|
1.83 |
Likewise, estrangement disarms myth. It
disrupts
the link between human beings and their
surroundings. ("Small
History" 251).
Benjamin
points to the
photographs of Atget. They are of deserted
streets and locales. They are void of any
human
figures. Benjamin notes that this makes them
unlikely to provoke mythic or auratic
phenomena.
Identification appears to be the key for the
production
of aura. Furthermore the success of the
identificatory movement relies on the suppression
of
consciousness.
|
1.83 |
|
1.84 |
The question of consciousness will gain importance
in
Benjamin's later essays that broach the topic of
aura
after he has been called upon to distinguish his
position from that of Jung. The Swiss
psychologist defines the soul in two ways:
as a
relation to the unconscious and as a
personification of
the contents of the unconscious (Psychological
Types
306). The privileged
personifications are
feminine. For Jung the earth in the mythic
form
of the mother is the source of all power (302). He
also claims that phantasy
is the mother of all (69).
|
1.84 |
|
1.85 |
Upon viewing photographs, especially those of
female
subjects, Benjamin's stress is on the desire for
narration which arguably can slip if not into
personification proper then into
identification.
Of course as a new and strange optical unconscious
is
opened up by the camera there is nothing inherent
in
the apparatus to prevent personification, however
muted, to drive the storytelling. The
pregnant
pause of the still shot, especially read as
continuing
past and future, does not envelop but does
capture, in
Benjamin's case mesmerize, the viewer.
|
1.85 |
|
1.86 |
Adorno's critique comes to mind. A 1935
letter
from Adorno critiques Benjamin's use in the
Arcades
project proposal of a concept of collective
unconscious. Adorno not only holds that it
is
difficult to distinguish such a concept from a
similar
one in Jung but also that such a move ignores the
role
of commodity production in the shaping of
dialectical,
as opposed to mythic, images (n17).
Benjamin will reformulate the category of
experience in
more materialist terms. Such a move is
accompanied by the eclipse of female figures in
his
discourse.
|
1.86 |
|
1.87 |
In a later essay Benjamin acknowledges that
"experience of the aura thus rests on the
transposition of a response common to human
relationships to the relationships between the
inanimate or natural object and man"
("Motifs" 188). It is in this
transposability that Benjamin grounds a
distinction
between types of experience, between
Erlebnis and
Erfahrung. He sets as
contrary
impulses the opposite movements of the
transposition: the inclination to objectify
the
human against that of anthropomorphising the
world. Benjamin's investigation comes to
rest in
this dichotomy. To go beyond would be to
examine
and confront transposability itself.
|
1.87 |
|
1.88 |
A similar move is discernible in the Artwork essay
where the aura of historical objects is explained
using
the same examples from the realm of nature
(mountain
range and shadow of a branch) as found in "A
Small
History of Photography" but the factor of
enfolded
time is now absent ("Artwork"
222-223).
Distance is the
only operative term
to remain. Also absent a
possible
effect of Adorno's critique of Benjamin's
similarity to
Jung are female figures.
|
1.88 |
|
1.89 |
They will reappear after the personification-
objectification problematic has been displaced by
the
Erfahrung-Erlebnis dichotomy. Woman is a
striking
figure of the uncontrollable in Benjamin's
Baudelaire
essays. For example, the figure appears in a
single sonnet as the "vase de
tristesse", the
fleeing one, the ornament of the poet's
nights.
Benjamin reads the figure as a challenge to love
"sated with the experience of the aura"
("Motifs" 189). However
this description is oddly like the figure of woman
taken up by mythographers like Klages and Jung for
whom
it is both natural object and human being and in
this
combination outside rational grasp. The
difference lies in the ascription of
function.
For the one position such figures are the markers
of
the shocks served by life in a modern
metropolis;
for the other, the potential to cushion them.
|
1.89 |
|
1.90 |
Shock is the point of departure for Benjamin's
distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung ("Motifs"
163). Erfahrung
is experience as part of the self. Like aura
in
an age of technical reproduction it is
waning. It
is related to practice in artisan
manufacture. This is contrasted with greater
emphasis on drill in mechanized
work
settings. Erlebnis, as experience
disconnected
from the self, experience lived through, is a
response
to modern urban conditions as thematized by the
jostling crowd.
|
1.90 |
|
1.91 |
Experiential modes constrained by conditions of
perception in the sphere of productive activity
can be
aligned with those modes created by
consumption.
To render the relation between self and world,
cultural
consumption in Benjaminian discourse employs its
own
vocabulary: distraction and concentration.
|
1.91 |
|
1.92 |
At the conclusion of the Artwork essay the
absorption
of the viewer by the object is expressed in terms
of
the concentration of the gaze. Distraction
is the
alternative mode. To explain it, Benjamin
turns
to the perception of architecture and haptic habit
where the object is absorbed. In this
discourse
optical perception cannot be habitual as it may be
in
older ray theories of vision. It is not
clear
whether the assumption of the untranslatability of
sensory modes grounds itself in the distinction of
modes of experience or vice versa.
|
1.92 |
|
1.93 |
The unbridgeable gap between sensory modes
maintains
the undialectical treatment of the problematic of
absorption. It radically dichotomizes the
relation between human self and environment.
|
1.93 |
|
1.94 |
When determinism and dichotomy are discursive
partners, the truism that experience is made and
it is
affected by environment can lead to accounts of
the
relation of technology to perception where mimetic
response is the sum total of experience.
However,
humans have the capacity to change their
environments
and themselves. Both Benjamin and McLuhan
recognize this. At times they both forget
it. The points where the sexual politics of
biological and social reproduction surface in
their
work offer places from which to begin to judge how
fully each integrates this intuition concerning
the
dialectical relation of nature and history into
theory
making.
|
1.94 |
|
1.95 |
Furthermore the absence of that elusive conversion device for sensory modalities hinders theorizing about interaction. Be it transposability of personification-objectification in Benjamin's play of proxemics or McLuhan's prosthetic metaphor recycling and chiasmic reversals, in limiting the possibility of sensory transcoding, both thinkers approach movement and change in a dichotomous fashion. The division between the temporal and spatial arts stands unmoved. So too, remain unchallenged the sensory biases at work in the dyadic models of reproductive politic. |
1.95 |
