Today's proliferation of media, their base and equipment, has given urgency to the need to theorize the issues they raise and, consequently, have brought about the return to film theory and to media theory more generally of a vocabulary borrowed from a description of what Gilbert Simondon called ‘technical objects’: devices; instruments; machines; technologies; techniques; dispositifs. Because of the structural importance of these terms to the approach taken in this volume, it is important that we establish distinctions between them.

A Few Definitions

Technique/Technology

Historically, ‘technology’ is a term initially used to describe a field of study that began in English- and German-speaking milieux, first by Christian Wolff in 1728 in his Preliminary Discoujrse on Philosophy in General, in which he invented the concept in its modern sense. His work had no concrete consequences, but was adopted more successfully as a simultaneously theoretical and pedagogical project by Johann Beckmann in 1772 and then in 1776 in the latter's Anleitung zur Technologie. Traces of it can be found in English in Jacob Bigelow's Elements of Technology of 1829. The goal of technology was to describe, classify, and analyse the technical operations of the mechanical arts, or ‘the science of the arts and of the works of art,’3 in the words of Christian Wolff.