librarypunk - 109 - Walter Benjamin in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction feat. laborkyle and laborabby

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

Oh boy we’ve got something special! We’re joined again by laborkyle to talk about Walter Benjamin and his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Also AI, fascism, and dreams.    Kyle’s YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/laborkyle Profane Illuminations: Theology for Militants https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeV314axro4 All Gamers Are Bastards: https://soundcloud.com/agabpod Media mentioned https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068327/    Discord: https://discord.gg/2CNQgjwgR 

Arthur, you're just like, did you see a ghost? He's got something to say. He does, Arthur. Let him speak. It's like one of the one funny things in Portlandia is the feminist bookstore. Let them speak. It's me for Arthur. Is that where does anyone want to see my master's degree comes from to? Oh, God.

Is it? Does anyone want to see my master's degree? I think that one is. I think that's Portlandia. Yeah, no, the feminist bookstores. like actually hilarious. Does anybody? Anyone want to see it?

Yeah, no, I got it in a box up there, so I got my dead name on it. Because I'm lazy. I'm lazy, you know. I don't want to change it. It's queer culture. Arthur, what the fuck are you? Arthur. Serious.

He like wove through the mic stand and the watch. hanging down. They like went through. Good job, buddy. You're very nimble. It's like my cat waking up at 5 a.m. in the morning getting on the dining room table and knocking all of the shit off because I forgot to feed her before I went to bed last night. Vengeance. See, Arthur has all of a sudden started developing bastard qualities, but not with me, just with one of my roommates.

I know. The tucks. Yeah. The tucks. like he tries like he like he like he never tries to get into my food or drinks I mean if I'm drinking water in a cup he'll try to get into it and that's it but apparently he tries to like get his face into her her tea and she'll put a thing in the bottle like in the in the mug to keep it and he whacked it out and I'm like he's never swatted anything of mine ever he like fucks with her cutips and shit when she's doing her makeup I'm like what's into you buddy She's been chosen. Goop.

I'm Justin. I'm Skalkanlcom library. I'm a pronouns are he and they. Hi, I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they them. I'm Jay. I'm a music library director and my pronouns are he him. We have a guest.

Would you like to introduce yourself? My name's Kyle. I'm just some guy and my pronouns are he and him. And also happy to be here. That's my other pronoun. Always happy to have you. That's like the nice friendly version of my pronouns or kiss my ass or whatever. The fucking idiot conservatives like to say.

It is, isn't it? And my pronouns are, how do you be here? My pronouns are here to have a good time. Feeling so attacked right now. It's like unironically say these pronouns. My pronouns are, I don't really understand why I'm catching strays over here. Yeah, my pronouns are. please stop.

Just in general. No, I love, I love Library Punk, and I love the three of you very much, and I appreciate you having me back. Yeah, it's a good program, as everyone knows. Thank you. And you've been very busy. Eight, you've been doing Agab, you've been doing profane illumination, you've been doing some videos that were very nice and touching. I'll link to all of them.

Is there anything I'm missing? No, that's pretty much it. and just parenting. And I'm writing a book, but that's not available for pre-order yet because just I'm sorry to my editor. I go on to podcast and I apologize to my editor. It's my new hobby. Sorry, Carl, when I'm on programs, but hopefully, yeah, you can also find my stuff. I do a lot of stuff with zero books and repeater media who published my stuff.

and there's a couple of new thing. That's where Profane Illuminations is. And there's a couple of other interviews. There should be one that's coming out recently. It's about, it's an interview with a writer about a book about how music can affect sort of policy changes in your city, which is really great. And there's a lot of other good stuff on there too from my friends in Asid Horizon, as well as John, the Lickrackeryk, guy, my co-host for my other show. And yeah, so that's a, I think of would be of interest to your listeners in particular. I'll have to buy that music one for my library. It sounds like right up my school's like fucking alley.

It's really like practical, which I think is like refreshing. Yeah. It's about the way that like arts and culture are brought under this umbrella often, but that policy around music can and should be more impactful when it's given its due. And it's a, and the book is called This Must Be the Place, which is just such an awesome title. Oh, nice. Yeah. So today, I wanted to have Kyle on because I've been wanting to do a Walter Benyemin episode.

And I've also just wanted to know more about Benyemin because Kyle brings him up often. And I started reading a book and I really wasn't getting it. I was picking up pieces obviously. I'm like reading a book. But I'm just like, it's not coming together for me. I'm not getting like the theme. that this guy's on about. Also, I have, like, 20th century, mid-century continental history is, like, not my strong

suit, especially when it comes to, like, philosophers and people who are doing, like, Frankfurt School stuff, which Ben Yominez. So I was like, what can we focus on? And because of, like, sort of the discussions about generative AI, I don't know how much we have to actually get into generative AI, but I want to talk about one of his influential essays, the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction because it's pretty, I feel like It's timely. And unfortunately, things just keep getting more timely, which I'm really sick of.

I want things to be a little less timely. I want to be lost in an academic contemplation for a couple decades, sort of removed from the world, kind of like Lenin in exile, just like having more or less a good time and just writing some books about communism and just, you know, kind of like the good part of his life. But he was like, he's kind of doing good work. Yeah, it's like, remember what our podcast was vibes based? It's really hard to talk about library news, quite honestly. We haven't really been able to do it all that much. Even though we've been doing news episodes, it's like, the same news happened. It's not really topical if the same news happened.

Shit's fuck. Just somewhere else, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Basically. God fucking damn it. God bless America.

Yeah, got to catch them all of library and shitty things. Yeah. Like, there used to be other news about libraries, and now it's just book bands. And that's all that. Yeah. Book bands and cops. Yeah. The Mudder Museum found me on Blue Sky. Protect the Mudder people found me on Blue Sky.

They're still sending out a little spam link. Like, here to learn more. I'm like, you already sent me, you don't make friends with spam, buddy. I understand you want to keep Mudder weird and everything. But, like, you already sent this to me on Twitter. You sent the exact message to the episode post on Twitter, and he sends it on Blue Sky now. I just got it. I was like, come on, guys.

Let it go. It's, I don't know. Oh, I guess we haven't covered it since it happened, but Dr. Irons got resigned from the college of physicians. So who knows what will happen with them? Yeah. Those are one second mutter up there. Yeah.

Yeah, it's like literally the episode came out and then that happened. It's part of me wanted to be like coincidence, but the power we have. We're just, we've got our finger on the pulse of the nation. We do. I'm always saying this. I saw a little background on the essay of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. It's written in 1935. World War II is on the horizon.

And this came up the same year as Triumph of the Will, which I thought was pretty interesting. I have notes on that. I had to watch it twice and one semester in two separate classes. So it's really interesting. sort of a Marxist look at how is the masses experiencing art and then how can that be either politicized or how could politics become turned into art with all of its attendant reverence and loss of self and conservatism. Yeah.

I don't know. Kyle, do you want to start us off? Sure, yeah. I mean, so the work of art and mechanical reproduction, Asia mechanical reproduction is a really important essay for a lot of fields of studies. If you're an academic, you've probably, in some realm of the humanities, you've probably encountered it. It's particularly important for historians and art historians, people who are engaged in cultural studies or the field of critical theory, and really any field that's interested in interrogating changes to aesthetics and the production

of art throughout history, particularly those changes present in the late 19th and the early 20th century. So Walter Benjamin was a German Jew who spent, he spent a lot of his life mobile as a precarious academic, which is, you know, unrelatable to all of us, I'm sure. He spent a lot of his life in France, which is, you know, in part his interest in the sort of the arcades of Paris. I'm sorry, there's a crying baby. Of course there is. Hello, baby. Shouts that to the baby. She's got notes. Yeah, let her speak. silencing women on the on the left wing podcast can't pick you out what that hell

kind of flying I'm going to put I'm going to put the Lee Edelman's side of my brain away so I can be like oh, I'm the baby so yeah so yeah Benny means political life

his political life as a communist in particular began with an interest in the in youth politics in the youth movement in Germany, which is something that he goes on to talk about children, childhood, and students, and like the student movement for a while. But he was best known, and then he got more involved in Marx's politics and visited the Soviet Union. But during his lifetime, he was best known as an art critic or a critic of literature and of theater. Despite his posthumous popularity and the discovery of his work as like a foundational thinker, he was a foundational thinker for the

Frankfurt School. And this all came from, there's a publication of the collective volume of his work after he died in Germany in the 1950s. And then there were various translations of his work into English, but particularly a collected volume that came from Harvard University Press around that time as well. His role as a revolutionary critic, I think is probably the most important framework to approach his thought. Oh, Abby, come on, baby. You got let me record. I'm sorry. Do you need to edit her name out. No, that's okay. Okay.

It's okay. My husband's been working crazy hours and so we've been kind of flying solo a little bit. It's okay. No worries. It's okay. There's no such thing as a podcasting emergency.

Yeah, that's well said. So yeah, yeah, his work as a revolutionary critic is probably the most, and I would argue, the most important framework to his approach. Oh, baby girl, come on, you're just sleeping. I'm sorry, y'all. It's okay, baby.

I'm sorry. I mean, the amount of hours we've spent on Jay talking to Arthur like this is incomparable. When one of us is patting the baby, the other one is patting our cat, Otis. And it's still very funny to me. But, yeah, Ben Amin was best known as, like, an art and literary critic in his time. his publications are in some ways all over the place. That's why collected work, volumes of his work became very important. For Benjamin, criticism exists downstream, importantly, from a philosophical sense,

from an attempt to kind of transcend certain rationalist worldviews on the one hand. And on the other hand, he was attempting to move through history into this encounter with the present. And the thing about Benjamin that's most important, actually, is the fact that he came up with a theory of history. And it's not that his contemporaries weren't necessarily doing similar work, but he came up with a very unique way of examining the past in that he had this, and this is where I really relate to him. He had this very profound interest in the past,

and the past for him had this kind of certain magic to it, which is important to the essay that we wanted to talk about today. And he wanted to sort of attempt to illuminate a profane sense of things. the profane being, like profaning the sacred in a way that allows for us to examine the sort of like, again, the magic of history, the really powerful sense of things, while also working as a kind of revolutionary critic. And it's this combination of ideas that gave rise to what the scholar Margaret Cohen called Gothic Marxism, which is a very important to my own thought, as well as, those in my, you know, sort of intellectual orbit, you know, the Hore Vanguard and, you know, those, you know, are all a bunch of friends of the show. But the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction is about this profane illumination, specifically with regard to the origins of a field

of aesthetics. And again, as Benjaminina as being interested in history, he takes this sort of like very to the origin of the idea of aesthetics. And like the, as in, you know, in his original Greek, you know, being in translation, something of feeling in perception or a perception of feeling. So the original definition, I think is of prime interest to Benjamin in the critique of artistic forms. What it does is, and these are in his words, it detaches the reproduced objects from the sphere of tradition by replicating the work many times over. This is what happens in contemporary art, and we'll dig back into it a little bit. But it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence, and in permitting the reproduction to reach the recipient in his

or her own situation, it actualizes that which is reproduced. So what he's saying here is that in the changes in capitalist production in the 19th and the 20th century resulted in not just a change in the way that art is made, but a sort of change to the sort of fundamental idea of what art is and could be. The way that he uses this, he starts this out in this essay by approaching it through a concept of what he calls aura. Ora for a work of art is the cultic, the ritualistic, the authentic, and ultimately some kind of separate from the social world quality, a magical quality of a work of art. Art is granted an authority through its sort of its distant from our present state. And the useful comparison that he brings up in the essay is the sublimity of the natural world, right?

In the essay, he observes, he talks about the observation of a mountain, uses that to help us understand what aura is. We perceive aura and the beauty of nature from perspective that appears fixed or from results that appear fixed. Beauty transcends time and it transcends place, or it exemplifies these things in some sort of perfect, almost theological way. But the thing about this is that when you change the context of a piece of art, of the perception of the sublimity of nature, sublime nature from the perspective of individual subjects like us, the aesthetic value or the interpretation of it changes. So it's not that he's purely affirming the idea of art has this transcendent quality that moves beyond time and space,

but that we perceive it as such, in spite of the fact that the interpretation of a statue, for example, on the one hand, if a statue of a Greek god in one context is about an affirmation of that social world or about a particular context in that time and place, you move forward in time and you can see that in a different context with different religious beliefs and different social environments, that that statue can now become a profane object or something that acts as some kind of a forewarning or anything like that. So when you change the context of a piece of art or perception or the aesthetic value or interpretation of that value changes. When it comes to mechanical production, mechanical production reduces or diminishes this effect of originality and unique and authentic qualities. and it mechanically produces copies.

And so all of a sudden, art becomes something quite different in a contemporary capitalist context. For Benjamin, the context is the late 19th and the early 20th century. He's German. This is after World War I, after sort of the Germans' push into Africa in the high era of imperialism, and the backlash to the high era of imperialism.

art, when it's made a copy of a copy of a copy, and when it's distributed in a more broader context than it ever has before, it ultimately avoids this cultic character, and it mobilizes and publicizes images into a great deal of perspectives rather than more fixed perspectives in our ever-increasing interconnected world across this kind of fluid macro space. there's still individual context and subjectivize experience when it comes to interpreting art, but art has a further reach into our lives more than it ever had before. One thing that I think about when it comes to this context, well, I mean, you can call it artistic, but more within the context of production is think about the production of the automobile

in this time period. In the 19th century, the automobile was being created in, originally in Europe, and then you know, it moved to the United States where it became sort of, the U.S. became this sort of, you know, leading automobile manufacturer in the world in the 20th century with the production of the Model T and Henry Ford's changes to the way that, to factory work, the assembly line. But the automobile started out as this in the middle in the late 19th century, something that was steam powered, that was incredibly expensive and difficult to produce. It was a certain status, a symbol, of a certain status of a type of person, like predominantly wealthy people, only wealthy people could have this and afford this kind of a thing. People who produced automobiles

could only make a certain number a year. They would be, you know, assembled, and it's very much like the history of capitalism, right? They would assemble, you know, different parts of them and then put them together in a different place. Someone would do one thing, someone would do another thing, or if they produced it all in one place, it would take a very long time.

You don't move forward very long, in time before all of a sudden the internal combustion engine is invented, and then all of a sudden automobile manufacturing moves to different parts of the world, and then with innovation in production, all of a sudden you have the birth, not quite, you know, it takes to the middle of the 20th century for the consumer culture around automobiles to emerge, but you see the very beginning of incredibly rapid changes happening in technology. And so all of a sudden, what was moving much more slowly before picks up a crazy pace. And now you have, like, individual people are now brought in to deal with this new mode of production. Benjamin being a Marxist, this gives us a really

useful context, I think, for how he's approaching his sort of brand of criticism, because he's talking often about the technology of photography and the technology of film. In his role as an art and literary critic is about using using his interpretation of these new mediums to sort of examine the social world. And it creates like, it's about new ways of living that exist downstream from changing modes of production. And for Benjamin, and I think he is like, Justin, you brought up the triumph of the will, we'll talk about triumph of the will, but like the fact that this essay in Triumph of the Will came out so close to one another, I think so radically, affirms Benjamin's thesis, which is that, you know, and we'll get into the fascism question,

you know, which comes into the end, but the idea that art has taken on a new, completely unique quality via changes in production, if that all makes sense. The uniqueness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition. This tradition itself is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable. An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks who made it an object of veneration than with the clerics of the Middle Ages who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura. Originally, the contextual integration of art and tradition found its expression in the cult.

We know that the earliest artworks originated in the service of a ritual. first the magical and then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence 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, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. The secular cult of beauty, developed during the Renaissance and prevailing for three centuries, clearly showed that ritualistic basis in its decline and the first deep crisis which befell it. An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships,

for they lead us to an all-important insight. For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree, the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, 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. It will help me understand the aura and the loss of aura over time is the cult value to the exhibition value, so things being seen in galleries going from rich people own art to then these sort of exhibits in which other people can see art, and then from exhibit value, exhibition value to reproduction in which art can come into your life in lots of different ways and in fact can sort of just like be now sort of just beam to your phone at any moment. so that there is this sort of loss of cult value.

And you also see it in sort of the disrespect of art. There's probably a connection to proletaritization of art. But, you know, the good Twitter account for exposure where everyone's like, why would I pay for art? You know, there's sort of not understanding that it takes effort. And then, of course, with all the generative AI, everyone being like, yeah, this is democratizing art. And it's like, you're making shit that no one bothered to make. It's not really, what's the value in it? There's sort of like a, there's a labor theory of value to be to be.

pulled out of there. Why would I read something? No one bothered to write. And also, like, the thing with AI is not necessarily that there's no, quote, original. It's more like how it's being used to exploit, like, labor. Yeah, it's definitely not making money or anything. It's definitely not

revolutionary. It's sort of I think the last dying gasps of low interest rates culture on tech as a field. And maybe we'll see much more conservative growth, because no one's making money off of this shit. and kind of can't.

Yeah, it's almost in this, the AI stuff is almost in this like, now I'm not by any means even close to informed or expert on this, but from passive observation, the AI stuff seems to almost be in this, it's this extremely sort of contemporary third space between like the consumptive model and between, you know, art as a form of expression and production. And rather as this like,

it's an analogy. that I use probably too much, but this sort of like pink slurry that turns into chicken nuggets that is really sort of central to the way that we consume culture. I guess it's more about like, well, Benjamin would be relevant to it in the way that it produces in our relationship to these sort of the artificial image. The art of, like what's I think so useful as a diagnostic practice for the functions of AI is how it like contributes to this passive consumption. And I think like the essay that we're talking about like really, you know, I think what part of what's so useful about it for our contemporary moment is that we have become so adapted to the

like for the film model and like Benjamin's relationship to film is the thing that I'm the, I feel the most sort of qualified to talk about. And the way that film has sort of embedded itself into the cultural parlance of our contemporary moment, in a way that moves beyond not just sort of like its ability to capture and produce and produce our imagination, but how it almost functions as the imaginary itself. AI serves a, like it serves a purpose, but the purpose of that is, is almost absent, it's this like, rather than an active, rather than it producing a kind of aura that is like theological in a sense, right, rather than if it's something that comes from outside, but in a passive way. So it's almost as if like we're able to like observe but

unable to interact with. But our idea of observation becomes the interaction itself. The shooting of a film, especially of a sound film, affords a spectacle, unimaginable, anywhere at any time before this. It presents a process in which it is impossible to assign to a spectator, a viewpoint which would exclude from the actual scene such extraneous accessories as camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assistance, etc. Unless his eye were on a line parallel with the lens. This circumstance, more than any other, renders superficial and insignificant any possible similarity between a scene in the studio and one on the stage. In the theater, one is well aware of the place from which the play cannot immediately be detected as illusionary. There is no such place for the movie scene that is being shocked.

Its illusionary nature is that of the second degree, the result of cutting. That is to say, in the studio, the mechanical equipment has seen. penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice. The site of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology. Right, that was where I was going, and I'd lost the thread, so thank you.

How, when we talk about museums as well, they're sort of trying to recreate the aura, even as it's slipping away. So, you know, treating film as art, Ben Amin is talking about. By treating it as art, he means art for art's sake. He means as a cultic sort of thing that should be revered. And so by moving it away from, its mechanical reproduction value back to its exhibit value, putting it into the exhibit in order to kind of ossify it into this area of what is art, what is the gallery? Imagine watching a film only in a gallery or whatever, which also made me laugh a lot because then I thought of like, if that's the case, we've really failed at like making video games art because like there's

almost still no critical kind of structure that is sort of reifying the art. of video games, except, I guess, the museums and libraries that create collections of them for preservation. Yeah. I was going to say this essay, the one part of this essay where I was like budding heads with it is the whole art for art sake thing because I think it is, there's so much. I mean, and I guess he can, he's also making this argument about like the adverse, but like I feel like there's so much revolutionary potential in art for art's sake in that like,

art, like, the sort of, like, reclamation of leisure and reclamation of things don't need to have a purpose. Things can be separate from labor. Things don't have to have a monetary value or anything like that. Like, beauty can just be there or, you know, transgression can just be there, like, art, whatever. But, like, like, he's arguing that it can be, like, co-opted by, like, by, by fascists. But also, cinema can be, you. like co-opted by fascists and that's what happened to Tribe of the Will, right? So I don't know. It was like the one part of this essay where I was butting up against was the art for art

sake thing because like I see the revolutionary potential in that, I guess. I don't know. Yeah. And then like, no, but like I think I think that's an interesting sort of approach to it because there's like there's always this double edge when it comes to the idea of pure art. On the one hand, it, like, inspires. And this is where it sort of Benjamin, like, in his approach to surrealism,

sort of attempts to bridge, I don't know about it, if it's a gap necessarily. I'm sleep deprived. But he attempts to kind of, like, find in the sort of transgressive form a way of doing politics as a way of approaching form itself. because film is the like, like sort of the cheap, the chief problem of Benyman's time is the sort of the production of like capital P propaganda,

not propaganda in this sort of like loose sense like a piece of art that's attempting to sort of swayed, like, and appeal to a kind of sensibility. But the more intimate interpretation of how that sensibility cuts to our individual experience. The idea of experience and experiences relationship to history, which is, you know, too much of a rabbit hole to go into Benjamin's sort of Kantian thing. But like it's that the relationship to experience is, is really important to him. And it's because of the, the way that we interpret and we interact with, or at least in his time period,

if we can historicize him, which I think helps particularly with what you brought up, Jay. Yeah. If we're historicizing him, it's about the sort of changes in the process of interpretation that creates this new managed sense of what art is and can be, which is where fascism comes into play. At the end, not to jump to the end of the essay, but at the end of the essay, Benjamin does something like a slightly uncharacteristic of what he usually does, which he gets very definitive and offers like, he offers sort of like a direct clarity about a political problem rather than sort of talking around the problem or sort of like artistically engaging with the problem.

Again, that's why I kind of relate to him. because he has this affinity for pastiche. Again, there's the sort of Dadaist, surrealist approach to the way that he writes. But, like, the cult of pure art combined with the filmic mode is the thing that results in Lini Reefenstahl and the triumph of the will. Riefenstahl was, as the lore goes, I guess, she was inspired by a viewing of this film called the Mountain of Destiny. for any of your listeners who don't know, which is this film about, it's really a film about a mountain, but the context of the film is that there's a son who's embarking on an expedition

that initially took the life of his father, climbing this mountain. And he seeks the permission of his mother in the movie, who initially forbids him from climbing this mountain, sort of in affirmation of his father's desires. And he had, like he basically, it's about a son who seeks new permission, from his mother and says, please allow me to do this thing you have forbidden me to do

an affirmation of my father. It's a film that emphasizes the sublimity of nature in a way that is patently affective, even in a contemporary moment, right? The camera subjects the actor to this series of tests without adjustment, meaning that any identification with the actor is done through the lens of a camera, quite literally, but also figuratively. It's this idea of humanity as an aesthetic experience, and that aesthetic experience contribution to sort of like the reduced sort of like free-based, if you will, a version of this, its contribution to the production of managerial politics, which is fascism. Fascism doesn't exist within its own, like fascism doesn't exist in a vacuum. Part of what's, you know, a useful critique of it,

but also historically important is that fascism is not original, but it is about its function as a managerial regime that does not create these aesthetics as politics outright, but determines the best way to manage reactionary ideology. So as Benjamin, he references first the futurism of the early 20th century, is his reaction to sort of the Italians. He talks about, quote, the human domination over the subjected machinery,

which is this idea of war within the context of the gas mask and flame throwers in tanks and puts all of that in conversation with the production of film. There is, of course, a communistic response to this synthetic aura that he believes like you should politicize art in a way of passing through the technological process to reconnect with a sense field of human experience. But the chief problem is absolutely sort of brought to the search. in Triumph of the Will, which Lina Reef and Stahl as the sort of like chief architect of the cultural production of the Third Reich used triumph of the will as a way to sort of balance

everyone's individual experiences, their sense field of human experience, and to manage it within this aesthetic politics. So this sort of montage, this sort of like synthetic construction becomes very real to a lot of people. And it's like, you know, it shows that we're, like, we're always sort of, when it comes to interpretation of art or the preservation of art, something that's probably relevant to your listeners, we're always attempting to sort of manage,

not in the same sense of the fascist sense, we're always attempting to sort of like strike some balance between its preservation and its exhibition as a way for resisting, the drives of contemporality. And in Benjamin's case, the drives of modernity, which is the, you know, the sort of mega-capitalism, the mega-management of fascism as a way of managing capitalist production while sort of reviving a sense of aura in not just the creation of art, but in

the world around you and how there is this sort of magic in this sense of belonging. to a reactionary, ultimately imagined, synthetic version of history. And instead of thinking, Benjamin's challenges to history in general, is always about history's sort of imposition on the present, but also that presence's way of manifesting, writing, and interpreting history. So history is not this thing that ultimately comes from outside. It does come from outside. But the way that it intervenes and impresses itself upon the present,

It's almost inescapable in a way. So I talk about in the book that I'm attempting to write in between podcasting and feeding a baby is it's chiefly about the harnessing of that as a kind of spectral energy. This way that like in the same way of politicizing art as this sort of this reaction to the more sort of fascistic aestheticizing of politics. in the way that we're able to use history and interpret history through this mode in a way that repoliticizes the present using the past while not being fascists. The past has something to say, but it is always bubbling up from within the present. And ultimately, as Benjamin says, when we're approaching art in this way as an attempt to like illuminates the profane as such, that also history does not necessarily have to exist with this aesthetic politicized quality, but that in the case of Marxism, it allows us to use the contemporary social world as a way of interpreting those same things.

So the context in which something manifests also offers its primary critique. And so film as a form of art and photography and the mode of production, despite this loss that we have of aura, there is still history to be written within this context. And that's why it's necessary for him to find some element of politicization in the production or the preservation of art because it all comes from within that sense of interpretation. If I can somewhat change the course, because this ended up, reading Ben-Uin got me thinking about Batai a lot, and I do have like a contractual agreement to bring up Batai every episode until Hot Batai falls over. Yeah, all folks. But yeah, what Jay was saying earlier about the art for art's sake really got me thinking

about like consumption, because Ben-Uin-Men is looking at this from like a production point of view of like the way that we create art is not only like changing its distribution but it's also in particularly in film it's like breaking up moments you know you can film someone jumping off a scaffold you can film the fall later uh you can juxtapose a man looking hungry with a plate of food shats that kyllishab effect yeah and you can see things you can't otherwise sort of see with your eyes. So there's like no original there because it's all spliced together and edited and changed. And also sorts of, on Batyza, he's thinking about consumption. How do we consume? How do we have excess? How do we give gifts? How do we waste time? And also have these moments of the

non-self, which I think is probably why people thought Batai sort of reactionary because he says, we love to lose ourselves in a crowd. We love to be overwhelmed by nature. both of which are what you brought up with Triumph of the Will and the what was the one about the sun and the mountain? Mountains of Destiny. Mountains of Destiny. Yeah, there's so many fucking mountain movies that are like in early Fashy Germany. So many fucking stupid hiking movies. Hiking is fascist is my take.

Just kidding. Yeah, don't make me hike. Yeah, don't make me hike. Putting it in my tender profile. No hiking. Hiking is revisionism. So, but what Beniamen is saying

in the end, I think it dovetails nicely is that there is this desire to then turn the fascist desire to turn the only thing that can really be let me get the right phrasing here.

It is Ars, Harriet Mundus, let art be created though the world perish, says fascism, and expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of Lark Polar, art for art's sake. Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the First Order. This is the situation.

of politics which fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art. And this is sort of the fascist endgame, and there is no other. And it allows us to unite against an other being represented, the mass of troops, cheering on your side. And I think, I also had a lot to say about war, but I'm not as clear on it exactly. Because I know he held back some of his writings over time because of the Second World War and he didn't want to write about war as sort of like a great limit experience

because he thought that was just not to be done at that moment. I think he maybe saw the danger in it. So I just am interested why these two thinkers are both dovetailing. Plus, they both have interests in the same things like religion and history and reading, pulling things out of, not necessarily out of context, but pulling things together in ways that are interesting. And they were friends. They had a relationship with one another.

It's interesting. Like the arcades project, which was Benjamin's kind of his own magnum opus, his approach to the, I think it's the most useful context for his thought in general, his, you know, as he's the love letter to a dying Paris, because he has this affinity for the drama of lost art or whatever. And I'm also very dramatic, but that's because I'm gay. and it's like this idea that there's a repository of objects through which the interpretation of modernity can remain very key and that it exists in this sort of psychosocial imagery of space. He entrusted Batai with the manuscript for this. I think like in part like that there's a lot of interpretation that we can do of their relationship that. Did they kiss? Did they explore each other's bodies?

That's what I want to know. That's what we all want to know. I was a freak apparently. Van Uyman was also very horny. That's one thing that people don't talk about is that he was very horny. I could tell from his writing, by the way. Talking about like orchids and penetration. I'm like, yeah, that's right, buddy.

Yeah. We got to love a tiny German Jewish man talking about penetration. It's like, it's interesting to explore this idea of like energy production as this, you know, for Batai, this kind of like form. of luxury or leisure, the sort of our potential destination for excess, while Benjamin attempts to sort of like capture this, Batai sort of releases it almost in a way. That's probably not a very good interpretation, but that's the one I've got. It's like, I don't know, the relationship between them, like, the idea that it sort of settles on the library, I think is very poetic, like even if I were on a different podcast,

I would say this, that like the sort of necessary cataloging involves this sort of like critique. And I think what's interesting about particularly if we settle in on sort of the Marxist question when it comes to Benjamin's writing. And I know in the show notes you brought up the Gradrysa, this idea that like we're going to, like when Marx writes in the fragments of machines, he's talking about this sort of capturing of leisure time. And the way that this sort of like settles into the capitalist mode of production is by, I brought up automobile production earlier and it actually is really useful illustration of this, particularly for contemporary moment considering what's happening with the UAW right now. The change in the mode of production required sort of the setting down of individual tools and of individual skills from workers. And instead, and the incorporation, and Marx didn't know this, but it ended up happening. happening through Fordism, the incorporation into this larger sense of production, this sense of automation that attempts to, while on the one hand displacing individual sort of like worker qualifications

and abilities, the more specialized work that came in the beginning of the 19th century before the Industrial Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution happens. And then all of a sudden, you see this emergence of what we call unskilled labor, which isn't, you know, a it's a descriptive, not a prescriptive term. So it has this, it's about, you know, the function of an individual worker on an assembly line rather than their, you know, individual value. More about their proletarianization than their actual skills. Absolutely.

That's exactly it. It's about their sort of like, it's about incorporating them into a single stream of production. And like what's so interesting about the way that it relates to kind of, you know, go off the rails a little bit. It was interesting how it sort of relates to our contemporary moment in a decidedly sort of deindustrialized society is the kind of absence of the individual worker in production. The emphasis on sort of our, not just our interactions with one another as this kind of production, but our relationship to, you know, production as leisure time. We're talking about AI, right? And we're all of a sudden tasked with all of these things, or like social media, you can think about it. that way. We're tasked with all of these sort of like, quote unquote, unskilled, like, we're tasked

with this unskilled role in production that is, it's difficult to understand precisely how it accumulates wealth, how it like sort of makes things for other people to have or whatever, but ultimately we're a part of it. And so, like, leisure, I think the change in how leisure time functions is actually the, maybe not the perfect way to reconcile Benjamin and Batai. But it's sort of like, is this kind of, it's the contemporary question that both of them offer, you know, something of a solution to. No, I think it's a thread that kind of connects them. It's, I wish I had more time to read, but it was just a sleepy week for me. There's an episode we actually just put off because I'm like, I can't, I can't read anymore.

We're coming back to this later. It'd be like that even for librarians. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's just, I had to buy a suit. I have a job interview tomorrow, but the suit's not ready, so I have to wear my old tiny suits. I'm going to look like a big kid in the suit that doesn't fit.

I also interviewed. I also had a job interview, so I relate to that intimately. You have to just dazzle them. Give them the old razzle dazzle. That's the way to do it. I wonder what Benyamed would think of the musical Chicago. Speaking of brasil-dazzle, anyway. Well, like, okay, so there you go.

So one thing that I thought of, and it's one of my favorite examples sort of like the, and we're talking about it on Twitter a little bit. Oh, hell, yeah, here we go. Yeah, one of my favorite sort of like close readings of a piece of culture, and it made me, we brought up Chicago as a perfect, the same sort of the same songwriting duo who produced songs for Chicago produced songs for the stage musical and eventually the film version of Cabaret. And one of, I think, the most, like, really impactful ways to understand the, like, sort of

re-politicization. And honestly, within the context of leisure, too, because it's all about sort of the, about the conflicts between cosmopolitanism and Weimar, Germany, and the emergence of fashion. is from a scene toward the end of cabaret where it's a scene that begins at a beer garden, a very ordinary scene of leisure. Yeah. And it's a scene. It has these whispers of transgression in it as one man lights another man's cigarette with

an incredible amount of horny, unbroken eye contact. They cheers to Africa. And then all of a sudden, a young boy, a blonde boy, begins to sing. lyrics gather together to greet the sun tomorrow belongs to me. And as this very beautiful song is being sung, all of a sudden the camera pans down to reveal his Hitler youth uniform.

And then the sort of entire leisure gathering erupts into this seemingly spontaneous fit of nationalist expression. It's a very, it's like, it's a horror scene. It's supposed to be. It's terrifying. It really, it's, and like, it's, it's so intense. And it's so perfect in like describing the like, you know, the conflicts in this time period,

historicizing this film and historicizing Benjamin is so relevant and important to contemporary interpretations of what art can possibly do. Oh, baby girl, don't, I'm on a roll. Put your binky back in. I know. I know. My binkie fell out. Put it back in.

I'm sorry. No, this like, it was a scene I watched in the class in undergrad that like, I had already seen in love cabaret because again gay but the like I watched it in a class about and this entire class was all about it was like it was the class didn't have anything to do with world war two it was everything leading up to world war two and it was about sort of interrogating and understanding in particularly the cultural expressions that led to sort of the rise of the Nazi party and we were talking about leany refinstall earlier and the sort of the film as a mode of creating and inspiring a type of fascist art that uses technology to attempt to connect to

and imagine sort of reactionary past. And in this case, Tomorrow Belongs to Me, which is written by two Jewish men, like, is this really remarkable way of illustrating this while critiquing it? And within the context of like a film that is so like powerfully and poetically, like joyful and expressive and at the same time transgressive and alien and seemingly foreign while still encapsulating and personifying its own historical context, all of a sudden you're confronted with the like the potential for the aesthetic, the pure aesthetic experience of politics. And so you're like presented with on the one hand this like these, these transgressive forms. And on the other hand, those transgressive forms are then confronted with

something that, like, to those in the film, as well as to people who like, like very uncritically used that song, including like gay Nazis in the United States, apparently, like, used that this song uncritically as sort of like an exemplification of the very thing that it's critiquing. I think it's such a useful portrayal of the tension that is necessary. for approaching interpretation that Ben Amin, I think, is trying to, because on the one hand, Benjamin, like, wants to talk about what's lost, but also wants to talk about what's gained in this essay. There is something lost with the loss of aura, right? The time and the place in the production of art is devalued. But at the same time, what's gained is this new potential for

interpretation in a wider sense from a, you know, a great, a greater deal of people. And why that through this interpretation and approach to technological production is perhaps the solution to its own, like it's like I was talking about earlier, within its own context, the problems create their own solution, which is very Hegelian, Alphabet, right? It's this like, it's this reconciling of difference in a way that is in somehow, despite all, you know, despite our, you know, most immediate understanding, manages to give rise to the new. Yeah. Sadie, did you have any questions about, like, what about the essay that you wanted to throw at Kyle while we have him? I have to admit that I didn't really get it.

And I think that's just part, partially just my brain lately has not been in a very philosophical form of thinking, but also just, I guess no. I am really having, I am really interested in like, I am listening, even if I'm like silent. Just checking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is, it's a surprisingly difficult read. And I wish I had been exposed to before so that this would be me revisiting.

it after having sat with it for, you know, a couple years since grad school, it would have been much nicer rather than still fumbling my way around, Ben, you mean, and understanding what he's about. Because it's not even that it's like, because it's not that the language is even dense compared to like maybe some other philosophical or theoretical works. It's just like trying to wrap your head around like, okay, what's he trying to say? What's he arguing for? Wait, wait, he's contradicting himself now.

Wait, what's he mean? like it kept going and be like, wait, does he like this thing or doesn't he? Was like kind of my struggle with it. Like I liked it and like Justin found like a video and sent it in our group chat

and I watched like the three videos that this like media studies guy made about it and it like made it click for me. But yeah, it was just like kind of I was like reading it throughout the day and it was like I love nonlinear like

fiction and I and I love like weird nonsense but it was just like hard for my brain to keep the threads going through all of it like throughout the day. Yeah. No, go ahead, Sadie. I was just the, I had just started to really get my head around the the whole aura concept when we started recording. So, but yeah, no, I think this is definitely something I'm going to have to come back and revisit a couple of times to really get it to like start to not metastasize. That's the wrong word for it. But you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. So like you've all touched on like I think like this is, you know, and it's probably the thing that's continually frustrating about Benjamin's thought, but you've touched on it in a way,

which is this idea that like one of Benjamins sort of like the chief. figure of his thought is the flaneur, which is the, um, it's, it's the walking poet who wanders around and is sort of fascinated by, confused by, surprised by, perplexed by, across a sort of a spectrum of feeling, um, sort of like the, the various context of his environment. I always refer to sort of like the way that I approach my own sense of writing is I'm like a hobo poet, which is this idea that like our states between our waking sense and our sleeping sense are these sort of subvertible frontiers through which thought actually manages to sort of reveal itself.

Like Benjamin talks about this idea of waking from a collective dream as a way of realizing the necessity of our own politics. And I think what's so interesting about that and what's worth pursuing is that it aligns itself so closely to the way that we approach our day-to-day life. It's this combination of our sort of realized, our actualized experience with our sort of subjectiveized interpretation of how the world works. It's this very strange, this very sort of like alienating sense that is unique in modernity and post modernity.

It wasn't always this way. It's kind of Buddhist. Well, you know, like really, like it has this it's this precision in these oppositional qualities that like that which is sort of like radically foreign all of a sudden becomes, you know, individualized and meaningful in this ultimately gradual process of awakening. And like my argument that I've been making sort of passively in my writing

and the things that like, and videos that I make online are all very personal these days. But that, those personal experiences are always the inspiration for theory. I'm never just talking about my personal life, right? You can't watch a video that I make and say, oh, Kyle's going through X, Y, or Z. Even though I'm directly stating that as such is because all of that for me, is the theory itself. So the experience, like, Benjamin talks about the experience in the language of children, as well as sort of like the language of dreams

in this sort of like inversion of the Freudian sense. He calls for this awakening from a collective sleep that we all have. And like sort of my expansion on that has always been like this, you know, again, an additional sort of like artistic dimension in that idea, which is that awakening within our dream, And I talk about this in profane illuminations a little bit, that like to be able to not be reduced to the sort of,

not only are we pushing against the one-for-one interpretation of our dream state, right? We're looking for the manifest content when there's actually embedded latent content and all of this stuff. But what if there is a possibility within sort of to recognize our collective sort of balance between these waking and sleeping states, something that the Marxist thinker Ernst Blocke also talks about, he talks about daydreaming quite a bit. What if we're able to sort of like awaken within this sense of interpretation and be awake within the dream? And is that not the potential for our like our diagnosis or is that not the potential for our diagnostic capabilities? And so I guess what I'm most interested in when it comes to this, not just as a model for interpreting history, you know, if you're listening to

this in the future, please go get my book. But this. this idea that like we're not yet conscious of what is possible and we're not yet conscious of what is not yet. So we are so sort of pushed in our sort of like we're pushed and we're pulled in between these, you know, these waking and these sleeping states. More and more I think we get deeper and deeper into this kind of like dreaming state in our contemporary moment. We're put so much more distance is placed between us and our mode of production, us and

our potential for interpreting the world around us, us and culture, right? We are now so much, like, individual people are, like, buried within the production of culture. We react, we interpret culture, we consume it, and then we react to it, and then we post that reaction, and then that reaction is reacted to by other people. And it's this, like, really shitty way to live. But, like, that's not, like, I don't like being, I don't like being, I feel like too puritanical, if I'm too reductive in my interpretation of these things, I want to understand them rather than sort of condemn, be condemnatory. And so it's this like, that is the fundamental struggle, I think, of the warm stream of Marxism,

of which Benyman is like a huge part. Benyman and Block and Bertolt Brecht, who were all in some ways in conversation with each other, either literally or through their work, this idea that like, yes, on the one hand, we have the sort of cold stream of the communism, the diagnostic potential for understanding the mode of production and how that can be changed. But then on the other hand, we have the way that people live their lives, which is in this weird balance

between our lived experiences and our interpretation of those experiences. So the challenge that's posed through this essay, which this is heterodox interpretation, like, you know, if an art historian listened to this, they'd probably be like, you're full of shit, man. But like, that's fine. I truly believe that the challenge between this is trying to find some sense of how we interpret

and that Benjamin in sort of platforming the figure of the Flanur has at least for me given me the opportunity to interpret my own experiences in a way that does not reduce them to the realm of experience but that unleashes them within the social world. And that's what Marxism does and that's what Benjamin's sort of interpretation of Marxism allows us to do is to take the things that feel the most discreet and to recognize how profoundly social it all is without reducing it to this dry sense of the social world. We get to interpret and understand our lives on the one hand. And then on the other hand, we get to incorporate that into a social scheme that allows us to not feel so individuated or alone or sort of

precise in this atomized contemporality, but instead as this sort of like, you know, this is a loaded fucking term, but validated in a way, in this context, I feel like my interpretation of my experiences are validated by the mode of production. And that is very, in my opinion, very important to any contemporary

interpretation of what Marxism has the potential to do as a way of thinking. Because everything else, it just gets, it either gets so dry, or it becomes about this sort of like vague sense of like affirmation. You know, I think affirming people and their experiences is very important, of course. But if that does not have any interaction with or isn't used for as a means for interpreting the social world, then ultimately that's all it is, is affirmation. And I don't want to be affirmed.

I want to transcend that affirmation, like while including it's, you know, the struggle against it, you know, that's, yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, pulling that all together is really helpful for me because it's the great power, I think, in a lot of Marxist thought is realizing that everything is a series of relationships. And even though we say, like, oh, this is social media, we use it in, like, profoundly antisocial ways. But because of that, we are also still participating. And you get to see, like, why is this an antisocial use of what should be a social metaphor? What's the impact of, you know, I don't know, fewer people going to see movies in person and waiting for them to stream at home. Why was Zoom comedy so bad? And it's like, why are most films of Shakespeare so bad? And it's like, oh, because the audience has to laugh. There has to be like this participatory stuff.

And it can only be filmed and reproduced as sort of a stage play. And that's sort of like an interesting thing about comedy that I came to realize. It's like, it is just sort of theater. and it can't not be. It was never about the jokes or the clips or the sketches, even though a lot of a lot of comedy albums

kind of had those. We found out that sort of like in mass as an art form, it didn't work. And then further thinking about like, okay, what does that mean for it as an industry or how people relate to it

or how people retell jokes or any kind of endless things? This isn't Pod Damn America. I'm not going to psychoanalyze comedy. But it's, it's just something I was thinking about. Also, I was in like a mood yesterday, so it was very funny that dreams came up so much

because I went to bed because I'm a lucid dreamer. So I was like, okay, I'm going to have a lucid dream. I'm going to make sure that I'm aware that I'm dreaming next. And I was like, I really hope something interesting comes along to tie the lines between sort of what I'm thinking about politically right now and Beniamine, sort of like the spectacle of war. And instead, I had a dream about trying to, navigate a farm getting back to the road so that I could go buy gas because McCarvers had a gas.

And I was in this massive farm just talking to people and watching their little lives fold out for a really long time. That's so Beniminian. That's so bit. That's so, but there had the extraordinary and the ordinary is what inspires me all the time. Like these little senses of the world that we have, these little objects that we collect, you know, Baintyman does an essay about unpacking his library for a reason. Like, it has this like, there's so much meaning, like, not just for ourselves, but for other people in these kind of, like, this small sense of things as they are that I find very poetic.

I don't know. I just like, I just like, you know, maybe, like, I'm sure that there's some sort of way I can extract my own interpretation of that and how, you know, my bias, my conscious or unconscious biases combined. with my actual experiences, you know, makes me inclined toward thinking about our, our small little lives, like the small time that we have left on this earth as a way to, like, think through politics. But I honestly don't, you know, it's, it's only because of that that I'm like, well, I don't know any other way to do it. So I might as well observe the small things and try and find some sense of meaning, you know, like, and Marxism just gives, it's a, Marxism grants permission for that, and I only see that through this way of thinking through it, you know.

I think that's great. I seriously need to look up if there's been any, like, scholarly work on bin Amin and, like, Buddhists, specifically, like, Vajrana or Tantric thought, because, like, the micro as the macro and, like, the mandala and, like, meaning and how, like, things take on these meanings and, like, the individual. thing can represent the big, like the, where the macro is found in the micro and vice versa and all that. And like everything you were saying about like dreams and waking, I was like, shit, I wonder. It's like, literally I took like, when I took a Buddhist philosophy course in college before I was Buddhist, I was like, this is just like Derrida. So I'm like, and then I found a thing for someone wrote about difference and this one specific Buddhist concept. So I seriously need to look up to see if there's, it's on the brain because me and Kate recorded Monday night.

episode of Tinder subject about Buddhism so that I still need to edit oops sorry Kate that's interesting like I like the religion we didn't even get to get into the religious dimension of Benjamin which is like so like like interpreting benjamin through this like it's a lot of people try and interpret him like through his like most relevant contemporaries like he's closest to like he was friends with Adorno like interpreting him through Adorno or interpreting him through Adorno or interpreting him through Western Marxism of the time or interpreting him through Gersham Sholem, who was his very close friend. A lot of what we understand about Benjamin, bless you, baby sneezed.

A lot of what we understand is through letters that he exchanged with these various figures. And like I'm, you know, I take the, you could call it the lazy way out or you could call it the most sort of like, you could call it one way or the other. You know, like he's not any one thing. He's a combination of all of these things. but his relationship to Kabbalah and Gershom Sholem, the sort of chief revivalist of Kabbalism, I think. Oh, that makes so much more sense now.

I mean, you know, like, and I think that religious dimension is sort of like, not transcendent, but like movable in a way, and that's what's so important about all of it, you know, like, it's just, you know, he was a, he was a secular Jew, like he was a bourgeois Jew, and so he was primarily secular, but like his relationship to, like a huge figure in the interpretation of Jewish thought in the 20th century reintroduces the religious element not reducible to a particular sense of religion but to the realm of human experience and thus like it has this like I'm a fucking Protestant and like this little Jewish man is my chief influence like you know it's like Benjamin and

Jesus. But you know, like, I know Jesus was Jewish, but like, you know, like it's, you know, I can't, I can only overcome that. I can't sort of reduce anything to it. I have to try and, you know, move through it and above it, which I think, I think Beniamen would like, I don't know. Yeah, you're stuck. You're sort of abandoned to the world of your tradition you grew up and there's sweat

conversion never, uh, to anything else never really appealed to me. It's like, no, this is what I'm saddled with. And, uh, the only way out is through. and sort of playing with it more and saying that, look, it's my tradition. I get to decide what it means now. And I think I find that much more satisfying than sort of adopting a new one. That's funny because the words that came to my brain as you were saying that, Justin, was fistfight Mormonism. Which is what I think I have chosen to do with my own version of that.

I love it. Yeah, it's a wonderful tradition of struggle and religion that I was thinking about last night. that is just unfortunately very subdued in Christianity and I wish it wasn't. Yeah, like I totally, like when I lived in Salt Lake City, I totally went on a day with someone who was a socialist Mormon, which was an interesting conversation. They were just telling me about how, like, in like a lot of like early Mormon writing and thinking there was actually a lot of like socialist and like communist potential in it. And then they all decided they hated fun.

Yeah. Generally how that goes in the formation of new religions. The ones that don't die out. They're kind of follow-up pattern. Okay, we've gone a while, but obviously there's more to talk about. There's always more. So come back for more. Yeah, we need to talk about that one about Biniamen talking about his library.

Unpacking his library, yeah. Yeah, and also, I mean, more Batai to come. We're working on a couple things that will integrate Batai some more. and I think it'll be a fun through line for the rest of this year. If I can finish my reading, which I keep getting more books to read. I just got to speak. I'm like, why did I order this through ILL?

I'm not going to have time to read it before they need it back. Yeah, like I also got the Betaya biography through ILLL and I was like, wait a minute, I'm a fucking idiot. And also all the Beniamen books I got through I alone. I was like, I got to return these. like now. ILO. I'll make ILO longer.

Yeah. Make I a little longer. I'm holding a proud edition of checking out library books, looking at them on the shelf going, I should read that and then returning them when they're over to. Yeah. It's so much worse when you work at the library and so you get like a four-month checkout. And then you're like,

You're like, you still do it. Four months. You mean, I always just renew my own shit because I'm the director. Ultimate override. With renewal. yeah no i can override the the restrictions i'm the director i'm god yeah make i l l l l l l l l l yeah make it really really ill i'm the else thank you kyle for coming on i know you're really busy but we love

having you here i love you all dearly and i'm always happy to i love your podcast and I hope I can offer some reprieve to your listeners from the hellishness of day-to-day life through my weird ramblings about things. The concept of aura may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We defy the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you find. Follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.

This image makes it easy to comprehend the social basis of the contemporary decay of the aura. It rests on two circumstances, both of which are related to the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life. namely, the desire of contemporary masses to bring things closer, spatially, and humanly, which is just as ardent as they're bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day, the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.

To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of the mark of 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.