BULLETIN OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY / Feb-ruary 2001Ellul / REMARKS ON TECHNOLOGY AND ART

Remarks on Technology and Art

Jacques Ellul

It is not my intention here to formulate a philosophi-cal approach to the relation between art and technol-ogy. I shall not attempt to provide a generally validexplanation or even a sketch of that relation. Othershave already done so in anthropology (Leroi-Gourhan) and in philosophy (Hegel and his epigones).My aim is more modest: I think that a total transforma-tion of technology has taken place since 1945 and (as Ihave shown elsewhere) that our society has passed froman industrial era, not to some sort of “postindustrial”phase, but rather to a “technocratic” phase in whichtechnology influences everything, and has indeedbecome the chief determinant not only of man’s habi-tat but also of his history. This transformation haschanged art as well, and in no mean way: contempo-rary art is remote from what has for millennia beencalled art. Far from seeking beauty or meaning, it is nomore than a game, and all agree to define it so. Thisnew conception is the product of technology. Today arthas two main orientations, the first a direct reflectionof the increasing role of technology, the second a sortof explosive reaction against the rigor of technologicalthinking. In these brief pages I’d like to indicate howcontemporary art relates to modern technology and tolocate that art in the technocratic universe.

Art and Science

The relation between contemporary art and sciencehas not gone unexplored. In a remarkable articleSchlesinger has tried to show that science and art havethe same approach to reality. Heuristic strategies, thedirect examination of experience, the positing of more-or-less-fruitful hypotheses—art and science advanceside by side, in defiance of dogma and in quest of theexperience that can legitimate them. Science enablesus to restructure the external world, art to interpret ourexperience of that world. Both are sources of evolu-

tion, yet also means of evaluating that evolution, andboth produce a sort of permanent revolution. Clearlythis parallel is rather questionable, but what interestsme is precisely the fact that the correspondence and itstheoretical formulation have been the subject of somuch research; everybody seems convinced not onlythat science and art are closely related but also that sci-ence determines what modern art shall be: Schlesingereven attributes characteristics to art which by allaccounts would appear proper to science. There can beno doubt that the rule of science exerts an inescapableinfluence upon art. We know how much the SpecialTheory of Relativity altered our perception of the uni-verse; when the “uniform, rational” space of Newtonwas dissolved, art had to take into account man’s newdomain, Space-Time. Not surprisingly, it was at justthis period that Picasso was painting his “Demoisellesd’Avignon.” Again, more or less as antimatter wasbeing discovered, “the notion of anti-art reigned supremein the arts: there was the antinovel, antipainting,” etc.Another example: Monet apparently regarded the can-vas he was working on as a sort of “field” in the sensein which the word is used by physicists, that is, as aspace differentiated into tiny intersecting particles;and Monet invented his style of painting just as Max-well, from 1868 to 1873, was perfecting his theory ofthe electromagnetic field. It was science which madesense of movement in time and space; but, not longafter, Duchamps was painting his “Nude Descending aStaircase.” Spatial relationships, speed, the internalstructure of objects—science has preceded the plasticarts in all these subjects of research. J. Michel has evenclaimed, with some justification, that Max Ernst was a“painter of the Freudian era.” Ernst studied psychiatry,discovered the artistic value of the drawings of thementally disturbed, and fed upon what he knew to bephantasms and hallucinations (which, in fact, he soonlearned to induce). His domain is that of the uncon-scious, but an unconscious to which the human mind isno longer given up quite without consciousness, with-

Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, Vol. 21, No. 1, February 2001, 26-37Copyright 2001 Sage Publications, Inc.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay first appeared in Social Research,46, 1979, pp. 805-833. Reprinted with permission. Translated byDaniel Hofstadter.

out knowledge: an unconscious recognized by sci-ence. Last but not least, mathematics has had an enor-mous impact: Theodor Adorno pointed out that Vienna,which witnessed the birth of mathematical techniquesin certain previously inexact sciences, also saw thecreation of twelve-tone music.

The impressionist painters replaced traditional see-ing with a new notion of the object of vision and re-vived the analytical study of light and color. Francastelhas emphasized that, despite all the differences betweenartists and scientists, they both rely upon intellectualstructures: the impressionists’ empirical analysis ofthe sensation of color corroborated the discoveries ofscientists. But he cautions, and rightly so, that this factdoes not imply that they were following in the scien-tists’ footsteps. Later, the idea that matter is a form ofexpression of active yet also essentially disjunctive en-ergy led to those styles of art in which the expression ofdisjunction, of empty, energy-charged space, was theprimary purpose. One could go even further: does not,for example, the introduction into art of chance factorsand found objects derive from a whole complex ofmathematical interpretations? “How” asks Delevoy,

could artists have continued to want to imitate anatural world which physics (Rutherford, Planck)had shown to be in movement, which geometry(Poincaré) had shown to be malleable, whichbiology (Mendel, Weisman) had shown to be inconstant evolution, which chemistry (Becquerel,Curie) had shown to be radioactive, and whichpsychoanalysis had shown to be a play of hiddenforces? Even earlier, Cézanne had admitted thathe dealt with counters, equivalents for naturalelements: he wished with these counters to elicitin the viewer that sort of tremor usually inducedby the realization that time has gone by, that wehave shifted position, or that the scene before ushas changed.

One could go on quoting: Adorno, Delevoy, R. Clair,Francastel, Daix, MacLuhan, Moles. . . . Yet theirclaims are usually modest: science does not seem tohave had a direct influence upon or to have offered im-mediate inspiration to the arts. Daix writes that the en-tire influence “consists in metaphors, for painters attheir easels had not the slightest notion of what washappening in physics.” Francastel similarly refrainsfrom overstating the case, and Delevoy even notes thatno mental adjustment to the discovery of the fourth di-mension has taken place in our culture. Yet all empha-

size one “coincidence”: that everything has transpiredas if the great scientific discoveries have influenced thethought, the vision, the sensibility of the artists. Somethinkers have even insisted that art is as effective as sci-ence as a way of apprehending the world, and onewhich arrives at the same result. This seems to me ab-surd. If there has been no direct influence, neither hasthere been any convergent progress. If certain paintershave worked their way toward a new way of perceivinglight, that cannot have been the consequence of a mi-raculous, implicit, unconscious accord with scientistsof whose very existence they were unaware. And yet, ifthey introduced a new sort of movement into their pic-tures, surely that was not entirely independent of thephysicists’ new understanding of kinetic energy.

It seems to me that the impact of science on art (Irefer only to the modern period, of course, not to thewhole of human history1) has come about in a twofoldpattern. First, Western man has acquired a global atti-tude, which the artist shares and puts to work. A vul-garized and popularized science, of whose exact work-ings the layman knows little, but which has alreadymolded the general intelligence and sensibility, placesman in a new position in the world, and the artist tendsto feel this sooner than others: he receives, all unwit-tingly, an image of an order founded on exact measure-ment and calculation, and he is impelled (though with-out at first being able to verbalize his impulsion) tomake an art based on a rational ideal. Society loses itsreligious infrastructure, and the artist is the first to feelthis. When society then reorganizes itself along linesdictated by the scientific will to rationality, those mak-ers known as modernists soon follow suit. But at thesame time they learn that they can now manipulate oreven recast nature at will; after all, if science is assuredof its mastery of nature, why shouldn’t the artist toofeel tempted to declare his independence toward motif,model, canvas, all traditional syntax? Science can re-model everything; the artist too wants to rearrange hisuniverse. Science, indeed, affords him a sort of modelof power, created of the most powerful means: the art-ist begins to feel himself a demiurge. All is recalledinto question in order that it may be reconstructed, notcapriciously of course, but according to esthetic ruleswhich, once again, are vaguely modeled after the rig-orous laws of science. And we notice that artistic the-ory, in imitation of scientific theory, begins to play anever greater role. Science takes nature as the startingpoint of its analysis and research, not as the unalterableproduct of divine creation: it no longer cataloguesnature but takes it apart and puts it back together again.

Ellul / REMARKS ON TECHNOLOGY AND ART 27

The artist follows the same procedure: the motif is nolonger something given to imitate but a point of depar-ture for successive transformations, for a process ofanalysis aimed at de- and recomposition. The sameprocess has taken place in literature, sculpture, music,etc. And just as nineteenth-century science transformedthe interpretive universe that had preceded it, so artistschallenged the ancient conventions of their trade. Such,then, is the first link between science and art: not one ofdirect influence, or of miraculous coincidence, butrather a slow penetration of the intelligence and sensi-bility of the artist by whatever the collective mind hasmade of the scientific spirit. But there is another muchstronger and more important connection, that which ismaintained by technology.

Art and Technology

What has really influenced artists is technology inits various manifestations. There are two main ways inwhich this has taken place. On the one hand, the greatscientific discoveries become known through theirvarious practical applications. Only when new scien-tific ideas find practical application are artists able tosense what they are about. The great “break” in music,literature, architecture, and painting happened between1845 and 1885, for it was precisely then that technol-ogy was being most rapidly transformed. It was alsothen that artists first encountered “the machine” on awide scale; Baudelaire, for example, condemned pho-tography, the ugliness of machine-made objects, theinsanity of industrialization, etc.2 Francastel has offeredwhat I find a most satisfactory periodization of thisphenomenon: from 1850 to 1890, the first encounterbetween industry and the arts, beginning with union,evolving into opposition, and followed by attempts atreconciliation—early functionalism, for example—and, finally, dissociation,3 with art being regarded as anoble, lofty, integrated activity opposed to the machineand to the deforming character of industrial labor. Inthe second phase, from 1890 to 1940, art becameinvolved in rationalistic notions of organic beauty butalso in a revived impulse away from the mechanicaland toward the irrational. In both cases, the impact oftechnology was felt as a definitive break with the past.Technological development, it seemed, takes placewilly-nilly; it utterly transforms man’s sensible, hencehis mental world; the moral and visual values of thepast can no longer be his touchstone; a dead world can-not furnish the matter of a living style. Of course wemay, in our fear or laziness, merely copy what we have

inherited and try to preserve the vantages of the oldsociety; but this is doomed to failure, and can only giverise to an art patently ill-fitted to our social reality.Architects cannot build houses as they did in the eigh-teenth century; sculptors cannot shape forms as theydid in the thirteenth. They must rid themselves of out-dated schemas that inhibit thought and vision. Theymust see a new world with a new eye, they mustacknowledge the need to create without recourse to theold certainties, to supposedly immutable techniques.Technology’s destruction of tradition forces artists toinvent a new esthetic.

But technology also exerts a more direct influenceupon the artist’s activity. There are new tools, media,processes: art, indeed, provides a verification of thebasic law of technological society, that the transforma-tion of the means of production entails the transforma-tion of everything else: artists do not use a certain me-dium merely because they have in some abstract wayderived from science a new vision of the world. Themessage of modern art is that the means are every-thing: it is precisely the transformation of the meansthat has produced the different schools of modern art.There is probably no more revealing study of the im-pact of mechanization than B. Rordorf’s “La Transfor-mation de l’aspace habité” (Bulletin du CentreProtestant d’Ètudes de Genève, 1975). In this study ofLe Corbusier, Rordorf, despite his closeness to his sub-ject, despite his admiration and sympathy for the ar-chitect, shows that

this great creator, whose explicit aim was todevise an architectural order suited to our indus-trial civilization, especially where it had shat-tered the established patterns of the old cities,wished above all to complete the transformationof space born of the explosive growth of industri-alism. And the wish to rationalize constructionaccording to the pattern of mass production reallycomes of that desire for precision which is thevery soul of technocracy.

To note that Le Corbusier used new materials, that hebuilt houses like factories, is not in itself especially in-teresting: one must understand how the architect, withhis standard of the “Modular,” according to which manonce again becomes the measure of all things, is inevi-tably led to build houses in which the purely techno-logical imperative, with its classification of functions,reigns supreme. And, significantly, it is always motortraffic that takes priority: as Rordorf puts it, “traffic,

28 BULLETIN OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY / February 2001

like the segregation of urban functions, of which it is aspecific example, far from giving life or movement tothe city, destroys the city’s space and its life.” And hegoes on to show how Le Corbusier’s architecture re-flects the nature of a society in which only productionreally counts, in which culture is merely recreation.“The compartmentalization of space,” he writes, “isaccompanied by the specialization of behavior. . . .Man is split into various discrete activities, into sepa-rate needs. . . . Functionalism is merely the architec-tural expression of the general social discipline.” Andhe reminds us that Le Corbusier’s Radiant City wasdedicated “To Authority.” “The ‘architecture of joy’really meant the organization of good clean fun ac-cording to a philistine, even an authoritarian pattern.”He cites Caroux’s opinion poll taken at Le GrandeBorne at Gringny, that great “overshadowing presencewhich seems to obey only its own laws, and to becomethe manipulative subject of its inhabitants, who are rel-egated to the role of objects. . . . ” Here architecture ex-emplifies one of the salient characteristics of moderntechnology, the transformation of everything into anengine: one flips a switch and the building “goes on.”Thus le Corbusier: “In this age of interpenetratingtechnologies, I propose one sort of house for all coun-tries and climates: the house of perfect breath.” Towhich Rordorf rejoins: “What he really wanted to dowas to hook us all up to a big oxygen bottle!” Liketechnology, this sort of architecture wants simply toassemble homogeneous elements each with its ownclear function. The architect becomes the administra-tor of an exact syntax within a delimited space. (Thisnotion—of an exact syntax in a delimited space—is infact a valid description of all modern art.) The sort ofarchitecture and city planning that have come out of LeCorbusier entail the negation of all heterogeneity, “andthat is why man has come to lose both his depth and hisspontaneity.” Man can no longer be a “habitant,” toemploy Le Lannou’s coinage, and this very condition,or noncondition, is the direct expression of the newtechnocrat-produced milieu in which man and hishouse are now situated. Rordorf puts it well: “An art,”he says, “has gainsaid itself: in finding a new place forman, it has annihilated him.” And this is precisely thefailure and the internal contradiction of all modern art.

Now let us shift our focus. Two discoveries promptedpainters to embark on the enterprise known as plein airpainting: the invention of outdoor photography, andthe commercialization of the tin tube (the latter hardlya momentous invention, but one which rid artists of thebother of grinding pigments). It was above all photog-

raphy which changed men’s perceptions of reality:they were obliged to acknowledge another vision thanthe one they had known. Presently new forms of light-ing, first gas, then electricity, transformed the realm oflight, and the paint and dye companies offered a newand undreamt-of range of color. The speed of locomo-tives introduced a new tempo into the vision of townand country. One had, it was felt, to represent move-ment in a synthetic mode, but this mode was still con-ceived of as something mechanical. “Organic pro-cesses,” writes Lewis Mumford, “were reduced totheir mechanical equivalents.” Yet with the perfectionof certain instruments the converse also became possi-ble: with the stroboscopic camera, for example, onecould show successive moments of a continuous move-ment on one strip of film, giving the illusion of anorganic rhythm. Yet it was only after 1950 that theexplosion of technical possibilities came to change thevery conditions of creation. The use of acrylic colorsgave rise to color field painting, with its rapid drying,its heavy impastoes and scratchings. In electronicmusic it even became possible to synthesize sounds4

which have contradictory auditory qualities, seemingto some hearers to rise in pitch while to others theyseem to fall. Xenakis has combined music with sixhundred flash-lights and three lasers, all reflected inmirrors which create a changing architecture of light.Every twenty seconds taped coded signals conveytheir instructions to the lighting system, which itself isin sync with a multitrack music tape. M. Philippot hasinvented what he calls a “visible algorithm,” a value-scale obtained by means of microsigns with which hecan make designs. And then there is Bayle’s “accu-smonium,” with its two layers of bass speakers andothers held aloft on poles or dispersed throughout theauditorium. Here one can even get an immediate re-reading of taped sounds recorded with highly sensitiveengineering devices. In music as in the visual arts, newequipment has given rise to new art forms.

Artistic invention has by degrees become less direct,more often mediated by some prodigious apparatus.Highly technical calculations are made to attain resultseither vaguely conceived of in advance or quite unfore-seen. The well-known “ambulomare”—sometimescalled “the deconditioning machine”—enacts the tran-sition from architecture to sculpture using modernchemical products. Dubuffet has made walls of ex-pansible polyesterene, the same material that Niki deSaint-Phalle used for her Nanas. Both Dubuffet andSinger have used epoxy resin. Artists are no longercontent to create “environments,” they manufacture

Ellul / REMARKS ON TECHNOLOGY AND ART 29

whole new landscapes of which no other human beingever dreamed: forms larger than a human being whichthe spectator must enter among, climb, or stroll around,thus losing his spectatorship and becoming a partici-pant. The sense of touch is as important as that of sight,and synesthetic sensations are induced: the “user’s”visual or mental routines must be suspended. PiotrKowalski has experimented with deforming elasticsurfaces (elasticity being one of the properties of the“cocoons” used for storing war materiel). Weinbaumhas employed several synthetic resins to make stained-glass windows. Yet when creativity and new materialsmeet there is always a problem: the encounter may bederisory, but the Bauhaus was an early example of justhow profound it can be. One wants, of course, to try outall the new media, not only because they allow for newpossibilities within an art form, but also because theyallow the traditional boundaries among those art formsto be blurred (I shall be returning to this intermixing ofthe traditional art forms). The word media refers alsoto tools—the new equipment that permits innovativecreation, yet also conditions the nature of that creation:contemporary music, for example, is evolving as afunction of its new instruments. One no longer producesworks of art, one manufactures programs. Xenakisdoes calculations, Barbaud seeks to discover as clear aformulation as possible of the objective constraintsthat limit all musical creation: “Algorithmic musicconsists in the formulation of the sequential list ofoperations to be carried out with certain data to obtainthe desired musical effect.” What is involved here isnot only a new operation but a new music, “a music ofmachines, where the laws of logic governing specificdata are followed without any ad hoc improvisation.”These words are most significant, especially in thatwhat counts—as in nonartistic technology—is the me-thod, the process, and no longer the subjective inten-tion of the artist or even the effect to be produced uponthe listener. This is an attitude we shall often encoun-ter. But the machine is also movement: art becomes“dynamic”: the artworks change form. One need onlythink of the “universe of inflatable objects.” Theproblem of form, such as artists have tried to resolve itin the past. That is, with static media, is now outmoded.We are far from the first attempts, in which, followingthe example of the cinema, painters tried to render theeffect of movement: after all, it was still canvases thatthey were painting. Now one can produce movementitself. The artist tries to invent open, indeterminate,multidimensional structures requiring of the “con-sumer” a multisensorial experience. Yet the new media

do not merely make invention possible, they are also instrictest concordance with what technology has madeof art: the artist, inspired by new possibilities, in effectinspires technology itself, fills it with his spirit. Hereman is no longer of any importance: art celebrates notman but abstract “forces” and is thought of as a “field”of such interacting forces. This involves a conceptionof art both totally despairing and radically negating ofall freedom: a theory affirmed in particular and appliedby Jackson Pollock. And the artist is, as it were,worked by technology, to the degree that he uses prop-erly technological media and equipment: he becomesthe agent of the technological system.5 Technologymay even be his model, the machine may be his directsource of information.6 The Italian architectural schoolcalled Nuove Tendenze7 proclaimed that a house shouldresemble a gigantic machine, with the brutal simplic-ity of technology, and that the modern city should beconceived by city planners as full of noise and ofmovement. (If they were still alive, these creatorswould be delighted by the quite unplanned cities thathave grown up around us!) Since technology has pro-duced our environment, it is technology, we are told,that the artist/witness must take into account. But thattechnology has become complex and difficult: it is nolonger merely a question of walking to the new railwayto see the iron horse roar by. Nowadays technologymeans (for example) nuclear power plants: but to knowsuch a thing, to transmute its reality into art—what ajob for the artist! He would have to be able to passthrough the portal that separates ordinary mortals fromnuclear technology.

The limiting case is when the technical object be-comes a work of art per se, to be considered esthetic inits own right: perhaps an “elegant” dam, warship, orairplane. “The artist who seeks new forms,” says Nikide Saint-Phalle, “has been overtaken by the new tech-nology. He feels ridiculous when he looks at the beautyof a rocket.” N. Vichnay characteristically titled aseries of articles about modern technical achievements“the New Cathedrals” (Le Monde, November, 1974).The pont de la Manche, the Usine Marémotrice, theConcorde, etc.—all these prestige technological enter-prises were treated as works of art expressive at once of“faith” and “beauty.” Yet the error of functionalism isto fail to see that if adaptation to function can result inbeauty, it does not necessarily do so: a 1939 pocketcruiser is a delight, but a 1970 aircraft carrier is amonstrosity.

Very early certain characteristics of technology be-gan to be reproduced in art. Standardization is one. We

30 BULLETIN OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY / February 2001

find such tendencies particularly in pre-World War Iarchitecture. Malthesius, championing the Werkbandschool, wrote that “it is only through standardizationthat one can establish reliable and generally acceptedcriteria of taste.” (Though standardization still plays arole, “taste” has been abandoned as an artistic crite-rion.) Then there is the division of labor. Its inspiringquality stems primarily from its embodiment of a newspace-time dimension: today one wants to analyze thecomponents of movement, to decompose time intoimages, and, finally, to translate into an optical lan-guage the “constitutive moments of a phenomenonwhose nature is to resolve itself in space and to melt intime” (Delevoy). (And of course the division of laborhas been introduced into esthetic production itself.)

There is also a direct inspiration from machines,whose perfection has been a sort of ideal. Besidesfunctionalism, a sort of new vision of harmony hasbeen in the making: even in today’s experimentationwith disequilibrium, with rupture and with conflict,the ideal of precision covertly remains, though occa-sionally at the service of some sort of artistic delirium.Heidi Mayer paints with millimetric precision, as if toexpress a vision of madness in a world of robots, man’sanguish before a future that he has created and that willcome to dominate him; viewing her painting, we are inthe presence of one of those undreamt-of contradic-tions which characterize our time’s art.

But the central contradiction is that for freedom: itwould seem that technology has opened up vistas in allfields, that the artist can resolve any imaginable prob-lem with new media and equipment. Robert le Ricolaisseems able to resolve all the problems of city planningwith extraordinary innovative techniques (for traffic,tubes encased in cables, etc.). Dubuffet even resolves“spiritual problems” with technical means: technol-ogy is the ideal way to get anything done. But it soonbecomes an imperious mistress, rigid and authoritar-ian. Art is subordinated to the proliferation of media: itis the logical imperative of the technique that comes todetermine style. Doubtless man acquires through thesetechniques a new knowledge of himself and of tech-nology. He sees what no one ever saw before: the moonfrom close up, the evolution of a fetus accelerated tothe point where it is visible, the behavior of the rarestexotic birds, etc. All is seen and known. J. J. Trillat hasshown how X-rays and the electron microscope allowthe eye to explore a previously invisible world. Paintersand architects also express this new vision (thoughTrillat points out that certain of their creations camebefore the images revealed by close-up photography

and electron microscopy, as if the artist had discoveredby intuition what technology was later to reveal). Suchdiscoveries extend also to color: we learn that color isnot what we thought it was according to our traditional,learned viewpoint. Here again the artist is liberated.Yet let us return for a moment to the key expression, “atraditional, learned viewpoint.” Psychosociologyteaches us that we see the world through forms andimages that are traditionally transmitted to us, unawarethat what we think we see is very different from what isactually there. Now one of technology’s chief effectsis that it calls all traditions into question. Technologyupsets our universe of images, of traditional construc-tions, of transmitted doctrines. Yet what has happenedis that this prodigious freedom has become part of anew determinism. It is not that art cannot be made in atechnological society. Chenevière has judiciouslynoted, in speaking of technological man as an “art con-sumer,” that mental stress, overconsumption, the ex-cess of information, nervous tension, etc., deprive manof “vacant time,” so that he cannot genuinely meditateor gain distance from events: thus his experience of artis acquired too rapidly: the public has no leisure tofamiliarize itself with a work of art, it seeks the imme-diate phenomenon. In the theater real participation hasbecome impossible, so theater companies try to re-place it with devices like symbolic aggression. By thesame token, to the degree that social relations have lostall density it has become vain to try to represent them,to symbolize them, to enrich them, in the theater.Whence the theater of the absurd, the theater of deri-sion, etc., which are not the products of artistic cre-ation but reflections of the condition of the spectators.MacLuhan has shown that photography changes notonly our attitudes but also our internal dialogue. Theculture is that of the Gestalt, induced by an image, andsocialization is linked to the transformation of means,for example, the means of communication: one tries toreappropriate something from the flow of information.Perhaps the video generation is in the process ofreplacing the TV generation; this would be interesting,since video can produce an “action culture.” The morethe new media allow the artist to do whatever he wants,the more consumption, as well as production, becomesstrictly determined by the very technology that hasprovided the means of expression.

Art Separate From Technology

Technology’s influence upon art is not without anundertow. One may even speak of the separation of art

Ellul / REMARKS ON TECHNOLOGY AND ART 31

and technology. For centuries they were indistinguish-able.8 There is in what is called folk culture a close re-lation between tools and a certain esthetic sensibility.It is only recently that art has become quite separatefrom technology. Art is now thought of as somethingmore exalted. Freedom and beauty, in the unalloyedstate, are practiced by a few people for a tiny clienteleand are set apart from the manufacture of purely utili-tarian objects for the masses. Art seems as cut off fromthe people as it does from daily concerns, but art alsolacks the vigor of the people, of daily life. Until nowmass production has brought to working people and tomost of the bourgeoisie nothing but material goods,most of them ephemeral; mass-produced goods aresoon caught up in a swift tide of distribution, use, andabandonment. The work of art has always had, at leastup to now, the claim that it would last, probably for alleternity: “The work of art will be beautiful if it is in-visibly chiseled out of the most resistant marble,wrenched out of the desire for something perfect; itwill then be indestructible as a diamond.” In contrast,mass-produced objects are meaningless, if not posi-tively ugly, but indispensable for the time being. Oncemoney was invested in beauty (in the simple beauty ofdaily use: a beautiful piece of furniture, fine linen, agood family house in a traditional yet well-balancedstyle) whereas today it is invested in machines. Forworking people the moped has replaced the carvedchest, for the middle class the car has replaced the sil-ver service.

Mass-produced articles are contrary to the natureof art because they are interchangeable and im-personally manufactured. . . . Art is the fruit of apersonal act whose author set his hand to nature.When a man has been present, his product bearsthe stamp of art. But modern industry no longerchisels but casts, molds, vacuum-forms its prod-ucts in an unnamed substance that it rightly callsplastic, in which it is possible to impress what-ever decorative shapes one wants, in order to hidethe characterlessness of the medium itself.9

And as the everyday object, the product of technology,becomes totally divorced from art, from the presenceof the man embedded in his work, one falls back uponan art which comes to seem the more admirable that itis absent, useless, self-sufficient: “Work in wood, stone,or metal becomes the monopoly of artists who orna-ment the lives of a privileged clientele, with the people

having a right only to the reflection of this work, thatis, to reproductions.”

Art is perceived as something very different fromthe products of technology. A particular case was theinitial reaction to photography: critics were ready togrant that it adequately reproduced reality, and eventhat it could serve as the carrier of the myth of the real,but artistic activity was still thought to reside else-where. The plastic arts, faced with this new competi-tor, had to convey a sense of their differentness, to quitthe realm of reality and venture into the unseen and theunknown. “From now on,” it was said, “painting iseverything that photography is not.” Daix has offered amost convincing analysis of the three dislocationswrought by this flood of artificial images. First, a tech-nique had replaced an art—we no longer need a man tomake an image of a man. Second, the photographictechnique has revealed the imperfections of humanvision: it has led artists to wonder what it is that theyreally see, to accept, by degrees, the truth that conven-tion has had a strong hold upon that vision, and thus tofree themselves from the images they felt they ought tosee. Last, photography conveys vastly more informa-tion than could ever be conveyed before. The variousforms of technology, then, do not all produce the sameeffect upon art. Some are felt as competition for theartist’s traditional activity, such as photography forpainting, or recorded tapes for live music. In suchcases the artist must rethink his art, do somethingnew—he is driven to make himself different, to affirmthat artworks are different from the products of tech-nology. Other forms of technology merely providenew tools and media for an art activity that remainsessentially traditional. Still others seem totally outsidethe realm of art, offering it nothing of interest, yet stillthey are part of the technocratic world, which deter-mines the artist’s or art-lover’s very essence though hemay be insensible of the influence. Sometimes, on theother hand, the artist wants to use a modern, techno-logical medium. There is a constant traffic, as Fran-castel has observed, between science, applied science(technology) and the arts: “A technical discovery givesrise to a plastic interpretation, and the latter in turn sug-gests a use for a new material whose potentialitiessociety has not yet realized.” Here the artist is in effectthe inventor of a new use for a technique. But often,confronting the technological imperative, society andits artists merely give up all the creative claims of artis-tic mastery: art is liquidated by the onslaught of tech-nology. This leads one to suspect that artistic activity

32 BULLETIN OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY / February 2001

in our century has much the same status it had in thelast: the status of an activity which, despite artists’claims, is marginal enough to be left alone—it does notdisturb anything essential. Pompidou, according toFermigier, has made only one truly historic pronounce-ment: “We must adapt Paris to the automobile andleave behind our outmoded estheticism.” Here there isno question of a meeting of art and technology: art isscrapped, technology embraced. Buckminster Fulleris another who has gone on the warpath against “esthe-ticism”: “The world,” he writes, “evolves from the vis-ible toward the invisible: architecture will evolve in thesame way.” He clearly regards electronics as the deci-sive development; architecture is no longer a goingconcern because the world of construction is in fluxand the art of the solid is doomed. All structures cansimply be built by engineers, and we can throw art andother such nonsense to the winds. We’ll all live ingeodisic domes in a dymaxion universe. Technology isin total command; art vanishes. And Fuller is perhapsright, to the degree that by “art” he understands meredecoration. But his way of thinking implies that artmay from now on be found only in those nooks andcrannies of society that technology has not yet filled.Small wonder, then, that a major contemporary esthe-tic current urges that art be entirely independent oftechnology: whenever—as after Hiroshima, or afterthe birth of the ecology movement in 1968—peopleespecially distrust or fear technology, and want toavoid it or rid themselves of it, a type of organic, non-figurative art, radically opposed to the constructivistside of modernism, comes to the fore: abstract expres-sionism, “action painting,” more recently lyrical abstrac-tion, etc.—this sort of painting claims to owe nothingto technology. Yet one wonders if it is not indeedlocated in the interstices of our technological society,if technology does not ignore it merely because it is sounimportant. René Huyghe argues that art has ceasedto be an amusement for esthetes and has become theconquest of reality. But he fails to see how thoroughlyart has been conditioned by technology: art is the poorservant of this new reality. If photography has broughtabout a transformation of the painter’s role, the archi-tect too is now confronted by modern engineering(whence Buckminster Fuller’s radical defeatism, adefeatism that wears a triumphal, antiarchitecturalmask). Yet it is by no means impossible to create anarchitectural work of art, even one that may be de-scribed as “antitechnological” (i.e., nongeometrical).What initially opened the whole debate was the C.H.U.

by Wugenski (1966), a disciple of Le Corbusier. Thiswork was celebrated as “antitechnological” preciselybecause its art component had not been appliquéed butwas an integral part of the initial creative concept. Yetthis building is really only a judicious blend of all pos-sible modern techniques, including psychological ones.It is a model of what the artist may do with moderntechniques (not unlike Xenakis’s music), but it neitherquestions nor confronts the technological environ-ment. A successful work of art is not automatically adefiance of technology. Since the beginning of the cen-tury art has been an attempt, ever renewed, to meet thechallenge of technology, but it is itself situated withinthe technological system. The technocratic experi-ment has been integrated into the life of mankind,including artists, who may use it or protest against it,but who can never dominate it except fictively. Stillless can they symbolize it: when art tries to negatetechnology it only bears witness to the impotence of allsuch attempted symbolizations.

In the Technological Universe

After trying to sketch the complex relationshipbetween art and technology considered as two objec-tively analyzable realities, I should like to try to under-stand what art becomes when it is a function of thetechnocratic system.10 As happens in all environments,art, when integrated into the technological environ-ment, assumes its character. The artist adopts a techni-cian’s mentality (“I just paint, period,” said Manet).The artist, who for a century has been claiming thismentality for his own, is simply the expression of hissurroundings. Everything confirms this harsh judge-ment. Thus a growing number of artists consider thatonly technical problems are important. Doubtless art-ists have always posed themselves such problems, butonly as minor and subordinate ones. Beginning withManet, beauty, art, painting were identified by the art-ist with the metamorphosis of reality into paint. Thatmetamorphosis was his whole job: “Reality itself,” asDaix puts it, “is the act of transformation into paint.”These are words that might perfectly well have comeout of the mouth of a technician who considers realityto be the production process: the technical productionschema is void of all meaning, of all concept. The tech-nical job is taken for the only reality, and claims toaccount for all reality. We find this same ambiguity inmodern art. The painters—and the critics—were over-come, amazed by photography and the cinema, which,

Ellul / REMARKS ON TECHNOLOGY AND ART 33

contrary to subjective vision, gave an exact account ofthe real, until they saw the arbitrary and fallaciousquality of this product. In the same way, high-fidelitytechnicians imperceptibly betray the original music,until the aural simulacrum becomes an ersatz reality(Schaeffer). Here modern art follows the same ambig-uous progress as all technology.

Art has also become a form of action. The criterionof utility is progressively abandoned until the meanshave predominance over the ends. Hence art maybecome an instrument of propaganda, destined to per-suade an audience or spur it to action. On a deeper levelart is now thought fitted to work, by means proper toitself, upon our vision of the world. Of course art atother epochs, as in the Counter-Reformation, has beenused to convince people of things, but I’m not certainthat it had such an explicit will to modify man’s vision,man’s understanding of the world. It was more inno-cent then. Today we are experiencing a sort of doubleconsciousness characteristic of the technological era.11

The modern artist has the conviction that the man inthe street does not see the truth because blinded by afalse reality, by a fallacious cultural heritage. And hemakes art to destroy this heritage, to transport us into adifferent mental world. “From the slavery of represen-tation to the advent of the ‘sensibility of absence,’ asystem of qualities has, in less than two decades, abol-ished a system of grandeurs, vanquished anthropo-morphism, dissolved the ‘subject’ in the sign. . . . ”(Delevoy). It is not only the autonomy of the pictoriallanguage that is acquired, but also art as a conscioustool of action, that is, as a technical means. It is thetechnical environment that produces this mutation (pre-viously it was merely a byproduct).12 In the same waythere emerges a concern over the usefulness of art. Artcan no longer be pure or useless. It has a function. Evenwhen people try to cast off this conviction they remainbound to it willy-nilly. Traditionally art had no utility,or rather that utility belonged to the nature of art itself,when it had a magicoreligious quality. The great trans-formation of this century is that the utility of art isregarded as its function. What is important is no longerthe content of the message, the expression of a sense ofbeauty, but the material in which this message isembedded, its medium. And one must know if thework really reaches the millions it is intended for. Herewe have a singular paradox. One often reads sociolo-gists, philosophers, art critics claiming that “nowadaysthere can no longer be any ‘misunderstood’ artists orpoètes maudits. The power of the media, the curiosityof journalists, the delight in everything new—all these

would immediately rescue any genius from obscu-rity.” But this is true only if the product of the artist istransmittable to the public. The important question is:Can this artistic discovery be used by, say, a major net-work— which is to say, Is it useful? The utility crite-rion of modern art is rarely explicit, but it reveals theprofound influence of the technocratic mentality.

But the essential point is that the means dominatethe ends. One of the major characteristics of the tech-nological universe is that it is a system of means fromwhich the ends have disappeared. Hence the “utility”of which I have spoken cannot be measured against theattainment of goals: there are no more goals. Nor canone say that art’s “aim” is to destroy a traditional modeof vision. This is an effect of technological autonomyand not a teleology of art. The principal interest ofevery artist today is the process employed rather thanthe result.13

Ricardou’s Puor une theorie du noveau roman offersus a subtle analysis of analogous literary procedures,the works he analyzes being worthy of interest to thedegree that they use these procedures. The formulathat continually recurs is: “It’s not what you have tosay, it’s why you have to say it.” Ricardou uses theexcellent phrase “the pen’s animal spirits,” but hecould equally well have written “the brush’s animalspirits.” To produce a work of art is simply to submit toa calculation, to an order, to the act of writing itself.The artist and his goals no longer count. One reliesupon montage, collage, puzzles, etc., and it’s thenewly invented technique which excites interest andadmiration. Of course these techniques do not have thesame dimensions as industrial ones: one of the essen-tial aspects of industrial technology is mass produc-tion. Indeed, the great weakness of art (except in thecase of Moles, who is consistent to the end) is thatsince one is interested only in the technique one ratherquickly tires of the product, and the artist, hardpressed, is forced to hunt for new techniques, failingwhich his “consumers” will lose interest. This is a logi-cal continuation of the tendency which began in thelast century, when the autonomy of the pictorial orderwas discovered. The act of painting became its onlyreal legitimation, one no longer referred to god ornature. It was a typical technician’s attitude, whichunwittingly expressed the demiurgic, promethean atti-tude of the technological adventure: to destroy the realin order to reconstitute it, to destroy appearance inorder to recreate it. One could not wish a more perfectidentity of project and attitude: modern art is theexpression of the technological mentality at its most

34 BULLETIN OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY / February 2001

pure and total. It was Theodor Adorno who bestgrasped the phenomenon when, speaking of“Schoenberg and Progress” he wrote, “[Twelve-tonemusic] is a system of dominating nature and musicwhich corresponds to a nostalgia for the first era of thebourgeoisie, when industrialists or merchants acquiredthings by means of better organization. . . . ” Whereasin the past art had played the role of nature’s mediatorand handmaiden, it must now try to acquire, to domi-nate and replace her.

The exposition “Babel 65” expressed, in especiallyvigorous terms, this affirmation of the primacy of tech-nique: “There are no more artists,” proclaimed Miro,“only men who express themselves with plasticmeans.” Kowalski declared that he was “more inter-ested in the way he got his forms than what they lookedlike. . . . ” Mathieu’s analysis seemed perfect: “For thefirst time in the history of form, the sign precedes thesignification.” So much I concede; but that is onlybecause art is no longer linked to a human intention, toa mental reference, but instead brutally expressesthrough its signs the reign of technique. The signexpresses the technique, no longer the imagination orthe personality of the artist, who is a creator startingfrom zero.

Unfinished Art

Art thus becomes a sort of confirmation of the tech-nological universe. Because technology is integral,and also a factor of integration, and because techno-logical society is universal, we are witnessing the dis-covery of integral techniques of artistic compositionwhich are in reality an extreme effort to palliate theanguish of modern man, who feels himself eaten up bythis totally integrated world. And here too we see oneof the two faces of this art: compensation (the otherbeing reflection) for the technological universe. Butthis art is, by virtue of that very fact, inhuman. For thatis the game technology forces art to play: the inhuman-ity of art expresses that of technology in the very nameof the human and as a remedy to man’s anguish. Wehave here the key to this art, and the meeting point of itstwo functions. But in its client role vis-à-vis technol-ogy and its universe, art profoundly changes its char-acter: before, it had always claimed to offer a finishedwork, something which had attained a final perfection:if one note, one spot of color were removed, the wholewould seem incomplete. We have already seen that thisclaim is no longer made; art is now located in the realmof the transitory and the instantaneous. This quality is

also inherited from technology, since the latter is alwaysin transition, each state of technological developmentbeing merely a stage on the way to something moreefficient. But with modern art there is an added factor:incompletion appears inevitable. Every modern workof art is essentially unfinished. Rubens made hundredsof drawings for each painting he did and regarded themas nothing. Yet the slightest scrawl by Picasso wasinstantaneously delivered to the public as a completework. Add or take away two or three yards of Niki deSaint-Phalle’s plastic Nanas and little is changed. Mod-ern art is by nature a succession of unfinished workswhich condition one another. There is no longer, as wehave seen, one work. No work seeks to attain the fin-ished, the eternal, the equipoised, the perfect, becauseno technological means is ever exhausted, it is neverreally anything but a sketch of something more effi-cient to come, and, at the same time, no technologyexists for itself, with its own internal meaning: it has nosense except in relation to all the other technologicalsystems. Nothing is more comical than to hear criticsand philosophers say that there are no longer any indi-vidual artists because modern man has become soli-dary, socialized, that it is the community that creates (areturn to the Gothic!), that the monster of bourgeoisindividualism has been vanquished, and that the artistis now a conducting rod in the great collective creativecurrent of the masses, etc., etc. In reality all the charac-teristics of modern art, without exception, come fromthe universe of technology. Not only is technologyalways in transition, but at any given moment it is at thesummit of its possibilities. And it is here that art is soprofoundly devalued: it is constrained by this momen-tary “perfection” of technology to be nothing but asketch of itself. Art cannot bring technology to a halt,thus no work of art can ever be finished. The modernartist restricts himself to a translation of technology;what previously composed the specific activity of theartist, a sort of heightening of reality in the service oftransposition, has now been annihilated. “Natural”reality is wiped out in the promethean process; techni-cal reality triumphs. Sometimes this double determi-nation leads one to believe that the artist is freerbecause he has been liberated from figuration. Onefeels that he has outrun reality in the pursuit of a sym-bolizing function; but this is false. His art is on the con-trary perfectly servile, indeed figurative in relation tothe technological environment. It is banally imitativethough it claims to be highly composed. This sort of artis taken for an art savant, but it is more savant than anidiot savant. It is, to be sure, intellectualized, in the

Ellul / REMARKS ON TECHNOLOGY AND ART 35

image of the surrounding technological environment,but in this sense it is merely the reflection of theabstractness of the system: only in that sense is itabstract. Yet it is influenced not by technological form(except during the early period when the machine andits movements were being directly copied) but by thestructure of the technological system and of its inform-ing principles. It is the true witness, the tangible sign ofthe system. In this sense, it still fulfills its traditionalfunction, but only by having repudiated its humangrandeur and creativity.

Three Environments

Thus the transformation of contemporary art hasbeen brought about not by the direct influence of tech-nological systems, not by science or philosophy, notby politics or economics, not even by the creativity ofthe artist. Modern art is the transfigured reflection ofits environment (which in no way detracts from the“genius” of the artist, who is neither a mechanicalmeter nor a spiritual archangel).

I should like to refer briefly to the theory of the threeenvironments. During the prehistoric period man’senvironment was nature. Art was conceived as a func-tion of this environment, was directly at grips with it.Scholars often speak of magicoreligious art. In realityart had the function of exorcism, of dominating theenvironment, and this took place through symbolicchannels. When settlements became denser and morenumerous, and social organization came about, manbegan to consider society as his true environment.Nature was still there of course, but relegated to alower level of importance. Here we enter human his-tory; man’s great preoccupation was no longer to sur-vive but to organize his society and to govern it. Thegreat problem became one of politics. Progressivelyart became the reflection of man’s various societies.Of course art remained magicoreligious, but now inrelation to society; it remained symbolic, but symbolicnow of social functions and political acts. Art had anessentially political function in the broadest sense.

Once again the human environment has changed: ithas become the technological universe. Clearly ourearlier environments, nature and society, have not beentotally destroyed: nature has been conquered and is aminor force, but society remains ideologically domi-nant. Man has not realized that his politicosocial prob-lems refer essentially to yesterday’s environment, whichis already devalued and outmoded. True, society sub-sists as a source of trouble and danger. But the artist’s

sensibility feels the transmutations more quickly thanothers and expresses them not directly but by meta-phor. Art is no longer magicoreligious, symbolic, orpolitical. The technological environment, having be-come the reigning milieu, has brought about new,essentially functional art forms. It is a case of artificefunctioning in relation to artifice, none of it symbol-izable. Art receives its character from the technologi-cal environment, where every force works upon everyother. And hence art takes on a ludic function, theludism being at once the positive reflection of the free-dom conferred by technology and a compensation forthe fatality of technological growth.

Notes

1. Note, however, that very early in the scientific age ideas be-gan to filter from science through to art. It has been observed thatbecause Kepler posited an infinite universe the Baroque was born:thenceforth space was no longer a datum, but something to be con-structed. Pictures, towns, poems—all lost the unique center aboutwhich they, as geometrical forms, had previously turned. Rubens,Borromini, and Góngora were in fact engaged in the translation ofthe Keplerian cosmology.

2. “What man worthy of the name of artist,” wrote Baudelaire,“has ever confused art with industry.”

3. I have bypassed naive attempts to conjoin art and technol-ogy by putting cast-iron flowers on Singer sewing machines or zincgarlands on the combines of the 1860s. Giedion has devoted an ex-cellent study to this phenomenon, and Delevoy has described it as“the metamorphosis of the sewing machine into a lotus, of the pho-nograph into a morning glory, of the gas jet into an acanthus leaf,and of the Metro entry into a whole botanical garden.” Art Nou-veau tried simply to appliqué art to the bare, irreducible products oftechnology. It would be easy to call this a peripheral phenomenonof bourgeois and reactionary character: it expressed the fact that artfelt itself voided, emptied out by technology, and tried to recoverits legitimacy by clinging to technology at the same time that it at-tempted, by adding the esthetic element, to efface the inhumanityof technology and thus to sanctify it. It has been claimed that thereis a contradiction between the industrializing impulse and the sen-sibility, the humanism, of art; yet, from the very beginning, somesort of conjunction of the two seemed inevitable. We have wit-nessed the birth of an art which is no longer merely applied decora-tion (though of course such decoration still exists: the French gov-ernment requires that 1 percent of all construction budgets bedevoted to ornamentation: in official circles art still is—as it has al-ways been—a kind of decorum) but the product of the profound fu-sion of the esthetic imagination and technology. The days of nos-talgia for handmade naturalistic decoration are mostly behind us;nonetheless, we still find a tendency in that direction in the prolif-eration of commercial design workshops; and indeed one couldeven claim that design is quite the opposite of art, since it merelyshapes industrial objects in a more-or-less-attractive way. Thewhole current notion of design is merely a prolongation of what, inthe inter-war period, was called Moderne; and if current “industrialdesign” is more than a mere revival of “thirties Moderne,” it is per-haps also no coincidence the Kitsch has become popular again con-currently with “industrial design.” Mankind must permit itself

36 BULLETIN OF SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY / February 2001

memory, nostalgia, even regret; but that is not where technology ispointing.

4. The sound synthesizers now used by composers in the elec-tronic music field, with their generators, filters, and modulators,can be used for both the creation and the modification of sound. Amemory bank allows them to retain information, and they are smallenough to be “played” during concerts. Since 1945 John Cage hasmade use of recorded tapes to create a total sound-space and to in-troduce chance elements into his art. His work is an example of anart which is more and more the direct product of the technicalmeans.

5. I do not of course mean to endow technology with humanqualities: I do not say that technology has a will, consciousness, orthat it has somehow purposefully gotten hold of the artist!

6. What is really important is not that the artist takes the prod-ucts of technology as his model, nor that he is inspired by scientifictheories. The importance of the relation cannot be illustrated, byLeger’s cogwheels, Honegger’s tone-painted locomotives,Stenberg’s crane-resembling sculptures, mechanical-looking ar-chitecture, Tatlin’s International Tower, or even Le Corbusier’s in-habitable machines. Such examples provide evidence of a directbut really rather superficial influence, and reveal the effects ofmechanization, industrialization, rather than those of technologi-cal thinking as such. All this is nothing more than “being of one’stime.” What I am trying to pinpoint is a far more subtle and pro-found nexus. One must remember that like the philosopher and thesociologist the artist is always behind his time: he usually still seesthings from the vantage of modern industry, the machine. Thus ourFrench architects, overcome during the sixties by a veritable mod-ernist frenzy (which produced La Defence, Le Front de Seine, andthe Tour Montparnasse), are making an architecture reminiscent ofan older industrialism, car-loving and destructive of neighborhoodlife, without realizing that their designs really express, not sixtiestechnology, but the industrialization of the prewar period. It wasonly unconsciously that these architects expressed the technologi-cal system as such, which is exactly what I am trying to stress.

7. It was perhaps the Futurists who first posed the theoreticalquestion of the relation between technology and the new art. By1910 they had seen the importance of the diversity of materials, theuse of mixed media, the longing for a machine esthetic, the pri-macy of structure, etc. Cf. G. Lista: I Futuristi—Manifeste,Documenti, Proclamazioni (1973).

8. On what follows see Charbonneau, Le Paradoxe de la cul-ture.

9. P. Bellini has written a study of this subject titled Estetica ecomportamento (1977) where he calls our society “the society ofthe identical.” The “identical” is the perfectly crystallized, the re-duction to stereotypes totally different from tradition (i.e., values

so perennial that they may be projected indefinitely into the fu-ture). The identical—that is, massive standardization—is impov-erishment disguised as profusion, without values, principles, ortruth, losing itself in endless reiteration, though exciting curiosity,distraction, even “interest.” Industrial production creates “theidentical society,” whereas art creates a society where when canchose “the different.”

10. J. Ellul, Le Système technicien (1977).11. Sometimes art’s relation to the technical universe is clearly

perceived and expressed: thus Rosenberg, who insists that art mustevolve as a function of technical efficiency, and Efron, who empha-sizes that the evolution of art takes place according to the progressof technology and not according to the human experience of art.But the more clear-cut case is that of Marshall MacLuhan, who in-sists that art provide exact information on “how to modify man’spsyche to bring him into full accord with technology, and even topredispose him to receive the new technological current.” To averta social breakdown from the overrapid development of technology,the artist must “leave this ivory tower and enter the control tower ofsociety.” He is there to modify the soul of man in relation to theneeds of technology. At the same time he must translate the vie desformes of electronics and make it directly accessible to the people(Understanding Media). This is the classic expression of the beliefthat the artist is a factor in making the world conform to technicalprogress.

12. Perpetual innovation, the severing of artistic roots, the im-position by art of norms of vision geared to the rapid changes of oursociety are important factors in the ideological acclimatization tothe necessities of productivity, and of integration into the techno-logical environment. It is purely illusory to believe with Lebot (inL’Art de masse n’existe pas) that in a formal game anything otherthan inert images are produced. He mentions “forms critical of thesystem that has brought them forth” which cause “an irreducibledifference” to arise. What difference? Difference from what? Allthis is mere dreaming.

13. John Cage emphasizes that it is the technique itself that fi-nally becomes the art: we are equipped to turn our attention to theoperations of art. But the most remarkable thing is that with hispure, his exclusive technicity Cage cannot prevent himself from re-ferring to nature and to man. This sort of contradiction is character-istic of the mental confusion which reigns in the world of art pro-ducers (Cage, Silence, 1958).

The late Jacques Ellul was a founding editor of The Bulletinof Science, Technology & Society. He mentored BillVanderburg, the current editor-in-chief of the Bulletin, for 5years in Bordeaux, France.

Ellul / REMARKS ON TECHNOLOGY AND ART 37