Work of Artin the Age of its Technological Reproducibility

• Premise: centrality of media technology in the production (and capacity) of modern culture

• Note text and type just one medium among many…

• In the 19 Theses, I see four main themes at work

Four Themes in Work of Art

• Theses I to IV: Media as the medium between the base and superstructure

• Theses V to VIII: Room for Play as a radical renunciation of eternal value

• Theses IX to XVII: Film Action as a model and transformation of all Social Action

• Theses XVIII & XIX: Futility within Capitalist Relations, leads to Fascism

Thesis I

• Early historical materialism (i.e. Marx) was formulated in infancy of capitalism

• Relation between culture and economy, structure and superstructure is only now possible to see in maturity

Thesis II

• Techno Repro makes art accompany everyday life

• Art keeps pace with speech and action

• Sound film (in 1935) is the apex of potential for art

Thesis III

• Reproduction has no history

• History and unique trace is source of aura

• Aura withers in the age of Techno Repro

• Substitutes a mass existence for uniqueness, liquidates value of tradition

Thesis IV

• That premise is not techno determinism

• The medium is conditioned by both history and nature, all perception is cultural

• Thus, decay of aura is response of the masses’ desire for experience. Aligns the masses with reality (and vice versa)

Thesis IX

• Film rejects mere copying and embraces the capacity for editing

• Use natural means to give convincing expression to the fairylike, the marvelous, the supernatural (Utopian imaginary?)

Thesis X

• Film reproduces its own production

• Film art comes only in montage

• Film actor is in a state of “test”, so that screen test is the epitome of acting

• Experience of masses itself is “test” confronted with the apparatus

• Film makes this test capable of exhibition

Thesis XI

• Film actor merely acts him or herself

• Completely forgoing aura and identity and essence

• No original, no aura, in film acting

Thesis XII

• Film actor is displaced before the masses

• Masses control the image

• BUT PROVISO: Not possible under capitalism, not as a mass audience…

• Question: Needs to be mass without being mass audience? How possible?

Thesis XIII

• Newsreel: everyone can be film actor

• Has parallels in newspapers, in bureaucracy, in democracy, in literacy…

• Distinction between author and public is no longer axiomatic

• BUT PROVISO: Not yet true for Hollywood

Thesis XIV

• Film Spectator, like the film actor, always has the camera (apparatus) in view

• Cinematographer penetrates, is a surgeon of reality

• Film provides the equipment-free possibility of interpenetration of reality with the technology (with the apparatus?)

• We are all cinematographers of reality…

Thesis XV

• Techno Repro changes relation of masses to art, infuses pleasure into appraisal

• In cinema, individual reaction is concentration of a mass reaction

Thesis XVI

• Social Function of cinema is equilibrium of humans and the apparatus

• Insight into the necessities governing lives

• Assures vast, unsuspected room-for-play (speilraum, field of action, gambling den)

Thesis XVII

• Film achieves goal of dadaism:

• Tactile, percussive constant change and loss of aura

Thesis V

• Art’s origins in cult and religious ritual

• But techno repro experience is based on politics!

Thesis VI

• History of Art infuses humans into the representation…

• Techno Repro takes them out, leaves room-for-play, interplay between nature and culture

• First mention of film: Trains apperception to deal with a vast apparatus… FN 11.

Thesis VII

• Face value, approval, cult value finds its last refuge in early photography

• As humans fades from focus, exhibition value becomes total, context is total, captions become obligatory

Thesis VIII

• State of technology compelled Greeks to give eternal values to art (because statues and bronzes)

• We lie on opposite pole with film… focus on editing and change, room for improvement in every shot

• Radical renunciation of eternal values

Thesis XVIII

• Mass produces different kind of participation

• The disreputable character of entertainment is flipside of devotion

• The distracted masses absorb the art into themselves… in becoming a mass, but also litterally in the play of light, lichtspeil

Thesis XIX

• HOWEVER (one last proviso)…

• Spectre of fascism shows that granting people expression without rights, leaving property relations intact, merely aestheticizes the political, leads to war.

• In this realm, only war sets mass goals while leaving property relations intact

• On the one hand, an essentially contemporary theory of ComCult, in 1935!

• Empirically grounded, historicized, playful reading of media in culture