VV(12): Avant-Garde

[Dave Monroe]

"'From Munich, and never heard of Hitler,' said Weissmann, as if 'Hitler' 
were the name of an avant-garde play.  'What the hell's wrong with young 
people.'" (V., Ch. 9, Sec. ii, p. 242)

I realize now that I negelected to title my initial post along this line 
("VV(12):"), but, well, I'm sure that you're all familiar with Walter 
Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1937) 
and that notion that Fascism results in "the introduction of aesthetics into 
political life."  Again, see Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and 
Reflections (Ed. Hannah Arendt.  Trans. Harry Zohn.  NY: Schocken, 1969), 
pp. , or any of the following ...

http://web.bentley.edu/empl/c/rcrooks/toolbox/common_knowledge/general_communication/benjamin.html

http://www.ipdg.org/museum/collage/benjamin.htm

http://pages.emerson.edu/Courses/spring00/in123/workofart/benjamin.htm

... see esp. the "Epilogue."  As well as the footnotes ...

As Andrew Hewitt notes in "Fascist Modernism and the Theater of Power," 
Chapter 6 of his Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the 
Avant-Garde (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1993), pp. 161-94 ...

"The argument of the 'Reproduction' essay hardly needs reiteration.  What 
does require further elucidation, however, is the subtext of that analysis.  
This is quite literally a sub-text, confined largely to a series of 
footnotes in which Benjamin examines precisely the ways in which fascism has 
been empowered by technological advances, making use of the very 
reproductive techniques that supposedly oppose it." (167)

And here he cites Benjamin's "baldest statement of this counterposition to 
the main argument of the essay" as ...

"Mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of masses. In big 
parades and monster rallies, in sports events, and in war, all of which 
nowadays are captured by camera and sound recording, the masses are brought 
face to face with themselves. This process, whose significance need not be 
stressed, is intimately connected with the development of the techniques of 
reproduction and photography. Mass movements are usually discerned more 
clearly by a camera than by the naked eye....  This means that mass 
movements, including war, constitute a form of human behavior which 
particularly favors mechanical equipment." (Benjamin, Illuminations, n. 21, 
p. 251)

And Hewitt continues ...

"Since Benjamin emphasizes reproducibility as something inherent to the 
reproducible object, rather than reproduction as a secondary and accidental 
process to which the object is subjected  ... [and] Since reproduction 
reduces the specific to the reproducible, the proletariat to the amorphous 
mass, technological advances potentially lead into a depoliticization which 
runs counter to Benjamin's argument.  The very process of liberating 
reproduction, which Benjamin celebrates, nevertheless feeds directly into 
the fascist spectacles, the marches and the wars that he condemns." (167)

"Implicitly, a play is being made upon the complementary and compensatory 
relationship pertaining between political and aesthetic senses of 
'representation.'  At the same time that he criticizes fascism for offering 
mimetic instead of political representation, however, Benjamin is obliged to 
see this displacement as ... an adequate expression ... of the 'truth' of 
the essentially reproducible masses." (168)

"What Benjamin chooses to overlook is the way in which the loss of 
specificity of the aesthetic moment implicitly in the process of the art 
work'd loss of aura encourages the process of the aestheticization of 
politics by liberating aesthetic experience from the institutional 
constraints that held it in check.  Reproducible art is not only an 
alternative to fascistic social practice, but also a potential tool for it." 
(168)

Here, however, Hewitt takes up a different topic ...

"Also in a footnote, Benjamin examines the impact of techniques of 
technological reproduction upon the very structure of parliamentary 
democracy." (168)

And cites ...

"Since the innovations of camera and recording equipment make it possible 
for the orator to become audible and visible to an unlimited number of 
persons, the presentation of the man of politics before camera and recording 
equipment becomes paramount.  Parliaments, as much as theaters, are 
deserted....  Though their tasks
may be different, the change affects equally the actor and the ruler....  
This results in a new selection, a selection before the equipment from which 
the star and the dictator emerge victorious." (Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 
247, n. 12)

And comments ...

"Bourgeois parliamentarism is implicitly linked with the theater and its 
decadence is shadowed by the demise of the theater.  Likewise, Benjamin 
suggests that we think the relationship of fascism to democracy as analogous 
to the relationship of film to theater.  But what is the relation?  At the 
most basic level, both theater and film share certain representational 
presuppositions: fundamentally, that there is a reality that is subsequently 
to be represented, acted, filmed.... however .... Theater and film are not 
just two ways of representing the same thing; they necessarily reconstitute 
the thing itself." (169)

"It is strange, then, that in an essay that celebrates the liberational 
potential of technologies of reproduction it should be film--the medium 
deprived of aura--that creates both stars and dictators....  Clearly, it is 
necessary to rethink the aura of the dictator and the star in this context.  
the aura of the dictator is predicated upon his lack of specificity and 
intrinsic reproducibility.  In other words, the aura attacked by the filmic 
medium and the charisma f the dictator are not one and the same; indeed, 
charismatic authority seems to be created precisely by virtue of its 
effacement of aura.  For charisma is not created--as vulgar usage would have 
it--by an act of individual volition, but rather by a collective act of 
faith.  The aura of the dictator consists in the recognition of a certain 
arbitrariness: in the awareness that he could be anyone.  More than this, as 
an always already reproducible representation of individual, antidemocratic 
authority, the Fuhrer already is anyone." (169)

[and here I would direct your attention to, variously, and hardly 
exhaustively, say, George Orwell, 1984 (1949); A Face in the Crowd (dir. 
Elia Kazan, 1957); and maybe even those 175s on the other side of the wall 
from Blicero et al. in Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's rainbow (1973)]

"The representational degeneration Benjamin traces from theater to film in 
this footnote involves a recognition of the charismatic leader as something 
less--rather than more--than the individual.  Charismatic individuality must 
be understood as a form of contradiction in terms, for it involves the 
collective investment in the category of the individual." (170)

Here, by the way, Hewitt evokes again an earlier citation ...

"... as regards Nazism, the verdict was incontestably exact: the 
'aestheticization of politics' was, indeed, in its essence, the programme of 
National Socialism.  Or its project."

... from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics (Trans. Chris 
Turner.  Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), p.61.

Hewitt continues ...



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