The Disenchantment of Art<\/a>). Rochlitz doesn\u2019t use the term to demean, however. Benjamin \u201cis not an essayist in the manner of Montaigne; the scientific imperative is not lacking in his essays. He conducts concrete research from a philosophical perspective.\u201d In his essays, Benjamin \u201ccreated or rethought numerous concepts that are part of philosophical debates today: notably, truth content and subject matter, symbol and allegory, aura and mechanical reproduction, cult value and exhibition value, dialectical image and remem\u00adbrance\u201d (9).<\/p>\nThough there is no system, \u201cwe can nevertheless speak of a fundamental schema in his approach and philosophical conception.\u201d There is a framework that Rochlitz describes as a description of progress in history: \u201cthe succession of catastrophes that moves from a fullness of meaning, impure because of its mythical character, to a poverty of meaning incarnated by abstract \u2018meaning\u2019 and by the \u2018reification\u2019 of the mechanically reproduced commodity, Benjamin seeks to mark the pauses where the liberating \u2018genius\u2019 of humanity has manifested itself while pointing toward a decisive liberation\u201d (9).<\/p>\n
Art gas \u201ca privileged place\u201d in this account of the genius of humanity breaking out of a process of abstraction, but its role is defined by the fact that it stands out as an enchantment in contrast to the disenchantment of reason. As Rochlitz puts it, \u201cart occupies a privileged place, but only to the extent that the enchantment of its appearance is dominated by the disenchantment proper to knowledge.\u201d Thus, \u201cGreek tragedy, baroque allegory, Charles Baudelaire\u2019s modern poetry, and revolutionary film are among these privileged moments where a loss of meaning is heroically converted into a symbolic form free from all pretense\u201d (9). Benjamin formulates this framework in different ways: \u201cfrom the first conception of a world of Ideas bringing together authentic forms to the transformation of the critical act into political action, and from the privileging of the actualization or destruction of tradition to the remembrance of a past threatened with definitive occultation.\u201d Throughout, \u201cthe idea of rescuing a liberating act of signification, forgotten or disregarded by the official tradition, remains constant\u201d (9-10).<\/p>\n
Art itself participates in the disenchantment of the world. What Benjamin describes as the destruction of the \u201caura\u201d makes its first appearance in his \u201cA Small History of Photography\u201d and more fully in \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.\u201d In the latter, \u201cBenjamin attacks the religious foun\u00addations of as they dominate the aesthetic experience in the traditional sense; according to him, this experience is contemplative and fetishistic. This theory draws inspiration from the Weberian theses on desacralizarion. But what will replace the ritual underlying_any work of art is now, according to Benjamin: not an autonomous experience but rather politics: not the ideal receiver, God, but the idealized receiver, the public of the struggling class\u201d (149). Benjamin eventually admits that art does not evolve as he predicted. In an essay on \u201cThe Work of Art,\u201d he argues that film brings a crisis to art in general. Yet, \u201cFor better or for worse, however, art has survived the crisis precipitated by film, just as it survived Dadaism, which, if we are to believe Benjamin, was only the prelude to cinematic shock effects. Above all, even if we except commercial film, film itself has hardly evolved in the direction of politicization announced by Benjamin; it has not radically escaped the field of art\u201d (149). <\/p>\n
He defines the aura in his essay on art in an age of reproduction. It is \u201ca strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance of semblance or distance, no matter \u00ad how close the object may be.\u201d Rochlitz glosses this with: \u201cTwo negative qualities seem to define the aura: the uniqueness of a moment of temporal apparition and its unapproachability, its distancing despite a possible spatial proximity\u201d (152).<\/p>\n
Benjamin finds the root of his account of the destruction of the aura in Hegel, whom Benjamin quoted in Illuminations<\/em>: \u201care beyond the stage of reverence for works of art as divine and objects deserving our worship. The impression they produce is one of a more reflective kind, and the emotions they arouse require a higher test\u201d (quoted Rochlitz, 150). At heart, Benjamin\u2019s theory isn\u2019t philosophical but sociological. He draws on Weber and Simmel in concluding that the destruction of the aura is part of a \u201cgeneral disenchantment of the world, so much so that art, now without effect on public life, survives only in the private sphere.\u201d Like Nietzsche, Benjamin reacts to this decline, but not, in line with Nietzsche, with a plea for the aestheticization of life. Rather, \u201cInasmuch as the \u2018beautiful appearance\u2019 of art is now mere lies and artifice, it is no longer appropriate to celebrate pure and simple appearance, the vital lie that brings us intense experiences: Rather, we must sacrifice art in the traditional sense to preserve the public status and the pragmatic role of its productions. Unlike Max Weber, Benjamin is not part of the tradition of a \u2018Protestant\u2019 and rationalist critique of the image, nor does he confine himself to observing in a general way the desacralization of art; he under\u00ad takes to precisely show the modifications that certain arts have undergone, according to their technical composition, their relation to reality, and the social context of their reception\u201d (150).<\/p>\nPhotography dispels the aura, but not instantly. In his small history of photography, he argues that the very techniques of early photography preserve the aura of art. Because photographs required \u201ca long and concentrated exposure,\u201d they capture a continuum from light through shadow to absolute darkness. Early group photos preserve a feeling of conviviality. Photographs preserved an aura because of a \u201crigorous congruence between \u2018subject and technique.\u2019\u201d The technology existed within the world of the burgeoning bourgeois class, as it existed on the photographic plate. As the bourgeoisie triumphed, this aura disappeared and mere artifice took its place. In Benjamin\u2019s words: \u201cAfter 1880, though, photographers made it their business to simulate with all the arts of retouching, especially the so-called rubber print, the aura which had been banished from the picture with the rout of darkness through faster lenses, exactly as it was banished from reality by the deepening degeneration of the imperialist bourgeoisie\u201d (151). Modernity brings needs and values to the fore that are incompatible with the aura, that push against the distancing effects of the aura: \u201cTo bring things closer to us, or rather to the masses, is just as passionate an inclination in our day as the overcoming of whatever is unique in every situation by means of its reproduction. Every day the need to possess the object in close-up in the form of a picture, or rather a copy, becomes more imperative \u201d (152). Instead of the distancing associated with the aura, modernity promotes a proximity that edges close to possession, a reflex of bourgeois capitalist appropriation.<\/p>\n
Benjamin doesn\u2019t lament the decline of the aura; rather the reverse. Referring to the surrealist photography of Eugene Atget, he writes, \u201cHe was the first to disinfect the stifling atmosphere generated by conventional portrait photography in the age of decline. He cleanses this atmosphere, indeed he dispels it altogether: he initiates the emancipation of object from aura which is the most signal achievement of the latest school of photography\u201d (quoted, 152). Yet his language sometimes suggests a feeling of loss, a loss of the uniqueness of things: \u201cThe stripping bare of the object, the destruction of the aura, is the mark of a perception whose sense of the sameness of things has grown to the point where even the singular, the unique, is divested of its uniqueness \u2013 by means of its reproduction\u201d (quoted, 152).<\/p>\n
In summary, Rochlitz claims there are three reasons for the destruction of the aura: \u201caesthetic<\/em> authenticity, which is opposed to artifice; ethics<\/em> (or politics), the questioning of privilege and of the exclusive character of the aura; and, finally, anthropology<\/em>, a metamorphosis of perception, moving in the direction of a primacy of the cognitive attitude, which Benjamin notes here without making a value judgment.\u201d This last, he notes, is linked with the Hegelian\/Weberian theme of \u201d the progression of the rational mind in Western culture, in the sense of a progress of cognitive rationality\u201d (152-3).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Walter Benjamin had no totalizing philosophical system. He was an essayist, admits Ranier Rochlitz (The Disenchantment of Art). Rochlitz doesn\u2019t use the term to demean, however. Benjamin \u201cis not an essayist in the manner of Montaigne; the scientific imperative is not lacking in his essays. He conducts concrete research from a philosophical perspective.\u201d In his […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,1491,1562],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-disenchantment","category-walter-benjamin"],"yoast_head":"\n
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