Episode #152 - Transcript

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

Today’s show is the first in what I think is a pretty awesome series on Walter Benjamin. I hope you agree. And as always, I hope you love the show today.

So, Walter Benjamin is notorious for being one of the most allusive thinkers of the early 20th century. His work is a combination of influences so varied it’s almost funny. It’s a mix of ideas so seemingly disconnected, the act of connecting them is almost as impressive as the ideas themselves. He’ll go from Kant, then over to Marx, then back to 19th-century German literary criticism, then over to Jewish mysticism. He’ll go all over the world. And needless to say, what results from all this is a very interesting critique of 20th-century culture. The man’s work is often referred to as difficult. Sometimes people go so far as to say it’s downright incomprehensible. This is, no doubt, part of the reason why there’s such a lack of representation of his work in the world, which is part of the reason why I wanted to cover him here today.

Sometimes when reading Benjamin, he can say things that on the surface seem to be completely irrational or completely counterintuitive. But I think the biggest barrier in trying to understand what he’s saying is, in a weird way, understanding what he’s trying to say. But that said, I don’t think you can just begin the discussion with Walter Benjamin’s most famous work called Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction as some people do. And I don’t think you can just cannonball into talking about his critique of modernity as some people have in the past—things like the Arcades Project, phantasmagoria, “The Crisis of the Novel.” No, I think there are a few extremely important things we need to understand about Benjamin’s thought in general before we can even hope to start covering these more complex topics. And I want to start today, in true Benjamin fashion by the way, by talking about something that’s going to at first seem completely random but will ultimately end up being a piece of a larger critique that we’ll excavate over the course of this series. And that is by looking at one of his early essays called “The Task of the Translator.”

So, the title of the essay is actually really good if you wanted to describe what the essay’s all about. When somebody is translating something from one language into another, what exactly is the job of that translator? What is the task of the translator? Now, at first this may seem to some like a pretty strange question to ask. Translation seems pretty straightforward. You have a text written in one language. You speak another language. Really seems as simple as just saying what they said in one language in another language, and the end result will be that it’s readable to a whole other group of people that didn’t have access before. Who wouldn’t want that?

But this is a work in the area of translation theory. And to people who think about translation a lot, this would be a pretty oversimplified way of looking at the whole process that’s going on when we translate something. There’s a reason we don’t just copy and paste entire texts into Google Translate and then call that a translation. Because it’s a blurry mess, because sentences will read in a way that doesn’t make any sense. Because there’s often words or sayings in one language that there just isn’t a word for in another language. Because languages don’t line up perfectly, in other words. There are thousands of different ways you could translate any single sentence, thousands of different sets of criteria you could use when determining what exactly the best way is to do that. And considering that some people often swear by one translation of a work and throw out all the others—you know, they’ll say things like, “This translation of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is the best one, and all the other one’s—complete waste of your time.” These sorts of value judgments necessarily imply that there must be better ways to translate than others.

This is part of what Walter Benjamin is interested in getting to the bottom of. And if you wanted to find out what the best way to translate something is, seems like a pretty good place to start would be to consider what the task of the translator is at all. Benjamin writes about a couple different answers to this that are extremely common that he thinks are completely incorrect. The first one is that the task of the translator is to make the translation as accessible as possible for the reader in the new language: that when choosing between the thousands of ways you could translate a sentence, your job is to choose the one that expresses what is being said in the way that most easily allows people to get ahold of it on the other side. Walter Benjamin thinks this is wrong. And he begins making his case by underscoring the fact that, if we want to find the task of the translator, we have to remember that the translator is always doing their job while interacting with what is ultimately a piece of artwork. When you are translating a book of poetry, you are ultimately translating a work of art. When you translate a great novel, that is art. Even when you’re translating a work of nonfiction, was the author not poetically or artistically trying to weave together ideas into a tapestry that could be considered art?

So, in keeping with this, when considering the task of the translator, we also need to consider the nature of art itself. And on this topic, Benjamin says the following: “No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener. In appreciation for a work of art or art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful.” Now, if this seems like a weird thing to say because of our unique position in 2021, give Benjamin some time here. He’s making a point about the way art has typically been done historically. And what he’s getting at is that we don’t necessarily create works of art with the audience in mind, nor does a work of art need an audience to be considered a work of art.

Like, when you were 16 years old in your room, writing poetry in your own blood about how the security guard at the mall hates you, did you expect or even care if anyone read those poems? When you’re singing in the shower or doing some sort of interpretive dance completely alone in your room, are you doing those things because of all the people that get to listen to them? No, says Benjamin. And that’s because art is not about the audience. Art at its core is the ultimate form of self-expression. So, if we’re trying to translate the full meaning behind a work of art, the reader or the beholder shouldn’t really matter at all.

Okay, so let’s not consider the reader. Let’s just consider the text. What is actually inside of this book that we’re translating? In other words, the task of the translator is to engage in this purely technical exercise of taking the contents of one thing and dumping it over into another language as perfectly as possible. But Benjamin would ask, is this really all that translators are doing? Take this as an example: Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture—song about the War of 1812—powerful song, powerful. Now, imagine I take the sheet music, sit at home with an orchestra full of instruments all by myself. With enough time, playing all the notes exactly as they’re written on the page, I might be able to produce a recording of the 1812 Overture that is indistinguishable from the recording I’m trying to emulate. But have I recreated the extent of the meaning behind this work of art? Look, something I made in the year 2021 in my condo alone cannot possibly capture the meaning behind this work of art when it was created, where it was created, how it was conveyed. And the point is, no matter how perfectly you reproduce the raw data in a work of art, and no matter how perfectly you can translate the contents of a text, there will always be something more you are missing when it comes to accessing the entirety of its meaning.

Now, this isn’t an episode about translation theory. This is ultimately an episode about art. And it’s these two major points about works of art that are going to be massively useful for us when it comes to understanding the rest of this series. But for anyone interested, the one-sentence version of the task of the translator for Benjamin is that it’s derived from the story of the tower of Babel that in the beginning there was one language that’s now many different fragmented languages, and that the task is to build bridges between these different languages that share a certain kinship, always striving towards but never actually achieving that ideal of the unified language in the beginning. Obviously, so much more to it. Definitely recommend reading the essay if you’re at all interested. But again, these takeaways about art from this essay are the things that are going to help us understand what he’s saying by understanding what he’s trying to say. We will reference back to them as we need them.

Now, another initially confusing thing that we need to understand about Benjamin’s thought is why he would be so interested in something as random and oddly specific as late 19th-century German literary criticism. Why would this matter to him so much? Well, in a letter to a friend, Benjamin once claimed that during his time in Germany, literary criticism was not a serious genre, and that if anyone ever wanted to seriously have a future in it, they would essentially have to recreate the genre. One thing to note right off the bat here is that when we hear the words “literary criticism,” we are not just talking about criticism of works of literature. Certainly, literature is part of it. The literature of a time affects the culture of a time. When you ask someone for examples of things that helped shape their experience of reality, oftentimes they’ll respond with some really powerful books that they’ve read. But in the sense that books are collections of symbols that denote a particular meaning to you, couldn’t you say that the world around you is just as much a collection of symbols that you’re constantly reading that denote meanings as well?

For example, let’s say they tear down a building and they put up a new one that uses all new technology: new doors, new windows, a whole new design. Instead of a single-story rambler with a backyard, now we have a high-rise apartment building. There’s fences now. There’s a security shed, stop signs. There’s even little trashcans for people to stockpile their dogs’ discarded waste. Does the introduction of this new building—this new technology, this new symbol that people are reading—does this in any way change the experience of people who read it? Does reading the world around us have an effect on us at the same level that reading a book does? Interesting question.

One of the things Benjamin is interested in the most is how the introduction of a new technology shapes the experiences of people. And one of the most famous examples that he writes about is the technology of photography. Now, for the sake of us listening to this in the year 2021, let’s think of photography as any sort of photo depiction of reality. So, it’s not like video is something that’s exempt from this discussion. What is the technological predecessor to the photograph? There were of course many minor inventions that can be seen as just trying to do what the photograph eventually did much better than all of them. But the true predecessor to the photograph, when it comes to creating representations of reality, is the painting. If you wanted to look at a picture of a landscape or a person or even some sort of noteworthy political event that took place like some final dinner of some sort. I don’t know. Bad example. Point is, if you wanted a visual representation of reality in any sense, for the longest time, the painting was all that you had to look at.

Now, consider certain realities about the technology of the painting. They were produced one at a time. They needed to be done by somebody very skilled. They were expensive to produce. To see them for most of history you had to be in the exact same place that they were. And they were always produced through the lens of the interpretation of a particular artist. Someone didn’t deliver a stack of paintings to your front doorstep every morning showing you what was going on around town. So, for most of history your visual understanding of what the world was and your place within it really came down to what you immediately saw around you.

Another thing to consider, Benjamin says, is that for the longest time because paintings were so expensive and time consuming to produce, it was only the rich and powerful—most of the time members of the aristocracy—that could ever afford to have their likeness painted. Which means for the common person for the longest time, they didn’t have a right to their own likeness. But along came the photograph and all this started to change. Benjamin says it’s no coincidence that the first photographs you see are all people taking pictures of themselves, their families, and their loved ones. But it should be said, as we all know, there’s a big difference between being face to face looking at someone and seeing a picture them. There’s some degree of loss that occurs in the picture. There’s a reason people find it far more satisfying to travel and see things than to just sit at home on Google Images and look at pictures of landmarks. Once again, there’s some degree of loss there. Well, what exactly are we losing? Benjamin says that a good place to start looking is to consider the fact that as these people who are among the first to ever gaze into a camera lens to record their likeness—I wonder if any of them ever noticed that the camera wasn’t gazing back at them.

What did he mean by that? Remember back in “Task of the Translator” when we were talking about how the raw contents of a piece of artwork are not tantamount to the entire meaning of that piece of artwork. In the example I recreated the 1812 Overture. And no matter how perfectly I photographed that work by Tchaikovsky, there would always be something missing between what we could call my photo depiction and the original work. Think of the difference between being in person witnessing and experiencing the one and only Mona Lisa and merely seeing a picture of it. We recognize something has been lost in the photograph. Benjamin would say that what we’re noticing is missing is what he calls the aura of a moment or a piece of artwork.

He describes the concept of the aura here: “A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be. While at rest on a summer’s noon, to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour become part of their appearance—this is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains or that branch.”

So, I’m not sure if anyone feels the same way. Hopefully I don’t sound like a crazy person here. But I’m kind of a fan of the moon, you know, as a celebrity in my life. That’s my celebrity. Like, have you ever looked up at the moon one night, and it’s one of those nights where it almost doesn’t even look real? Like, you could reach out and touch it almost. In my opinion, that can be one of the most beautiful things that you could possibly see out there. And I’m not exaggerating when I say there have been at least 10 times in my life I’ve been looking up at one of those moons, and I pull out my phone. I’m all excited. I take a picture, and I go down to send it to all my friends that I don’t have. And I look at it. And I’m glad I don’t have friends because it just looks like a tennis ball floating in the sky.

This is what Benjamin’s getting at. There is no picture out there that could possibly capture the aesthetic experience of being present with that moon in that moment in space and time. As Benjamin’s describing with both the mountains and the branch in that passage, there is an immediacy to my experience of the moon because we are subject and object coexisting at a particular moment in space and time together. But on the other hand, there’s a distance between subject and object. And it’s this distance that allows for the aesthetic experience that’s not possible on the camera on my phone.

What’s true of my experience of the moon is true of works of art all throughout history, and this is something Benjamin calls the aura of a work of art. This is why it feels so different to see a picture of the Mona Lisa as opposed to flying to Paris and seeing the one and only Mona Lisa. And this “one and only” quality has been important for experiencing art in the past. This unique experience that someone can only have if both the subject and object are existing at the same moment and same place.

But it should be said, as a technological intervention into the experience of people, this is exactly what the photograph allows us not to need anymore. The whole selling point of the photograph is that we can visually capture reality, and it can exist outside of space and time. If the aura of a moment or a piece of artwork requires that distance to allow for the space needed to reflect on it aesthetically, then Benjamin would say we have to consider the fact that the key function of the photograph or the video is to reduce that distance. Benjamin would say that, during his time, the world is entering into an age where visual representations of reality aren’t limited to how many paintings you can produce. Basically, anyone with functioning hands can point a camera, take a picture of something, and then mass-distribute it to everyone. Yes, this decreases that distance. Yes, it demystifies reality. people can take as many pictures as they want. But in the same way you’d rather travel than see pictures of landmarks, this demystified reality comes with a degree of loss.

Yeah, you don’t got to fly all over the world anymore if you want to see the Mona Lisa, but with every silver lining comes a cloud. And the cloud here to Walter Benjamin is the destruction of the aesthetic experience of the past. Remember when we talked about German literary criticism and how he’s interested in figuring out how technology that’s introduced into people’s lives changes people’s senses and experiences of the world. Well, we are living in an age where the technology that has been introduced has made practically everything about our lives mass-reproduceable. This is why he’s concerned with the “dead genre of literary criticism in Germany,” because he actually thinks that technology has changed the experience of people so much that the critical tools that were used in the 19th century to analyze culture in the world were so outdated that they didn’t even work anymore.

We have technologied our way into a place where we lack the tools necessary to even critique the world around us. It’d be like trying to take a mortar and pestle and using it to grind up steel. The tools from a former era don’t work with our current technology and experience. We needed a new set of tools. In his words, someone needed to recreate the genre. And as we’ll see throughout the series, doing this will become a pretty considerable piece of his work.

So, when taking a picture, people gaze into the camera, but the camera doesn’t return their gaze: meaning there is not a subject and object coexisting in a moment of space and time; meaning that the photograph, reducing that distance we talked about, demystifying reality, leads to the decline of the aura. Benjamin writes about it here: “The peeling away of the object’s shell, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose sense of the sameness of things has grown to the point where even the singular, the unique, is divested of its uniqueness—by means of its reproduction.” Once again, there’s a difference between flying to Paris and seeing the one and only Mona Lisa and seeing a picture of the Mona Lisa that’s been mass-produced by technology just as there’s a difference between looking up and witnessing the moon and seeing the tennis ball in the sky on your phone.

Not only the photograph, but the technology introduced during the age of the mechanical reproduction of things has, as Walter Benjamin beautifully puts, divested the uniqueness of things. What is happening is we are destroying the aura of ourselves, the world, and works of art. More importantly though, we are changing the very definition of what a work of art is at all—“Task of the Translator.” See, we no longer need to care about mass-producing merely the contents or the raw data of a work of art. The destruction of the aura makes it so that now there’s not even anything missing if something’s mass-produced, distributed, and commodified. We have changed the aesthetic experience altogether. We no longer need to care about creating art for the sake of the consumer on the other side. Now we can make Marvel movies, because art is no longer the ultimate form of self-expression. See, I willfully sacrifice my own unique self in this era of reproducibility.

Let me explain that further, actually. See, whenever we take a selfie, we are essentially turning ourselves into a picture of the Mona Lisa rather than the real thing. We mass-reproduce, distribute, and commodify ourselves. We divest ourselves of our own uniqueness, and instead make our likeness into one of an infinite number of copies. Tell me, if the intervention of a technology like a building can change the experience of people and the way they see themselves, what might something like this do? And what if the critical tools of the past were incapable of seeing it? This mass-reproducibility of everything including of our own likeness, divested of its uniqueness—Benjamin would say it’s not a coincidence that this technology has corresponded with a rise in mass culture: mass production, mass transit, mass distribution, mass psychology, mass consumption, mass communication. Take your pick.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, an important question Walter Benjamin would want to ask here—and something that’s going to be really important once he creates this new method of criticism and it starts looking at what the world has become—once again, fascinated by how the introduction of new technologies affect the experiences of people—with all these new forms of communication available, what happens when you can turn on the TV or the radio and you can see or hear crowds of people gathered at a political event or a concert or a sports game? What happens when for the first time in human history the masses can come face to face with themselves?

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