ACFM - ACFM Microdose: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Episode Date: June 7, 2026

The ACFM crew gather for a close reading of Walter Benjamin’s foundational contribution to 20th century cultural and media theory. Download the short text and follow along as Nadia, Keir and Jem consider The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, published in 1935. Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

This is acid man. Hello and welcome to ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Jeremy Gilbert. I'm here as usual with my friend Nadia Idol. Hello. And Keir Milburn. Hello. And today in this microdose episode of ACFM,

we're going to be talking about Volta Benyemin's classic essay, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. At least that is how it's most commonly translated into English. Keir, this was your idea. It's a good idea. Why are we doing it? Why are we talking about this essay by a Marxist philosopher from the 1930s? Well, first of all, we haven't done a reading session for a while.

So every now and then we take a text and we read through it. And we're going to read through this text page by page, or aphorism by aphorism, perhaps we'll put it that way. And so, dear listeners, if you want to read along with us, this text is really widely available online. You could go and download it. We're going to read through the most famous iteration of this text. There's a few different iterations,

and we're doing the one which was published in the book, Illuminations in 1969, the first English translation. So it's the most common one, etc. So you just go around. You can pause now, go download it, and read along if you so. The reason I thought it would be a good text to read was, well, firstly, because we've just done an episode about shock. We mentioned Benjamin and Boudelais and people like this on the idea of shock.

In that, we sort of talked a little bit about Benjamin's writings, about film and stuff, and about how he had quite a subtle conception of shock. And I thought, there'll be really interesting to get into it a little bit more, basically, tried to think through that problem of, like, well, how do we politicise shock? Beyond that, though, it's just this really classic text on art and how we can criticise that, or think about art in a way that our perception of art and culture more widely, basically, changes,

as society changes. That's something really interesting to think about. It's a text that people go back to a lot, basically. I remember a big wave of people going back to this around the turn of the century, to think about digital reproduction, basically. You know, we got to this stage where reproducing property in digital form, you know, images, etc.

It got to such a low cost. It was virtually free. And people were trying to think through what that would mean. It's been all sorts of developments since then. We might touch on non-fundible tokens, NFTs, bored ape, all these sorts of things. We might even talk about AI, artificial intelligence and like that, that sort of AI generated images and text, etc.

We might talk about that sort of stuff. Yeah, but that's the reason I thought it might be an interesting text to go. through. Annoyingly, this is yet another one of Keir's brilliant ideas. So I'm very happy that you made this suggestion. So thank you, Keir, for bringing this text. I didn't know about this text, but I hadn't read it or when I did read it as a very long time ago. And I think it's an excellent text for us to read with you listeners and to kind of take a part and analyze. I suppose that there's some really interesting concepts in there which develop out of this

kind of theorizing of shock like Keir mentioned. I'm particularly interested in this idea of aura and this idea that how art has developed as no longer being in situ. And I can see a lot of parallels with that with the digital age. I teach media and communication. So I'm really interested in media theory. And this is really interesting preliminary text for people thinking about media theory particularly, but also as I was reading through, there were several things which pointed to really interesting observations and kind of theoretical underpinning around stuff like the subject and the audience and especially what distraction is and the attention economy. And as somebody who is, you know, an interested in and, you know, a practitioner of

engagement, I'm very much interested in engagement in social movement. I'm particularly interested in how that kind of interfaces with kind of our digital reality in the 21st century. And I actually found a lot in this text that I found useful in thinking about parallels for today. And then, of course, like Keir mentioned, the stuff on art and like the social function of art. So, you know, I think it's about only 19 pages, but in a very short few pages, there's actually quite a lot there. So I thought it would be a really interesting thing for us to talk about together as a collective in ACFM, but also with you, our listener. Have you got anything to add on that, Jeremy, yourself?

It's a classic of the 20th century, cultural theory, sort of proto-media theory. Yeah, it always repays reading and thinking about. Before that, I'll remind listeners, if you like ACFM, we've got a monthly newsletter, an email that goes out once a month that includes lots of extra material that's put together by producer Chal. You can sign up to that. on the Navarra website, if you just go to Navaradia.com slash newsletters. I would also always really encourage people to consider supporting Navarra Media because they make

this possible. And I think most listeners will know they're an absolutely vital left media project for Britain particularly, but for the broader English-speaking world in many ways. And don't forget, you can also listen to the music on the main episode. on the Spotify playlist, the ACHA FM at Spotify playlist on Spotify. We should probably say something about who was this guy who wrote this essay, and why has it become so widely referred to in the past few decades? So Walter Benjamin, as how the name would normally be pronounced in German, but people in English, because it's written Walter Benjamin,

often just say Walter Benjamin. He was one of those people, like his main job really was writing as a critic. Like he didn't hold an academic post. He was a kind of critic, an essayist. He was born in the 1890s. He finally had a tragic sort of death. Well, actually, it's not totally agreed on whether he committed suicide or was assassinated. While he was in the process of trying to escape from Nazi Germany,

he was a kind of associate of the so-called Frankfurt School, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, where Marxist or quasi-Marxist think like Adorno and Marcusa started out working before they managed to escape to the States around the same time. He wasn't very widely read in English at all, really, until the 70s. There's a book comes out at the end of the 60s, a collection of his essays published under the title Illuminations, which is edited by Hannah Arendt, who at that time in America is probably the most famous of the sort of intellectuals who had escaped from Nazi Germany to become

some significant and influential figures in the American Academy. He gets read quite widely in the 70s and 80s, into the 90s, the academic journal of which I'm the current editor, new formations, did quite a bit, actually, to promote interest in Walter Benjamin's work. I love my colleagues there. We're very excited by it. And I've got to say, he's one of those figures I'm always a little bit dubious about, because there's something a bit, a bit culty about him.

He didn't really write that much. A lot of what he wrote is sort of suggestive. You know, he never wrote. He didn't write kind of long book, long really well research books. There's one really substantial sort of research project, which wasn't published in his own lifetime, but was finally published really just a few years ago. It only came out in English at all a few years ago. The Arcades project was a kind of study of the Parisian arcades in the late 19th century. basically kind of precursors of mauls.

And so, but he is a figure, you know, despite my kind of wariness of the sort of cultish attachment we end up having to these figures who get sighted over and over and over again, which would even include, I mean, in my case, I often find myself thinking I refer to Gramsci too much. Gramsci was a really brilliant guy who did great stuff, but also a lot of the stuff we refer to Gramsci for is like,

it's stuff like pretty much, lot of people in the 30s were kind of realizing on all ends of the political spectrum about how politics had to work in a mass society. But like Gramsci, though, with Ben Yamin, you know, whenever you come to read it, you can't get away from the fact that he's saying something really penetrating the interesting and that really seems to anticipate contemporary problems. So this essay is published. It was published in some critical journal in Germany in the 30s.

I think it was published in French, actually, first. Was it first published in French? There wasn't a German translation until after the war. Okay, but he reputedly wasn't very happy with the French translation, that's my understanding. There's now at least two English translations in existence. The most recent one translates the title as the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility,

and the one that we're using is the 1969 translation, which is the one most widely available, which is, as we keep saying, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. But you can get a sense of how those words are being used if you think that, well, in one translation they say mechanical and in one they say technological, basically he's talking about the whole question of, well, what happens to our ideas about art, broadly conceived in an epoch when it becomes possible to physically reproduce art objects, almost perfectly. And then a lot of it is about cinema. Anyway, a lot of it is about cinema. Yeah, I'd like to also contextualize maybe in short, you know, some of the stuff that you already

mentioned, Jeremy, but like just to give our listeners a bit of a historical context of like what's happening. So like as you mentioned, this essay was written, you know, 1935. I didn't realize it was in French first, but the context in which he's writing is that this is, you know, interwar Europe. And there's various different things that are happening socially. So maybe like a few of those points are like film and photography and radio, like rapid technological change culturally is occurring. There is kind of a rise of like the mass media, as we kind of know theoretically, but also like the concept of the mass audience. And that's something that I want to come back to and kind of problematize with a kind of feminist reading of that. But, you know,

like in theory, like in this subject, the mass audience becomes an area of interest. Obviously there's growth of fascism, right? And this is mentioned explicitly in the text in terms of like Germany and Italy. And then obviously that, you know, like I said, there's the in between wars. And kind of I think this text, as I understand it, is a response directly kind of to these conditions. And so while I don't think it's an explicit warning, it's kind of about he does bring up fascism and the asceticizing of politics. So we'll come to all of this stuff. But, you know, spectacle, media, mass emotion, like all of these things.

those concepts are going to relate to that text. So it's just important to talk about, like, that's the context in which he's writing. Just one more, even more specific thing. So he's a German Jew, 1935, it gets published. Hitler is in power from 1933. He has to leave. He's living in Paris at this time. And it's when he's trying to escape from Paris to go to New York.

And he, you know, he fails to get through the French-Spanish border and kills himself because he can't escape the country. etc. But in 1935 as well, you see the release of Lenny Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, the classic fascist film, basically, and that wins all European awards that year. That's some sort of context as well. When we later on, we start to think about film and fascist uses of film and spectacle, etc. So I think that's probably enough on the broader context of the text, and we'll bring motor out as we go. Should we go to the page? Should we start?

Let's go to the page. So the very first thing on the page is actually a long quote from the French writer Paul Valéry. And it's from an essay called The Conquest of Ubiquity, which you can find translated online. It's very short. Valeri is a really interesting figure, a kind of key figure of French modernism. He was a sort of bridge between the late 90s, sort of decadent generation, who we did refer to recently on an episode, actually. and the kind of the 1920s period of high modernism. I mean, Benyemin is sort of obsessed with Paris, actually.

One reason he ends up being a really important figure, Benjamin, is because he's sort of the first 20th century Marxist thinker to really try to think through, like, what is the political and significance of all this stuff that's been going on in the arts, of which Paris has been kind of the epicenter since the late 19th century. And anyway, Valéry, basically,

in this essay, he's basically just musing on, really on the implications of photography and audio recording for what it's going to be like to live in the world as a human. And he says, like, we're moving towards the world, which we're going to be constantly surrounded by things that we've historically thought of as like art objects, and he meet and sound recording and pictures. It's really interesting actually, because Valerie in that essay, actually, he really focuses on audio. He really thinks that it's the, it's audio recording and the ubiquity of music that makes possible that he's really focused on. Benyman doesn't say anything about that in this essay. He's really focused on the visual and on cinema. And that is kind of interesting.

I mean, it's not a criticism of Benyman, but, you know, really, because really a lot of what Benyman is talking about in the whole essay is things that, which are applicable to any concept of recording being possible. I really like this first quote. And I think it sets up. some of the ideas that that come afterwards. And the bit that I would pick out is just through, you know, almost just after the middle. I just really like this sentence of in all the arts, there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it is used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power.

And I just, I think there's something there that kind of sets up the stuff that Benjamin's going to bring up. So this idea of like in situ and what he starts saying about the aura, which will obviously get into, is kind of preempted by this quote. Yeah, I think that's right. And I really think it's always worth reflecting on this, just how kind of wild it is. Like if you just look around the room, you're probably in now. If I look around the room, I'm in now, I'm surrounded by photographs, like on packets, on boxes, on books. I'm surrounded by these like effectively perfect images

like things out in the world and that is just a normal part of what it means to be human for the past 100 and a bit of years and that wasn't part of what he meant to be human for the 100,000 years before that and it is really kind of wild. Yeah, if you want to see a mountain,

you have to go see one. That's what it was like for the vast majority of history. Yeah, exactly. But also sound recording, isn't it, basically? You know, the fact that you could have, like, you know, if you want to to see a concept, you'd have to go to it, etc, etc.

You know, in many ways, in many ways, all of history has been leading up to podcasting and in particular, the ACFM podcast. Thank you, Walter. We are the dialectical resolution of history, the manifestation of absolute spirit anticipated by Hegel. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's true. I mean, and sound, I mean, the thing is,

photography, of course, is a whole sort of new art form, but, I mean, quite a lot of, actually, the context for the essay that we're talking about today, and it's a context that Benyman himself refers to very explicitly, is the fact that people are very preoccupied in the early 20th century with like, well, what does the fact of photography mean for the whole idea of painting? Like, what's the point of painting anymore? And there is an argument that the whole series of experiments

that would come to be referred to retrospectively as modernism, that sort of begin with impressionism and run through cubism and surrealism, the work of the foes, etc. They're all basically artists trying to figure out what's the point of existing now that people can just take a photograph. Just being really good at drawing and painting stuff doesn't really cut it anymore.

That's problematic because I would say sort of expressionist painting like Turner, like long predates photography, although arguably Turner's actually responding to the possibility of things like engraving and lithography sort of taking over the proto-photographic function of image-making. so maybe that still holds.

But in music, in the field of music, I would say, in a sense, it's even more dramatic. Because basically everything we think of as music today, almost everything only really becomes possible once you have audio recording. Before that, you've got the orchestral tradition and kind of folk traditions and some sort of commercial popular traditions. And those are circulated through technological means. They're circulated through the technological means of sheet music and sheet music printing and the sheet music industry really begins in the mid-18th century. That already has a big impact on people's

idea as to like what music can be. And even before that, you know, people are writing. People can sort of write down music. But like the vast bulk, you know, the vast bulk of the music people listen to today is music of a type, which only becomes even physically possible to do once you can make a recording not of a score, but a recording of a specific performance and then circulate that. and then and edit it and produce it in the studio. Yeah, no, I think you raised a really interesting thing from those examples that you put forward, Jeremy, simply because as you were speaking,

I was thinking, well, you know, we're going to get to, again, we keep on saying all the things that we're going to get to, but we will get to in the text, this kind of concept of distraction. And, you know, your point about sitting in a room and being surrounded by kind of like all of these pictures and kind of visuals of things that do not exist in your space, perhaps like it might be taking over,

like one of your senses in a certain way. And if we think about, you know, the moving image or like film without sound, but with like a live orchestra, you can also think about like a podcast without images. So what happens to you in the brain and to you like, and what happens to people on mass socially if you're experiencing like moving image and sound compared to when you're experiencing one and not the other. And then the other sense is being stimulated by your direct environment. Like, I think it's different, and I'm sure there's loads of studies around on that. I mean, for me now, you know, as I'm going through this recording, like, I'm looking out into greenery, and that helps me focus on the work that I'm doing here. But perhaps if there were

images, you know, it'd be more, if there were images flashing in front of me, or if I was partaking in, you know, a visual, not just an audio version of this podcast, like it would have a different effect, right, on what it does to people. So that's interesting. We'll come back to that in terms of distraction as well. We haven't got to the preface yet. So the text proper starts with a preface where Benjamin sort of introduces and Marxist distinction between

the base and superstructure. Only he uses substructures, isn't he? But this idea that like, you know, that there are changes in the technological base and the relations of production, which move more quickly than sort of like culture, like the cultural response to these changes that take place.

technology and production, etc. So there's a sort of catching up process, basically, and art is one of the ways in which that sort of catches up. I think he would go along with that sort of idea. And then there's a little bit about what the revolutionary demands around the politics of art might be. And he sort of talks about the need to brush aside a number of outmoded concepts such as creativity and genius,

eternal value and mystery, concepts who's uncontrolled and at present almost uncontrollable application would lead to a processing of data in the fascist sense. I think it's worth saying something about the context, the ideas of creativity and art, etc. Because I'd say, I mean, it's just, it's worth keeping in mind that really he's writing in the context whereby, in the early 19th century, this idea which I think a lot of us

are still familiar with today, this idea that art, with a capital A, is a very special type of human experience, is different from craft, It's restricted to a few types of activity, what we think of as the fine arts. And what characterises value, what gives art value is some idea that works of art express like the irreducible genius of their individual creators. This is obviously really problematic.

It's very individualistic, it's very elitist, privileged forms of aesthetic practice, was really, in almost all cases, you can only even get access to training in if you come from a social elite. I mean, people have been picking it apart, like, as soon as people start pulling it forward, really, like through the 19th century. But it's pretty widespread, it's a pretty widespread 10th of assumptions. And he's just sort of assumes that he's assuming, well, that's not how we want to think about art. And he never really sits down and says this explicitly in the essay. But really, this essay is Walter Benjamin, a kind of Marxist influence or Bohemian intellectual in his 40s in Europe between the wars thinking what about cinema

right? Well, what is it all about film? Like what are we going to make of it? Like is it cool or is it shit? And he's really clearing the decks here. He's saying, look, whatever we're going to say about film, but we're not going to say is, well, like it's good if it fulfills the criteria like a Victorian art critic would have attributed to a painting. But those are not, or would have used to value a painting, I should say. That's not the criteria. according to which we're going to try and say, is film or a film like good or shit? Yeah, I mean, I don't really have any notes from the first,

kind of from the preface first paragraph, but it just immediately started getting me thinking about, like, the direct parallels with the mass media subject as we would analyze in the 21st century, like the scrolling subject and the distracted subject and the attention economy. So already from the beginning I started thinking about these things. Yeah, there's a sort of underlying argument, isn't there,

that like changes in technology, go along with changes in perception in some sort of way, or introduce new ways of perceiving the world, etc. Then we move on to section one. And he says, in principle, a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artefacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their work,

and finally by third parties in pursuit of gain, forgeries, I'm presumed he's talking about. Mechanical reproduction of work of art, however, represents something new. And then he sort of goes through different sort of technologies which predate photography, such as woodcuts and lithography. Yeah, I mean, this bit right at the end, where there's a bit where he says for the first time

in the process of pictorial reproduction photography freed the hand of the most important artistic functions, which henceforth devolved only upon the eye looking onto a lens. So this is when he starts to do like, is it the eye or what happens when it's through the lens? And I thought that was kind of interesting and in terms of how it relates to communication theory and how it evolves over time

because we start to get this idea of like the subject. He's raising the question of like what, you know, in a sense, like what is the perspective which is created for the viewer? And also, yeah, I mean, a big part of what the essay is concerned with is the question of like, well, what does, to what extent do new media technology, like have specific effects on viewers and on culture, as opposed to just being vehicles through which, you know, sort of through which ideas can be communicated.

Because I guess, I mean, implicitly what he would be arguing against here is an idea which would say, well, like, cinema's basically just an extension of theatre. Like, it's just a different way of viewing theatre and it isn't, it's not really a fundamentally different thing. He's saying, no, you have to understand it's a fundamentally different thing and the technology makes it fundamentally different. maybe today that seems like a truism but that is what he's getting

out and he's anticipating there this is one reason the essay is seen as so important today because it sort of anticipates so Marshall McLuhan you know the North American media theorist and it anticipates sort of Kittler and sort of German like social media theory

he basically anticipates a bunch of people especially after TV becomes a thing trying to work out like to what extent do specific media end up having specific effects. I mean, I'm saying it's a truism, and if I'm putting it that way, then people listening,

and I think, oh, well, yeah, obviously, obviously, like, films different from theatre. But it's also with keeping your mind, well, if you take that kind of perspective too far, then you can end up with a perspective, according to which, well, the ideological themes in a film are totally unimportant. Like, all that's important is something about the experience

of sitting in the cinema and the way in which the camera makes you feel, you just kind of ignore the semantic content or the narrative completely. And like in the history of media and cultural studies, really from, I would say from the 50s and 60s onwards, there tends to be a sort of back and forth movement. You'll have one cohort of people who are like really into thinking about, yeah, really, well, when you go to the cinema, like really what you have to understand

it's like in this darkened room and have all these images flashing out of you and this thing that's been made in this really artificial way. And then people will come back on that and say, well, no, it's like, you know, that's, it's totally different if you're doing that and you're watching the Battle of Alger as to if you're watching like, you know, triumph of the will or if you're watching Snow White and actually what the film is about is important. And then those people tend to be interested in things that different media have in common because the things that Snow White is about are also things that a novel can be about or other things that a painting can be about.

So there's this sort of back and forth movement and you don't, and ideally you don't want to go too far in either direction. But at this point in this kind of history, the thing Benjamin is really trying to think about, it is sort of cinematic form and it's the kind of the technological nature of it as something very new and very novel that he's trying to sort of think through. In the first section, but on page three now, I thought it was interesting that he brings back Paul Valerie again with this kind of quote around like, just as, you know, water, gas and electricity are now pumped into your house. And I think what's interesting, there is the piece of that quote where it says in response to minimal effort. So it seems to be

making the parallel there or bringing forward the parallel of like you're going to be supplied with visual and auditory images that you didn't ask for it, but you start to take for granted, become part of the infrastructure of your life, just in the same way that you've got water, gas and electricity, whereas a generation ago, like those things were not there. And that made a substantial difference to like how you experience life. daily and that's what I take from the water gas and electricity bit which I thought was interesting.

Well, no, it's extraordinary. That quote from Valerie, he says, yeah, we shall be supplied with visual auditory images which will be appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand. So he's actually anticipating a kind of technological media environment which is not the one that Valerie is in or the Benyman

is in the 30s. He's anticipating the media environment which we've only been in really since the age of streaming. Like it's really interesting because I'm always quoting to students like David Bowie in some interview in the 90s, so music's going to become something. You just, you turn on and off like a tap. Because it's kind of, it is sort of interesting.

I mean, something I've kind of said to my kids before, they found kind of interesting, kind of amazing. I said, well, yeah, it's true that all this stuff didn't exist when I was a kid, but like everyone knew it was coming. That this is exactly the future in some ways that people anticipate. Yeah, everybody knew there would be video phones in your pocket. That was like a science fiction thing going, back to the 50s. There were prototypes around in the early 90s. So it's this sense of the imagined

future, this sense that actually a lot of stuff that people think of is very contemporary, is very contemporary, but it was clearly anticipatable like 100 years ago. There's a little sentence in this section where he sort of talks about that. He says, just as lithography virtually implied the illustrated newspaper, so did photography. So did for photography foreshadow of the sound film and it's like, you know, precursor technology sort of imply what might follow basically. I think video phones are one of those things. It's something quite easy to put together, I think.

You know, I remember even in the 90s, the idea that you could do a direct connection to somebody and have somebody video in. It was amazing. I remember at a friend's birthday party. I faked up a video communication to come into this party from Alice and Tumble who were in the United States. And we had to basically film a video, which I would provide the questions to, and they would have the answers. And we faked a video call, basically, and everybody was amazed.

You know, 10 years later, it would be so common, it would be banal. Yeah, but, I mean, it's interesting that you're bringing up, like, something that happened a few decades ago. I was just thinking with this about the minority report, right? So I remember going to see that film in the cinema. I was 21 when that came out in 2002. And one of the scenes in the beginning of that film is all of these advertising that's personalized to you, that's talking to you as you walk down, you know, corridors and whatever. The stuff that exists, you know, the visual and auditory pollution on the underground, there's all of these video images as you're going up the escalators, which are incredibly disorienting and really annoying. And the minority report like, you know, preempted all of that.

And I remember seeing it in the cinema and thinking, oh shit, this stuff is coming. In that minority report, I remember that the technology was you'd be walking through a clothing store and they would be scanning your eyes and then give you personalized adverts, etc. Of course, it turns out you don't need that. You just have your phones, et cetera, and you have apps on your phone which are listening to you all the time. And, you know, we all get that where you write an email to somebody and all of a sudden you're getting adverts for a word you mentioned in that sort of thing. A world of constant surveillance is something that has been baked into technology.

for quite a long time, I think. Anyway, let's return to the text. To we move on to Section 2, the Section 2 starts like this. Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element. Its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.

And later on, he's going to call that element aura. The best line. Absolutely, I'm happy that you read that out here. That is, I think, you know, that's a summary of the point it is trying to make, I think. And I think space and time, of course, we come back to this on ACFM, right? And the importance of engaging with both. And that time shouldn't just be, you know, the consideration of socialist and base of conservatives, but the importance of understanding place, you know, from a radical leftist perspective.

And I think we can kind of bring that in to kind of some of this media theorizing as well. what happens when cultural production is replicated in a way that takes it away from the context in a very literal sense to when it occurred? Yes, well, that is, it is really interesting. It is really important. And, I mean, he raises all these questions. I mean, the next paragraph begins with that line. The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity.

And this whole question of like, well, what is authenticity in art and culture? like, does it matter, should it matter? That becomes a massive preoccupation. There's art theory and cultural theory in the late 20th century. And the whole problem of the original, of the original, the relationship between the original and its reproduction. So probably, I mean, two of the, like, big, big names, the big international celebrities to come out of the French philosophical scene,

the 70s and 80s, like Jacques Derridan and Jean-Baudiard, they're both in different ways really preoccupied with this question, this question of all, you know, what is the relationship between the thing and the thing which is represented and what is the, Bojah, I'm not going to bother talking about, but Derrida becomes like the most famous philosopher in the world, like really because he gets picked up by these American English literary departments, and the reason he gets picked up by American English literary departments,

that's because in his early work he's really interested in the whole problem of writing. and he basically his whole his whole stick really starts from noticing that well if you're like trained in the European philosophical canon like you're reading all these books going about thousands of years and a lot of the time the

philosophers writing these books they seem to be quite anxious about the fact that they're writing but they seem to be anxious about it and it seems like what they prefer to be doing is talking to you face to face but they can't and so they get kind of worried about that and then there's this whole question well what is

you know, what is writing and is it an inherent fact of language that it could be written down even if it isn't because otherwise it just wouldn't really work the way we think language works and what is the original, you know, what is the real scarring point of European philosophy if it's Plato, but actually in all of the Plato text, he says, well, I'm just transcribing stuff that Socrates said and Socrates didn't write anything down. Like, what's all that about? And a lot of this is anticipated here. A lot of this is anticipated. A lot of this is anticipating. by then you mean raising this whole question. Like, well, what, you know, what happened to our notions of the authenticity of the artwork

when it becomes reproducible? You can think of it in really crude terms. You can just think about the fact that, well, yeah, think about in the art market today, you know, what a work of art only has, like this exchange value, it's this price, if it is like the original work of art, whatever that means. And yet it is possible to make like all perfect facsimiles of works of art, which the boy, but then so, so who cares? So why don't you just, why don't you just pay one of these expert forges,

like a couple hundred quid, like, and have a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa? Like, why do you care about having the original or trying to steal it or whatever? And he's trying to sort of unpack that. His argument is that basically there's a kind of religious, there's a kind of quasi-religious or really a more or less explicit. religious concept of the kind of holiness of an object. Well, he thinks that the idea of the art object as having this very uniquely special quality that you can only really experience by being in its physical present.

He thinks this is directly derived from the way in which religion or some religion, probably most religions, treat like holy objects in holy places. And so this notion of the aura is the quality which should, the imagined quality which is attributed to the object when it has this sort of quasi-religious function and he sees European ideologies of art really as attributing to art objects, this kind of aura the same way that like medieval Christians attributed the aura to the relics of the saints or something like this. And if you think about it in a totemic sense, like that makes complete sense. If we go back to the idea of like the mountain, if you are bringing the mountain to the people,

through this object or through this piece of art. Like that's quite a big deal. Of course it takes on some kind of like cultish persona in a sense and becomes ritual and is contextualized within a kind of ritualistic reality or understanding because this is not widespread, right? You can't see pictures of mountains all of the time. So if the mountain is like in front of you in another form, like it's understood to fulfill that kind of role.

And that's why I think this concept of aura is really kind of powerful to help us understand that. One of the things to pick up on, I think, is, you know, there are people whose job it is to go and investigate the provenance of new, of paintings to see if they are, they fit the style of a great master, etc., all these sorts of things, do you know what I mean? It's sort of like, that's something you have to do when you only have to do that sort of stuff and then, like, you know, in an age of mechanical reproduction,

in the age of easy reproducibility, etc. That sort of value, he calls it cultic value a little bit later on, basically. And it's this idea that, like, you know, lots of works of art when they were made for religious reasons weren't made to be seen, or were made to be seen only by small amounts of people. And you can go right back, you can go right back to the cave paintings of animals,

you know, people are found in France from, you know, the Neolithic age or before that, the pre-Neolithic age, etc. They're painted representations of animals, specifically in places where it's really, really hard to get to. So lots of people are not going to be able to go and see them. Do you know what I mean? What's the purpose? What's the role of those? You know, it's got some sort of cultic or religious or some sort of spiritual sort of purpose. Do you know what I mean?

I think that's the sort of inheritance of aura as well, that that sort of religious or cultic value attached to art, which he says carries over basically, doesn't get completely eliminated. He has this thing of like, by making reproductions, it substitutes a plurality of copies for a nuke existence, and in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or the listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object, reproduced. In my head, that's this idea that, like,

say a painting is like, you know, on the Sistine Chapel, etc. Michelangelo's painting on a Sistine Chapel, you know, you have to go there and look at it where it is. and so the whole context upon which you see that is already, you know, it can be predicted basically whereas if I just get a picture of that, I've got a picture of that, I could get a picture of that now up on my laptop

and I might well have another picture next to it and over there is another picture on the wall and so basically there's a whole new series of connections that can be made. It's taken out of the context which the art is controlling or whatever you know, I'm put into my own context, do you know what I mean? Which I think is what he means about the

object is reactivated basically in that sort of context. This ends up becoming a really big deal for Derrida as well. I mean, his argument is partly the reason why writing provokes so much anxiety is because it means that a text that's written down can be taken out of its original context and put and put read in a different context. So you can never be as sort of completely sure that somebody is understood you properly. like if they've just read a thing you've written as you can if they're there with you or face-to-face, like present, talking to you.

Yeah, because you can misinterpret it and cancel them in 21st century terms. Yeah, or you can reinterpret it. I mean, misinterpretation might not be the right term. And the problem of context, actually, the whole question of context. Like, what is a context? Like, how an arrow is a context? It becomes really interesting there. Which relates to, I was going to say, what he talks about later,

Like, when we talk about context, this issue of the actor on the stage versus the actor in front of a lens. Because if there isn't directly an audience to engage with, then you don't have that, there isn't some kind of discourse in some form or another about the quote-unquote authenticity of the meaning and intention of your piece, right? Whether it's in writing or whether it's on stage. So there's a parallel there. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And so, I mean, the point he makes or the argument he makes is the aura is what mechanical reproducibility destroys. And in a way, like a photograph and a film just don't have it in the same way. They can't have it in the same way.

It's kind of interesting then to think about ways in which certain kinds of, you know, art photography and even certain kind of art film actually have tried to sort of restore the aura of the film. You think about what is that like that guy? Who's that experimental, who's that American artist, made the Kremaster films? But you're only allowed to watch in a gallery. Like, they can't be shown in a cinema. There's something I think about a lot whenever I read or talk about this essay actually is I think you certainly can make a good case that a lot of what's going on in certain kinds of art

practice from the late 19th century is artists trying to restore the aura or recover the aura. which means basically restoring or recovering or protecting the unique authority of the gallery as a space within which art has to be experienced and the gallery as institution. My experience actually of having students read this essay is it, well, it's very easy to read this. Like if you're not, like in Paris in the 1930s, hanging out with a bunch of sort of revolutionary adjacent bohemians, it is quite easy to read this and think he's saying this is all bad. It's very easy to pick it up and read and think he's saying, he's saying oh it's bad that capitalism is destroying art,

which he isn't. I think it's very kind of tentative, actually, his suggestions. He's saying, yeah, this might actually be cool. Like, it might be cool that cinema is destroying the concept of art. He doesn't offer any defence of the traditional war of the artwork at all. You know, Benyman is the guy who is often created for his great line. Like every record of civilization is a record of barbarism, which is a critique of a whole kind of tradition of,

history of ideas and history of culture, which you would really associate with bourgeois and aristocratic culture in the 18th and 19th century, which focuses on the history of, you know, philosophers and great works of art. And Beny Min's basic point is, you know, as a socialist, you know, we have to know that that history is always a history of like oppression of poor people and colonialism and imperialism and indeed, you know, oppression of women as well. So I think, and so that is where he's coming from. So he doesn't offer any kind of defense of the idea of the aura. But I think quite correctly, actually, sort of correctly and usefully, he's saying, well, you know, there's a possibility that this could lead to a sort of revolutionary consciousness being promoted by these radical new forms of media production like cinema, but it's not necessarily going to be the case that that's what's going to happen.

I mean, yeah, I think he's trying to promote, like, greater understanding through a critical lens. I mean, it doesn't read to me as some kind of polemma. No, it's not. It's not a pandemic. No, I know, but to your point, I don't read it as such, but I think the point that you were trying to make, Jeremy, is that people might read this because he's got this kind of Marxian politics as some kind of like an attack, as in this is what has happened to art and therefore. And I think, I think part of the reason why I actually don't think it is that easy to read is you're not entirely sure like which direction he's going into. And I think that's why it's like a challenging text in a good way. As he's presenting some ideas which I think are interesting and useful and can be mapped onto especially like 21st century realities and media theory.

But there isn't this kind of, you know, like crass, kind of Marxist. It can't be used in that sense, basically. It's too complex for that. At first, what he's doing is something, it's like it's analytical, isn't it, basically? A diagnostic. And he's trying to just like, you know, he's trying to say, look, well, you know, when technology changes, etc. When the relations of production change, etc.,

then our modes of perceiving change, etc. And our ways of understanding things such as art and culture change, basically. And they sort of reflect changing social relations and these sorts of things. But later on, I think he moves on that diagnostic thing to something which is much more sort of political because he says that, you know, the destruction of the aura, that opens up the possibility of the democratic. of art basically,

when art is no longer, you know, attached to this notion of supernatural, sort of genius, these sorts of things. And when it's no longer attached to like this sort of

religious aura, you know, it becomes open as a tool for people to sort of understand themselves, basically, to express, you know, find meaning in their lives,

etc., and position themselves historically and therefore, you know, can lead towards people becoming more active subjects and think like that. That's the

sort of like normative dimension in it, I think. It's a diagnostic dimension and then a normative dimension, something like that. But we'll come to that towards the end of the text because there's several dangers, he says, that we have to get through first, one of which is like the dangers inheriting commodification, etc., which probably are the things that have a dominated cinema for the 20th of 21st century, but then also like fascism and fascist uses of this sort of technology. But let's get to that a little bit later in the text. That's where we're heading. are we ready to go into section three, Nicky? I think we are.

Yeah. Yes. At the top of section three, this point of like, you know, where it says during long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity's entire mode of existence, right? That sets us up to be understanding like how a perception is changed using the new medium of film, which we've obviously talked about a little bit, but that starts to set up some of the concepts of shock and distraction, which will come later. I mean, he's not the only one at this time.

There's lots of other people who are thinking about how cinema trains perception and thought. There's lots of really interesting, you know, female theorists, which my understanding is he doesn't actually interact with because people, like, he doesn't interact that much with people from the avant-garde movements, necessarily like the woman whose pseudonym is Breyer, this kind of theorists who funded a lot of avant-garde work, who's also thinking around a lot of this stuff of perception, but I think he takes it in a different direction with this kind of focus on aura and shock. I mean, he talks about the unarmed eye. I quite like that phrase in this section three. I thought it was a useful concept, this idea of, you know, we've talked about

armor before, Keir and I, when we've done consciousness raising, I think armor and like the armed and the unarmed is kind of interesting to think about in terms of culture and capitalism specifically. So I think, you know, by using this phrase like the unarmed eye and what the unarmed eye is subjected to is kind of an interesting one as we go along. Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Does he mean to like the naked eye, as we would call it? I think it's something stronger than that. I think he's saying that I think the suggestion is that the eye could be armed, as in protected in some way, from some sort of onslaught. So I would read it slightly differently as the naked eye, because then it kind of, it makes,

it helps you understand some of the arguments that he's making, you know, later. There's a very nice passage where he says, to pry an object from its shell to destroy an aura is the mark of a perception whose sense of the universal equality of things has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. I'm not quite sure what he means by the universal equality of things there. That might be like this shift towards economic value,

you know, money is the universal equivalent, that sort of thing. Well, I've always taken that as he, yeah, he's sort of gesturing toward this sort of analysis of commodification. And that is one of the ideas which is in the background of this essay, but which it doesn't really get into in any detail. Because, of course, the problem with saying all that stuff about Auras is Bollocks. We don't want any more of that is that's not really obviously consistent with another kind of Marxian cultural criticism,

which wants to criticize the logic of commodification and the commodity form. and basically say, because, I mean, there is a whole Marxian tradition of cultural criticism that says, look, the trouble with what capitalism does to culture is it commodifies everything. And it makes everything into an object that you engage in a transactional relationship in order to obtain, that you've had to sell some of your labour power in order to obtain, and that you therefore have a kind of alienated relationship to, and the actual process and the actual, you know, the thing itself is somehow an act of ratification,

meaning sort of thingification. And of course, like in music, for example, there is a very, very radical tradition of kind of Marxian approach is to music and music culture, which basically says, yeah, like, you just can't really have sort of radical recorded music because just the act of making it into a recording like turns it into a rarefired commodity.

It sort of freases in time or was actually a living moment of social interaction. And the only really kind of radical way of consuming music would be like in live performance and ideally that live performance should be fully improvised.

I'm sure I talked about this before, you know, when I first moved to London in the beginning of the 90s, I did sort of flirt with that kind of the London musician collective scene this kind of radical improvisers. scene but it did mean like I would I would be at these gigs in the back of pubs where like I was the only person not performing and everyone else was like 20 years older than me and someone who

could remember 1968 in the student occupations that was that was it um so and that's obviously limited like almost any sort of Marxian critic today would say yeah if you're if you if you've got a critical perspective which says that is cool but like uh public enemy is bad, then you've gone wrong somewhere. You've missed, you've missed as tricks somewhere. And this is the thing really. This is, I think that's Benyman's starting book. That is Benyman's intuition, actually. Benyman's intuition is, well, there's a, there's a really obvious thing for Marxists to say about art in the work, art and the age of mechanical reproduction, which is, well, it's all just commodified, it's reified, therefore it's bullshit.

it. Obviously that is just going to take you to a place where you can't, you know, it's just going to take you to a place that's politically impotent. And he's trying to work out a different approach. But he doesn't really get that much into the whole problem of the commodity. It's just, it's kind of touched on. And I think that passage you're referring to there, he's touching on it. I mean, this is the way I always put this to students is like the Marxist, the Marxian critique of the commodification of everyday life and capitalist culture is it creates a situation. in which your relationship to everything is basically the same. Like your relationship to your education, to the music you listen to,

to the coffee you drink, to the clothes you wear is the relationship, is a commodity relation. It's a retail transaction relationship. It's all something you buy. Or if you're in the manosphere, your relationship to women. Well, it is, but I would also say, look, that critique goes way back before now at the moment of the manosphere, and it's a debate within kind of feminist and gay liberation. sexual politics. So it was a big debate in the, it wasn't big, it was a persistent debate in the

70s and 80s. Was it okay? Was it okay for men, for gay men and women to objectify their objects of desire because the power relationships were different than along the patriarchalaxis, or is that still not really okay? Because that was basically a capitalistic way of relating to people, which nobody should engage in. So how we should relate to these things is not always straightforward. and we're not going to have time here to get into like all the debates around sort of commodification. I think I've sort of set out like what the problem is. I mean, one issue is the commodification is not the same thing as capitalism. Just worth saying.

Which is a thing that often confuses people because if you read page one of Marx's capital, then you get the analysis of the commodity form. And it takes like however many thousand pages to get around to making the point that it was never really about that anyway. really it's about production and capital accumulation. And the point is, so it's very easy to think what it means to be a Marxist in the domain of cultural and social critique is to be against the value form of the commodity.

And, but the point made by lots of people like Phenambra Dell, for example, is, well, you can have commodity circulation, you have people like buying and selling stuff and even trying to make a profit, and that's not capitalism. That is not capital accumulation. It's not necessarily wage labor exploitation.

And that is basically fine. And in fact, as the right-wing libertarians are obsessed with pointing out, that has been a driving motor of culture and civilization for thousands of years. And the argument made by people like Braddell, which I think is basically right, is, well, yeah, we should acknowledge that. We shouldn't concede to them that because trade, truck and barter, as Adam Smith calls it, are basically good things, therefore capitalism is fine. Because they're not the same thing.

For sure. But I think the distinction there is that, commodification of everything, of daily life, is different to objecting to the commodity. The commodity per se and commodification, that's the distinction that politically is important for us in the 21st century. Well, totally. And that is, I mean, this is one of those examples I always like to give of why in the end, like, the theory won't tell you in advance, like what the correct political attitude is. Because basically, there are just some things which is basically

find commodifying, some things which, that it isn't. It doesn't, it doesn't, the commodifying education is bad. The commodifying chocolate bars is based, it's probably fine. Probably. Maybe not. I mean, I guess. I don't, I apologize. It's less bad. It's definitely less bad. It's definitely less bad. Anyway,

sorry, I've gone off on one about commodification in response to that thing about value. Where are we up to? Here, bring us back to the page. Where are we? Let's return to the text. We are now on section four. Let me go

through section 4 and explain what it's about. It starts with this sentence says, the uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition. We can skip a bit and then it says, originally the contextual integration of art in tradition was found in its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest artworks originated in the service of a ritual. First, the magical, then the religious kind. The magical would be like the painting of the animal on a cave. Obviously we can't know that that's what's going on, but that's what he's referring to, I think,

or something like that. Yeah, he is, yeah. It is a significance of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the authentic work of art has its basis in ritual. This ritualistic basis, however, remote

is still recognizable as secularized ritual, even in the most professional, forms of the cult of beauty. And so it's like this idea that like, you know, it starts with magical, then religious and then it gets sexualized into this conception of beauty, basically. There's sort of like a theology around art is something he's trying to get to. Then later on, he says, for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. From a photographic narrative, for example, one can make any number of prints. To ask for the authentic print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion

of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice, politics. Like a really important section of that, which I've basically preceed. But like, you know, we've already mentioned it. You know, it's moving. There's some sort of movement here from a sort of like cultic value of art, then it's this sort of movement from like magical to religious to like secularised culture of beauty. Lots of people would mourn that sort of secularisation perhaps, but like base and the removal of aura, but the removal of aura allows a new basis from which we can start to both practice and assess art. And that's like immediately political and we'll get to like the different ways

that that can go wrong a bit later on, I think. The end of section five, I wasn't sure what was being said in that last paragraph. Does that stand out to you as something we need to discuss? Well, one of the things he talks about here is like, of like the different values placed on art and there's a movement from this cultic value to what he calls exhibition value, the exhibition value of the work. So one way to understand that is in cultic value, it's not necessarily the maximum number of people viewing the artwork, which gives it the value, basically. It's religious value, do you know what I mean? You know, like I said, the painting of the antelope in a cave is not meant to be seen by a lot of people. Do you know what I mean?

There's all sorts of works of religious art where only certain people can view it at certain times, you know, depending on your status within the church or something like that. When that sort of like starts to get broken down, the value of art, it becomes its ability to be exhibited somewhere. Yeah, and this anticipates a lot of later debates around the sort of tension between like mass culture and non-mass culture. Like I was saying yesterday, we were getting ready for this. I mean, one of my favorite examples is the, so debates around the meaning of punk in the 70s

and the fact that there's this sort of ideology expressed by people like Malcolm McLaren and John Leiden, according to which, well, basically, the only way you could be an authentic punk, a true punk, was to have gone to the Sex Pistol Gigs in London in the 1970s. And that anyone who just saw, and maybe if you were one of the people who went to the live shows and decided to form a band after that,

of whom they were quite a lot. But if you were someone who saw the sex business on the telly and decided to copy their clothes a bit, become a punk, for that reason, you could only be, as television personalities played in the song we played recently, you could only be a part-time punk,

you can only be a plastic punk, a fake punk. And my critique of that has always been, well, that's, it's kind of ridiculous. Because if, yeah, if those had been the only people who participated in punk, no one would,

it would barely be remembered. It would have just been some tiny little scene that existed for like 18 months. and nobody cared about. It only became of historical importance because of all the people who saw them on a telly. And I copied it for that reason. And that tension between a kind of notion of immediacy and authenticity

and the kind of mass function of culture and the kind of mass accessibility of culture, that is what he's getting at there with the notion of exhibition value. From that point of view, you know, the value of punk was its exhibition value. It was its capacity to get on the telly. and to sort of mean something, like even if it meant something different to what it meant to Malcolm McCarman and John Lloyd

and to, you know, thousands of teenagers watching it on the telly. Which is, again, it's interesting, and again, it anticipates a lot of like what Derrido is going to try to get into in his kind of thought about the nature of meaning and the disseminate, the fact of the meaning, sort of the meaning to work, it has to be possible for it to be so disseminated,

as he puts it, rather than just communicated from one person to another. Perhaps we should return to punk a bit later, but we could really hold that up as a way in which mass reproducibility, you know, that has this possibility of democratising art, basically. And so, yeah, it was basically,

you know, part of the reason that punk spread was because John Leiden swore on the Bill Grundy show. Lots of people watched it, and, you know, lots of adults got really outraged and shocked by it, and lots of kids sort of saw that, and they thought,

I want some of that. I thought they could see something of what they wanted in that, basically. They see something about themselves in that and in the music, etc., that sort of stuff, do you know what I mean? And the reaction to that was, oh, in that case, I want some of that and I can go and form a band. That's the possibility of the destruction of aura, you know, meaning that you could do it too. The destruction of this conception of the genius, etc. The genius is going to noodle on stage for 45 minutes, etc., replaced by, you know, somebody, you know, could barely play their instrument but had attitude. That sort of ideas.

It's almost like the ear myth of punk. But let's return to that a little later, perhaps. What was the section that you didn't quite get, Nadia, that you were saying towards the end of this? Yeah, the last bit of, right, towards the end of Section 5, which is a small section. Like the whole bit where it goes, this is comparable to the situation of work of art

in prehistoric times, win by absolute. emphasis on its cult value. It was the first and foremost an instrument of magic, right, okay, fine. But then the bit after that, where it goes only later did it become to be recognized as a work of art, in the same way today, by the absolute emphasis on exhibition value, the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions amongst which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later might be recognized as incidental. This much is certain and today's photography and film are the most serviceable exemplifications of this new function. I wasn't entirely sure what the point was.

I think it might be like, you know, really, really sort of like the basic idea of like art is created for a long, long time, for rich people to be exhibited in their houses to show that they are wealthy, etc, etc. Portraits of rich people, etc., etc., and it wasn't meant to be for lots of people to see. Do you know what I mean? And then that changes because you start having like, art exhibitions has been this really important function in which, like, lots of people are supposed to go and see it. All right, lots of people from particular class, perhaps. But, like, that's exhibition value, if you want to put it that way.

That idea of, like, the art exhibition is completely superseded by things such as, like, films being shown in, you know, in cities all around the world. Do you know what I mean? That's the sort of movement, I think, that he's getting at. Right, let's go to section six. Oh, yeah, there's a really interesting bit in that, isn't it? that like photography doesn't completely eliminate the aura. And he's talking about one of the focal points of early photography being the cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead,

of the last refuge for the cult value of the picture. So it's, yeah, so basically, you know, this idea that people would go and get portraits done, which would be a really incredibly rare thing, you know, a portrait photograph done. Before that, only extremely rich people could get people, could get representations of their faces in like busts or in paintings, etc. I think he's also talking about lockets, carrying round the picture of another human on you. I'm going to get a full AI simulation of myself made,

so that if anything happens to me, you can carry on doing ACF. I'm sure he won't be as good as gem-splaining as you will be, Jeremy. So, you know, that'll be the test. How do we know we're not actually interacting with a gems bot at the minute? You don't? Because I couldn't afford one. Yeah, that's the absolute proof. This kind of idea of, you know, photographing Paris as a scene of a crime, I thought was interesting.

Yeah, so there's like, you know, the first thing people do with photographs is to reproduce the portrait, etc. If we still use that, don't we? But then, like, people start to take people. of empty streets, basically. You know, just basically sort of like urban landscapes, basically, without people in them. And, yeah, so, and Benjamin likens this to scenes of crime photographs, basically. One of the things I find most interesting about this text

is a kind of different phraseologies. Like with the unarmed eye, which I thought was useful. There's, in Section 6, he talks about the demand of a certain kind of approach and in the middle about free-floating contemplation, is not appropriate to them, they stir the viewer. So he's bringing forward this idea that the viewer can be stirred. It's interesting in terms of thinking about how he's talking about the aura, right, in relation to this. And he hasn't come quite yet to this idea of the distracted subject, but he's almost starting to allude to it by the, you know, the unarmed eye and the viewer

being stirred in this section. Yeah, contemplation starts to become a big thing, I can't remember if it's a bit later on where, like, yeah, when you're stood in front of an artwork, you're supposed to stand there and contemplate it, do you know what I mean? And let your eye rove around the artwork, etc. and be in a state of contemplation. And like he's sort of claiming that film disrupts that, in fact, and we're being reinforced it. But we'll get to that a bit later. Okay, let's move on to section seven.

In some ways, it's like a section talking about whether. debates about whether photography is an art and then whether film should be seen as an art form. It's already a slightly out-of-date debate by the time he's writing. Like nobody's really saying film can't be an art form. In that case, let's move on to section eight. The artistic performance of a stage actor

is definitively presented to the public by the actor in person. That of the screen actor, however, is presented by a camera with a two-fold consequence, the camera that presents the performance of the film actor to the public need not respect to performance as an integral whole, guided by the cameraman,

the camera continually changes its position with respect to the performances. The sequence of positional views which the editor composes from the material supplied him constitutes the completed film. And I think it's that thing again of like, when you're at a play,

when you're at a play, you know, basically your eye can be moving about the stage, etc, you know, there's sort of some more autonomy there perhaps in what you're looking at, etc. Whereas the camera is guiding your view there. Later on he says, the audience's identification with the actor is really an identification with a camera. Consequently, the audience takes the position of the camera. Its approach is that of testing. That is not the approach to which cult values may be exposed.

I mean, to some degree, it's to do with this like photography and the camera replacing the eye to some degree Dietzsche Vertog has got writing about that and his film, you know, his early Russian Soviet films were all like, you know, taking these non-human perspectives of this camera really up high or really down low, etc., really inventing this sort of language of film really.

It's traditional in universities to show students Vertog's film the man with a movie camera and have them read this at the same time. This is the bit that I alluded to earlier. towards the end of eight that I thought was, you know, it's not like he's the first person to say this or, you know, the last person. There's a lot of people who say this. But I think in the context of his argument, it's important to note this idea a little bit further on from where Keir was quoting this bit about that the actor does not present their performance to the audience in person.

And like basically what that does to the artistic production. Like what it does when you aren't doing, you know, you aren't presenting the art, you aren't saying the thing, you aren't writing to somebody who is right in front of you or somebody who you can have a direct discourse with. And that moves over space and time with film. And that got me thinking, I mean, it's a well-known argument made with, you know, film and how film is different to stage, but it also got me thinking about. the parallels with kind of like online behavior and online debates, you know, in the 21st century, is that like that common, you know, quote or it's a bit trite now, but that kind of idea of would you say all of these things to somebody if they were standing in front of you in the pub? Like with a lot of people, they absolutely wouldn't because people feel very free to be able

to insult each other online or present an argument or an idea online, which they wouldn't kind of in person. I think that's interesting to think about in terms of the spectacle, but it's also interesting to think about in terms of like the production of not just art, but like ideas in themselves. If the delivery is kind of to the actual audience is removed in time and space from, you know, the moment that it's actually being done or created rather. We're on to page nine. Section 9. Yeah, this opens with that famous line.

For the film, what matters primarily is the actor represents himself, to the public before the camera rather than representing someone else. Really, he's talking about the conditions for the idea of the celebrity, as we would think of it today, someone who's kind of primarily famous for a sort of persona, rather than for, you know, their actual sort of activities. I'm not sure if I agree with him, actually. I'm not sure. I think it's perfectly possible.

There are film actors who are like character actors who are not. playing themselves and also this logic of celebrity has been a function of sort of capitalist media culture by the time he's writing like since the early 19th century. I love showing students pictures of the sort of all the kind of merch you could get with Lord Byron's face on it in the early 19th century and it was definitely not, you know, it was definitely the fact that he was supposed to be this sexy geezer more than the fact that they adored you know the quality of his verse structures that they made him a, made him this massive celebrity.

So I think that is something actually that is built into capitalism that is, and Beny Union has been a bit too technologically deterministic in that account. I think he's talking about something that's a function of capitalism and not really a function of film. But like acting does change a lot when it's, when it's for a camera rather than on stage. So, you know, you have the things such as the close-up, etc., which is much more subtle forms of acting are called for than on stage where you have to really project.

Perhaps that does lead to a more personalised attachment to the actor. Although, you know, he's sort of saying that it actually goes the other way, in fact. You know, he says it's stripping the actors of their aura because of this reproducibility thing. I mean, you could argue that he's identifying a tendency of film and it's assumed this is happening

in a capitalist context. And it's a film which is a tendency that erudical cinema has to work against, actually. So you can think of the film practice of someone like Mike Lee, you know, whether the actors aren't really acting. They're sort of devising the performance in some way that there's a necessary sort of technique to get away from the fact that the sort of articulation of this visual technology of the cinema with the, with capitalist logics, is otherwise going to reproduce this very, this kind of individualistic logic.

He's also touching a little bit on like the production, how film gets, produced basically so you know you basically have a series of shots etc later on in this section he talks about you know an actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door perhaps they'll shoot a gun near him or something like that you know to get to get real reaction out of him etc and then pretend that that's the knock at the door and you can do that because it's not a continuous performance it's a performance which goes back over itself and over itself again until you get the right shot and that sort of stuff basically so it's he's sort of making distinctions with with stage acting.

But he says that, you know, that process, that process of mechanical reproduction and the process, the process by which film is made, says consequently the aura that envelops the actor vanishes and with it the aura of the figure he portrays. And then in section 10, he says, the film responds to the shriveling of the aura of the actor with an artificial buildup of the personality,

in quotation marks, the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person, but the spell of the personality, the phony spell of the commodity. Yeah, but I think what's useful for that bit is the bit that's just before it. He does this bit on the market where he offers not only his labor, but also his whole self, this is the actor, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach. Right. So the market where he's offering himself because of the way the way film is developed. And then after that, he says, during the shooting, i.e. the shooting of the film, he has a little, he has little contact with it as any article made in a factory.

Right. So what I understand from that is that he's saying he's making a parallel with alienated labor here. That's what I'm taking from it. And he's saying the consequence of that alienated labor is what then the film industry needs is the creation of the celebrity. to basically overcompensate for the loss of aura out of time and space context. That's all true, and his analysis is good, but I'll say again, that isn't me, that's also true of Byron. Byron doesn't know his public personally. Once you get to the era of mass print, writers are writing for an audience they don't know. And their persona, something about their kind of public persona,

comes to be more important than any notion of their authentic self. and it's true you know and it's true of Beto the great image of the early 19th century artist as genius is this sort of

necessary function of the market that he's operating in he's trying to sell sheet music and he's trying to sell tickets I think everything he's saying is right but I also I think I think it you know it's only rhetoric

it doesn't really matter it doesn't make anything you saying wrong but I think he's slightly he slightly overstates how unique this is to cinema as I was reading this whole text I'm thinking forward, not only bad. And I think isn't that interesting to think about, you know, this whole thing in the 21st century of like, are you taking down, if you're having an argument

with somebody online, the inability people have to basically take down the argument without taking down the person or the individual without doing like a whole character assassination? And that's made it very difficult for people to have discourse in debate. And I'm saying that deliberately, from a radical left perspective, not from some kind of centrist, liberal, you know, Oxford debating society kind of perspective. But I'm saying there is something that is lost

if people are unable to be taken at the point of their ideas. And then you can extend that to talking about, you know, women or like people of minorities who are like criticised for like what they're wearing or what they look like, right? And then if you think about how that's become flipped by influencing culture, where people,

which to me I read as a kind of, of despair in a way, like structurally, of people saying, well, okay, if you're not going to take me by the content of what I am producing by my ideas, that I'm going to have to sell myself based on a persona. And so I directly saw a link between what he was saying there, is beginning to happen with the cult of celebrity by how people are doing that to themselves under late capitalism commodification, which of course is not directly what he's saying, but I could draw the link. You can follow that line of thought in this section where he really does start to preempt both the possibilities and the dangers of two-way communication, which will later become

social media and these sorts of things, basically, because he starts to go on about how this would be the case that, you know, it was only authors who could have thousands of readers, etc. And then towards the end of the last century, with the increased extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific profession and on local organs before the readers. An increasing number of readers became writers, at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press, opening its readers space for letters to the editor. And so, like, yeah, that's the first opportunity to answer back. Yeah, now you've got to read the next sentence.

And today, there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, finding opportunity to publish somewhere or other, comment on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. I had five underlines onto this bit. Yeah, yeah. That's the precursor, isn't it, to both the potential and the dangers of the internet and social media. Because of letters to the editor written in green ink, of course, is like the precursor to the... to the social media rants, basically.

It's certain sections of society, right? So he's talking about probably like, you know, white middle or upper middle class men. Like, I'm sure there's whole sections of society who will not be afforded, like, the same space to be able to, like, write letters to the editor. But his point stands for a certain demographic, right? Then he ends that section, trying to think through whether the breakdown of the aura, opening up democratic space, etc., can be transferred to film, basically. And he says, all of this can easily be applied to film where transitions that in literature took centuries have come about in a decade. In cinematic practice, particularly in Russia, this changeover has partially become established reality.

Some of the players whom we meet in Russian films are not actors in our sense, but people who portray themselves and primarily in their own work process. In Western Europe, the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to man's modern legitimate to modern man's legitimate claim to being reproduced. Under these circumstances, the film industry is trying hard to spare the interests of the masses through illusion-promoting spectacle and dubious speculations.

In some sort of way, that's the democratic potential of this, the collapse of the aura, basically, is that people can, you know, represent themselves to each other or we can represent ourselves to each other, not necessarily just as individuals, but also as masses. And like, that's one of the, the things that Soviet cinema is trying to do in those early, early days, basically, is to try to, you know, through Eisenstein and these sorts of things,

is to portray the crowd, the active crowd, the active mass, etc. Yeah, and he is also gesturing towards the idea that kind of autonomous production of media, like production outside the studio system, or people doing their own production is, like, a good thing. But YouTube is really sort of fantastic as a phenomenon. It's an extraordinary phenomenon. The extraordinary phenomenon for music culture, like the extent of the archive now, including really rare and obscure music. Like, you can't hear any other way.

It's like really amazing. And it's cool that people could do stupid little video essays about any shit they want. Like, of course, most of it's stupid and most of it's shit. Of course that's true. But it's like, it's great that people can do that. Unfortunately, capitalistic interests still determining what gets seen, as he says here. And what, so basically what passes are. like illusion promoting spectacles and dubious speculations,

i.e. the conspiracy theory. But it is really true, isn't it? I mean, because one of the times when this essay got re-read and like, you know, represented as talking to the present was like, you know, the early internet and stuff like that, and all the hopes people had for this much more freer sort of public sphere, basically. That's not the internet we had, we've got. And the reason it's not is because, you know, it's,

privately owned and it's, you know, the algorithms upon which that functions is, you know, is specifically, you know, to act in an anti-democratic way, basically. That's all true at a tendential level, but it's important to acknowledge the kind of counter-trendes. I mean, I would say, I mean, honestly, one thing I've noticed just in the past few years is I get a certain kind of student these days who is actually more able to sort of engage with a demanding lecture than they would have been a few years. years ago. The reason is they've got into watching really long video essays on YouTube, and that's the thing they've been doing since they've a teenager. And like for years and years,

really for much of my sort of teaching career, because I'm mostly teaching students from, you know, not from upper middle class backgrounds. You know, even when I started teaching, I had hardly any students who didn't struggle to sit through a lecture because they didn't come from a culture in which he did that. And their experience of anything comparable was watching half-hour TV shows. You know, and that was, this is like, pre-internet. And now, you know, there are, if you're a curious teenager, you can find people that go in for like two hours about some, just some shit they're sort of interested in and sit and watching. It's a counter, it's a marginal trend, it's a minor trend. It's a trend,

which is obviously countervailed by the fact that, you know, most young people now can't even listen to a record for three minutes, you know, because, like, literally, the average length of pop, this has gone down, because that's what trends on TikTok is like... I would concur. I would say the same thing with my students. I think there's a percentage. I agree. It's a small percentage, but it's a growing trend of gen alphas who are rejecting, like, digital completely and, like, have gone bought CDs and are, like, gone really analog because they're very aware of how this stuff is affecting their brains. Behind all of that, I think, though, is this, is this, like, there is still a utopian potential for the internet. That desire for, like, a public sphere and for the ability of anybody to be able to create content. etc, these sorts of things.

If it was run by different algorithms would be something which looks a lot more like the line of inheritance that Benjamin is setting out here. In some ways you can understand almost all of contemporary politics and cultural on every scale, just understanding this, that of course the internet always had utopian potential. And of course, Capital was going to do everything in its power

to preserve that utopian potential being realised. So they have to do all kinds of weird shit to us and to it, because otherwise, of course, we'd have used it to organise global revolution by now. Why wouldn't we? But then any, that's what happens with every innovation. I mean, it's what happens with every movement and every innovation is that capital moves in and fucks it up before we have any chance to kind of reclaim it in any democratic sense. Yeah, but I think it can never completely fuck it up, because otherwise it would remove the creative potential from it that it relies on to produce value. That's what I think. That's being a good, a good autonomist.

But that's what incitification is, is that thing of like, basically, it's undermining, it's used value, basically, because it's because of monopolistic tendencies within social networks and social media, etc. Back to the old text, anymore for any more in section 10 or should we go on to section 11. I've got very little in section 11, actually. In the second paragraph, he's got this bit where he's going, the surgeon represents the polar opposite. of the magician, right? The magician heals a sick person by laying on of hands and the surgeon cuts into the patient's body. And then basically he goes on to say, the magician and the surgeon compared to the painter and the cameraman, right? So the painter maintains his work in a natural distance from reality, but the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. So basically the painter

is the magician, right? Hence, like the aura and all of that. But the cameraman is basically the surgeon, right? Because he's penetrating into, which I just thought was interesting. And then he closes this bit by saying, thus for contemporary man, the representation of reality by film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter. Since it offers precisely because of the through-going permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is one entitled to ask from art of art. So it's just kind of like interesting, got me thinking there about like, I'm not sure if I agree with this, but I kind of like it, this idea of like the surgeon and the and the magician and how it applies

to art. So we start saying that cinema is much more, you know, it's taking reality apart and putting it back together. It's much more... Embodied, that you're kind of... You're taking the subject and you're kind of... It's you're interfering with the very essence of what the subject is. You're going into the thing, right? So you're making something by going into it.

And there's kind of an invasive kind of sense to it, right? Rather than with painting, which I think has got some kind of distance, which kind of says something about this kind of totemic and rich... that that distance has some kind of like godly sense to it. You know, you're painting the mountain from far and kind of representing it in the same way that the magician heals by kind of putting your hands upon it, but you're not kind of like going in and playing with the essence of what it is, which of course is what what film does because film is kind of creating something where you don't have space for contemplation. That's being formed by he's saying here,

But I think by extension, you could say like just the whole production of a film in itself. That's what I take from it. Yeah, there's also, there's something here which you can talk about in terms of like classic semiotics, like classic theories of signs. It's so long since I've looked at this stuff. I can't remember the terms properly. I think photography, photographs, film images are referred to as what are called indexical signs because you can't create the image unless at some point there's some kind of contact

with the thing actually being there. Like the object is there, it's light reflects back on the film. So there is a real, what dare we call a trace, the trace of the actual object. Whereas with a painting, the painting is produced entirely from, it's iconic, it looks, visually resembles the object, but it's not indexical because there's no real necessity for the object to have been there. It's been in the presence of the thing, of the representation, and the painting has to be conjured up entirely from paint. Of course, you could tear that apart if you want, You say, well, there are lots of kinds of painting, kind of realistic and portrait painting,

which you can't really do unless you're sitting in front of the guy. So the object, the person, the bowl of fruit. But there's something there. I mean, there is something there about photography and light writing, as the term actually means. But I think we should go on to 12. This is one of the most interesting lines, isn't it? It opens with the line,

mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses towards art. the reactionary attitude towards Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction towards a Chapman movie. One of the things he's responding to, and one of the things lots of commentators are responding to at the time he's writing this, is this sense that, well, there is a sense in which, like, a Charlie Chaplin film is just as avant-garde, it's just as weird as, like, an experimental painting, but people like it, people like it. And it's sort of fun. That is a really, it's a really interesting observation. And of course, this is why Benjamin is a really important thinker for later generations of cultural critics who become in different ways interested in the ideas of popular modernism or the idea of the popular avant-garde or the avant-garde in popular culture,

which I just did an interview for the Love is the Message podcast with David Wilkinson about his writing about the part of his writing, about the fall. I mean, we were talking about Marr Fischer's quite famous essays, about the fall and popular modernism. But of course, they would, you know, it's yet another one of those themes, which I Mark did write very well about, but a lot of people don't seem to realize he was not the first person ever to write about. And the fact that modernism as a kind of aesthetic was present in popular culture, you know, it's stuff that people like Raymond Williams and other critics were very interested in in the 60s and 70s.

And, yeah, Benyman is a kind of key reference points for these guys. It's really important in terms of it in history of thought. And it is really, you know, it's a potent observation. He does give a good explanation for it. I would say, I guess I've already hinted at this. There's a certain set of explanations for phenomena around art, which are kind of hovering in this essay, which would be really a sort of straightforward,

you know, Duchamp, you know, Duchamp to Baudieu, sort of influenced critique of the gallery's institution. And a recognition of the lot. The galleries are basically galleries are elite institution. So people are not, people kind of don't feel, most people don't feel included by them, whereas the cinema is not. The cinema is like a popular institution. And precisely because, actually, precisely because it's a capitalist institution

that can accumulate loads of profit by letting loads of getting loads of people to go to it. And it's not a criticism at all would have been, you know, this is an early treatment of the issue. But he never quite sort of explicitly says that, though it seems to be sort of implausive. implied and that's partly what's going on here but he's and I think he's interesting because he's sort of trying to attribute this difference in the mass's response to chaplain and mass's responses to Picasso sort of with reference to this idea of the different thing that goes on the different way you're expected to relate to the object like the fact that watching a film is a sort of quality to be effectively different experience and there are different sort of expectations in

terms of the level of seriousness and attention you're supposed to give to it. And it doesn't, he never quite makes the point that actually these are just, these are, these are the cultures of different social groups. They're different in class terms. Well, this is it. This is it. And I just wonder why he picks specifically Picasso and this specifically, I mean, okay, maybe he's just picking whatever artists that people are going to know the name of. But I, but I was thinking the same thing, Jeremy. I was thinking like, is he talking about like the cultural context in which this, you know, this media or this art is consumed or understood or experienced. Is that actually the point here rather than the, you know, the art

form itself, which he's just spent the last few pages talking about specifically the production of, because they don't seem to map onto each other for me. Well, he sort of mentions this towards the end of the chapter. He says, in the churches and monasteries of the Middle Ages and at the princely courts up to the end of the 18th century, a collective reception of paintings did not occur simultaneously, but by graduated and hierarchised mediations. And it says, although paintings began to be publicly exhibited in galleries and salons,

there was no way for the masses to organise and control themselves in their reception. Thus, the public, which responds in a progressive manner towards a grotesque film, is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism. And I think that bit about like the masses, controlling themselves and their reception of culture, etc. That's a really important thing when we get into popular modernism, basically, and the idea of like, you know, of people organizing themselves around their reception of culture

in terms of music, etc. These sorts of things, you know, like subcultural movements, teddy boys, rockers, hippies, punks, ravers, etc. Do you know what I mean? Conscious organisation around their reception. and that organisation yourself around reception of culture has at certain times gone so far along this sort of Benjaminian line that is led to a critique of capitalism and commodification.

Do you know what I mean? This is a real precursor of that conception of popular modernism, I think. That's all true, yeah. I mean, I mean, with reference to Benjamin as well, I mean, one reason he's so popular is because he writes his quite short texts that like where he's covering like a big, big topic. Like, it's a topic, well, if you were going to cover it, like covering all these angles, you would have to write a book about it.

And it's sort of, you know, there's a trade-off. There's a trade-off. This is what I always think, in my mind, I always think Benin, sort of a blogger. Definitely is a blogger. He's a blogger rather than a writer of, like, peer-reviewed journal articles and books. He's a blogger, but he also, I bought a book recently, which is a collection of his radio. either short radio plays or radio lectures basically for young people which he did on German radio.

He's a podcaster. So he's a podcaster. As we said, the whole of history is leading up to the ACFM podcast. Well, all right. Well, I think we should just say a little bit more. In Sex and 12, what he does is he goes on, he talks about what happens to painting in the 19th century. And he sort of says that in some sense,

like actually the opening of big public. galleries and which do lead to a kind of mass of viewing of paintings, like already you start to pose a sort of problem for painting, because painting as an artistic practice has evolved in this historic context where that's not really, it's not really kind of what it's for. It's not really designed for tabloids of people gulping at it in a big gallery. He says it can't really be an object for Symbols-Haneus collective experience in the way the film can, which is, of course, very interesting about film. But the thing he

the artful, he then compares cinema to, from that point of view, is architecture. It's as the buildings like basically create a sort of artworks that can be simultaneously experienced by many, many people, which is interesting.

Although obviously it's still, I mean, one's immediate intuitive responses I have to say, well, that's true, but it's, you know, you still have to be in the building. Think about things kind of incredible about cinema and radio at the time when he's writing is like millions of people can experience the same thing at the same time all over the world in this distributed way.

And that's, and that is the really kind of extraordinary thing about cinema and radio for people during this first phase of mass media culture is you can have, you have got, on any given weekend, you'll have millions of people watching the same Hollywood film at the same time. Should we just to section 13, which is sort of about the way that photography and film he says the film has enriched our field of perception and he uses

the analogy of like Freudian theory he said 50 years ago a slip of the tongue passed more or less unnoticed only exceptionally may such a slip have revealed dimensions of depth but since Freud has written about slips of the tongue and their importance we now we notice them

much much more he says he sets that up on a way like theory has has expanded our field of perception made us concentrate on certain things, basically, more than others. And he says later on, as compared with painting, filmed behaviour, lends itself more readily to analysis,

because it is incomparably more precise statements of the situation. And later on, he talks about, you know, slow motion, all of these things that are opened up. And like, the thing that comes to mind is Moibridge's famous film of a horse running, basically. And this was before film, he's just set up a load of cameras with, like, strings attached them and got a horse to run past. It was only when he analysed,

when he developed those films, is that we realised that in fact, all of a horse's legs leave the ground at the same time. They just wasn't perceptible from the human eye, basically. And so the, so photography and film...

Yeah, I still say it's a hoax. Horses don't fly. One of the photographs shows a horse levitating, basically, with all its legs off the ground. And of course, that's sort of like, We could accelerate that a million times with microscopic photography and these sorts of things, etc, etc.

It just presents perspectives that the eye can't reach basically. I think this is point of view here. It just expands our realm of perception, basically, or alters it and expands it. I would just say that when I was reading around this stuff, I mean, we won't have time to go into it in detail. But if listeners are interested in a late 20th century critique, of his theories kind of around and this kind of stuff that we're talking around about spectators, sorry, spectatorship specifically and the kind of creation of the mass spectator. I mean, there are feminist critiques around the way he's kind of presenting

shock, which is not really to kind of throw out his arguments in any way. In a way, if anything, like, I think those arguments are mostly looking at Laura Mulvey and Grizilda Pollock who both do stuff about shot and film. And I think basically the way they complexify it is saying, okay, well, it's interesting what he's talking about. It's not talking about the gendered construction of that and like the involvement of like power relations and gender power relations in terms of training perception. So there's like a whole set of like interesting theory around this stuff. So I just wanted to mention those two authors. Because that kind of builds on his work, but they don't do that until like the late 20th.

century. Well, that specifically what they're really concerned with is ideas about spectatorship, like Molfi and Pollock. And the idea, and there's this idea that's based on a kind of feminist reading of psychoanalysis and Freud

that somehow within patriarchal culture, the act of looking, observing the object is itself sort of gendered. And this idea that patriarchal culture presents, create a kind of scopic culture, like a culture of looking, within which women are the object of the gaze,

but women are not supposed to actively look. Sexual desire is thought of as something that is experienced by men who desire women, but women kind of don't really function as sex objects at all, or if they do, they're essentially narcissistic. So, like, women are supposed... Both men and women want to look at pictures of beautiful women, and women want to think about being those women, and men want to think about possessing those women.

So this is the whole question of the gender dynamics of spectatorship. which they think is, not fair to say it's absent, like a short essay, but they think sort of you have to take account of if you try to think properly about the way in which spectatorship works in cinema. Exactly. I think that's a really good summary. I mean, the only thing that I would add onto that is that, like, it's interesting what he's saying about, like,

how film can potentially, I think, I think essentially saying training perception and how it can, that kind of idea of, distract. In a way, you could read it as him saying, like, shock and distraction is good, and we're going to get onto more of that, or, like, does have, like, progressive potential because of this idea of democratizing perception, which we've kind of already started talking about. And I think, you know, what Laura Mulvey especially seems to be saying is, like, fine, that's democratizing it, perhaps in terms of, like, the masses, but that's not necessarily, that doesn't mean that it's not reproducing gendered power relations.

So, like, that's the interesting bit, I think. Yeah. So it's the whole idea of the male gaze, isn't it, basically? Of, like, it's leading our perception around, around from a presumed perspective of, like, a male audience member or something like that. And it probably was at that time a male director, etc. Yeah, and I mean, that's taken for, and I mean, I would say, when a woman experiences a film that is the script and the director,

and most of the team and the kind of in the kind of imagination of it are mostly created by by women. It is kind of, if anything, I think the shock, the shock that I've experienced is like, oh, my goodness, all the other films I've seen have been so through the male gaze. This is so experientially different, you know. I'm thinking of the portrait of a lady on fire or a woman on fire or whatever it's called. There's like certain films where it's written very much through the female gaze and it's so stark. So I feel like that democratizes it because it brings in my female experience in a sense.

And that's obviously not something that's addressed by this text. So it's extended by feminists, I would say. Should we move to section 14, which starts with a real banger? One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could only be fully satisfied later. Yeah, it's a really great annoying, yeah. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could only be fully obtained, which could be fully obtained only with a changed technological, technical standards, sorry. That is to say in a new art form. And then he sort of, he sort of says,

Daadaism attempted to create by pictorian and literary means the effects which the public today seeks in the film. Well, I think that whole idea, the idea that the radical function of art is to raise people's expectations, to raise demands, to inculcate desires, that capitalism can't deliver on. That is really, although it's really important, and it's an early iteration of a theme which you're going to find in the work of delism with Tyree,

but it's also, it also runs through kind of populist strands of cultural studies as well. I mean, it even kind of, it anticipates a kind of line that some people would take within the 80s in certain strands of cultural and political criticism that can eat consumerism, like shouldn't be denounced with a kind of austerean moralism that it should be encouraged because sooner or later capitalism just wouldn't be able to meet the level of demand. If you just keep telling people, yeah, you should want to kind of

you should want to have loads of roads are really nice stuff. You know, the second and last paragraphs have quite a lot in it. I'm kind of almost, I don't know where to start. So I guess there's this line of like in the decline of middle class society contemplating. became a school for a social behavior. It was countered by distraction as a variant of social conduct. Dadaistic activities actually assured a rather vehement distraction by making works of art the center of scandal. One requirement was foremost to outrage the public.

So here, again, he was bringing back the contemplation thing. He's talking about it in connection to class. and asocial, which I suppose is in a way like antisocial behaviour, I suppose, and then scandal. So there's kind of a lot of different concepts that are brought together in this piece, which I thought was interesting. There's some just fantastic lines, in it. The work of art of the Dadesh became an instrument of ballistics. It hit the spectator like a bullet. It happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality.

It promoted a demand for the film, the distracting element of which is also primarily tactile, being based on changes of place and focus which periodically assail the spectator. The following straight on from it says, let us compare the screen on which a film unfolds with the canvas of a painting. The painting invites the spectator to contemplation. Before it, the spectator can abandon himself to his associations. Before the movie frame, he cannot do so. Noosuna has his eye grasped a scene that it's already changed.

It cannot be arrested. And so it's that idea that, you know, you stand in front of a, of a painting and you take your time, you contemplate, you try to work out what's going on, etc. But with film or even perhaps with Dadas, sort of performance,

you don't get a chance to do that, basically. You know, just as you're, you know, you're getting used to one thing and everything comes along, etc. And that's sort of reminiscent of Baudelaire's sort of descriptions of modern life, do you know what I mean? The shock of modern life,

you know, you're constantly being assailed by new sensations, etc. Do you know what I mean? It eliminates, that space and time for contemplation. It raises this big issue as to like, what is the sort of ecology of attention and emotional investment that we want from like a potentially radical or critical subject

in this new modern world? So actually, when I've been teaching this to students, I do like to show the man with a movie camera. I also like to show Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. And I really like to read it alongside, Antonio Gramsci's essay Americanism and Fordism but it's not an essay, it's a set of notes

should always be remembered that which are written almost exactly the same time I think a couple of years after this and you know that one of those bits in the Gramsci notes that I'm always referring to is the bit where he says well maybe it's actually cool

that people working on assembly lines like they don't really have to think about their jobs because they can think about other stuff instead like revolution and labour organising and I mean, he doesn't put it in exactly those terms, but that's what he means. And there is this sense that if people are no longer doing the thing, they're doing in sort of pre-industrial, actually even just earlier forms of industrial manufacturing, pre-automated manufacturing in a certain sense,

or if they're not engaging, if they're not, they're not engaging with art in this particular way, which is very much about being present in the moment, sort of focus, then, you know, maybe that's not all about. like maybe actually they're developing a kind of critical distance from their work or from indeed from the artwork or the culture around it which is going to be sort of desirable from a radical perspective and that's sort of that's kind of hinted out in Gramsci. I mean he associated with Dada and kind of Dada's deliberate flouting of ordinary conventions of sense making as a kind of end in itself. And you can also associate it actually with like Eric Sarty, French composer, who's a sort of seen today's an antecedent of ambient music, who produced this music, what he called furniture music, and he said he wanted it to be ignored, he wanted

to be ignorable when you went into a room. And there's this kind of, there is some sort of intuition linking all of these different practices and observations, that intuition is that, yeah, it's really true that like industrial capitalism sort of fucks up your perception of the world than your consciousness, but what you don't want, you don't want to hang on to kind of the forms of subjectivity like enabled and promoted by 19th century bourgeois culture. You don't want to hang on to those because that's what you're trying to get away from. I mean, I was thinking about that in terms of like the age of the scroll is I think what people have psychologically done to defend themselves.

I think not fully engaging in a way is a defense mechanism. You know, like it's in a way it's like it's a revolt to like too much input. Is it that this is the distracted subject in a way he's trying to say that can be emancipatory with the shock effect of film, as he continues to say, like in this passage. But I'm trying to kind of map that up onto the 21st century and kind of how people consume media today. I was still thinking about that one. That line from Duhamel, I can no longer think what I want to think, thoughts have been replaced by moving images.

He sort of says, this constitutes the shock effect of the film, which, like all shocks, should be cushioned by heightened presence of mind. So one way of reading that is, like, look, you know, the, what the sort of like, the form of like the cinema, etc., reflects the form of modern life to some extent, you know, this constant clashing of like new sensations, etc., which sort of eliminates the space for that sort of bourgeois form of isolated contemplation, something like that. And so what was happening through films that we have been. trained to be able to, you know, accept those shocks, etc. But he's also saying that, you know,

we should try to cushion them for a heightened presence of mind. You know, he's not eliminating the idea of thought or thinking about what's going on, etc. But you're trying to, we're trying to get to a sort of level of thought, perhaps contemplation, which can take place during these moments of shock and perhaps even distraction, something like that, perhaps. Yeah, but I don't think he proposes how that is psychologically possible. And that's the thing that I think is interesting. He's like, this would be a good thing, but it's like, I'm not sure how that is possible

in light of how many frames per second. You know what I mean? Apart from a kind of alienated watching, which is what we're experiencing with the second and third screening of like watching of film or, you know, programs on the telly while you're scrolling. It's the next part that is, does anyone have anything else they want to say in terms of 14?

because in 15 there's quite a great quote that I want to get to. Well, right at the beginning of that paragraph, the first paragraph of Section 15, it says, the greatly increased mass of participation has produced a change in the mode of participation. The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a disruptible form was not confused, the spectator. I mean, I think this is all, this comes back to what he means by the distinction between distraction and contemplation. But we can come back to that in a minute. Yeah, so he basically quotes Duamel again by saying Duamel calls the movie a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn out creatures who are consumed by their worries.

Yeah, that's why I secretly think when Keir's doing is like letterbox plays. There's more, it gets worse, so hold on. So then, you know, and then there's a break in the passage, but it's a continuation of the quote. it is a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence, which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a quote unquote star in Los Angeles. But let's be clear, Benjamin is not quoting that approvingly. He thinks do you mails a dickhead for saying that.

But it's interesting, right? Because this is the argument that's being made. by people, you know, today about like, this is what happens when people are mindlessly watching stuff. And what's interesting, to your point, Jeremy, is he's basically, he doesn't, he doesn't explicitly say, he's like, I don't agree with this. Like, this is, this is a position of, you know, somebody who's like, I suppose, a famous serialist who's like doing all of the serialist work or whatever, but it's not his position. The line of far as that is clearly this is at the bottom, the same ancient, meant that the masses seek distraction, whereas art demands concentration from the spectator.

Well, we can trace it back to like, you know, bread and circuses, etc. And these sorts of things, you know, they keep the masses distracted, that sort of idea. But it's quite a subtle, it's quite a subtle sort of point he's trying to make, which he says, like, a man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legends tell of the Chinese painter when he views his finished painting. He's trying to put forward this idea of distraction, which isn't like a negative idea. I mean, he kind of toys around with it, and it's related. I mean, I can tell you, the standard way of reading this in the literature, the secondary literature, is that he's very close to Bertolt Brecht,

and Bertolt Brecht's idea that in what Brecht calls epic theatre, the whole, the point of the play will be, and we mentioned this last time, the point of the play and the way it's produced will be that the audience are encouraged to have this highly sort of critical relationship, like both to their whole kind of world and social conditions, but also to the very sort of practice of theatre itself. And I mean, I think it's worth stressing

what all of this is reacting against a little bit. And it's something else, we passed over the passage where he talks about the late 19th century idea of art for art sake. You know, I talked much earlier on about the romantic ideas of creativity and artistic genius. But then really what you get is this tendency in particularly in literature and theatre in the late 19th, very early 20th century, whereby there's this idea that art has to be this like incredibly carefully created and like plays and novels should give you this absolutely believable, absolutely accurate portrayal of like the emotional lives of the people there about who are all basically members of the sort of bourgeois class.

and that's all it should do and it shouldn't do anything else and you shouldn't really know anything about the personality of the artist and the fact of being really, really good at doing that is what makes an artist an artist, not the fact of them having something to say about society or justice

or God or any of that bullshit. And art itself becomes this sort of religion and partly this is what, you know, people like Brecht and Ben you mean, they're all reacting against all that. They're saying, no, fuck that. Actually, who cares? You know, you don't want to sit and watch a play

and believe your, actually in some guy's living room, like you want the play to be some like interesting sort of exercise in making you think about the world. And they sort of, he uses this word distraction is sort of related to the feeling of like slightly discomforted, but sort of half engaged, half critical,

you know, consciousness and sort of reflexive self-awareness which Brecht wants his audiences to experience and which Benjamin sort of thinks as cinema, goers can experience. It's also, it's sort of, it is also in a really vulgar way, it's sort of related to an idea which again, like media theorists, theories of audience reception will develop in later decades, which is just the point that, well, you know,

we're talking about like people just sitting scrolling their phones, not really watching the film. And that seems kind of a negative thing, because people's attention is being absorbed by something else by the phone. But, you know, people who study audiences will talk about the way in which people watch TV shows or films, sit and chat to them about their chat to the film with their friends

and they sort of tune in and out depending on whether it's interesting and actually they're engaging with the text in a kind of relatively selective and kind of active way and they see this as a kind of exercise of a certain kind of agency and that's really what I think he's sort of

getting out with all this stuff about distraction versus contemplation he's saying you're saying there's a radical potential in I mean to some extent even in the act of like not really watching the TV show like scrolling your phone, chatting to your mate, then watch the film again, then watch it again. And still finally, you have actually watched it all, because he watched it on your own time.

You've almost kind of edited it in real time. You've engaged with it in this kind of active way. So he's saying, like, we shouldn't lose sight of the sort of potential for these things to have a kind of critical value. I'm not saying he's right or wrong, but that is what he's getting out with all this stuff, I think. I think you're right, actually, at the end of that section, he says, The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in a position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies, the disposition requires no attention.

The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one. That low-level critical perspective, basically, is something which is absorbed into everyday life rather than just being a special moment of contemplation or the moment of contemplation being a special and unusual one. Something like that you might be saying, I think. Anyway, let's move on to the end of the actual. epilogue. That really has, does contain all the big bangers and it's much easier to grasp.

I love this bit because I think it's really poignant, right? So he says, fascism attempts to organise the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. So simple, but so beautiful to me. Like the difference between a voice and a right is just really important. And it's not very much, like, to me, that that goes beyond like any critique of like film or art or whatever. I think it's a really, really, really important political point to make.

And it helps us understand the terrain today a lot more. Yeah, we should go on. We should do the next sort of lines as well, I think. The masses have a right to change property relations. That's the right he's talking about. Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. And he goes into all this thing.

He's really laying into Marinetti, like the futurist theorist who allied futurism with fascism. So it's really important for Benjamin that we do not accept that being really into modernity and modernism and the other on guard means we're fash. He cited Marinetti's like notorious comments about how basically war is like the ultimate R form, like is the ultimate act of sort of creative intervention in the world and therefore war is beautiful, war is good. You know, his whole argument is as he says that fascism aestheticizes politics. Fascism turns politics into a spectacle, fascism turns politics. We might say in contemporary parlance, you know, fascism makes politics all about the vibes and the images, all about the likes and the clicks, and it doesn't, and instead,

well, we'll say what he says instead in a minute. I think it's a good point. I'm a little bit skeptical when sort of, you know, I mean, very close or friends and comrades, like worry a lot about how, you know, the fash gets so many more views on YouTube, because I just sort of think at the end of the day, if you have a politics, which is all about getting the likes on YouTube, you are already fash. That is the logical conclusion. Yes, I agree with people. I agree with people like Gary Stevenson, whatever. And I've said what's good about YouTube.

I agree we need to use it. But the difference between being a socialist and being fascist, is you understand that ultimately, however many clicks you get on YouTube, if you don't also have a mass movement, you don't have people going to meetings and talking to each other, even maybe just talking to each other online, but actually talking to each other,

not just liking on YouTube, then you're not a Democrat, you're not a socialist, and the tendential logic of your politics is indeed a celebrity fascist. So, and that is all encapsulated in that idea of the aestheticisation of politics. Like fascism is the aestheticisation of politics. And it's also why I think it's also resonant with stuff, you know, we used to talk about a lot on the show about having, you know, how your relationship to political parties should be

instrumental. Don't look to the political party as being the thing that expresses your identity in the world, like, you know, like culture and art does. You've got to, and because that is also, I would say, that is a version of the aestheticization of politics, actually. In a certain sense, certain kinds of tendencies and identity politics. They are the aestheticization of politics. That's what he's talking

about. But then finally, he concludes on this famous, but also to be an enigmatic line, because it's the concluding line, and he doesn't explain what he means by it, really. He says, this is the situation of politics which fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds

by politicizing art, which, you know, is a fantastic, I think it's sort of right. I think it's right that it means that, you know, what it means to be so radical is to look for the liberatory and emancipatory potential in culture, in art,

in the domain of the aesthetic. But I also think this reminds me of something I keep coming back to quite a lot recently. You know, lots of people, including people on the left, including some people around Navarra media, they're really fond of that Steve Bannon phrase. politics is downstream from culture.

And they seem to think, yeah, that's cool and radical to say politics is downstream from culture. Without taking account of the cat, Steve Bannon's like a right-wing ideologist. People think that's cultural studies. It's not, cultural studies are the opposite. Politics is upstream of everything. Politics being the domain in which power relationships are contested or reproduced. And that is why, like it's a big theme on our show quite a lot of the time that will, you know, it's great, you know, I mean, I mean, I mean, for me, a really important observation of a lot of sort of cultural criticism is,

I like, I mean, you know, you're never going to get music this as compelling as exciting as the music of the 70s until we have a kind of, you know, premier revolutionary situation like we had in a lot of societies like the 70s. And it's, you know, because I love music, I want revolution, you know, but you can't look for a substitute for revolution in music. You know, you can't. You're not going to find it. It's sad, but you're not going to find it.

And you'll get depressed if you go looking for it, which is sort of what happens to some. It happened to various music critics, actually, I think, in the 90s and 2000s. They got depressed because they were looking for revolution in the domain of music, but not understanding, they couldn't find it there. Because revolutionary music comes from revolutionary politics and not the other way around. And I think that's really important. I think that, I think all that is what he means, like when he says communism.

politicises art. Yeah. I mean, one of the things that you could say, though, is that like culture and music and so forth at certain stages it's been able to sort of almost prefigure ways of life that we want to achieve

by politics, you know what I mean? But it's only ever enabled to do that by proceeding political struggle in my view. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. But I think that's the sort of relay sort of thing, you know, there's a precondition for the democratisation of production of culture and art, basically. They're the material preconditions. And then at that stage, you know, art and culture

can play a role, I think, in sort of prefiguring further movements towards democratisation of everything, basically, which is what I think he means by the politicisation of art. And understanding that the role of that human relations plays in politics and ideology. both of those things. This is asking about.