Kracauer sees a dialectic operating between memory and technical reproducibility: “memory images are at odds with photographic representation,” as competing bearers of truth content (p. 50). In turn, photographic images have the power to create and shape memory. This is just one of many ways that technology threatens to alter perception. With photography “a person’s history in buried as if under a layer of snow” (p. 51). Photography’s increasing power to alter consciousness and perception, and its insidious wiggling into to the memory image, threatens to alter our perception for the worse, concealing and obscuring the true nature of things by insisting too strongly on their mere appearance (p. 51).
Having voiced this danger, Kracauer gangs up on the illustrated newspapers, in which he sees technology as changing people’s perception for the worse. The illustrated newspapers aim for “the complete reproduction of the world accessible to the photographic apparatus” (p. 57 – 58). They represent reality “from every possible angle.” Kracauer is very mistrusting of this overabundance of images and disparages the illustrated magazines for their superficial depictions of reality, and the ascendancy of the spatial over the temporal. Somewhat histrionically, he claims that “the flood of photos sweeps away the dams of memory,” thus articulating the danger that photography poses. “The spatial continuum from the camera’s perspective dominates the spatial appearance of he perceived object; the resemblance between the image and the object effaces the contours of the object’s ‘history.’” His conclusion is emphatically dire: “Never before has a period known so little about itself. In the hands of the ruling society, the invention of illustrated magazines is one of the most powerful means of organizing a strike against the understanding” (p. 58).
Nothing is innocent about these illustration magazines. Even the layout is reactionary, as the “contiguity” of images precludes the possibility of them penetrating consciousness the way memory does. The illustrated responds to the fear of death by representing the world as a “photographable present” that has been “entirely eternalized” (p. 59). If the illustrated magazines represent to Kracauer a counterrevolutionary mode of replicating and envisioning reality, the antidote is to be found in film. At this junction Kracauer’s tract, which started out as an innocent ontology of photography, gains the character of political manifesto.
With more than a little Romantic wistfulness, Kracauer discusses the role of the symbol in nature and how it is altered by representation. His conclusion rounds out a political theory. “No different from earlier modes of representation, photography, too, is assigned to a particular developmental stage of practical and material life. It is a secretion of the capitalist mode of production. The same mere nature which appears in photography flourishes is the reality of the society produced by this capitalist mode of production.” Kracauer’s conclusion is that photography needs to become progressive via film and play the “go-for-broke game of history” (p. 61). In contrast to the illustrated magazines, which are an analogue to the historicist film fantasy and seek merely to cheapen memory with a proliferation of images, film can alter reality by its fantastical techniques and elements. This is something that can be used for political ends.
The serious and progressive function performed by abstract, non-mimetic film is librating to the masses. “A consciousness caught up in nature is unable to see its own material base. It is the task of photography to disclose this previously unexamined foundation of nature. For the first time in history, photography brings to light the entire natural cocoon; for the first time, the inert world presents itself in its independence from human beings.”
He addresses the ways in which photography has altered perception in such a way as can be harnessed for political ends. “Photography shows cities in aerial shots, brings crockets and figures down from gothic cathedrals…The photographic archive assembles in effigy the last elements of a nature alienated from meaning” (p. 62). This “warehousing of nature” has the power to provoke “confrontation in every field.”
His hope at the end of the essay for film to carry on this go-for-broke-game of history is linked to film’s dream-like nature. “The capacity to stir up the elements of nature is one of the possibilities of film. This possibility is realized whenever film combines parts and segments to create strange constructs. If the disarray of the illustrated newspapers is simply confusion, the game that film plays with the pieces of disjointed nature is reminiscent of dreams in which the fragments of daily life become jumbled” ( pp. 62 – 63). Thus, Kracauer ends his essay by privileging montage and surrealistic proclivities in film. He revolts against the realistic and merely mimetic uses of photography, finding proto-revolutionary practice in abstract and artificial art. There is an interesting connection to the expressionism debate here. Kracauer’s position allies him with Benjamin in his essay.
Benjamin’s essay has a more overtly political intent than Kracauer’s. If Kracauer’s text starts from purely aesthetic propositions and then develops into a political project, Benjamin starts and finishes his essay with political proclamations, peppers the argument with various political observations and anecdotes, but nowhere develops a sustained political argument.
One key difference is that Benjamin plays closer attention to the mode of aesthetic reception than Kracauer. Benjamin attaches importance to the ways that technology has changed the reception of art in the modern age. He uses examples both of the photography and the gramophone: “The cathedral leaves its site to be received in the studio of an art lover; the choral work performed in an auditorium or in the open air is enjoyed in a private room” (p. 103).
Benjamin is clearly less interested in offering a pure ontology along the lines of Kracauer. He analyzes the loss of the aura and diagnoses it as a social necessity. Technologically reproducible art loses its here-and-nowness and substitutes a “mass existence for a unique one” (p. 104), which is responsible for the decline of the auratic. In film, Benjamin finds both a desire and a promise to liquidate the traditions of a culture. A limitation of Benjamin’s thought is that he doesn’t consider the mirror image of this possibility: the creation of a new culture through propaganda.
Benjamin is more explicit that Kracauer in asserting the relationship between changes in human perception and social changes. To explain the decay of the aura, Benjamin looks for a “social basis.” The decline reflects the mass’ desire to “get closer to things” and “overcome each thing’s uniqueness” (p. 105). For Benjamin, technology can respond to social needs by altering perception. Reproducible art represents a social desire to find the sameness in what is unique; thus, he interprets technology as aligning reality with the masses and vice versa.
Tracing the social history of the photograph through the aesthetic movements of the 19th century, he discusses the crucial role that photography played in the formulating of l’art pour l’art by severing art from its basis in cult. With film, technology finds a way to reinvigorate art: film can re-enfranchise art and imbue it with political relevance and power. By altering perception based on social need, art is rendered serviceable to revolutionary goals. By making the masses aware of their own alienation and estrangement, film can become a powerful weapon. This means that film can become a powerful weapon. As he writes, film, which contains “new social opportunities, is being clandestinely exploited in the interest of a property-owning minority” (p. 115). The task is to wrest the cinema from this property-owning minority and harness it for revolutionary ends.
Benjamin’s enthusiasm for the “hitherto unimaginable spectacle” of film connects to Kracauer’s totalizing historicist cinematic fantasy. Benjamin discusses in detail the various film techniques that can alter our modes of perception, such as close-ups and slow motion, techniques which “bring to light entirely new structures of matter.” Of slow motion, he writes that it “not only reveals familiar aspects of movements, but discloses quite unknown aspects within them – aspects “which do not appear as the retarding of natural movements but have a curious gliding, floating character of their own.” The film-sphere resembles a dream; the camera discovers the optical unconscious. “This is where the camera comes into play, with all its resources for swooping and rising, disrupting and isolating, stretching or compressing a sequence, enlarging or reducing an object. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis” (p. 117). This analogy between optical and instinctual unconscious is perhaps the strongest indication in the text of the radical and revolutionary potential film has for altering human perception.
Benjamin claims that film has affected a Fourth Copernican Revolution. He describes the unconscious eye of the camera as an instrument for collective dreaming. He is advancing a pawn on the chessboard of Kracauer’s go-for-broke-game. While Benjamin anticipates the dangers of technology in mass media, he sees positive uses for it; for instance; as “psychic immunization against…mass psychoses,” through practices like collective laughter. (p. 118)
Benjamin’s discussion of Dada as a forerunner of film shows that he sees film’s revolutionary potential residing not merely in its mimetic usage, but in its capacity for abstraction and surrealism as well. He applauds the aggressive assault and irreverence of the Dadaists, their “ruthless annihilation of the aura in every object they produced” and their commitment “to outrage the public.” When Benjamin writes about the “successive changes of scene and focus which have a percussive effect on the spectator” he endorses montage for its revolutionary potential, much like Kracauer does.
My subject here has been how Kracauer and Benjamin envisage the political implications of the changes in perception that arise from new media and technology. For the purposes of this paper, I have concentrated on those elements of their arguments that directly pertain to the topic at hand, since neither Kracauer nor Benjamin offers a top-down, systematic argumentative chain, but rather a constellation of arguments that work with varying success.
It is remarkable how fresh these arguments sound even today. The passion and rigor with which they quarrel and theorize about these technologies would have you believe that cinema and photography had only recently been invented. In fact, both technologies had undergone significant and extensive experimentation and change by this time. And while some of what they say might strike us as backwards and wrongheaded, we can still learn a lot from them in our own over-technologized epoch. At the same time, we eagerly need the Benjamins and Kracauers of the present age to analyze and diagnose the effects and implications of art in the digital age.
0 comments:
Post a Comment