Page 190 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 190
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
operates from relatively early stages of the industrial society on. An over-
view of all art in the 20th century points to a conclusion that the existence
of mass culture and huge transformations of artistic production depend-
ed on each other. They were part of the world, within which the mass per-
ception of reality in a mutual confluence with artistic products worked as
a dispersed agency that generated a movement of constant complex chang-
es. Benjamin’s emphases on the effect of “mechanical reproduction” epis-
temologically structured the understanding of this condition. Curiously,
this structuring of theory did not happened immediately after the text was
first published. “Benjamin craze” among philosophers and related theore-
ticians, as I pointed out a few times in the different contexts in the previ-
ous chapters in this book, actually erupted about thirty years later in the
1960s.1 Nevertheless, a special importance of film within mass culture in
Benjamin’s conceptualisation cannot be circumvented as a presupposition
for any thinking about the effects of recent technological leaps.
Benjamin‘s simultaneously aesthetic and epistemological break-
through signalled particular dialectics between technology, art, and such
social agency as politics. In view of these dialectics, how a work of art is
produced became especially important and, even more, how it is re-pro-
duced, which includes also the mode of perception that he described as
“distracted” (Benjamin, 1969: 239). These dialectics are what concerns us
most in the digital age and not just in a mental construction of the repeti-
tion of a technological effect on a new “higher” stage of an imagined pro-
gress. Therefore, the effects of the digital technology on film, and indeed,
on all visual representation, cannot be simply explained in an analogy of ef-
fects of the mechanical reproduction on a work of art in Benjamin’s times.
Of course, a mode of production containing technology cannot be taken
separately from its consequences, which imply aesthetics as well as politics.
Hence, when we discuss the “digital revolution” and its meanings in and for
cinema as art, we should understand it strictly dialectically – not as an “end
of cinema”, but as a transcending of the art of cinema, which turns into the
historical core of something yet inconceivable in the future.
1 Actually, Benjamin‘s essay became an important and widely cited reference not be-
fore 1960s in Germany and after 1968, when the selection of Benjamin’s essays (edit-
ed by Hannah Arendt under the title Illuminations) was published in the “non-Ger-
man” world. Therefore, a whole range of film theorists in the period of some two
decades after the Second World War, were not aware of the existence of the essay.
188
operates from relatively early stages of the industrial society on. An over-
view of all art in the 20th century points to a conclusion that the existence
of mass culture and huge transformations of artistic production depend-
ed on each other. They were part of the world, within which the mass per-
ception of reality in a mutual confluence with artistic products worked as
a dispersed agency that generated a movement of constant complex chang-
es. Benjamin’s emphases on the effect of “mechanical reproduction” epis-
temologically structured the understanding of this condition. Curiously,
this structuring of theory did not happened immediately after the text was
first published. “Benjamin craze” among philosophers and related theore-
ticians, as I pointed out a few times in the different contexts in the previ-
ous chapters in this book, actually erupted about thirty years later in the
1960s.1 Nevertheless, a special importance of film within mass culture in
Benjamin’s conceptualisation cannot be circumvented as a presupposition
for any thinking about the effects of recent technological leaps.
Benjamin‘s simultaneously aesthetic and epistemological break-
through signalled particular dialectics between technology, art, and such
social agency as politics. In view of these dialectics, how a work of art is
produced became especially important and, even more, how it is re-pro-
duced, which includes also the mode of perception that he described as
“distracted” (Benjamin, 1969: 239). These dialectics are what concerns us
most in the digital age and not just in a mental construction of the repeti-
tion of a technological effect on a new “higher” stage of an imagined pro-
gress. Therefore, the effects of the digital technology on film, and indeed,
on all visual representation, cannot be simply explained in an analogy of ef-
fects of the mechanical reproduction on a work of art in Benjamin’s times.
Of course, a mode of production containing technology cannot be taken
separately from its consequences, which imply aesthetics as well as politics.
Hence, when we discuss the “digital revolution” and its meanings in and for
cinema as art, we should understand it strictly dialectically – not as an “end
of cinema”, but as a transcending of the art of cinema, which turns into the
historical core of something yet inconceivable in the future.
1 Actually, Benjamin‘s essay became an important and widely cited reference not be-
fore 1960s in Germany and after 1968, when the selection of Benjamin’s essays (edit-
ed by Hannah Arendt under the title Illuminations) was published in the “non-Ger-
man” world. Therefore, a whole range of film theorists in the period of some two
decades after the Second World War, were not aware of the existence of the essay.
188
