2M03 6.1 Walter Benjamin and the Possibilities
of Emancipated Spectatorship
Mon, 10/19 8:48AM • 46:00
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
benjamin, art, image, culture, mass, adorno, film, frankfurt school, lafayette square, perception,
photography, mode, space, reproduction
SPEAKERS
Sarah Brophy
Sarah Brophy 00:00
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to English 2M03 Concepts of Culture. I hope that everyone had a good
reading break. I'm excited to speak with you about concepts of visuality, mediation, and spectacle this
week. So in these lectures, we'll be setting up some important concepts to guide our work on various
contemporary visual media as the semester continues.
Sarah Brophy 00:26
Here at the outset I wanted to remind you that our mid semester survey will be open until Friday. So
thanks to everyone who has contributed their thoughts so far on how the course is going. I am finding
your comments very valuable. I had anticipated one of the points that has come up from a number of
you, and that is that some streamlining of our reading load would be welcomed by many. So I've made
some changes. And ask you to please take careful note of the changes to the weekly reading schedule.
This is posted on Avenue to Learn. I'm also picking up that many of you are finding the podcasts a bit
lengthy, though you are finding the content interesting. So I'm going to be challenging myself to rein in
the length as best I can while continuing to offer enough context and depth for our discussions.
Sarah Brophy 01:19
The final sort of introductory thing I wanted to say is just that the class performed very well on the first
midterm quiz. The average on the quiz was 76%. So I was really happy to see that, and I hope to see
the strong work continue as we move along here.
Sarah Brophy 01:38
So today's lecture 6.1 is entitled "The Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin, and the Possibilities of
Emancipated Spectatorship. So first I want to say a few words about some key terms that we need to
think with to contextualize Benjamin's "artwork" essay.
Sarah Brophy 01:59
-1-
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
So the first term is mass culture. You can think about the term mass culture as originating in the late
19th and early 20th century, as the new discipline of sociology arose, and intellectuals and urban
planners and cultural critics started to think about, you know, the transformations of this period. So a
couple of things to think about when we think about mass culture are the rise of urbanization, as
opposed to sort of local communities. Industrialization, the rise of the the factory, with its processes of
mechanization and automation. So we've got urbanization, industrialization also think about
commercialization and mass media. So we can think about the rise of the possibilities of broadcast
media, as well as advertising, photography, and graphic design. So finally, after urbanization,
industrialization, and commercialization and mass media, also think about just an overall process of
standardization, the capitalist ordering of work, leisure and consumption. Mass society theorists, as
exemplified by the sociology of Emile Durkheim, for instance, distilled the idea of "mass man": that
humankind had become, through these processes that I just outlined, humankind had become become
alienated, separated from meaningful life and labor, separated from community. Humankind had
become mass society theorists thought "atomized," separated from others, passive in their
consumption, and therefore open to different kinds of manipulation, open to propaganda in particular.
Sarah Brophy 04:29
So if you want a comic exemplification of some of these anxieties about mass culture, and the idea of
"mass man," you might I suggest for a supplementary example, look at a couple of clips from the film
Modern Times directed and performed by Charlie Chaplin. This is a film from 1936 and it was made by
Chaplin who had already risen to fame at this point at a moment when the dominant mode was shifting
from silent to talking films. So Chaplin was reflecting on, you know, what was possible within the
industry of mass culture. So the clips that you can look at there two scenes, one is "Factory work," and
the other is "The Eating Machine." They're both very short both under four minutes. And I suggest that
you might want to look for the way in which masses, movement, and machinery are represented in
these clips from Modern Times. What is the relation amongst masses, movement, and machinery? And
how are they being represented to us. And so I'll just suggest briefly that in these clips, Chaplin's
embodied movements comically show the dehumanizing effects of automation. So he, as he leaves the
assembly line, where he's been using two wrenches to repeatedly put on some kind of bolt on the
assembly line, he then tries to perform the same action on every other object and person that he
encounters; he cannot stop that automated movement. So it's a good example of the human body
becoming attuned to the assembly line, attuned to the clock of the factory system. So check that out
just to kind of remind yourself and, you know, think about the kind of arguments about mass man and
you could think of Chaplin as you know, comically intervening in some of those processes.
Sarah Brophy 06:42
The second term that I wanted to define at the outset is the Frankfurt School. The Frankfurt School
refers to a circle of German Jewish intellectuals influenced by Marxism, who are particularly concerned
with analyzing and theorizing culture, in the period from the 1930s, into the post war period. So I want
to refer briefly to social and cultural theorists of this school of Theodore Adorno, and Max Horkheimer,
and to their essay, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception."
Sarah Brophy 07:27
-2-
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
So, this essay was published in 1944. And it you know, offers us a little bit of context for understanding
the distinctiveness of Benjamin's contribution as he was also, you know, associated with them, and he
was their friend and interlocutor. Adorno and Horkheimer proposed that culture on a mass scale
functions as an ideological tool, binding modern society together through ideas of consumerism, fun
and pleasure, and the good life, while ultimately serving ruling class interests and exploiting and
mystifying the masses. So they pointed out that, you know, within the Hollywood system, there
appeared to be something for everyone. However, in fact, what is on offer is very limited, and actually
characterized by sameness and homogeneity. There's no choice. As they put it, "the diner must be
satisfied with the menu." And so although mass culture offers, you know, this seeming like plenitude of,
of fun and pleasurable and satisfying experiences, for adorno and horkheimer, it's ultimately practicing
"a fraud on happiness." That's their phrase "a fraud on happiness." Mass culture seems to offer to fulfill
us but it actually deprives us of true happiness. It's giving us just, you know, a kind of commodity that
we have to conform our desires to, but we mistake it for true pleasure.
Sarah Brophy 09:12
So Adorno and Horkheimer, just for a bit of context, had fled Germany for Britain and the US in the
1930s. escaping the camps. They both returned to Frankfurt after the Second World War in 1949. They
were rightly fearful and critical of resonances that they saw between what they had witnessed of the
fascism of Weimar and Nazi Germany on the one hand and U.S. mass culture, on the other hand. They
saw propaganda at work in both.
Sarah Brophy 09:56
So Walter Benjamin was also associated with the Frankfurt School, and, in fact, it was very close to and
corresponded extensively with Theodor Adorno. Benjamin's work remains especially interesting
because while he shares critical premises with these neo- Marxist critics of mass culture, he's more
optimistic about the potential of new forms new forms of, namely photography and cinema, and he's
also more optimistic about the rule of audiences. He quotes the conservative physician-critic Georges
Duhamel on page 267 and notes that he, Duhamel, had criticized the movies in the 1930s and very
classist terms, calling the movies "a pastime for helots," "a diversion for the uneducated and the
wretched."
Sarah Brophy 11:02
So, Benjamin counters the laments of his contemporaries, both the critiques of fellow Marxist and the
critiques of conservative critics. And he argues for taking what he calls the "different kind of
participation" that is emerging more seriously.
Sarah Brophy 11:22
So let's think about Benjamin some more. So we're going to focus on thinking about mass culture and
modernity, aesthetics, its politics, and thinking within through "The Work of Art in the Age of its
Technological Reproducibility by Walter Benjamin This is the third version of the essay published in
1938. All right, so Walter Benjamin's dates are the 5th of July 1892, was born in Berlin and grew up
there. He died on the 26th of September 1940 in a town near the French/Spanish border, and I'll talk a
little bit more about that in a moment.
-3-
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Sarah Brophy 12:14
So Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher and essayist, associated with the Frankfurt School but
a bit on the edges of it. Benjamin was interested in mysticism and in new cultural forms of modernity.
He wrote beautifully about topics ranging from German tragic drama and his childhood in turn of the
century Berlin to the modern experience of strolling in the Paris arcades. His biographers have
characterized Benjamin as brilliant, influential and eccentric. Here's a quote from Bruno Arpaia's book
about Benjamin, The Angel of History: "Benjamin simply absented himself and avoided growing close
to anyone, he preferred to stay away from the infighting of the communist movement, or the oblivious
pettiness of the various emigre groups. He was reserved, yes, but he ended up alone choosing
isolation. And for years, he wrote the saddest letters to his friends, who are by now scattered to all four
corners of the world regretting that loneliness. He wrote letters pretending that letter writing was an
anachronistic," end quote. So you can see the sense of a figure who, you know, had the this hesitancy
about some aspects of life, but also, engaged in a lot of writing extensive correspondence, as well as
very innovative manuscript production. I wanted to talk about a little bit about more about Benjamins'
life, and death. After being temporarily interned in a French concentration camp in 1939, Benjamin fled
Paris in the summer of 1940, and headed to the Spanish border. This was a precarious journey through
Vichy France. And as is well known that you he locked the necessary exit visa from France. And then
he joined a guided party that crossed the Pyrenees on foot in an attempt to enter Spain as a illegal
refugee. So he was an asylum seeker. He was turned back by customs officials at that border. And
then he took his life in that small border town of Port Bou on in September 1940. His papers he had
entrusted in Paris to his friend, the French philosopher, Georges Bataille so we do have much of
Benjamin's writing that could have been lost in this precarious journey as he fled the genocide in
Europe.
Sarah Brophy 15:02
So I want to identify some tools for reading Benjamin. And then elucidate the key concepts from the
artwork essay. I think identifying some tools for reading venue mean is helpful because you know this
mysticism and, and his kind of very highly creative and visionary approach can be a little bit challenging
to follow. So I wanted to talk about three dimensions of the essay, creative dimensions, if you will. One
is fragments, the second is time and sense perception, and the third is dialectics.
Sarah Brophy 15:42
First, fragments. It helps to read "The work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility," or the
"artwork" essay, for short, with an emphasis on Benjamin as seeking to try to tap into what can't be
grasped by our current concepts. He's interested in what we don't know, what's emergent, maybe what
can't be fully assimilated to thought. So the essay consists of 15 sections, an epilogue, and 49
footnotes. We could say that it doesn't quite add up into a coherent whole, that it's associative, and
evocative. We see logical leaps between various sections. And the essay produce itself produces a
kind of "shock effect," perhaps similar to some of the shock effects that then you mean is trying to
describe is brought about by new media modes. So he touches on a variety of art forms and media
modes from painting, and sculpture, traditional modes to photography, and film and newspapers and
his juxtapositions of references to those modes can sometimes be jarring. Ultimately, his focus is on
trying to grapple with the visuality of photography and film.
-4-
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Sarah Brophy 17:12
Alright, secondly, after fragments, another tool for reading that you might find helpful to think about is
time and sense perception as an underlying focus and commitment of this essay. The artwork essay
focuses on contemporary sense perception, on the lived time of experience, of our present time and of
Benjamin's present time. But he's also very interested, Benjamin is, in narratives of historical time. And
you can see this in his references to, you know, historical modes of painting, for instance, or sculpture.
So how are the two related contemporary sense perception and historical time? They don't necessarily
mesh, but Benjamin finds ways of funneling history into contemporary sense perception. And he's
interested in thinking about how and why perception changes, one quote that's helpful to hold on to on
page 255. It's one of the italicized for emphasis lines, in Benjamin's text, and it reads, "Just as the entire
mode of existence of human collectives, changes over long historical periods, so too, does their mode
of perception." And so where this ultimately plays out for Benjamin, is a particular focus on
technological change and its implications for our embodied perception. We are changing, we're
becoming new, we're entering into a new mode of existence as a human collective, as our embodied
perception changes in response to technology. So he's particularly interested in what has happened to
human visual perception as a result of the rise of the camera in the 19th century, first with photography
in the mid 19th century and then with film at the end of the 19th century. So, the viewer, he suggests,
becomes affiliated to the gaze of the camera, we become to some extent, you know, part of that
apparatus, our primary kind of affiliation is to that process of viewing through the camera.
Sarah Brophy 19:55
So thirdly, after fragments and time/sense perception, the third tool to hold on to in thinking about
Benjamin's text is dialectics or dialectical materialism. So this is a Marxist concept. Dialectics helps us
to understand culture as inherently conflictual, and oppositional. So we can think about that process of,
you know, thesis, antithesis, resulting in some kind of new, perhaps in some kind of new synthesis.
Culture develops through oppositions, and Benjamin gives us a number of oppositions that he's
interested in. So some of them are authenticity versus imitation, thinking versus perception. We could
add contemplation versus distraction, and politics versus aesthetics. You could add more if you wanted
to, there are many more oppositions that he considers within the essay. So you might want to take a
moment to scribble down one or two more if they're coming to mind for you.
Sarah Brophy 21:10
What I'd like you to consider is that Benjamin is interested in sustaining a dialectic by never ultimately
favoring one half of the opposition over the other. We could think of his methodology then as a matter
of frozen or suspended dialectics. We don't seem to get to synthesis. So we hold on to for instance, the
idea of reception and distraction as happening simultaneously. Maybe the closest we get to a synthesis
is the idea that he has of "fusion” but you can still see the opposed term, see the conflict, when he talks
on page 264 about the idea of looking in the modern era, as involving "immediate intimate fusion" of
"pleasure and appraisal." So we don't necessarily get a new term, but we get pleasure and appraisal
fused together. And we can still see the operations of both. Alright, so I hope that these tools for
reading fragments, time and sense perception, and dialectics helps you to find ways into Benjamin's
piece.
-5-
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Sarah Brophy 22:39
Now I want to focus on the key ideas developed in the artwork essay. And here again, I've got a list of
three things to talk about. First, I want to talk about the negative theology of art and the decay of the
aura. Second, I'll address the new mode of participation, the new mode of viewership, that Benjamin
sees as coming into being through mass culture, and particularly through new visual forms. And thirdly,
we'll talk about the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics. Alright, I'll repeat each
of those titles as we go along. And that gives you the general outline. So we're going to go from art, to
viewership to aesthetics and politics in that order. Alright, so first, the negative theology of art and the
decay of the aura.
Sarah Brophy 23:39
In this essay, Benjamin is trying to explain and predict the changing nature of visual media and the
viewer's encounter with them. The medium of photography, and then film, changed the status of the
image by making reproduction possible. And these possibilities of technological transformation
dramatically and fundamentally change the meaning of art in society. In his view, reproducibility means
that famous works of art are more accessible to people because they can view these images in books.
And, you know, today in our age, own copies of them to put on their own walls in the form of posters, or
we can view them online this demystifies works of art and makes them seem less untouchable and
magical than they would have appeared in a different era before this capacity for reproduction. An
image that maybe in the past might have existed within a single place can now be seen in many
different contexts, an art history book, bulletin board and advertisement.
Sarah Brophy 24:55
So for example, think of the many contexts and guises in which Leonardo DaVinci's Mona Lisa portrait
now circulates. It's a surprisingly small work of art on display in the Louvre in Paris, if you can get past
the crowds and security forces to see it. But this image also appears on coffee mugs, posters. featured
in The Da Vinci Code, movie and book is a site of a hidden message. And it has been, the portrait has
been altered to reflect the features of Monica Lewinsky, aliens, Satan and many more.
Sarah Brophy 25:31
Mechanically or electronically reproduced images can be in many places simultaneously, they can be
altered. And they can be combined in different sequences and spatial forms their narrative sequence or
collage. They can also be accompanied by text by captions. These capabilities have greatly increased
the ability to image of images to captivate or persuade, but they've also taken the images out of the
context of tradition, and what Benjamin calls "cult value." Instead, the value of images resides in their
"exhibition value," and they become emancipated from older hierarchies. So we have a movement than
away from magic (the cult of the ritual of perhaps ancient and medieval, and even Renaissance times),
through secular ideas of art's status as special and separate from the social (so those ideas of beauty,
taste and authenticity that we talked about in relation to the Enlightenment, but also ideas of pure art
and art for art's sake in the 19th century). Here I'm referring to Section four, for what we might call this
negative theology of art. Ultimately, reproduction pulls us out of that idea of art's status as special and
separate from the social and toward the idea of exhibition value's primary importance, that's primarily
where images get their value in the post- photographic era. This emancipates images and opens up the
possibility for a political understanding of art for Benjamin.
-6-
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Sarah Brophy 27:26
So what does Benjamin mean by the term aura? Why and how is aura being destroyed or we could say
set on a course of "decay" to borrow his word. On page 254, he writes, "what withers in the age of the
technological reproducibility of the work of art is the aura." By aura, he means originality, authenticity,
and presence, presence in space and time, in particular space and time. And these qualities of
originality, authenticity, and presence, are associated with cult value, they inspire veneration and
worship. The impact of mechanical reproduction is that it destroys this sense of presence in space and
time, but also of those qualities of beauty, and sublimity.
Sarah Brophy 28:25
Consider this quotation from page 253. Quote, "even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is
lacking in one element, its presence in time and space. It's unique existence at the place where it
happens to be." Instead, with technological reproducibility, the reproduction effectively "detaches" the
artwork "from the sphere of tradition," quote, "It substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence."
Benjamin is pointing out that authenticity can't be reproduced, however. And it's challenged by the
capacity for reproduction. This results in "the liquidation of the value of tradition."
Sarah Brophy 29:15
So Benjamin's central point is about the effect of reproduction on the image, and how the meaning of
an image and viewers relationship to it changes when it can be reproduced. New aspects of these
representations are revealed by the lens of the camera and the context of our viewing change. We are
no longer required to be present in the same location or moment to view or listen. So this is not a
moralistic approach. Benjamin is saying that this decay, this destruction, the shattering of the aura is
neither good nor bad. It's a technological phenomenon that's going to bring about a change in
perception, is already doing so, and you know, we can't go back.
Sarah Brophy 30:06
So now having talked about the negative theology of art and the decay of the aura, let's talk about the
second key concept in Benjamin, that's the idea of a new mode of viewership, a new mode of
participation, if you will. This is emancipated art and exhibition value. Benjamin's working assumption is
that viewing what we see and how we see is conditioned by historical context and by our social political
situations. Through the breaking of the aura, the audience is brought closer to the work of art and is
engaged politically, rather than being kept out of worship for distance. Massification then creates new
publics we watch as members of large audiences, rather than encountering works of art as a one on
one interaction that is primarily contemplative. Now, it may seem that, you know, we, you know, through
recording technologies and digitization that we are watching privately say in our own homes. But we are
actually watching as members of large audiences, although, you know, we're in private spaces. So it's
an interesting thing to think about. The point is that we're not necessarily in a worshipful and
contemplative space.
Sarah Brophy 31:31
This means for Benjamin that the work of art has become a new kind of "construct," it's a construct, not
something conjured anymore. This is page 257. And as a result of the way in which the work of art has
-7-
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
become a construct, the work of art is "democratized," as he puts it on also in 257, "the whole social
function of art is revolutionized." We have a shift away from contemplation and worship, to distraction
and examination.
Sarah Brophy 32:04
Film and photography in particular allows viewers to notice new things, and to move in close to
examine the results of the imaging process. So let's look at an example that Benjamin refers to on page
258, and that is the photography of Eugene Atget. And so I want to if you open up the image files for
today on Avenue or you can pop this title into Google if you like. It's a picture titled "Hotel du Sens" by
Atget, and this is from Paris in the early 1900s. We see here, a kind of curved city street buildings on
either side kind of vanishing point around the corner to the right and a hotel sign on the left with modern
kind of graphic design imagery. So the point that I would like to suggest here, developing a reading of
Atget's "Hotel du Sens" is that we don't worship this image of the modern cityscape. Rather we are
curious about it. What kind of hotel is marked by the sign on the left and who's staying there? What will
greet us or indeed what might be lurking around the corner? So we examine such photographs as the
ones such as the ones produced by Atget as "scenes of crime," potential scenes of crime, suggests
Benjamin, on page 258. They might even become "evidence," he suggests, in "the historical trial. With
Atget and thinking with Benjamin too we look for "political significance," we are "unsettled," not
"contemplative."
Sarah Brophy 34:00
So such effects of engagement and defamiliarization are even more pronounced perhaps with moving
images. Consider this key quotation from Benjamin on the idea of "unconscious optics." This is page
265 to 7: "Our bars and city streets, our offices and furnished rooms or railroad stations and our
factories seemed to close relentlessly around us then came film and exploded this prison world with the
dynamite of the split second, so that now we set off calmly on journeys of adventure among its far flung
debris with the close up space expands. With slow motion movement is extended. And just as
enlargement not merely clarifies what we see indistinctly in any case, but brings to light entirely new
structures of matter. Slow motion not only reveals familiar aspects of movement, but discover Causes
quite unknown spaces. Clearly, it is another nature, which speaks to the camera as compared to the
eye. It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious, just as we discovered the
instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis."
Sarah Brophy 35:19
So, what I really like about this passage is the way it uses visual description, to imagine that we have a
kind of stable world that seems to be kind of claustrophobic, perhaps the world of, you know, the
modern city, urbanization and industrialization, with its offices, factories, and domiciles. But film allows
us to see in different ways it explodes the prison world and allows us to investigate differently. We can
look at close ups and slow motion and see, see differently see even spaces that we could not know just
with the eye.
Sarah Brophy 36:04
To illustrate this in a more contemporary register, I'm suggesting that you look at a video from BBC life.
This is BBC nature with David Attenborough. It's a four minute clip, and it's called "Ant fortress under
-8-
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
attack." So you get to visit with the camera of the BBC, the cameras of the BBC crew, you get to visit a
weaver ant colony and see things that you could not see with the naked eye, you get to see the fact
that the ants are actually farming caterpillars in order to feed upon the caterpillar secretions, all sorts of
kind of kind of grossly interesting things that are made possible by the telephoto lens. And of course,
this also gives rise to the extended kind of analogy to human culture through the anthropomorphizing
voiceover. So you think about that we could never see the weaver ant colony by the naked eye, but we
can see it through the camera, we can see things about ant culture, and perhaps also have things
revealed about our own media culture in the process.
Sarah Brophy 37:28
Alright, Benjamin ultimately characterized the photographer or that camera operator, as a "surgeon,"
cutting into the patient, versus a magician, casting a spell to cure them. The audience, our ourselves
as viewers, is allied with the analytical and surgical actions of the camera. There are opposing
tendencies in play, and Benjamin concedes "the audience is an examiner, but a distracted one," as he
writes on page 269. So examination and distraction are the key characteristics of the modern viewer, it
seems like an opposition: how can we examine if we're distracted? But he argues that those things are
happening simultaneously.
Sarah Brophy 38:26
So the third and final key concept to consider is the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of
aesthetics. Consider the political context of the masses in the 1930s, accepting the way that they were
governed and a seeding to propaganda. Ben, you mean and other Frankfurt School theorists were
particularly concerned with the effects of propaganda in Weimar in Nazi Germany, and think about the
fact that the 1936 Olympics corresponds to the date of Benjamin's drafting of this essay, so on
everyone's minds at this point, in circles of cultural critics were the iconography of the Nazi regime, the
rallies and the films. Benjamin, in his epilogue, points to the fascistic potential of film and photography
to particularly to their potential for aesthecizing war, rendering, war, sublime, patriotic and inevitable. He
writes on page 269: "War and only war concert a goal for mass movements on the grandest scale," and
then he quotes the Italian artist Marinette's fascist Futurist call to embrace imperialist war in North
Africa with the repeated refrain "war is beautiful."
Sarah Brophy 39:51
From a Marxist perspective certainly for Benjamin there's the idea that the productive forces of society
continue to have their outlet in this way because the property system capitalism prevents their full
expression in works for the collective good as it ultimately profits, more from the destructiveness of war,
from the selling and use of armaments from mobilizing the military, instead of "draining rivers" as we
might in large public projects (and could we debate the, you know, those projects), but Benjamin says
we fill trenches with dead bodies instead. We also supply artistic gratification to our sense perceptions
that makes us experience destruction as a form of aesthetic pleasure. this is page 270.
Sarah Brophy 39:51
So this is really, you know, the kind of crux for Benjamin why he wants to think about how the breaking
of the aura means that the audience is brought closer to the work of art, the audience is engaged
politically, rather than being kept at a distance by rituals, but the danger is not not resolved. This
-9-
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
process of emancipation can manifest itself in one of two ways, the aestheticization of politics, which
presses all of this potential into fascism, or the politicization of art of critical analysis and awareness
and social democracy.
Sarah Brophy 39:57
Despite its emancipation through technology, Benjamin suggests art continues to be pressed into the
production of ritual values. And in the process art is being used for fascistic purposes aesthetics are
being pressed into a certain kind of political purpose, a fascist purpose that that aggrandizes war,
violence, conflict, oppression
Sarah Brophy 41:53
So wanted to explore briefly an example of this dual potential. And the photograph I want to show you
is a picture of Attorney General of the US William Barr standing in Lafayette Square, across from the
White House as demonstrators gathered to protests gathered to protest the death of George Floyd.
This is June 1 2020, and it's an Associated Press Photo. So you can pull that up in our image gallery.
Here in this Press Photo, we have the Attorney General of the United States standing beside an
armored vehicle, with military police emerging from behind him and security detail on his left. The
picture shows the breakdown of boundaries between administrative bodies and the police. What's a
senior member of the administration doing here flanked by these security and military forces? If we
begin to ask that question, we may be prompted to look up other images of what happened in Lafayette
Square at the beginning of June 2020. And we begin to place this image in the context whereby we
come to understand it as part of the scene of the orchestration of a spectacle of Donald Trump posing
in front of St. John's Church in Lafayette Square with a Bible after the square was forcibly cleared of
Black Lives Matter protesters. This is another yet another moment of Trump trying to produce a strong
man persona, and have that circulate. So we can read the photo of Barr as actually part of the Trump
spectacle. And, you know, we don't have to read it in a consenting way though. To examine closely is
to question the constructed nature of the scene in the square, the use of force that made it possible,
and to ask who is accountable.
Sarah Brophy 43:45
So going back to Benjamin, we can see that ultimately, the loss of the aura, the negative theology of art
opens up new possibilities for us to move in close to the media around us to politicize and radicalize art.
Photographs and film and other visual media become something that we can examine, as if we're
examining "scenes of crime," we can look for "political significance," we may do so in a distracted way,
because we're surrounded by so much media.
Sarah Brophy 44:23
One thing we might want to hold on to then as we think with Benjamin and to carry this with us in the
rest of the course is that Benjamin opens up an optimistic reading of the technologies of reproduction.
This you know, it's possible that the politics of art the political stakes of art can become more explicit,
and that the critical capabilities of viewers can be engage. However, Benjamin cautions on page 261,
"So long as," this is a quote, "So long as movie makers capital sets the fashion, as a rule the only
revolutionary merit that can be ascribed to today's cinema is the promotion of a revolutionary criticism
of traditional concepts of art." There, you know, he's saying that if capitalist interests are still organizing
- 10 -
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
our media world, you know, we may have that revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art, but
can we really turn that into a new politics? He leaves that dialectic, again, frozen, stalled or suspended,
asking for us to pick up those critical capabilities and maybe reorganize our society in a way that could
allow for different kinds of not only criticism, but social good and expression.
Sarah Brophy 45:46
All right, thank you very much, everyone. I look forward to continuing our analysis of photography's role
in contemporary culture and politics. So see you in the next lecture, looking forward to it. Thanks,
everyone!
- 11 -
Transcribed by https://otter.ai