Walter Benjamin Discussion

Assignment: Read Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in Ways of Reading.

His title is, of course, the source for the title for this course. One of our goals in reading Benjamin will be to apply his observations about modern culture to the transformations of everyday experience associated with digital culture.

Benjamin was a German philosopher born in 1892, in Berlin. He attempted to obtain a position at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, but was denied a position because of his unusual approach to philosophy. He ultimately wrote for magazines and periodicals and lived off a stipend from his father. He became interested in Leftist politics, read the works of Karl Marx, and even visited USSR. His friendship with Bertholt Brecht--the playwright (Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage) and sometime filmmaker--was very influencial. Brecht's emphasis on the "framing" components of the production--actors sometimes directly address the audience, read their lines as if they are "quoting" them. Benjamin was alos prominently influenced by the Surrealist attempts to become conscious of ,and therefore, transform everyday experience. Benjamin was also influenced by Dziga Vertov's (Man With a Movie Camera, Three Songs About Lenin) experimental cinema, including Vertov's notion of the Kino-Eye.

This political commitment led Benjamin to focus on the "everyday," the "refuse" of a rapidly expanding mass culture, which was tied to industrialism. He often focused on the discarded fashions, seeing them as an emblem of an acceleration of everyday experience associated with industrial capitalism. Benjamin's interest in the everyday produced some of his most challenging work, the Arcades Project, a massive archive of materials that Benjamin collected throughout his career that focused on teh nineteenth century Paris Arcades.

With the rise of Nazism, Benjamin fled for Paris in 1933, where he continued to focus on an analysis of everyday/popular culture. It is during this period of his life that Benjamin wrote "Work of Art." In his later essays, "The Storyteller," and "Paris, Capital of the 19th Century," Benjamin focused on these concerns as well. With the fall of France, Benjamin was forced to flee (with basically nothing more than a few manuscripts), traveling through the Pyranees into Spain. However, the Spanish border patrol wouldn't let him and his party cross, and in a fit of despair Benjamin took his own life.

The "Work of Art" essay is his specific attempt, under the influence of Brecht and the Surrealists, to consider how the relatively new medium of the cinema was changing human perception and social relationships. When writing the essay, he sought to find ways in which cinema challenged normal perception, much like the Surrealist artwork challenged conventional ways of seeing.

The essay opens with a discussion of the continuing exploitation of the worker/proletariat under industrial capitalism. He then suggests that the "superstructure," that is culture, reflects its economic base, or "substructure." However, Benjamin emphasizes that a study of culture can assist us in a revolutionary understanding of the changes in the economic base

At the same time, Benjamin saw in traditional art a hierarchical set of relations that placed the work of art (and the artist) in a privileged, almost god-like, position in relationship to the audience. He refers to this relationship as the "aura" of the artwork. Benjamin argues that the cinema, becuae it is infinitely reproducible, shatters the aura, because it shatters the distance between the audience and the artwork, creating a closeness to the image never before available.

Benjamin was also influenced by the Surrealists' Freudian reworking of Marxism, specifically their attempts to create new ways of seeing that would make people conscious of their experiences. Drawing from Freud's observations about slips of the tongue in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and the experimental techniques of Vertov (extreme close-ups, temporal dilation and expansion, split screen), Benjamin formulates the concept of unconscious optics, as a means of challenging traditional perception. This notion of "strangeness," what Freud might call, "the uncanny" permeates Benjamin's discussion of film.

Benjamin's essay concludes with a discussion of Futurism, another dominant avant-garde movement that celebrated the pure beauty of technology and violence. He suggests that the Futurists are complicit with the dangerous logic of Fascism.