The Power of Technique and the Absence of Man in a Photographic Picture

Abstract

The text problematizes the connection between art and the power of technology. The question arises: how can photography as an art, created as a technical invention, respond to the challenges of technical power, which manifests itself as an unconditional desire for domination that knows no limits? The esthetician from Sarajevo, Sadudin Musabegović, understood the very power of photographic representation precisely through the figures of division: mimesis - poiesis - techne. Martin Heidegger's opinion on technique is connected with the figure offered by Musabegović. Sadudin Musabegović's aesthetic thought provides possible answers to the question: how is a man present in photography itself when the famous film critic Andre Bazin said that photography is the only art we enjoy because of an absence of a human? And what role does art play in overcoming the crisis established by technology in the modern world? In the 'age of mass reproduction', art itself has lost its aura, as Walter Benjamin states, and Musabegović adds that even the photographed being has lost its aura. The problem of losing the aura can also be understood as a new beginning, as a ‘new source’ for art itself. But for the source itself, Musabegović says that he finds himself in the flow, that he is always outside himself, he is in the intertwining, permeation that manifests itself in a dynamic, reversible, and moving figure: mimetic activity – making techne – productive poiesis. This text aims not only to explain the meaning of this figure, which Musabegović established originally within aesthetics, and especially in the field of photography and film, but also to analyze its meaning in the context of unmasking the logic of modern technical control, which marked a modern way of living, thinking, and perceiving the world.

Keywords

• mimesis
• poiesis
• techne
• photography