pynchon-l-digest V2 #1678/IBM, Disney, Bush: Nazis?

[jporter]

On the beam, jackson. But the confrontation of aesthetics, politics and art
brings us back to the Uffizi, the tale of the two Judas trees, and, oddly,
those two Walters- Benjamin and the frozen Disney, lying now as enigmatic as
a thumbless monkey beneath the pole, or, pharoah (Copan?) under the pyramid.

The hollow Judas tree confronting the Botticelli is a very interesting
image. It seems the equivalent, in literary terms, of Dali's use of the
classical "vocabulary" in his version of The Last Supper. In Dali's work,
however, the role of Judas appears to be left to the observer. This shifting
of responsibility to the observer occurs in his surreal version because
Judas cannot be discerned with any certainty from the other prostrating
apostles hence, they are all relatively equivalent. Compare this with
Leonardo's renaissance version where there is broken symmetry, i.e., not all
the apostles are given equal weight, or have their individualities balanced
by a symmetrical counterpart. In Dali's version, only Christ can be
identified with any certainty by the observer.

And, of course, picking out Christ- breaking the symmetry- is the role of
Judas. It is his job, as it were. Is it a role freely chosen? I suppose it
depends on whether we're talking about works of art, or, whatever passes for
the real thing during the particular historical epoch in question. Different
historical periods seem to aestheticize the political arena more than
others, a tie to Benjamin:

> Of Benjamin¹s better-known pieces, ³The Author as Producer²
> (1934) shows the influence of Brecht most clearly. At issue is
> the old chestnut of Marxist aesthetics: Which is more
> important, form or content? Benjamin proposes that a literary
> work will be ³politically correct only if it is also literarily
> correct.² ³The Author as Producer² is a defense of the left
> wing of the modernist avant-garde, typified for Benjamin by
> the Surrealists, against the Party line on literature, with its bias
> toward easily comprehensible, realistic stories with a strong
> progressive tendency. To make his case Benjamin feels
> obliged to appeal once again to the glamour of engineering:
> the writer, like the engineer, is a technical specialist and
> should have a voice in technical matters.

[http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?20010111028R@p3]

I'll just add that it is ironic, in an aesthetic sense, that the observer's
inability to discrimminate Judas, by an artistic sleight of hand, enhances
his/her ability to see Christ, in the painting... Something about
complementarity, I suppose.

Again from Coetze's piece:

> Benjamin¹s keenest insights into fascism, the enemy that
> deprived him of a home and a career and ultimately killed him,
> are into the means it used to sell itself to the German people: by
> turning itself into theater. These insights are most fully
> expressed in (to use the title preferred by the Harvard
> translators) ³The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
> Reproducibility² (1936) but are foreshadowed in a 1930 review
> of the book War and Warriors, edited by Ernst Jünger.
> 
> It is commonplace to observe that Hitler¹s Nuremberg rallies,
> with their combination of declamation, hypnotic music, mass
> choreography, and dramatic lighting, found their model in
> Wagner¹s Bayreuth productions. What is original in Benjamin is
> his claim that politics as grandiose theater, rather than as debate,
> was not just the trappings of fascism but fascism in essence.
> 
> In the films of Leni Riefenstahl as well as in newsreels
> exhibited in every theater in the land, the German masses were
> offered images of themselves as their leaders called upon them
> to be. Fascism used the power of the art of the past‹what
> Benjamin calls auratic art‹plus the multiplying power of the
> new postauratic media, cinema above all, to create its new
> fascist citizens. For ordinary Germans, the only identity on
> show, the one that looked back at them from the screen, was a
> fascist identity in fascist costume and fascist postures of
> domination or obedience.
> 
> Benjamin¹s analysis of fascism as theater raises many questions.
> Is politics as spectacle really the heart of German fascism, rather
> than ressentiment and dreams of historical retribution? If
> Nuremberg was aestheticized politics, why were Stalin¹s May Day
 >extravaganzas and show trials not aestheticized politics too? If
 >the genius of fascism was to erase the line between politics
 >and media, where is the fascist element in the media-driven
 >politics of Western democracies? Are there not different
 >varieties of aesthetic politics?


If anyone else wants to pick up the thread, and discuss Walter Benjamin's
ideas, re: the aesthetics of power and the politicalization of art, and how
they might apply to judging Pynchon's political v. literary correctness, not
to mention the cryogenic spider monkey, please, by any means necessary, jump
in.

See you real soon!

  jody


> From: MalignD at aol.com....