In Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” the second, less censored version of which I will primarily deal with here (1936), the concept of “aura” seems to thread its way in and out of multiple schools of media studies: aura becomes an index of diachronic shifts in “symbolic forms,” a synchronic marker of modern perceptual modes, and a key term in locating medium-specificity. What seems missing from the often one-dimensional treatment of Benjamin’s use of aura (it’s destroyed!) is the presence of a paradoxical investment in its positive potentialities. Tracking some of the modulations in the concept within the Artwork essay will more fully allow us to speculate on the potential of aura within the mass media––the presence of which is much more apparent in the recently translated second version of the essay, as opposed to the now famous third version published in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. What is accomplished in what Benjamin calls the liberation from industrial drudgery into a fantastic “playspace?” How much stress can we put on his depiction of the cinematic spectator going on “journeys of adventure” (117)? And, a question that I seem to be very personally invested in, can it be possible that vegging out can serve a revolutionary function? Read the rest of this entry »
Briefly: I just came from a lecture by Michael Fried, and in the discussion session afterward, the question of subject/object interaction kept coming up in Fried’s constant employment of the pair “absorption and theatricality”–Yves-Alain Bois described it as “the engine that allows you to see.” This was challenged at several points–it seems that your (Fried’s) criticism only takes into account the presence of a single beholder. What about a crowd viewing the work? Similarly important to Fried’s “absorption and theatricality” is the staging of a kind of absorption. But in so doing, how do you ascribe the intentionality of the artist to that work and stage a sort of direct one-on-one confrontation with it? Fried keeps going back to the art object ‘performing’ these types–performing the address to an observer (anything else is virtually impossible?), performing a kind of intentionality of its creator. The art Fried is interested in does not provide raw access to intentionality, but thematizes intentionality itself.
It strikes me that this debate never seemed to be resolved in discussion–the various partisans remained entrenched. And it also strikes me that Benjamin seems to easily skate across this binary of subject-object interaction in his discussion of folk art and kitsch, when he writes “Art teaches us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch teach allow us to see outward from within things.” And it’s even more striking to me that the media through which Benjamin ‘solves’ this problem, or at least finds a way to think beyond it, is through a (sort of) technics of mass art, through collective, popular culture.
From Fourier’s last work, La Fausse Industrie ,1835-1836>: “The celebrated American hoax associated with Herschel’s discoveries about the world of the moon had raised in Fourier, once the hoax was revealed as such, the hope of a direct vision of the phalanstery on other palnets. … Here is Fourier’s response: ‘The American hoax,’ he declares, ‘proves, first, the anarchy of the press; second, the barrenness of storytellers concerned with the extraterrestrial; third, man’s ignorance of the atmospheric shells; fourth, the need for a megatelescope.’” Ferrari, ‘Des Idées et de l’école de Fourier,” Revue des deux mondes, 14, no. 3 (1845), p. 415.
-Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute W [Fourier], W6a,4
Here was the last refuge of those infant prodigies that saw the light of day at the time of the world exhibitions: the briefcase with interior lighting, the meter-long pocket knife, or the patented umbrella handle with built-in watch and revolver. And near the degenerate giant creatures, aborted and broken-down matter. We followed the narrow dark corrider to where–between a discount bookstore, in which dusty tied-up bundles tell of all sorts of failure, and a shop selling only buttons (mother-of-pearl and the kind that in Paris are called de fantasie)–there stood a sort of salon. On the pale-colored wallpaper full of figures and busts shone a gas lamp. By its light, an old woman sat reading. They say she has been there alone for years, and collects sets of teeth ‘in gold, in wax, and broken.’ Since that day, moreover, we know where Doctor Mircale got the wax out of which she fashioned Olympia.
–Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute H [The Collector]
Around 3:25 minutes into the first section, Chaplin begins playing with one of his most famous themes: the Tramp, aimlessly wandering around the outskirts of some field of action (namely a Circus, established in the film’s first sequence), by some stroke of absolute chance gets pulled into this apparatus (another paradigmatic Chaplin theme–a robbery that while not of his own doing, is still much appreciated).
The genius is not in the hilarity or ingenuity with which the Tramp attempts to escape this situation, but how, in his accidental insertion into this field of action, he plays with its rules. The rules of the game are, in the beginning, unknown to the Tramp. But gradually, coming up against the limits of the apparatus (the circus) and transcending them, the Tramp mimetically replaces and becomes the rules of the game. Benjamin: “An action performed in a film studio therefore differs from the corresponding real action the way the competitive throwing of a discus in a sports arena would differ from the throwing of the same discus from the same spot in the same direction in order to kill someone. The first is a test performance, while the second is not. Film makes test performances capable of being exhibited, by turning that ability itself into a test” (Selected Works 3, 111).
