Body, Technology, and Art: On Walter Benjamin's "Work of Art" Essay and Related Writings (original) (raw)
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*Abstract: Around the year 1900, the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film have had on art in its traditional form. In this piece, Benjamin discusses the profound impact of photography and film on our cultural conceptions of art. He argues that photography inherently lacks essential characteristic more stylish forms to create a visual representation: the aura, and hence that its main use ships from ritual to political. He discusses a shift in perception and its affects in the wake of the advent of film and photography in the twentieth century. He writes of the sense changes within humanity's entire mode of existence; the way we look and see the visual work of art is different now and its consequences remain to be determined. Benjamin devices the concept of the « aura » to explain what he sees as the near universal significance of uniqueness and permanence regarding what we consider as art.
Walter Benjamin, Film and the ‘Anthropological-Materialist’ Project
This thesis examines Walter Benjamin’s film aesthetics within the framework of his ‘anthropological-materialist’ project. His writings on film are dispersed among essays, notes and letters and may appear at first sight to be an incoherent collection of thoughts on film. However, I will try to argue that they form part of the same philosophical and political project as his ‘anthropological materialism.’ Thus, these writings sought, first, to analyse the transformation of the human senses brought about by the appearance of film technology; and secondly, to envisage the possibility of undoing the alienation of the senses in modernity through that very same technology in order to, eventually, create a collective body (Kollectivleib) out of the audience. This project dates back to Benjamin’s anthropological texts from the early 1920s and was central to texts such as One-Way Street, the Surrealism essay and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.’ The reconfiguration of aesthetics as aisthēsis that takes place in the latter text is analysed as forming part of this project, in which Benjamin is concerned with the transformation of the human body according to its interaction with technology. From this anthropological-materialist perspective, I address from the second chapter onwards the film figures—directors, actors, characters—and films that most concerned Benjamin. Thus, I analyse his writings on Soviet film with regard to the use and conception of technology in the country; the impact of the bungled reception of technology in Germany upon films from the Weimar Republic and National Socialism, especially in their representation of mass movements; the rehabilitation of allegory in the twentieth century with Charlie Chaplin and the possibility of undoing the numbing of the senses through his gestic and allegorical performance; and, finally, Mickey Mouse as a representative of the new barbarism that Benjamin advocated within his critique of bourgeois humanism.
A Critical Reading of Walter Benjamin´s The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction
Cadernos Walter Benjamin
Minha intenção é apresentar uma resenha crítica do mais festejado ensaio de Walter Benjamin, intitulado "A obra de arte na era de sua reprodutibilidade técnica". Várias dificuldades numa primeira leitura desse texto, especialmente devido a um contraste sensível entre sua brevidade e o grande número de questões por ele levantadas. As razões para isso residem nas próprias circunstâncias em que o ensaio foi escrito, mas se devem igualmente ao estilo epigramático adotado pelo filósofo. Isto por si só já constituiria um ótimo tópico de análise. Pretendo, porém, enfatizar outros aspectos: 1) o contexto em que o texto foi produzido, a fim de mostrar que se trata de uma espécie de manifesto; 2) o desenvolvimento do conceito-chave de "aura", que já havia sido mencionado num texto anterior ("Sobre alguns motivos de Baudelaire"); 3) a questão da "politização da arte", conforme aparece no epílogo do ensaio.
On Some Posthuman Motifs in Walter Benjamin: Mickey Mouse, Barbarism and Technological Innervation
This article discerns some posthuman motifs in Walter Benjamin’s writings on film and analyzes them in dialogue with recent literature on posthumanism. I argue that, from his early anthropological texts, Benjamin devised what can be considered a posthuman theme: the idea of the creation of a collective body in and through technology. It is, nonetheless, in his writings on film that he sets out most fully how this technological innervation into the body of the collective should occur, in this case through a rush of energy through the body of the audience. The arena of cinema reception appears in this way as a paradigmatic space in which to adapt technology into the collective body of the audience. However, cinema reception is only a rehearsal for what could exist for real in the revolution, when the collective attempts to gain mastery over the new techno-body. In this new reconfiguration of humanity, traditional formations such as families and nations would be discarded. I thus suggest that Benjamin’s theory finds an echo in current feminist and postcolonial posthuman authors. In this article, I will particularly focus on the period of the “destructive character” in Benjamin’s oeuvre (1931-1933), in which he develops a fierce critique of bourgeois humanism and conceives the posthuman figures of the inhuman and the positive barbarian, of which Mickey Mouse is a privileged advocate. For Benjamin, Mickey Mouse and his friends were examples of what human beings would resemble once they had merged with technology. Thus, I will argue that Benjamin’s theories around technology, the human body and cinema are useful in reconsidering our relationship with nature and technology in a (desirable, rather than actual) posthuman condition.
Perception and Mediation: A Critique of Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
The aim of the paper is to examine the impact of the mechanically reproduced artforms like photography and film in altering the nature of human perception. With the coming of mechanical reproduction in the early decades of twentieth century, the nature and condition of art had undergone tremendous transformation. The paperundertakes a close reading of the widely known essay of Walter Benjamin-Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction-on photography and film into account to see how the visual process has been altered with technological mediation. The essays examine in detail of how conventional art has undergone change with mechanical reproduction, how photography has altered the way we see, and how film has altered our perception of time and space.The paper argues that with the emergence technologically reproduced art forms, human perception also developed new modes of reception and sensibilities subverting the conventional categories of perception.
Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film
Amsterdam University Press, 2020
Walter Benjamin is today regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century. Often captured in pensive pose, his image is now that of a serious intellectual. But Benjamin was also a fan of the comedies of Adolphe Menjou, Mickey Mouse, and Charlie Chaplin. As an antidote to repressive civilization, he developed, through these figures, a theory of laughter. Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Film is the first monograph to thoroughly analyse Benjamin's film writings, contextualizing them within his oeuvre whilst also paying attention to the various films, actors, and directors that sparked his interest. The book situates all these writings within Benjamin's 'anthropological materialism', a concept that analyses the transformations of the human sensorium through technology. Through the term 'innervation', Benjamin thought of film spectatorship as an empowering reception that, through a rush of energy, would form a collective body within the audience, interpenetrating a liberated technology into the distracted spectators. Benjamin's writings on Soviet film and German cinema, Charlie Chaplin, and Mickey Mouse are analysed in relation to this posthuman constellation that Benjamin had started to dream of in the early twenties, long before he began to theorize about films.
Nature, Technology, Humanity: The Key Triangle for Walter Benjamin’s aisthesis
Walter Benjamin’s interest in nature was always central in his philosophy. However, his conception of nature was far from the German Romantics, who tried to mystify nature and separate it from social relations. In The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, Benjamin argued that the baroque mourning play combined nature and history through the allegorical mode and thus reminded man the transience of the world, rather than its eternity. Nature is, then, in Benjamin’s philosophy and more particularly in his theory on aesthetics, immersed in the social world. In this way, Benjamin’s conception of second nature was more positive (towards humanity) than, for example, Lukács’s, who saw it first and foremost as a space for alienation. In the term second nature, in which culture and technology take place, human beings have the chance to incorporate both technology (from here the concept ‘technological innervation’) and nature into their own body. For that reason, technology is not completely separated from nature, but rather functions as a mediator to ease the interpenetration between nature and humanity. Nonetheless, the conception of first and second nature was not always clear in Benjamin’s philosophy and these terms changed later to first and second technology. In both terms, though, technology occupied a central position and was understood by Benjamin as a medium in the relation humanity/nature, able to improve this relation to utopian claims, but also able to take revenge against both of them, as happened with warfare technology. I argue that the triangle nature, technology, humanity is especially important for Benjamin’s development of a theory on aisthesis, that is, on his understanding of aesthetics as sense perception. The aim of this paper is, in short, to understand the position of this conceptual triangle in Benjamin’s philosophy and, especially, in his art criticism.