Deleuze, G (1995): 97.
6
Gilles Deleuze, G (1995): 96.