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Mechanical Reproduction

Preface

• Valery epigraph: “For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what is was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”
• Marx is right, but outdated, for the long-coming changes in culture that follow a change in production are finally being seen. Studying art therefore is a “weapon” and has a “dialectic…no less noticeable in the superstructure than in the economy,” giving a rationale for what Lukacs has already begun to do.
• Anti-Fascism: says this essay will not help Fascism (which would benefit from outdated Romantic views of art: genius, creativity, eternal value), but rather give “revolutionary demands in the politics of art.”
  • Art no longer about “beautiful semblance”
  • Fascism uses the new structure of proletarian mass, but without proper changes in property organization
    • Under fascism, proles can express themselves, but not have their rights…which is why politics is aestheticized. Ritual values are produced only, and masses are controlled.
• Aestheticization of politics leads to wear
  • When you respect property rights, the only thing left for masses to do is…war
  • You have impeded natural growth of productive capacity b/c you want to preserve property rights, so the “sources of energy” must find any outlet: in war, an “unnatural utilization”
    • Basically, you have “tremendous means of production” and “inadequate utilization in the process of production” (unemployment, lack of markets)
      • Notice he’s talking about underproduction
      • If you deny outlets for tech, it will out…in bad ways: “a rebellion of technology:” your inability to become socialist has blocked you up and makes you violent
    • The moral use of technology lags behind that technology itself: we are “not mature enough;” technology can’t yet cope with “elemental forces of society” (Andrew: Virilio and Mc Luhan? also say this)
  • He quotes Marinetti’s manifesto on Ethiopian colonial war

Setting Up the Argument

• History
  • Artists could always reproduce by hand. Greeks: founding and stamping. Middle Ages: Printing press, engraving, and etching next.
  • Game changing invention: 19th c lithography b/c could “keep pace with printing” and thus with “everyday life”
    • Implies: illustrated newspaper
  • Game changing invention: photography: no hand needed, just the eye; “keep pace with speaking”
    • Implies: sound film
• Result: increasing acceleration
  • Valery: we will bring up images with the mere “movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign”
• Result: availability
  • By 1900, anyone can access any piece of art
• What’s the question? How mechanical reproduction and the film have changed “art in its traditional form”

Aura: “Withers” in the age of mechanical reproduction

• Original Work of Art
  • embedded into history and tradition (unique = embedded)
  • cf origin of art as ritual: the original “use value” of art is religious
    • end of the aura = “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual”
      • now, art can be “based on another practice – politics” instead
    • hmmm… does that mean revolution gives art a new use value?
  • cult of beauty (Renaissance – Romantic) was ritualism in decline, in crisis
• No reproduction can have a “presence in time and space” conferred by the “unique existence of the work of art”
  • No signs of aging, no changes over time: diff relation to history (can’t analyze history engraved on it via material changes, like “patina on a bronze”) (scientific proof)
  • What does that do?
    • Ruin authenticity, which requires original
      • authenticity: “the essence of all that is transmissable from its beginning” (ie the journey of the artwork as a piece of material suffering historical duration) b/c “substantive duration ceases to matter” (this is the relation of leisure spaces to their contexts, hotels to their foreign city) (hotels are mechanically reproduced too and have no aura)
      • because the reproduction can’t attest to that history and thus can’t attest to authenticity, “the quality of [the original’s] presence is always depreciated”
    • Allow you to see what the human eye can’t (photographic lens can reveal something you haven’t seen before)
    • Put the work of art in “situations” the original wouldn’t be in
    • Artwork “meet[s] the beholder halfway”
• Destruction of Aura
  • Replaces “unique existence” with “plurality of copies”
  • Larger signif than just art: it happens on many planes of existence
    • Part of the larger separation from “domain of tradition:” “liquidation” of traditional value
  • “destructive” and “cathartic” like mass movements
• Object “reactivated” each time it meets someone in his or her own context, thus shattering tradition
  • Me: as historical method taken from Marx it’s flawed b/c reified. How can something be right for revolution and wrong for history?
• Aura, cult value, escapes into the individual (the subject of the photo, for example)

Social Causes of Destruction of Aura

• “the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence”
  • ex: Psychopathology of Everyday Life created new power of perception b/c before people wouldn’t even pause to think about a slip of the tongue
  • ex: camera showing close-ups, filming familiar places so you reconsider them
    • revolutionary: b/c “assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action” whereas before the various rooms and places “appeared to have us locked up hopelessly”
      • how? changing way you view object “reveals entirely new structural formations” when you have slower or faster time or bigger or smaller space, reveals the unknown: “a different nature” and only b/c we decided to explore it consciously
  • thus, “social transformations expressed by these changes of perception”
  • “art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later” (taking about rise of photography; meaning that you have art sandwiched between the creation of a mode of life and its crisis)
    • this crisis: anticipating revolutionary art; reactionary rise of “art pour l’art,” which he calls “theology of art” negative b/c you have “pure” art without a social meaning or even the admission of content/topicality
      • culmination of art pour l’art: Marinetti’s war-mongering and Fascism in aesth of politics b/c they want to “gratify” the new sense of perception available by technology…rather than do something social with it: art’s alienation from the social has led it to find pleasure in destruction
      • remember he sees similar process between denying socialism/promoting fascism and inadequate or unnatural use of tech
• “increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life”
  • they want to “get hold” of things at all cost, even if only getting a reproduction (trading “permanence” of original object with the “transitoriness of the reproduction
• To “pry an object from its shell” is a “sense of the universal equality of things”
  • The masses are for equality, so the destruction of the aura into the reproducible object is the “adjustment of reality to the masses”
• Exhibition value (which to him has political valence) superior to ritual value

Revolution

• Art is NOT autonomous; its release from cult proved it
• Photography is the “first truly revolutionary means of reproduction”
  • It shows up at the same time socialism does historically
  • there is no “original” photograph
  • “Free-floating contemplation” not appropriate: instead, they “stir” and “challenge” viewer
  • Its invention and invention of film change the nature of art itself
• 225: hints that artistic value of art might be “incidental,” political value the most important, and that this truth will be discovered only later (not by his contemporaries)
• Art = “the creation of a demand which could only be satisfied”
  • Only future developments in art (creation of new art form) can adequately meet demands of what they’re trying to get it
  • Thus, decadence not about decay but instead “richest historical energies”
    • ex: Dada, prefiguring film: they share desire effects on people: “uselessness for contemplative immersion”
      • Dada used “waste language” and images; tried to destroy their aura
      • contemplation is “school for asocial behavior” so Benj’s not gonna like it
      • instead, ballistic art: hits audience, “happened to him” thus “tactile”
    • movie: denies contemplation b/c changing: “shock effect” (which mirrors real life of modern man b/c constant threat of modern life)

Film

• Relation to Critique
  • The film: audience is replaced by mechanical tool
    • The actor’s body has no corporeality; does not face audience in itself (says Pirandello, and Benj agrees); performance is done episodically and is edited (not a whole performance)
    • Alienated from audience, not creating the final product, just like factory worker alienated from product
    • Actor’s aura vanishes, more like a “prop”
      • “Cult of the movie star” is created to stave off the issue, but it is still “the phony spell of the commodity” (b/c it’s ultimately about boss’ capital)
      • This is the hang-up with revolutionary potential: can’t be as long as it’s capital that “sets the fashion”
  • The audience is in the position of critic automatically b/c takes up the point of view of the camera
  • The audience’s approach to actor: “testing”
    • Not the cult attitude at all!
  • Likes Soviet Union, which films regular folks doing their jobs; whereas in Europe “the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to modern man’s legitimate claim to being reproduced.”
• Expansion of press = everyone can be a writer, where quantity transmutes into quality (more people changes the nature of the work)
  • “Author” no longer wholly separate from “public”
  • Footnote, quotes Huxley from Beyond the Mexique Bay who say that “the proportion of trash in total artistic output is greater now than at any other period” b/c of increased availability of means to write (high wages, universal education). He’s pissed off. Benj responds laconically: “This mode of observation is obviously not progressive.”
    • Other people who react negatively towards these changes are silly, not understanding that even if something at first appears in ignoble form, it can still be good: that is a superficial judgment
    • He’s anticipating “Culture Industry” here: he says NO to the “ancient lament” that masses see art as distraction whereas real critics concentrate
      • Concentration: the work absorbs you; distraction: the mass absorbs the work (the latter’s best example is traced by history of responses to architecture)
• Magician is to surgeon as painter is to cameraman
  • Cameraman “penetrates deeply into its web” (into reality)
  • Cameraman: “multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law” (to make invisible the mesh of equipment that was really there)
  • Why does it matter today? “it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing penetration of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment”
• Why is film so important?
  • It is where the mass’ responses are progressive: they shun Picasso but embrace Chaplin
  • “The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert.”
  • B/c of mass viewing (architecture shares this; painting does not), individual response is always already mass response: they “organize and control themselves”
• Ultimately, different behavior towards art
  • Distraction: actually a sign of the lack of cult value of art, just like the fact that they’re critics

Random

• Cult value of art = art to be hidden 225
  • religious value? you hide it not exhibit it
• Reinhardt, film of Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Newsreel: makes everyone potentially an extra
• Architecture
  • More of an ancient form of art: you always have to have it (unlike say epic poetry)
  • You see it AND touch it: perceive and use it
    • thus understanding tourism (looking at the building) isn’t enough to understand architecture: perception isn’t only about optics: perceptions are “mastered” by habit
  • Remember tactile appropriation of building, achieved by habit 240, “this mode of appropriation, developed in relation to architecture, in certain circumstances acquires canonical value”
    • connex tactile movements with habit: that’s what habit is for him
• Technology itself aligned w/destruction b/c in modern times, the unwillingness to use to its fullest extent our new means of production (which can only happen via socialism)...means that we love destruction b/c it is the “unnatural” outlet for productive forces.
  • Art pour l’art is part of it b/c it is happy with destruction as an aesthetic pleasure. Anything is game if it’s aesthetically exquisite.