It’s interesting that Benjamin’s essay attempts to be positive about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, but it reads so negatively. Is that because we’ve all become a little jaded about how ‘the film’ (which we now know includes commercial television) works? While it may destroy the commanding aura of the original and elite object, I think we’ve all come to understand that it effectively creates its own aura as well. Any good Marxist knows that commodities are fetishized by the dissociation of use-value and exchange-value, and that the laborer is alienated by the separation of one’s labor from the object one creates by the fact that one is paid in dollar bills. Obviously the next step in the triumph of capitalism is to make impossible the tactile relationship one might have with the fetishized object; the object is an image. Benjamin sets up the actor-in-the-room and actor-on-the-screen binary in order to suggest that the film audience can somehow become more critical because of the actor’s absence, but it seems that the ‘shock effect’ of the camera’s work is more open to the inflated, uncritical, desirous gaping that accompanies the image of “breasts in a clinging sweater or the naked torso of the athletic hero” in Adorno and Horkheimer’s culture industry essay. What’s even more scarifying – and yet something that we as a filmic culture have accepted with amazing pluck and aplomb – is that the system of reproducible images has changed the very way we perceive. Benjamin’s thesis rests on a crucial ‘should be,’ when he states that “the shock effect of the film […] should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind” (238). Even with his allowances for the intellectual laziness of the masses, Benjamin’s perspective on ‘distraction’ as a means toward critical perception sounds rather…I’m sorry…I got distracted by the cheerleaders on Monday Night Football…where was I going with this?
Note: This post was written before I was able to read any of the other posts, and so I didn’t realize that most of the class read Benjamin as being negative about film and reproducible images — and that there would be such a rousing defense of film. I guess we’ll probably start with this discrepancy in our class discussion tonight.