So I started my intensive French course on Monday. It is fun, not too challenging yet, but it is good review. It's quite exhausting.
I am particularly exhausted today because we were up late last night with the Martins, who were enroute to Wenatchee. They will be back for a day and a half on Sunday. It was really great to see them.
I've been missing poker lately. I keep trying to find people to play with around here, but I haven't had a good game in a while.
That's all for now.
This morning, I read Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in an effort to tackle my reading to-do list. Benjamin’s work has been extremely influential in the realm of Marxist criticism as well as an important source for theorizing various branches of cultural studies. “WAMR” is probably one of his best known essays, and, as I found out, for a good reason. It is an outstanding bit of work that was relevant during Benjamin’s life (he died in 1940) but is even more pertinent today.
The central focus of the essay is the role of “art” in mass society, and one of his key concepts is that art pieces in past cultures were endowed with “aura,” his term to describe originality (as in uniqueness) and a consequently religious or sacred sense. Think, for instance, of ikons, sacred paintings, and, although he doesn’t mention this, relics. Secularized versions of art as aura can be seen in aestheticism. In contrast to this, mechanical reproduction removes aura from what it is we call “art” primarily by a) making something infinitely repeatable and b) separating it from its sacred/ritualistic/privileged context. The key examples he offers are photography and, his primary target, film.
While his thesis makes a lot of sense, I am really interested in what he alludes to later in the essay and how it would apply to our world today. Simply, I would argue that aura is replaced by “popularity” in mass culture. Take, for instance, the madly popular TV shows like Survivor or Desperate Housewives. I think the experience of watching such shows is very much determined by the fact that they are popular. This is Marshall McCluhan’s tribal experience at work. It is not originality that makes a work significant to us; instead, it is its mass appeal. Popularity becomes the key form of affect and emotional value found in the work.
Benjamin says as much in a footnote toward the end of his essay: “mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of the masses . . . . [when] the masses are brought face to face with themselves.” In this case he is referring to vast rallies, political or sporting events, war, the kind of experience typified perhaps by Hitler in front of the teeming audience. In a more subtle form, I wonder if audience polls and ratings are the same thing. The top movie, book, show or whatever is then purchased, read, etc because it evokes a feeling similar to that of aura, the experience of being in the crowd. We are looking at ourselves when we read The Da Vinci Code.
It’s obvious that there is a political consequence to all of this. First of all, we identify simply and purely with an amorphous collective of which the movie star or American idol is a representative. And a simulacral representative at that. Because we become addicted to the “humanity” expressed through the screen but can’t stand the neighbor who we have to experience in real life, as a flesh and blood human being. So there is an inherent contradiction: we align ourselves with a collective but are not personally committed to the members of that collective. Benjamin claims that in this situation, politics replaces ritual. It makes sense then, that our mass culture is a reflection of certain democratic values. The majority is privileged for being the majority – there is nothing else behind it. Unlike an ikon, which points to something larger and historical, mass culture is self-referential.
I think an even more serious consequence is that we only think aesthetics and values in terms of popularity and can no longer understand something like “aura.” This is why avant-gardes have, in many ways, lost their immediacy. That which opposes itself to mass culture can only do so through another form of popularity: elitism. Anything experimental, conceptual, “artistic” (when “art” is opposed to “mass”) only acquires that characteristic if the right people say it is such, if it is read by the right critics and valued by the truly knowledgeable. Whether it is mass or avant-garde, the underlying logic remains the same: a collective experience.
As a consequence, there are certain things we simply cannot think about in a mass culture. Benjamin quotes Leonardo (I believe Da Vinci) who claimed that painting is superior to music because music dies as soon as it is born. One of my professors sees the same principle in theatre: the actor, he always says, is dying in front of you. In our digitized age, nothing actually dies. It is always retrievable, recorded, secure, endlessly repeatable. Thus, the scientist in Videodrome isn’t really “dead” – instead, he exists inside the videos he has made for himself. Thus, we can no longer think death. Of course, we talk about it all the time, and our favorite shows and films are dedicated to dead people (murder, war, disease). But we cannot understand death because our arts don’t contain their own death. I think this is true for a number of things.
Benjamin refers to what he calls the “commonplace” that “real art requires concentration while mass art is absorbed.” Or, you could say that mass art is absorbing, since its affect comes from allowing the individual to be absorbed into a popularized body. But why does real art require concentration? I would say it does so because it destroys what we think we know and forces us into a state of abeyance. Some art leaves us there, while others bring us through it into a confrontation with truth. This is why I think art both requires and demands agency. This is where art is at its most politically efficacious, when it makes us reaffirm reality by thinking it again.
I’m still trying to come to terms with this in relation to our everyday experience, which I referred to in an earlier post.
Yesterday was our anniversary. Capria and I have been married 3 years. I made steaks and we watched From Russia, With Love. It was also raining. I love the rain.
Lang and Charity are coming in a week.
That is all for now.
The title of this post refers to fellow English scholar Tim Welsh's final seminar project. The course was dedicated to theories of the everyday, which included some really cool conceptual apparatus. My favorite: de Certeau's distinction between tactics and strategies. I wish I would have taken the course.
Yesterday I demonstrated classic Paul behavior by showing up to my language class in Pioneer Square a week early. I mixed up the dates. The plus side was that I have another week to look for an apartment and hang out before class starts, as well as the immediate benefit of spending more time with John Totten and the Dixons before they had to leave.
I also may be buying a moped. I'll keep you posted.
. . . posting when it is beautiful and sunny out there? I don't know. I guess it is discpline and a sense of responsibility.
If you have not figured it out by now, I think I watch a lot of movies. Probably too many movies. But I think I've come to terms with that. I study 20th Century thought. Movies were an important expression of that thought. So I shouldn't feel guilty about watching a lot of movies. If they are good ones.
All that is to say that I am going to see Jean-Luc Godard's Masculine Feminine this evening with some friends. I'll let you know how it is. I am also seeing John Totten and the Dixon's this weekend. That should be even more fun.
I start French classes on Monday. I am very much looking forward to that. OK, I gotta go.
Well, I am officially done with my first year of grad school. Papers have been turned in, grades registered, and all other responsibilities over. It's a very nice feeling. I will be spending the summer working on a) French, b) a reading list for my master's essay on the avant-garde and theory, and c) a conference paper on Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophy of agency and its relationship to literature for Berkeley's comparative literature conference this fall.
All of this talk of freedom is interesting in light of this brief write-up on Janice Rogers Brown in the NY Times. I think her position on responsibility and individual freedom is one side of the debate in political theory that will be ongoing as our government spends its "political capital" and the definitions of a just society continue to be rethought. In many ways, I agree with Ms. Brown's perspective, but I believe she is making a fundamental omission: namely, responsibility is not primarily a self-oriented attribute but an other-oriented one. I think we have historically spent way to much time talking about responsibility for one's self (which is clearly necessary) and less about responsibility for other people. Or, at best, we translate other people as "nation," that amorphous idea.
Complex stuff for a sunny day in Seattle.
Since I don't have deadlines hanging over me all of a sudden, it makes procrastinating on my self-imposed deadlines a lot easier. While doing so, I stumbled accross this review of Thomas Friedman's new book. As you may know, there are a lot of things I like about TF and a number that make me uneasy, and Scialabba does a very nice job, in my mind, of distinguishing between the two.
I find the article's conclusion particularly striking because I told my students something similar the last day of class: that while we should not ignore technology, communication, production, and all those other things that can be extremely beneficial, we should equally pay attention to those things that make us human. Otherwise, we won't have anything to say to each other, and that can quickly turn nasty.
In other procrastination news, this evening Capria and I are watching Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage in preparation for tomorrow, when we are going to see its sequel at the Seattle International Film Festival. I'll keep you posted.
A friend sent me this link to Human Events, a conservative news magazine I had never heard of, which asked a panel of conservative scholars to come up with the list of the 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries. The question, I think, is ridiculous, but their responses are both humorous and scary, depending on how you look at it. Particularly check out the "honorable mention" category.
Didn't "God is Dead" come from Thus Spoke Zarathustra? I haven't read The Gay Science, so it might be there as well. I personally think it is telling that they put The Communist Manifesto over Mein Kampf. By that logic, Communism and Fascism are both bad, but it is slightly better to be genocidal than anti-capitalist.
You get that sense from this other Human Events article on the New York Times Marxist agenda. Apparently examining the issues of class in America is a revolutionary activity. Which, I think, is my biggest problem with this particular brand of conservatism: it wants to silence any inquiry that opposes its activities/ideologies. I’m not saying brands of liberalism don’t do the same, but it seems to me most liberalism (even as it is classically defined) is a proponent of pluralist thinking and speech. If you propose a "most harmful book list," you’re obviously not encouraging the free exchange of ideas.
In other news, today is my last day of classes in my first year of Graduate School. That went by really fast.