Magicians and Surgeons

I really enjoyed both the preparatory reading and the discussion at the seminar looking at 'the moving image'. I remember Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction' from second year 'Aims and Methods seminars in Manchester back in 1975;  how edgy it seemed back then in a somewhat stuffy, conservative 'Red-brick' Arts and Humanities Faculty at that time immune from any jumped-up continental notions around semiotics and structuralism which had yet to leap the confines of 'The Sixties' campuses and rattle the cage of institutions still content to pedal the received canon.

I think Teresa set-up the preparatory reading well basing it around Benjamin's seminal work from the 1930's and then contrasting it with Nick Peim's more recent 're-reading' of it which seeks to explore its influence on later thinkers such as Derrida and emergent theories in media studies relating to audience theory.

So, what about Benjamin's essay? Aalmost eighty years from its first publication  it remains thought-provoking and infuriating in equal measure. Clearly there are aspects of the work that are prescient - the claim for 'popular art' to be given equal status to 'high art' as something worthy of study and of equal cultural significance; the assertion of art as a political as well as a cultural act, a clutch of thought-provoking dialectics - 'cult versus exhibition value'; contemplation versus absorption; the analogy of a work of art being used like a building not as object, all these ideas in one way or another were developed by the later pioneers of Cultural Studies. Above aall, the exploration audacious analogies such as likening a painter to a magician and the cameraman to a surgeon; even if they don't quite work on closer analysis, nevertheless they challenge the reader to think in a different way. Its no surprise that the work became so influential.

The infuriating aspects are how much of it does not really stand-up to close scrutiny. The central contrast between 'a work of art' (that is a visual work of art) and film rests on a simplification of both. Film's unique aspects are seen to be based on its reductibility - the fact there is no 'original' and on the basis that as a work of art it is constructed from clips afterwards rather than being 'performed' one off like a play. The contrast holds up partially if you adopt the Romantic notion of a work of art being the product of a lone genius, but step back towards the workshop production of Titian and Ruben's and in fact the modes of production were very similar to a film studio and the question of 'originality' is far from clear. The issue of originality in relation to drama is equally suspect,mainly because it ignores the fact that theatrical performance is the result of painstaking rehearsal before the production analogous to the careful 'editing' of a film which takes place after the shoot. The former is the product of pre-production, the latter of post production but each are constructs.

However, to criticise Benjamin's argument this way is to use the tools of an essentially rationalist approach to challenge a mode of discourse which is Marxist. The more you look at way the key points are argued the more the Marxist nature of the dialectic becomes clear.

 Here we must now consider the question of how Benjamin viewed the notion of 'aura'. One one side of the dialectic are 'traditional' works of art which achieve an aura through originality which results in them being revered as 'cult objects' whose status is reinforced through subsequent veneration, Benjamin differentiates between 'cult status' and 'exhibition' status either of which invests a certain capital value to the object. This is contrasted with new forms such as film which, according to Benjamin lack 'aura' because they are easily reproduced and can have mass appeal, breaking down barriers between 'high art' and 'popular art'. The traditional artist is seen as a magician the new artist as a surgeon, a cultural scientist who creates through analytical means (such as film editing) rather than a mysterious creative process.

Benjamin speculates that whereas traditional art places the audience in a contemplative position, new art absorbs its consumers, it is a startlingly prescient notion; not surprisingly pioneers in the area of mass media have frequently cited the essay. The final image for the work of art in the modern world sees the artist as architect, the audience inhabiting cultural space in the same way people live in a building.

Nick Pein's re-reading traces the influence the essay had on later thinkers whilst acknowledging that the central assertion of the piece, that 'mass produced art' would see the end of  works of art being 'revered' simply never happened. In reality nothing could be further from the truth, in film the 'auteur' emerged, TV programmes from 'Fawlty Towers' to 'Dad's Army were revered as 'national treasures' and 'celebrities' are  worshiped though some kind of inter-textual media feeding frenzy.

What I have gained from looking again at the essay is a better understanding of different types of argument and a realisation that my irritation with the essay in the first place has as much to to with an erroneous approach to it as inherent flaws in the work itself. My natural way of constructing argument tends to be a  conventional empirical approach, looking at evidence' and thinking about what can be drawn from them on a rational basis. Marxist and post-modern debates can work differently, the starting point can be a metaphor or analogy, other interesting assertions are considered in relation to that, then new analogies or metaphors are proposed. In some ways this concerns the broad inter-relationship of ideas rather than a consideration of logical connections between them. In a sense the resultant 'insight' - Benjamin's 'aura', Foucault's 'toolbox', Braudilliard's 'simulcra' remain  thought provoking, and 'claim validity irrespective of whether the premise upon which they were built was logically suspect or not.