R.L.Rutsky,
High Technê: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman.
Minnneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
ISBN 0 8166 3356 8 (pb)
192pp
US$17.95

(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press)

Uploaded 1 March 2001

How is one to situate this book? Does it look forward or back? Is it of this century or the last? What does it offer the study of cinema in the face of technological changes that are making possible new forms of cinema, drawing upon images, computers and software as much as actors, cameras and film, to create new spaces of imagination? The great lesson of the Information Revolution, with the Internet and Napster as exemplars, is that ubiquitous digital technology empowers people to initiate massive changes that are as unpredictable as they are irresistible. There is a need for theory and aesthetics that can at least keep up with this revolution, rather than lagging behind snapping at its heels.

Appearing at the end of the first full century of cinema, High Technê looks back to the insights of early twentieth century theorists like Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and others to develop an approach to aesthetics in our contemporary techno-culture. Rutsky does invoke more recent thinkers, such as Fredric Jameson, Andreas Huyssen, Donna Haraway and William Gibson, but there is a strong sense in the early chapters of a paradigm that flourished 50 years ago. For example, can we still usefully talk about an essence of technology a lá Heidegger, who longed nostalgically for a fantasized feudalism through conceptual lenses derived from Catholic scholasticism and who never renounced Nazism, but chose instead to subsume it under a metaphysical reading of history in which ‘American technology’ figures as the true threat? Rutsky seeks to deal with this issue by offering a revisionist view of “essence” as “a dynamic, ongoing process or movement” (6) that “dismantles” or “unsecures” the world (105), but this reconceptualization betrays Heidegger’s clear intention to lay hold of the unchanging core of technology by offering a tendentious reading of Greek philosophy.

Rutsky is alert to iconic events in cinema and cultural history. He discusses at length the significance of Metropolis (1927) (still echoed today in films like The Fifth Element (1997), Dark City (1998), and The Matrix (1999)) and offers a reconstruction of the spirit of the original, drawing on the novel Metropolis by Thea von Harbou who was Fritz Lang’s wife as well as his screenwriter. Rutsky frames his discussion in terms of the quasi-Christian concept of the Mediator that is so prominent in the film (eg., Freder as the mediator between his father and the workers, the heart as mediator between the hands and the brain, the mediation of masculine and feminine, etc). This leads him to argue that Hitler mediates maternal and paternal qualities in a manner reminiscent of Freder so that “the Führer, like Freder, promises…access to both: the resolution of a gendered modernity, of sexual difference, into an androgynous whole – the National Socialist state.” (64) One feels that such metapolitical speculations are taking Rutsky away from the core of his argument and also out of his depth. Significantly, Rutsky omits discussion of the influence on Metropolis of H.G.Wells, whose works The Time Machine, The Sleeper Wakes and A Story of Things to Come clearly influenced Lang and von Harbou. Wells, whose orientation was humanistic and socialist, saw technology in terms of science and class, while Lang and Harbou saw it in terms of metaphysics and Weimar-era angst. Wells denounced Metropolis in 1927 as the silliest film he had ever seen. There is a lesson here that Rutsky could note.

Rutsky also discusses what he calls the “avant-garde technê” and its relationship to functionalism, drawing upon examples from architecture and film. He argues, for example, that the “reification of technological form [implicit in functionalism] is the result of the extension of rationalization to the aesthetic sphere,” (83) and that this is followed by a further shift from a view of technology as instrumental to a view of it as form. He then addresses the implications of virtual reality (VR), seen as the idealized invisible technology, that is ubiquitous but also so subtle in its presence that it is indistinguishable from real reality, which it represents in digitized form (111). The aesthetics of VR are quite complex, indeed paradoxical, as its perfect realization must be expressed in its utter self-effacement. This is an argument that could well be deployed in the analysis of contemporary VR films like The Matrix. In his final chapter Rutsky develops a critique of ‘technological fetishism’ by applying Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism and notes the absence of awareness of the exploitative working conditions that have made much of the Information Revolution possible, and “the fear that human beings will themselves become mere objects or tools: slaves to technology, cogs in the machine, technologized zombies.” (146)

Ultimately, High Technê leaves behind its initial preoccupation with arcane German philosophy and the conundrums of critical theory. The fervid and fecund world of the techno-culture possesses a momentum that simply overwhelms finely-drawn abstractions and hands-off contemplation and instead delivers technology. Despite the intelligence of its various discussions, High Technê leaves one wondering whether the future of humanity’s encounter with technology really is illuminated by an academic preoccupation with arcane German philosophy and the conundrums of critical theory. into the hands of the masses to unleash the inchoate imagination and creativity that lies there. To his credit, Rutsky seems to appreciate this where he explores the “techno-cultural unconsciousness”. He distinguishes this from the invisible hand of capitalism, and assimilates it instead to Freud’s notion of the Id with its powerful dynamics that are both irresistible in their demands and unpredictable in their effects: “technology is neither an external instrument nor simply a threatening, uncontrollable other, but a promising generative process that, however monstrous or alien it may seem, is already ongoing within us.” (153) This is an important insight as we develop an aesthetics of the high-tech world-to-come.

Mervyn F. Bendle