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oskhen's review
4.0
The sheer magnitude of Walter Benjamin's writing is quite overwhelming when faced with the task of summarizing his views. The notes I took while reading amounts to a sizeable essay in-and-of themselves. At the core of his thought is the phantasmagoria and the profound effect it has on the way we relate to the world. The phantasmagoria is likened to an optical media device, and its effects: the denial of the most fundamental things of life.
This denial, like a filter between the subject and his experience, has a transitory form. It changes with time because of its reflexive relationship to man.
The essay which this book was named after, The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, sets out to sketch the shift in perception Benjamin noticed happening with the rampant evolution of technology. This shift is marked by the decay of the aura. His marxist roots are made clear by the way he elevates the problem, finding "the social basis of the aura's present decay" in the consumerist commodity fetishism which grant them, quoting Marx Das Capital, "sensuous, yet extrasensory properties." The phantasmagoria is in another way understood as the structural effect of commodity networks based precisely in the "debilitating effect over the human perceptual apparatus and intellect" which they are granted in capitalistic society.
I can't help but liken Benjamin's decay of the aura to Carl Jung's book Modern man in search of a soul. In general, the critique is the overvaluation of the concept as opposed to individual experience.
The importance placed in concepts, in symbolic existence, has a detrimental effect on our appreciation of life. A tree is no longer a magical creation by nature, something beautiful to marvel at, it's just a tree. Conceptualization is a fundamentally devaluing process, placing objects in the background to make room for 'more important matters'. In the essay To the Planetarium, we find references to what is lost.
I want to especially point out this perceptual shift which the decay of the aura signifies. The experience of the aura is today often regarded as mystical. To understand this notion, a quick look at the psychoanalytical movement of the mid-20th century will surely help. Jacques Lacan claims that "the unconscious is structured like a language" and Jacques Derrida famously said that "there is nothing outside of the text." What we find here is the complete overtaking of the symbolic, of the conceptual, over experience, in short, the decay of the aura. Which is quite terrifying if you think about it, because suddenly the system is all that is left, and the battle for retaining the aura is seen as leftovers from religious indoctrination. There is, for Benjamin, redemption in art.
"who we are, the character of the physical environment in which we move, and the character of the historical moment in which we live - are in fact denied to us."
This denial, like a filter between the subject and his experience, has a transitory form. It changes with time because of its reflexive relationship to man.
"Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives change over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception."
The essay which this book was named after, The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, sets out to sketch the shift in perception Benjamin noticed happening with the rampant evolution of technology. This shift is marked by the decay of the aura. His marxist roots are made clear by the way he elevates the problem, finding "the social basis of the aura's present decay" in the consumerist commodity fetishism which grant them, quoting Marx Das Capital, "sensuous, yet extrasensory properties." The phantasmagoria is in another way understood as the structural effect of commodity networks based precisely in the "debilitating effect over the human perceptual apparatus and intellect" which they are granted in capitalistic society.
”What, then, is the aura? A strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be. To follow with the eye – while resting on a summer afternoon – a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch."
I can't help but liken Benjamin's decay of the aura to Carl Jung's book Modern man in search of a soul. In general, the critique is the overvaluation of the concept as opposed to individual experience.
"The stripping of the veil from the object, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose ’sense for all that is the same in the world’ has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts sameness even from what is unique. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing significance of statistics"
The importance placed in concepts, in symbolic existence, has a detrimental effect on our appreciation of life. A tree is no longer a magical creation by nature, something beautiful to marvel at, it's just a tree. Conceptualization is a fundamentally devaluing process, placing objects in the background to make room for 'more important matters'. In the essay To the Planetarium, we find references to what is lost.
"They alone shall possess the earth who live from the powers of the cosmos. Nothing distinguishes the ancient from the modern man so much as the former's absorption in a cosmic experience scarcely known to later periods. ... The ancients' intercourse with the cosmos had been different: the ecstatic trance. For it is in this experience alone that we gain certain knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is remotest from us, and never of one without the other. This means, however, that man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally. It is the dangerous error of modern men to regard this experience as unimportant."
I want to especially point out this perceptual shift which the decay of the aura signifies. The experience of the aura is today often regarded as mystical. To understand this notion, a quick look at the psychoanalytical movement of the mid-20th century will surely help. Jacques Lacan claims that "the unconscious is structured like a language" and Jacques Derrida famously said that "there is nothing outside of the text." What we find here is the complete overtaking of the symbolic, of the conceptual, over experience, in short, the decay of the aura. Which is quite terrifying if you think about it, because suddenly the system is all that is left, and the battle for retaining the aura is seen as leftovers from religious indoctrination. There is, for Benjamin, redemption in art.
"In the true work of art, delight knows how to make itself fleeting, how to live in the moment, disappear, become new."
jakeyjake's review
The title essay, written in Germany during Nazi rule in 1935, with its main criticism art reproduced hash lost its 'aura', feels a bit crotchety to our modern internet-baked sensibilities. So little of the art I consume is direct-from-the-artist.
Walter Benjamin isn't just being grumpy, however. He chronicles art from the earliest human stage with cave paintings made for their 'cult' value, then through to the beginnings of mechanical reproducibility. Wood blocks, lithography, the printing press for the written word. And then to photography, of which he asks, 'whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art.'
Much of the rest of the essay deals with photography and film, with actors acting not for humans in a linear manner, but for lenses and in a most-convenient-to-film scene-by-scene order. He asserts that there is something essential lost in this transmutation, and yet he also seems to exalt film over past art for their ability to represent reality to the viewer. 'Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.'
There's something to be said for the political bent of this essay (something about the line, 'All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.') but I'll leave others to say it.
It was another line of this essay that sparked my mind. Speaking of publishing writing, Walter Benjamin says at one point, 'today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.' If only Walter Benjamin could see us now! What I'm trying to interrogate in my mind is the value of aesthetic gatekeeping in art and literature. There's no new insight in saying that most anyone can make and 'publish' on what is a reproducible scale unknown in human history. It's the SoundCloudization of music, the Tumblerization of publishing, Instagramization of graphics and photography. But the irony seems to be that for all this 'democratization', perhaps BECAUSE of this democratization, we seem to continue to look to our curators to do the work of evaluation for us and then to point and say, 'Here, here,' or 'there, there! Listen to this, read that, follow them, wear this.' As the 'basic character' between author and public dissipates, I find myself falling into the pattern of trusting the industry leaders. I read what Random House and Hachette print on their mega-presses instead of self-published laserjet or Reddit offerings. I listen to artists on major labels instead of independent creators. And perhaps I'm getting back full circle to the politics that I said I'd let others comment on, because it seems to me that my patronage of the big gatekeepers of art is a symptom of a sort of capitalist fervor or at least a mental model that believes that quality is somehow related to what sells?
Walter Benjamin isn't just being grumpy, however. He chronicles art from the earliest human stage with cave paintings made for their 'cult' value, then through to the beginnings of mechanical reproducibility. Wood blocks, lithography, the printing press for the written word. And then to photography, of which he asks, 'whether the very invention of photography had not transformed the entire nature of art.'
Much of the rest of the essay deals with photography and film, with actors acting not for humans in a linear manner, but for lenses and in a most-convenient-to-film scene-by-scene order. He asserts that there is something essential lost in this transmutation, and yet he also seems to exalt film over past art for their ability to represent reality to the viewer. 'Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.'
There's something to be said for the political bent of this essay (something about the line, 'All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.') but I'll leave others to say it.
It was another line of this essay that sparked my mind. Speaking of publishing writing, Walter Benjamin says at one point, 'today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.' If only Walter Benjamin could see us now! What I'm trying to interrogate in my mind is the value of aesthetic gatekeeping in art and literature. There's no new insight in saying that most anyone can make and 'publish' on what is a reproducible scale unknown in human history. It's the SoundCloudization of music, the Tumblerization of publishing, Instagramization of graphics and photography. But the irony seems to be that for all this 'democratization', perhaps BECAUSE of this democratization, we seem to continue to look to our curators to do the work of evaluation for us and then to point and say, 'Here, here,' or 'there, there! Listen to this, read that, follow them, wear this.' As the 'basic character' between author and public dissipates, I find myself falling into the pattern of trusting the industry leaders. I read what Random House and Hachette print on their mega-presses instead of self-published laserjet or Reddit offerings. I listen to artists on major labels instead of independent creators. And perhaps I'm getting back full circle to the politics that I said I'd let others comment on, because it seems to me that my patronage of the big gatekeepers of art is a symptom of a sort of capitalist fervor or at least a mental model that believes that quality is somehow related to what sells?
dsbookie's review
4.0
Really interesting critical theory. I feel like he is the easiest to understand that I have read so far. Especially since he keeps referring to film.
maria_1605's review
5.0
"Iată ce se întâmplă cu estetizarea politicului pe care o practică fascismul. Răspunsul comunismului este politizarea artei."