User:Lbattich/Notes on Walter Benjamin & the Work of Art in the Age of ...

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Preface:

Benjamin starts with the premise that the changing conditions of production – including the technologies and techniques of capital and cultural production – have an impact not only on culture, but also on how we perceive and interpret the world – and act on it. In this sense he writes: “The transformation of the superstructure, which takes place far more slowly than that of the substructure, has taken more than half a century to manifest in all areas of culture the change in the conditions of production."


Ch.1

Works of art have always been reproducible in principle. Consider the ancient practices of founding and stamping, and later the practices of woodcut, etching and engraving. With lithograph the image could keep the pace of the printed word, but it is only photography that, in Benjamin’s words, “freed the hand of the most important artistic functions which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking into a lens." Photography allowed two kinds of manifestations, or repercussions:

  • It can reproduce all transmitted works of art, thus changing their public impact.
  • It claims a place of its own within the artistic processes. (The art of photography and particularly the art of film, for Benjamin).


Ch.2

All reproductions, however perfect they are, lack the artwork’s presence in time and space, the testimony to its unique existence, the whole situation of the ‘original’. “The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity." Authenticity (in the original) has been developed and refined only through the development of techniques of reproduction. Yet photographic reproduction posses problems to the original’s authority, for two reasons:

  • Technical qualities of reproduction: can bring aspects not discernible to the naked eye. (Significantly, Benjamin seems here to give the camera full agency, as the lens itself “chooses its angle at will.”)
  • Distribution: Photographic reproduction bring the artwork in a variety of situations, which the original cannot access.

In this last point, consider philosopher Vilem Flusser remarks on photography: “The photograph is an immutable and silent surface patiently waiting to be distributed by means of reproduction." (p.56)


In a reproduction the quality of the work is always depreciated. Here then Benjamin goes a step further by claiming that the same happens with natural subjects that may be photographed. He makes the photographed subject the “original” – whether this is a person, a landscape or an artwork. This is a dangerous step as it supposes a mimetic approach to photography, in the sense that also traditional arts such as painting can be said to “depreciate” the “original” landscape they picture.


In the case of the reproduced artwork, what is affected is its authenticity. The authenticity of a thing is defined as “the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning” including its history and the testimony to it. And it is this historical testimony that is affected in reproduction, jeopardising the authority of the object.


Whatever has disappeared from the object in the technique of reproduction is related to the trampling of the object’s authenticity and authority. Benjamin terms “aura" this thing that has been eliminated. The loss of aura implies a loss of historical context: “the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition.” This “shattering of tradition” is connected to Benjamin’s contemporary modern crisis.


Ch.3

Benjamin extends on the notion that technology – and technology applied in culture – influences the manner we perceive the world (“the mode of human sense perception”, as he words it). The conditions and circumstances of production and industry affect not only social lives and artistic production, but also generate new kinds of perception. For Benjamin’s – and ours, arguably – modern times”changes in the medium of contemporary perception can be comprehended as decay of the aura."


The aura of natural objects is defined not in terms of tradition, but as “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.” Society has a tendency both to bring things closer to itself, spatially and humanly, and to overcome the uniqueness of every reality. It embraces reproduction for this resins.


Unmediated perception (as in non-reproduced perception of “natural” objects, if we accept Benjamin’s use of nature, and its view on perception), is related to uniqueness and permanence, whereas reproduction is transitory. Reproducibility and the demise of the aura have engendered a perception with an inflated “sense of the universal equality of things.” This drive to democratic equality even in general perception of the world flattens out not only history and tradition(s), but also thinking in general, and the importance of everyday reality, nature and the world at large. Any reproduced object can gives us a sense of this “universal equality."


Ch.4

Benjamin reiterates on the importance of the artwork’s tradition and historical testimony: this is what gives the work its uniqueness. An work of art, in regard to its aura, has a ritualistic function: “the unique value of the ‘authentic’ work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value.” This also refers to the secularised ritual of artistic appreciation of beauty, developed since the Renaissance. For Benjamin, art reacted to the development of photography and the advent of socialism with the aesthetic doctrine of art for art’s sake, which sought to isolate the work of art as an autonomous object separated from social functions, a doctrine of pure art. It is difficult to say whether Benjamin regrets or champions this loss of aura. It seems that he does both. This loss of aura and the role of the work’s ritualistic function does signify that artworks, and the perception of art, can have an immediate and real social function: “mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual." To this, however, one could add that mechanical reproduction emancipates the reproduction, but not the artwork itself (although it is then difficult to say: does the artwork reside only in the original, in its copies, on in all of them at once?). The artwork itself, in its authenticity (as compared to reproducible photographs) is still ritualistic – just think of the authority that the work has, just by virtue of being the original of many copies. The more a work is copied, the more its original gains in exhibition value.


Benjamin’s point, however, is that (the second function of photographic reproduction as mentioned in Ch.1) photographs and films, when they don’t reproduce some other artwork but are artworks in themselves, it does;t make sense to ask about their authenticity: they are designed for reproduction from the start.


(Cf. Flusser: “The concept of the original has no place. Their [the photographs’] value lies in their content [information], not in the physical thing.”).



References

Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (1983), Reaktion Books. 2000.