Thus the gap that separates the classic arts from their modern counter­parts does not lie in the technologies adopted, nor in the forms of representation, raising the question: what do the arts-relais have in common which distances them from all other forms of expression? Schaeffer main­tains that it is the greater readiness of radio and cinema to highlight the most im­mediate and evanescent aspect of the phenomenon being represented, while the other arts tend to start from the particular in pursuit of a universal dimen­sion. All the forms of representation favoured in the past manifest an indelible logocentric vocation, imposed by the need to go beyond the contin­gencies of daily life and express absolute concepts. However, such a need is foreign to radio and cinema which, on the contrary, possess an extraordinary facility for immediate description and evocation. Rather than portraying an idea, they seize on some unique, unrepeatable highlights in the continuity of time, cap­turing and offering to the viewer the living aspect of reality in the language of things. From the early days of sound film there was a critical tra­dition opposed to the excessive use of verbal language, which Sigfried Kracauer summarises thus: “[…] all the successful attempts at an integration of the spoken word have a characteristic in common: they play down dialo­gue with a view to reinstating the visuals” (Kracauer, [1960] 1997: 106; italics added). Yet Schaeffer goes a step further, rejecting reasoning  altogether as the basis for audiovisual con­struction in favour of an ‘analogic’ organization of the material. “This dynamic is the authentic clash we refer to, and which could be described as the battle between logos and kosmos: a realistic lan­guage in which the abstract strives to reach the concrete. The idea people form of the world around them and the words they use to name things come together and tend to create a world which is real. The arts-relais contribute images and sounds which would be as form­less as the world itself if we did not strive to make them mean something and relate our ideas to them. En­countering the concrete starting from the abstract, this is the great invention of language; encountering thought starting from things, this is the invention of radio and cinema” (Schaeffer, [1941-42] 2010: 54; cfr. Brunet, 1977: 77).

It is as well to point out that for Schaeffer the adjective concrète does not imply a direct link with the events of the real world which, as we have seen, can only be emulated imperfectly. Instead it concerns that whole series of ‘marginal’ aspects of a work which do not belong directly to the expression of an idea but which nonetheless participate just as actively in the overall definition of the tangible forms of the artefact (“[…] life at its most ephe­meral” as Kracauer puts it – [1960] 1997: xlix). Schaeffer returned to this point many times in his writings on musical theory, and what he had to say is also wholly applicable to the indirect arts: nuance, gesture, timing, touch, but also imprecision, hesitation, and in general each feature which goes to cha­racterise the immanence of a particular object in the representation, with respect to its ideal counterpart, are all potentially expressive traits, as long as the spectator is prepared to appreciate the subtleties.

Thus the materials of the ‘indirect arts’ are aesthetic objects (images and modulations) organized according to a syntax based on their tangible qualities. Such qualities are highlighted, ‘revealed’ by the camera and the microphone. This is the characteristic that Walter Benjamin indicated as a reduction of the ‘distance’ of the reproduced work of art (a category in which he included ci­nema as a matter of course) and which Adorno defined as ‘thingness’. It is significant that for these two philosophers this eminently demonstrative aspect of audiovisual artefacts represented one of the  limitations of the mechanical arts. For Benjamin it was the principal reason for the decadence of the ‘aura’, and for Adorno it confirmed the impossibility of an absolute construction in which the objects of de-composition can be manipulated as pure values (cfr. Benjamin [1936] 1969: 221; Adorno, [1966] 1982: 102). Thus the refusal to recognise the predominance of the logos which lies at the heart of Schaeffer’s theory can be seen as a denial of language and sense. In Adorno’s words: “It seems illusory to claim that through the renunciation of all meaning, especially the cinematically inherent renunciation of psychology, meaning will emerge from the reproduced material itself” (ivi: 203). This is why for the two German thinkers the reproduced image inevitably implies an allusion to society or pol­itics, viewed in a certain sense as a complement or an antidote to the excess of realism featured on the screen. On the contrary, for Schaeffer the morphologi­cal features of colour, light, pitch and intensity are the elementary semantic features of a second language, admittedly vague and imperfect but nonetheless able to support the weight of formal constructions and to convey other levels of sense. It is in this ambivalence between the necessity for an architectonic con­struction based on the manipulation of objects and the ennoblement of the concreteness of the ephemeral that we can glimpse the characteristic identity of the products of the mechanical arts. In fact they definitively distance them­selves from the novel, opera, concerts, and all forms of theatre, whether on film or broadcast, and can finally assert themselves as an independent lan­guage, both individually in the field of moving images and reproduced sound and, all the more so, in the audiovisual field.