Episode #153 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode is part two on Walter Benjamin. I hope you love the show today.

So, something important to consider about Walter Benjamin that maybe isn’t as much the case with a lot of other thinkers we’ve covered on this show is that his work is in many ways just as relevant today as it was when he was writing it. Philosophers obviously are always doing their work within a particular historical context. This context often shades the questions they think are even worth asking. So, when they come up with answers to these pressing questions, as interesting as their work may be, as much practical value as you might get out of it if you studied it, the world sometimes can pass their work by in terms of direct relevance.

The work of Walter Benjamin, though, is not this way, because as we talked about last time, one of the main things that concerned him was this relationship between technological innovations and the sensory experience and subjectivity of people. You change the technology that surrounds a person; you change the person. This is what we’re going to be talking about partially today. So, when he’s giving examples, he’s going to be referencing things like film and radio and TV, probably all three things that are on their way out in our modern world. But the way he thought these affected the individual subject and the political subject can just as easily be applied to different technologies: things like the internet, things like smartphones, self-driving cars, whatever you want. When you consider the fact that new technology is introduced faster than it ever has been before and how much influence this technology has in mediating our entire relationship with reality to the point you can almost think of us as cybernetic, maybe the work of Walter Benjamin has never been more relevant than right now.

To make the case for why, I want to start by telling you all a story about stories—storytelling, I guess. But maybe the better way to think of this is that it’s a story about how mythology has been delivered to people at different points in history—the unverifiable stories that people feel connected to and use to help navigate their existence. Now, it used to be that stories and mythology were passed down generation after generation by storytellers—highly specialized position. These people had to have great memories. They had to have great performative abilities. And they’d often tell these stories to entire crowds of people gathered around.

A few important things to consider about this early age of storytelling, though. One, the stories were received collectively by people. This was a group activity people engaged in. Some might say teambuilding. Another thing, these stories were told many, many times, sometimes to the same group of people. But an important point is that these stories were not reproducible. You could generally tell the same story, but it would not be an exact copy. There would always be variations, different details. Most of the time, if you’re a good storyteller, you base these adjustments on your audience. Point is, the collective process in which people receive their stories mirrored the collective societies that these people were a part of.

But as you know, time goes on: Gutenberg press, socioeconomic reality changed. And Benjamin illustrates how, at this point, our stories, our mythology, started to take form in print. We saw the rise of something called the novel. Now, reading a novel, in contrast to the oral tradition from before, is not a collective activity. People don’t all gather around the same book and wait to turn the page until everyone’s done reading. No, this is an individual sitting down, reading a book. Benjamin says, even the storylines of novels almost always are about an individual protagonist conquering some sort of challenge. Not a coincidence that the novel becomes the most popular form of storytelling during the extremely individualistic, solitary lifestyle of the industrial middle class.

One more important point about novels. When you have this sort of individual relationship with a story, what Benjamin thinks it starts to promote is a type of what he calls concentration or deliberation about the novel. This skill of concentration becomes an extremely important skill to have not only when you’re trying to glean wisdom from a story but also when it comes to formulating your own political viewpoints. More on that later.

But again, time goes on. And during the time of Benjamin, what he starts to see is the rise of mass forms of storytelling, mass forms of communication with the introduction of things like film and radio. Well, we heard his thoughts on photography and how it can alter a person’s subjectivity dramatically. What happens when we introduce another technology, the technology of moving images on a screen? How much of an affect is that going to have? Benjamin famously describes the cinema as a sort of training ground for the citizen of modernity.

Let me explain what he means by this. When you go to the cinema, you are once again receiving a story or a mythology in a collective way. This isn’t like the individual experience of the novel. This is much more like the era of storytelling where you become part of an audience of observers and listeners. And when you think of film as a work of art, there isn’t one single copy of Gone with the Wind where you got to fly across the world to be able to see it. Millions, billions of people can all view the same moving images at the same time if they wanted to. That is to say that film is like the age of storytelling in that it’s received collectively, but unlike storytelling in that exact copies of the story are now mass-reproducible.

I want to pause for just two seconds and say that a really important thing to remember here is that in this new age of the mass-reproducibility of art, Benjamin thinks that this changes several key premises about art that the artist now has to have in the back of their minds if they ever want to survive within a capitalist society, which in turn changes the very definition of what art is altogether. So, an example of this would be that within a capitalist society, if you’re going to mass-reproduce a piece of your artwork, you always have to in some capacity consider profit as an end goal, which in turn leads you to consider the greatest number of reproductions for the lowest cost, which in turn leads you to consider not just art for the sake of the merit of the art alone. Now you have to consider what sort of art is going to be the most reproduceable, distributable, and sellable. When the relationship between the observer and the artist becomes filtered by making art into a commodity, there are real consequences for both parties there. And we’re going to see this present itself in this new era of moving pictures on a screen.

But first, a couple more things about the sensory experience of film. This was really important to Walter Benjamin. He compares something like a painting to something like a film. When you look at a painting, the image is standing still. There is time to observe, concentrate, deliberate, to have that individual moment of aesthetic reflection. But with a film, the images and sounds are coming at you so rapidly, things are changing so quickly, there’s never any point where you can have a reflective moment because by the time you start on one, it’s already moved onto a completely different set of moving pictures in a different scene. The result of this is that the default state of subjectivity when you’re consuming artful stories made up of moving images and sounds on a regular basis—but also when consuming many other forms of art, it should be said—the default state is for a person to absorb the art in a constant state of distraction.

So, we have two different modes of thought here: concentration on one hand and distraction on the other. Benjamin describes the difference between concentration and distraction here: “Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art and the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction. The laws of its reception are most instructive.” So, again, this is going to be a really important distinction that Benjamin makes about different ways to experience art.

Someone who concentrates on a work of art is absorbed by it, whereas a distracted mass of people absorb the work of art. So, as a point of comparison, think about someone experiencing art during the era of the novel when concentration and deliberation were really important modes of thought. A person sees a painting, for example. They stare at it. They dissect it. They’re in a contemplative state where their entire aesthetic experience is rooted in a type of focus on the painting. Benjamin would say that they are absorbed by the work of art. But don’t mistake him for being somebody that’s saying that this is way better than being distracted all the time and we got to go back to doing things this way. He actually talks at one point about how art that requires us to be absorbed into it to have an aesthetic experience is kind of an aggressive move by the artist, if you think about it. The artist is essentially holding the aesthetic experience hostage. I mean, they’re basically saying that if you don’t surrender to me your undivided attention and a million dollars in unmarked bills, you’re not going to get anything from me.

But in our modern world, with the new technology that’s been introduced, concentration and deliberation have become outdated modes of thought. Being able to concentrate is just not as useful of a skill in the metropolitan societies we live in today. And this not only leads to the crisis of the novel, as Benjamin puts it—people are no longer able to relate as much to this type of art to get their mythology—but it also leads to the strategy that’s more useful in today’s world, which is, of course, to live your life in a constant state of distraction.

Let me give an example of what he’s talking about. Think of life in a modern metropolitan city. You are constantly being bombarded by fleeting images, sounds, smells, textures. Look, you may be walking down the street one day, and you see a flashing ad on a screen in the distance for a bottle of shampoo. You’re interrupted by the sound of a car horn next to you. But then someone tries to hand you their mix tape because they’re trying to get their music off the ground. Then someone walks past you, and they’re talking to themselves. And you mistake them for wanting to talk to you. But then you pass a restaurant. You smell the food; you look at their logo to try to see the name of the restaurant. But then someone shoulder checks you because you’re in the way.

This experience is like none other in human history. And on the off chance you’re listening today and you’re not a monk—you’re not wearing an orange onesie all the time—for the average person, trying to concentrate or deliberate on the experience that you’re having in a modern, metropolitan life not only would be overwhelming but downright impossible. The modern subject exists in a state of distraction because they have to, or else they wouldn’t get anything done at all. Think of distraction, by the way, not only in terms of your visual senses being fragmented—you’re looking at something; you see something else. You look over there; you’re distracted. No, Benjamin would say this is not the only way we pay attention with our senses. He says you could just as easily be in a state of distraction because you are constantly getting fleeting inputs across a multisensory landscape.

This is important because he’s going to say that during the era of the novel, things were way over-indexed in terms of the visual components of things. Sight became this monolith of our experience. People would sit down in a quiet, calm place, so they wouldn’t get too distracted so that they could concentrate on what they were reading. When you go into an art gallery, you probably don’t expect there to be a mud wrestling tournament in the lobby, and that’s for good reason. Visual things are important. But there are things you just cannot communicate through the single-sensory communication of writing that you can only communicate in a multi-sensory way as the storytellers of the past well understood.

The constant sensory bombardment and lack of stillness of modern life requires a different mode of thought to be able to absorb it properly. Once again, the world no longer absorbs us into it; we absorb the world as members of the distracted masses. And film and videos serve as the ultimate training ground for someone who has to live immersed in this distracted reality while still needing to passively absorb meaning as they go about their life.

So, in the same way the salons and cafes in Europe earlier in history would train the political subject through reading, discussions, and debates in these places, the cinema becomes the training ground for the modern subject. This is what he’s referencing when he talks about architecture, which he also considered to be a form of mass media. Sure, you could theoretically stop, look at a building, over-index on the visual, and really take it in for the work of art that it is. But Benjamin points out, we are not tourists, because in our cities when going about our daily lives, do we stop and view everything visually and start to freak out about it? “Guys, guys, you gotta see this airport bathroom tile. It is incredible! Get in here guys. Come on.” No, we don’t do that. How could you possibly do that? You’d be like Bob Ross with a smartphone if Bob Ross never had to get anything done with his day. We couldn’t ever do it. So that’s why our aesthetic experience is realized in the mode of distraction, by absorbing bits and pieces through our use or perception of the world around us.

Distracted masses of people within a capitalist society are not getting their mythology from deliberative concentration about things. They usually appropriate things in the world around them based on habits that they form, usually without ever even realizing they’re forming those habits or why they’re doing it. He says, “Even the distracted person can form habits. What is more, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction first proves that their performance has become habitual. The sort of distraction that’s provided by art represents a covert measure of the extent to which it has become possible to perform new tasks of apperception.”

So, by living in a state of distraction, we appropriate the world in many cases based on the habits that we happen to form. One of the main ways we appropriate the world around us is by having a particular worldview. Benjamin is clearly very concerned with these new possibilities of delivering what he saw as bourgeois ideology to the masses through the medium of moving pictures: most prevalent during his time, obviously, in the realm of cinema. But don’t get him wrong. Especially in comparison to his counterparts in the Frankfurt School, he’s actually very optimistic about this new technology and its ability to have emancipatory potential for the masses. He just doesn’t think that’s what it’s being used for.

Again, we’re combining passive spectatorship with film and video’s ability to promote a story or a mythology that’s in line with a particular political ideology. This is a far cry from the storyteller passing down wisdom from other generations. This is far from the novel from the age of concentration. This is a mass-reproducible delivery system that keeps people distracted and absorbing a story that could at best pacify their discontent with their place within society and at worst render people foot soldiers in the regime of a mass murderer. Not to mention, when you combine all this with capitalism, you have to also consider the filter that’s always present between film and the spectators: that the film needs to be funded by someone. And Benjamin wants us to always keep in mind that the very people that serve to benefit from keeping the masses distracted, absorbing an ideology that keeps things the way that they are just happen to be the very people that have the capital resources to be able to pick and choose which films to fund at all or which videos to produce.

All of this segues pretty well into his next big point: that the combination of this new sensory disposition of the subject—that we’re distracted all the time—plus the new role of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, plus the introduction of new mass-communication technologies—all of this creates a sort of fertile soil that seems to inevitably lead to fascism. See, art throughout history has typically been connected to some sort of religious underpinning or ceremony or tradition. Once again, the role of art was never to be mass-reproduced and sold. But now that it is, yet again Benjamin is going to say that this comes with both some good and some bad. The good is that now the meaning of a work of art can take any shape you want it to. Ultimately, in this new world, the distracted masses are the critics. And in this new world, now so more than ever, what the art means to you actually matters.

But once again, every silver lining has a cloud. And the cloud here for Benjamin is that art, in the sense that it can be appropriate in any way we want now, and that it’s now mass-reproduced, art has moved from what Benjamin refers to as the cult work of art to the exhibitionist work of art. Art in our new world is created primarily to be displayed. And whenever you display a piece of artwork, it must then take on the form of being intrinsically political. Put another way, the technology being introduced during this time has made it possible to politicize and mass-distribute art in a way that’s never been done before.

So, if you’re an aspiring fascist leader out there, this becomes an incredible weapon in your arsenal in this age of the distracted masses. Because back in the age of the novel, the political subject relied on concentration and deliberation to make their political decisions as well. They might go outside, find a nice tree to sit under, find a good quiet place to think about things, consider all the options, deliberate about which one is the best. Then they’d go and tell their local representative. And then they’d reflect on their decision afterwards. Benjamin thought we are no longer in the era of deliberative politics. More than that, representative democracy was in crisis. And it seemed like it was on its way out for good if for no other reason than how people in power are now able to directly communicate to the masses themselves.

See, the relationship between the political subject and the president or ruler used to be mediated by representatives in a representative democracy. Now, it’s mediated by technology as is our entire experience with reality and what’s even going on in the world. The representatives still exist. They still show up to work. They still go to the parliamentary meetings. But to Benjamin, these representatives have become spectators almost like the audience at a cinema. They are quickly becoming an obsolete part of the political process.

In other words, the decline of the aura even extends to our political leaders. Leaders can now put their voice on a radio or their face on a screen. And now they can directly communicate with masses of political subjects. Works of art, propaganda, films, radio programs, books, videos, songs—all these can now be mass-reproduced and distributed to those masses. These masses, through images on a screen, through photographs from above, can now come face to face with themselves. They can see themselves as a collective subject. At this point, identifying yourself as one of the masses becomes even easier.

Consider the fact that as the masses come face to face with themselves, as people see the masses depicted in a particular light on their screens, could those images be producing the subjectivity of the masses themselves? Now, if this were true, which Benjamin thought it was, then the implications of that are that we are essentially just living in a completely mass-produced existence. Not only all the obvious reproduction of material goods and art and basically every way you can possibly express yourself as a supposed individual, but we’re even now mass-producing people.

Benjamin at one point talks about, just think about the fact that things like film and TV and video lend themselves so much to political theater or political spectacle and propaganda. Because when you’re shooting a video of any variety and you point a camera at a scene that you want to capture, there is only one perspective from which that scene gets delivered in that way. Shot from just a little bit of a different angle, you might see all the cameras, the sound people, the strings attached to the performers that allow them to fly around. In other words, you would not see the image that has been designed for you to see but the world through a wider lens.

Now, imagine if there was a direct line of communication between people in ultimate positions of power through an online medium that only allows you to get your point across in 280 characters. Just imagine a Tweet has to encapsulate your thoughts on a matter. What’s funny is that people do it all the time, essentially conceding to the point that there’s zero nuance to whatever issue they’re commenting on. Can you really communicate anything other than ideology in 280 characters? So, doesn’t the platform itself filter out nuanced points of view by default? When the only things that can ever get upvoted and shared are things that you can write down on a fortune cookie, is that really the way we want people in positions of power to deliver messages to the political subject, especially considering the distracted masses need easy-to-grasp messages to absorb anyway?

Benjamin says this in one of his most famous passages. He says, “Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish. It sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses—but on no account granting them rights. The masses have a right to change property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged.”

Technology mediates everything that we do. Today we mostly exist in a digital ontology that we use to make sense of the physical ontology we actually live in. More so than ever, one of Benjamin’s greatest points starts to come abundantly clear: that as time goes on, the communicability of our experience as people seems to become more and more difficult.

Now, we’re going to talk about this concept more. But in a very general sense, it’s interesting to think about one of Benjamin’s examples here. He says that when soldiers went away to World War I and came home, you’d expect them to return with all sorts of stories about what their life had been like during the conflict. But he says what you typically see—because of the new, sometimes brutal technology that mediated their whole experience there—what you see are people that clearly have a lot to say but have a really hard time communicating any of it. There’s always a pause. There’s always a searching for the right turn of phrase to put somebody in their experience who wasn’t actually there.

Well, what if the technology that progressively mediates the life of the average person has a similar effect? How alienating would it be to have a host of experiences that you’d like nothing more than to share with the people you love and care about but that language and communication has atrophied to such an extent that it will always be impossible for you to actually tell them about it?

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.