Technology and Pierre Schaeffer: Pierre Schaeffer's Arts-Relais, Walter Benjamin's technische Reproduzierbarkeit and Martin Heidegger's Ge-stell

Abstract

Pierre Schaeffer's notion of Arts-Relais highlights aesthetic fissures in the passage from manual to mechanical techniques of sound production, fixation and reproduction. The Arts-Relais ‘instrument’ is a case of what Walter Benjamin terms technische Reproduzierbarkeit, and there is a close resemblance between the two roles of that instrument and the two manifestations of technische Reproduzierbarkeit as expounded by Benjamin. Furthermore, the Arts-Relaisinstrument materialises the shift from ‘older handwork technology’ to that technology which, in the words of Martin Heidegger, unlocks, transforms, stores up, distributes and switches about the energies of nature, and whose essence he terms Ge-stell. Heidegger's ‘sinking of the object into the objectlessness of the standing reserve’ (a feat of Ge-stell) intersects Benjamin's ‘decline of the aura’ (a feat of technische Reproduzierbarkeit), but while the decline of the aura paves the way for art as political praxis, the sinking of the object into the objectlessness of the standing reserve elicits from Heidegger an invitation to a return to the golden age of Greek techne. Is this not praxis too? And how does Schaeffer respond to Heidegger's invitation?

As befits an Homage to Schaeffer, this essay improvises ‘new uses for things originally meant for something else’ (Schaeffer and Hodgkinson 1987: 5), according to the rule of bricolage: to make do with whatever is at hand (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 17). A new structure is invested with disused remnants of old structures (Genette 1963: 37), as practised by the savage mind, structural thinking, musique concréte and Oswald de Andrade's antropofagia (Andrade 1928). One saves up by not making it to measure at the cost of a double operation: analysis (extraction of various elements from organised ensembles) and synthesis (organisation of these elements into a new ensemble where ultimately they will be entirely detached from their original functions).