Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - A Better Tomorrow

Episode Date: May 18, 2014

This week we examine the legacy of The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility by Walter Benjamin.  Media Theorist and Benjamin scholar (and translator) Thomas Levin explains why this essay resonates today and what Benjamin has to tell us about the utopian power of new media. Also Russell Meyer tells us about the Wu-Tang clan’s plan to release a sole copy of their new album and why he has turned to Kickstarter so he can buy it and release it to the world. And your host shares an imaginary story about Hitler and Goebbels encountering Benjamin’s essay during their final days in the bunker. *********Click on the image for the whole story about this week’s installment**********  

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called A Better Tomorrow. They are going to let people hear it, but it's going to be like a museum concert series where they'll pat you down and check you for recording devices, and then it costs $30 to $50, and then you get to hear it. It's not like a exciting, organic way to listen to music. Russell Meyer is a big hip-hop fan, so when he learned that the Wu-Tang Clan will be releasing just one copy of their new album, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, he got kind of fired up. Ultimately, only one person will get to hear this music, and if they don't want to share it,

it's going to be exclusive and never heard by most of the fans who would appreciate it. This single copy will be sold in a handcrafted, one-of-a-kind nickel and silver box for around five million dollars. RZA, the de facto leader of Wu-Tang, claims owning it will be like owning the scepter of an Egyptian king. So Russell and his buddy Calvin, who's also a Wu-Tang fan, decided to crowdfund the money to buy the album themselves. It wasn't even that methodical. It was kind of like a lark.

Calvin said, hey man, somebody should just start a Kickstarter and we'll get the money and buy the album and give it away for free. And I was like, yeah, yeah, that's funny. All right. The first day was like a waterfall. It gets picked up by Pitchfork. I got all these donations all at once, all these emails. Every time somebody donates even a dollar,

I get a notification. So I'm like, all right, something happened. This is an awesome idea. Wu-Tang Forever donated what I could. Five million fat ones to the Impressible Collective. Thanks for supporting true Wu fans. But all of Russell's new Wu brothers and sisters had a question for him. They're like, so once we get this, who gets the box that it's kept in?

And I'm thinking, guys, we have 27 days to go. We raised 15 grand. That's awesome. But the goal is 5 million. So probably it's not a concern you need to have. I doubt Russell's Kickstarter poses a threat to the billionaire Wu-Tang fans out there in the world. But in the end, it seems that RZA doesn't care who buys it. He just wants the music's true value to be recognized. The idea that music is art has been something we advocated for years, he said in a recent interview. And yet it doesn't receive the same treatment as art in the sense of the value of what it is. Industrial production and digital reproduction have failed. The intrinsic value of music has been reduced to zero. This particular privatized

album, I think, this idea that we have, it'll be something that will go longer than all of us. Before I read those lines, I assumed this whole thing, including Russell's response, was kind of a gimmick. Now I'm not so sure. I wouldn't be offended at all if people called our project a gimmick. I just want to hear it. Like, I wouldn't camp out to get an album or anything like that, but I guess I'll make a Kickstarter. Russell hopes the publicity from his campaign will at least get him a free ticket to one of the museum listening sessions.

I'm going to try to bring a recording device in there, you know? It's hard to imagine that music staying in that box for long. Talking with Russell about his Wu-Tang Kickstarter inspired me to take a book off my shelf. Walter Benjamin's essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility. Now, people still come to this essay, even though it was written in the 1930s, hoping to learn the secrets of how art functioned before technology.

It's a common mistake, especially today, as we witness the disappearance of concrete things like albums and books. But in order to truly get something from this essay, we must first ditch our nostalgia for the real thing. If the idea in reading Benjamin is to contrast something that was authentic or unmediated with something that is now mediated, less authentic, you're going to be very disappointed. Benjamin, if you in fact read the essay, says, look, the issue is not reproducibility. Things were always reproducible. Now, are things more quickly reproducible today in a digital age,

more quickly disseminatable in a digital age? They certainly are. Are they less authentic as a result? Certainly not. Thomas Levine is a New York-based media theorist. He's translated many of Walter Benjamin's key texts. When he has his students at Princeton read this essay, he makes sure they understand that Benjamin wrote this piece during a period of massive media historical and political upheaval, a moment much like our own. I think it's most productively read as a text that is trying to

engage what we could call aesthetic politics. I mean, let's remember, this essay is written in the mid-30s. Benjamin is in exile from fascist Germany, living in Paris. Benjamin specifically was a member of a group of anti-fascist writers, and he was interested in thinking about, well, how can one mobilize cultural practice as a form of resistance? So in a landscape today where enormous political upheaval and enormous media historical upheaval seem to be paralleling each other, these kinds of questions are understandably urgent.

Walter Benjamin says that in the age of mechanical reproducibility, the work of art actually gains power, new powers, especially the motion picture. Film allows us to radically remap the world as we know it. And the essay is fundamentally about the progressive political potential, the literally explosive potential of radical montage. Benjamin says, We used to walk down the street and the world seemed familiar to us,

and now with the dynamite of the tenth of a second, the capacity of film to produce radical rearrangement of the world through the cut, everything that was familiar becomes rearranged. As people become accustomed to watching films, they learn how to process a rapidity of image sequences that previous generations couldn't handle. This is a form of media literacy. That media literacy means they can now process new ways of understanding their own world.

The ability of film to present to people their world is, for Benjamin is not saying film itself offers us a path to utopia. It was the movies of Vertov and Eisenstein and Chaplin that excited him. He thought most films were total rubbish. Film can serve the interests of the ruling class, of the status quo, of power, unproblematically. So there's nothing inherent in cinema that makes it a progressive technology. It, like any technology, has progressive potential and reactionary potential. What Adorno and Horkheimer would go on to call the culture industry is precisely the realization of the worst nightmare of the use of technology both in radio and in film and television

to produce a kind of culture of consumption, acquiescence, etc., etc. Now, how do we produce a condition where lots of people won't simply swallow reactionary aesthetic practice? Those are the questions that the essay is struggling with. For Thomas Levine, it is this utopian potential that Benjamin writes about that makes this essay so important, so relevant today. Because there is utopian potential in the media we create and consume with our mobile phones and our laptops.

Walter Benjamin, Thomas says, can help us understand the question, what is art in the digital age and how can its power be realized? Does cyberspace represent a utopian potential? Absolutely. One could say the very politico-economic technical conditions that make possible the delivery of this podcast are an example and other nefarious corporate tendencies in cyber politics today, that the web will necessarily be a progressive medium? Absolutely not. So utopian potential, but utopian potential as a motivation for struggling to continue to try to realize those utopian potentials, which are and always have been, continually under threat. Why does this essay so resonate today?

Because it is a text that tells us media is something worth fighting about. And if we don't fight about it, the consequences are potentially enormous. Historians will probably never cease to argue over what exactly transpired in the bunker beneath the Chancellery during those last days of the Third Reich. But now, with the release of the final papers of Operation Myth, that infamous 1946 Soviet investigatory report, there is no longer any need to speculate over what it was that Hitler, Eva Braun, and Dr. Goebbels were reading during their final moments. When it became clear that the siege wasn't going to end anytime soon, Hitler had ordered a box of the classics of high German literature to be brought down into the bunker. But somehow the box got switched with a carton of books from the 1937 degenerate art show. It was an entire box of

books and magazines written by Jews and homosexuals. Hitler was furious, but there was nothing he could do. The Soviets were closing in, and there was no one who could be spared to look for a missing box full of Goethe and Hölderlin. But Hitler desperately wanted something to read. So on April 25th, he broke down and began rummaging through the box, hoping that maybe he could find something that wasn't entirely Jewish or gay. But to his dismay, he discovered that his dog had been using the box as a toilet. Now Hitler was really furious. He took the box outside and emptied the books onto the rubbish heap. He was so mad he almost didn't notice that slim volume that had somehow escaped his canine's bowel movements and urinary excretions.

It was a copy of the 1936 Zeitrift für Sozialwahrschung, a journal published by a bunch of German Jewish intellectuals living in exile. The journal contained one long essay entitled The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility by Walter Benjamin. This was definitely something Hitler would never choose to read on his own. But beggars can't be choosers. So Hitler brought the journal back into the bunker and showed it to Goebbels. Goebbels was aghast when he heard the Fuhrer say that he wanted the two of them to read and

discuss Walter Benjamin's essay together. Do you know who Walter Benjamin is? Goebbels shouted. No, Hitler replied. I don't. Goebbels gave his Fuhrer the lowdown. Walter Benjamin was a Jewish intellectual who left Germany when the Nazis came to power. He wrote essays about decadent writers like Proust, Kafka, Baudelaire, and Bertolt Brecht. He hated the Nazis, and he wrote hideous things about them from his perch in Paris. When the French capital was finally sacked, the Gestapo seized his apartment, and they discovered essays on everything from Donald Duck to hashish. Walter Benjamin himself committed suicide on the Spanish border when it became apparent that he would be turned over to the Nazis for lack of a French exit visa.

Goebbels pleaded with Hitler to return the essay to the rubbish heap, but Hitler was adamant. And so, on the night of April 30th, the two sat down together and began reading The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility. Walter Benjamin's essay begins with the thesis that the mechanically reproduced work of art is something radically different from the reproduced art of the past. He says it makes no sense to speak of originals when discussing photographs or films, for the relationship between the photograph and the negative is totally different than the relationship between the painting and the copy. But what Benjamin finds most interesting about this new relationship is the disintegration of the aura and the exposure of a lack of authenticity So far, so good. Hitler's able to follow along, but, he asks his minister of propaganda, is Benjamin arguing that this disintegration is a good thing?

Yes, Goebbels replies. My reading is that Benjamin believes that the aura and the belief in authenticity inherent in traditional works of art are what keep them firmly in the possession of the elites and allowed oppressive ideologies to control them. And, Goebbels continues, Benjamin believes that the artworks of the future, the ones that will evolve from new media will, by lacking aura and authority, not only have the power to emancipate themselves from control, but they will also assist in the very emancipation of the masses. But how, Hitler asks. He's starting to think that reading this essay wasn't such a hot idea.

Well, for example, Goebbels says, Benjamin believes the film is one of these new artworks, Well, for example, Goebbels says, beyond the commodity value of artistic experience. Benjamin believes that in the future, the audience will cease to be merely the receiver of cultural meaning, but will instead become an empowered producer of cultural meaning. But that's dreadful, Hitler exclaims. That goes against everything I stand for. And to think I let you make all those movies. Goebbels rolls his eyes. What do you mean,

mein fuhrer? Benjamin is wrong. I am your minister of propaganda. Trust me. I know all about the production of meaning. And I know all about the mechanicals of reproduction. And I tell you, this man is wrong. His argument is completely flawed, for the media that he believes will I mean, where does he think films come from? The Moscow Central Planning Committee? But Goebbels, Hitler says, it doesn't matter if they are instruments of fascism or instruments of socialism. The point is that they sow the idea that authority is something that does not have to be taken seriously, something open to interpretation. Oh, God, Goebbels, Hitler moans.

Think of our children. They'll have no respect for authority or tradition. I can see it now, little blonde German boys and girls marching through the streets demanding that they be taken seriously as producers of meaning. It's dreadful. Oh God, it's just dreadful. No, no, mein fuhrer, Goebbels pounds his fist on the table. Benjamin is wrong. The production of meaning will always be controllable. And if the youth want to believe that there is something empowering in the watching of films,

so be it. They should be allowed to deceive themselves, especially if it means they will forget about the real mechanisms of control, the means of production. Mindfure, I don't want to boast, but I believe that I have shown the world that total control of media

is indeed possible, even in the age of mechanical reproducibility. People are sheep, and people will always be sheep. And if they want to believe this empowerment cock and bull, so be it. It will only make our job easier. But Hitler was not convinced. He stayed up all night weeping over Walter Benjamin's ideas and their seeming inevitability. And in the morning, he painted a final watercolor and then put a gun into his mouth and blew out the back of his skull. Goebbels spent the following day writing a rebuttal to Walter Benjamin. He explained in detail how film was at its core a fascist art form and how naive it was to believe, as Benjamin did, that film would emancipate the masses. Far

from it, the film he wrote would guarantee their internal enslavement. He described his vision of the future. Millions and millions of captivated spectators all staring at a screen upon which his descendants would project images of fairies and sugar plums. He called his essay the magnificent aura of the film. Goebbels spent all day on his essay, but when night fell, he realized that it was, unfortunately, a total betrayal of his profession. So he burned the manuscript in the fireplace.

Then he killed his wife Magda and his six daughters. And finally, with a flourish, he took his own life. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called A Better Tomorrow. This episode featured Russell Meyer and Thomas Levine, and it was written and produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, with help from Ethan Cheal. The legacy of Walter Benjamin is the Theory of Everything's contribution to Radiotopia's series, The Long Shadow.

Check out all the other shows in our tribe. Everything you need to know is at radiotopia.fm.