Page 119 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 119
the principle of montage and literature
Greece, Spain, and Slovenia. One has to remember the iconic image of Bre-
cht‘s musing face with just a tinge of smile.
Deleuzian Delusionary Dividualism
Benjamin‘s diagnosis of the “age of mechanical reproduction,” as one could
say following Timothy Murray‘s logic, can be taken as a thought pattern
that opens new venues of reflection on just what is being produced in the
framework of reading and writing, looking, seeing, learning, and knowing.
Curiously, another comparison between two periods – namely, the 1920s
and 2010s – springs up: in the time of Döblin and Benjamin as well as in to-
day’s contemporaneity it is necessary to deal with a crisis, first of all politi-
cal, economic, and financial, and also a crisis of art forms, considering that
artists in all genres are searching for some new social relevance. The crisis,
which appears in Badiou‘s terms as a surge of the real within reality, points
in the direction of subjectivity, which inexplicably succumbs to forms of
domination within a system paradoxically based on the notion of freedom.
Yet another transformation of forms of social life and culture is evolving,
and so the citizen, as a psychological subjectivity attached to literary and
other kinds of narratives, becomes not only decentred, but in Deleuze‘s vi-
sion also deprived of indivisibility in the form of an individual. I am recall-
ing that at the dawn of the digital era in 1990 Deleuze wrote a prophetic ar-
ticle called Society of Control, in which he detects a complex change in the
social environment: from an environment of enclosure, as analysed by Fou-
cault, there is a transition to the society of control (here Deleuze is recalling
Burroughs). An entire range of institutions faces a manifest crisis within
the new mode of capitalism, which Deleuze labels capitalisme de surpro-
duction. “Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data,
markets, or ‘banks’” (Deleuze, 1990: p. 244, English translation, 1992: pp.
3–7). Digital technology serves as a tool of society of control. An important
aspect of Deleuze’s assessments in this essay is a hint against techno-fet-
ishism: “Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society –
not that machines are determining, but because they express those social
forms capable of generating them and using them” (Ibid.). What I am talk-
ing about here is a social form, within which a particular type of “non-per-
sonality” is taking shape. The formulae of life of this society contain a de-
composition of what has been the incorporation of empirical subjectivity:
the individual. Particular dividuals are now simultaneously citizens, actors,
stakeholders, entertainers, immigrants, a combination of attributes and de-
117
Greece, Spain, and Slovenia. One has to remember the iconic image of Bre-
cht‘s musing face with just a tinge of smile.
Deleuzian Delusionary Dividualism
Benjamin‘s diagnosis of the “age of mechanical reproduction,” as one could
say following Timothy Murray‘s logic, can be taken as a thought pattern
that opens new venues of reflection on just what is being produced in the
framework of reading and writing, looking, seeing, learning, and knowing.
Curiously, another comparison between two periods – namely, the 1920s
and 2010s – springs up: in the time of Döblin and Benjamin as well as in to-
day’s contemporaneity it is necessary to deal with a crisis, first of all politi-
cal, economic, and financial, and also a crisis of art forms, considering that
artists in all genres are searching for some new social relevance. The crisis,
which appears in Badiou‘s terms as a surge of the real within reality, points
in the direction of subjectivity, which inexplicably succumbs to forms of
domination within a system paradoxically based on the notion of freedom.
Yet another transformation of forms of social life and culture is evolving,
and so the citizen, as a psychological subjectivity attached to literary and
other kinds of narratives, becomes not only decentred, but in Deleuze‘s vi-
sion also deprived of indivisibility in the form of an individual. I am recall-
ing that at the dawn of the digital era in 1990 Deleuze wrote a prophetic ar-
ticle called Society of Control, in which he detects a complex change in the
social environment: from an environment of enclosure, as analysed by Fou-
cault, there is a transition to the society of control (here Deleuze is recalling
Burroughs). An entire range of institutions faces a manifest crisis within
the new mode of capitalism, which Deleuze labels capitalisme de surpro-
duction. “Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data,
markets, or ‘banks’” (Deleuze, 1990: p. 244, English translation, 1992: pp.
3–7). Digital technology serves as a tool of society of control. An important
aspect of Deleuze’s assessments in this essay is a hint against techno-fet-
ishism: “Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society –
not that machines are determining, but because they express those social
forms capable of generating them and using them” (Ibid.). What I am talk-
ing about here is a social form, within which a particular type of “non-per-
sonality” is taking shape. The formulae of life of this society contain a de-
composition of what has been the incorporation of empirical subjectivity:
the individual. Particular dividuals are now simultaneously citizens, actors,
stakeholders, entertainers, immigrants, a combination of attributes and de-
117
