Age Of Mechanical Reproduction Research Articles

The mother in the age of mechanical reproduction: Psychoanalysis, photography, deconstruction

The mother in the age of mechanical reproduction: Psychoanalysis, photography, deconstruction

"Turn off the dark": A Tale of Two Shakespeares in Julie Taymor's Tempest

In casting a female Prospero, as Andrew James Hartley observes, the actress herself experiences "an escape from patriarchy" only to engage in "a study of oppression," as she is forced "to sympathize with the oppressed while being powerless (for the bulk of the play) to escape her own tyranny." (134). In Julie Taymor's film adaptation of The Tempest (2010), this dynamic between tyranny and oppression is a reflection of Prospera's status as a montage effect of the two figures from whom she derives her authority: Prospero, her Shakespearean namesake, and Sycorax, the disinherited female ruler who, like Prospera, was banished to the island based on accusations of witchcraft. Radical montage, first theorized by Sergei Eisenstein and the Russian Constructivists, revolves around collision rather than continuity; it is the process whereby the clash of two discrete frames produces a dramatically new concept-not a synthesis so much as a third term that cannot be reduced to its component parts. Whereas continuity montage is always potentially co-optable by totalizing schemes, collision-based montage is intended "to make manifest the contradictions of Being" (Eisenstein 46)—a process that Walter Benjamin would later term "the politicization of the aesthetic." Replacing Benjamin's concept of "the age of mechanical reproduction," W. J. T. Mitchell characterizes the Twenty First century as the age of "biocybernetic reproduction." In Taymor's film, I shall argue, Prospera's unique heritage "reproduces" her as the site of a biocybernetic struggle. White, Western, imperializing, and male, Prospero is the quintessential Shakespearean patriarch and a figure whose magic we might think of as cybernetic—operationalized through C 3 I—the military paradigm known as command-control-communication-intelligence. Within this system, Ariel plays a crucial role as the literal interface between Prospero and his enemies. Sycorax, by contrast, is the profoundly "not-Shakespearean" matriarch who bequeaths to Prospera an ability to subdue the natural world, or bios , along with a keen awareness of her own place in the hierarchy as an oppressed female subject. Caliban, Sycorax's son and the island's only native, holds the key to Prospera's delicate navigation of this colonial paradigm. Whereas Caliban functions as Prospera's limbs by hauling firewood and performing other "offices that serve" the maintenance of her authority (1.2.313), Ariel functions as the sinews of her mind, purveying her thoughts to their material execution. Together, they collide to reinvent Prospera as a montage effect that epitomizes a distinctly posthuman and, indeed, biocybernetic "concept of agency . . . where actors fit oddly, at best, into previous taxa of the human, the natural, or the constructed" (Haraway 21). Ultimately, in Taymor's film, Ariel becomes more monstrous while Caliban becomes more human, as Prospera must come to identify, in the end, more with "this thing of darkness" than with her "diligent spirit." In so doing, Taymor's Tempest dramatizes the "contradictions of Being" female in the Twenty-First-Century.

Alex Goody Technology, Literature and CultureTechnology, Literature and Culture. Alex Goody. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Pp. viii+193.

<i>Alex Goody</i> Technology, Literature and Culture<i>Technology, Literature and Culture</i>. Alex Goody. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. Pp. viii+193.

Feeling through sight: zooming in, zooming out

This article analyses Alois Riegl's (1858–1905) notion of an aesthetics of proximity (Nahsicht), to which he associates the dimension of the tactile and the haptic. Opposed to Nahsicht is what Riegl calls the ‘optical-fernsichtig’: an aesthetics of spatial distance that in his view responds more satisfactorily to the essence of architecture. While Riegl's optical dimension relates to linear perspective, evoking a particular model of spatial construction, the haptic, on the other hand, alludes to planarity and to the drawing of profiles and details, promising to engender alternative modes of vision and spatiality.I intend to challenge Riegl's proposed correspondence between the ‘optical-fernsichtig’ and the logic of architecture, connecting the later instead with his aesthetics of proximity: as already suggested by Walter Benjamin's own reading of Riegl in the text ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936). Drawing from that connection, I will argue that some procedures typically associated to the haptic might be productively employed to interrogate and reinvigorate current architectural practice.

The The Digital Sublime of Feminine Spectacle in Busby Berkeley's "Footlight Parade" and Roy Lichtenstein's "Nudes with Beach Ball": Female Flesh Represented as Conceptualized Kinesthesia in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The The Digital Sublime of Feminine Spectacle in Busby Berkeley's "Footlight Parade" and Roy Lichtenstein's "Nudes with Beach Ball": Female Flesh Represented as Conceptualized Kinesthesia in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Visual Victorians: Response

as i undertook my assigned task of acting as a kind of scholarly sleuth or scout at the most recent meeting of the north american victorian studies association, i found myself reflecting on the sensual experiences of conferences: a swirl of words and ideas, tastes, sounds, sights, and spectacles. in short, academic meetings like those that occurred in Pasadena, california in october 2013 function simultaneously as opportunities for exchange and debate and feasts for the senses, spaces in which we rely not just on our intellectual capacities and auditory capabilities but also, for those of us who possess it, the ability to see. two developments in recent years have, in fact, furthered this notion that conferences are increasingly visual experiences: the growing use of PowerPoint presentations and the proliferation of studies of visual culture, not only by art historians but also by those who identify professionally, first and foremost, as historians or literary critics. as i contemplated the program in anticipation of the task set before me, i found myself thinking not only about the theme of the conference—“evidence”—but also about the different ways in which scholars now communicate their ideas and showcase their most compelling sources. the turn toward the visual that now characterizes many academic disciplines is transforming various aspects of humanistic inquiry in ways that mimic, at least in part, the transformations experienced by victorian subjects as they began to engage more fully with the emerging visual culture of the nineteenth century. one need not probe very deeply to find interesting areas of overlap. Just as the nineteenth century, with its reliance on new technologies of reproduction and projection, was defined (to borrow from Walter Benjamin) as an age of mechanical reproduction, the past twenty years have come to be known as an age of new media in which the computer literate have at their fingertips a virtually limitless supply of internet-based visual material. similarly, the transformations of

If I Had Possession over Judgment Day: Augmenting Robert Johnson

If I Had Possession over Judgment Day: Augmenting Robert Johnson

Andy Warhol: Folk Artist in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Andy Warhol: Folk Artist in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

O Problema do Meio Técnico na Estética de Benjamin e Adorno

The purpose of the paper is to make a critical analysis of the Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno’s positioning of on the philosophical significance of aesthetic products made in technological media such as photography, film and radio. Focusing our attention on the text “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, by Benjamin, and “The schema of mass culture,” by Adorno, we intend to show that the authors take the aesthetic dimension as converging in an immediate way with issues inherent to the materiality of technical means

Frieda Hempel and the Historical Imagination

AbstractThe recreation of Jenny Lind's first American concert by soprano Frieda Hempel in 1920 was a popular success, but raised a number of questions for critics. Examining its reception—and that of the concert on tour in Britain—shines light on postwar attitudes toward music history, as manifest in responses to particular repertoires, and to sound recordings. Hempel's hybrid programs, which included operatic coloratura arias, lieder, and American popular song, ran counter to the trend elsewhere toward specialization. At the same time, they resonated with attempts to cultivate a newly minted sociocultural group, the middlebrow. And, while the Lind project on many levels strove for historical accuracy, on others it overturned ideas of authentic performance. An altogether more complex picture of vocal performance in the age of mechanical reproduction thus emerges.

Cinema Education as an Exercise in ‘Thinking Through Not-Thinking’

In this article we explore the educational potential of cinema. To do this we first analyse how the American critical thinker Henry Giroux tries to give body to an educational theory in relation to cinema. His ‘film pedagogy’ is described as developing a critical response of the learner in relation to the public sphere of film. Giroux’s approach, however, seems to forget rather than explore the potential that is specific to the medium. Secondly, the article analyses Walter Benjamin’s (1936, Illuminations, London, Pimlico) essay ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, because here we find not a different educational response to cinema, but one of the first studies on cinema that describes its ontological nature and the potential of moving images for thought. Finally, the article discusses the cinema philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, who, in contrast to Giroux, does not construct a Cartesian framework around cinema. Rather, he recognizes and explores cinema’s potential for thoughts like Benjamin did. In this way, Deleuze reverses Giroux’s question of how education should respond to cinema. A pedagogical discussion hereby comes to the fore that does not ask the question of what methodology should be used in education to think critically about cinema, but what the implications are of the nature of cinema for thought and for education.

Real Presence: “Jesus Christ” and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Real Presence: “Jesus Christ” and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Poetry in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Denis Roche's Le Mécrit

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments I would like to thank Natalie Allen (Ph.D. candidate, University of Iowa) for her meticulous work editing this essay and translating the quotations from French to English. Funding from an Old Gold Fellowship from the University of Iowa allowed me to hire Allen as a research assistant for the summer of 2012. Notes Denis Roche was considered the poet of the Tel Quel, an Avant-Garde literary group that contributed to a literary journal of the same name. See Patrick Ffrench's The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (1960–1983) (1995). Benjamin writes in “Little History of Photography” that the photographers of the 1880s “made it their business to simulate the aura which had been banished from the picture with the suppression of darkness through faster lenses” and by “using all the arts of retouching” (517). For more on Roche's comparisons between painting and poetry, see Sarah N. Lawall's “Yves Bonnefoy and Denis Roche: Art and the Art of Poetry” About French Poetry from Dada to “Tel Quel”: Text and Theory (1974 Lawall , Sarah N. “Yves Bonnefoy and Denis Roche: Art and the Art of Poetry.” About French Poetry from Dada to “Tel Quel”: Text and Theory . Ed. Mary Ann Caws . Detroit : Wayne State UP , 1974 . Print . [Google Scholar]). Additional informationNotes on contributorsRoxanna CurtoRoxanna Curto (Ph.D., Yale 2008) is Assistant Professor of French and Spanish at the University of Iowa. Her research explores representations of technology and sports in French, Francophone, and Latin American literature.

Aura ex machina

The essay has three main objectives and therefore is divided into three parts. The first is to dispel some misconceptions related to the notion of aura, in the centre of Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (§ 1). First and foremost, is criticized the claim that Benjamin intends the decline of the aura of the work of art (its crisis) in terms of an irreversible end. In response to this misunderstanding is then analyzed the concept of aura in the light of fundamental opposition between the two conceptions of technology (as magic and as perfective mímesis) at the centre of the second version of the essay on the work of art (§§ 2-3). The theme of the aura is so is explained in the context of Benjamin’s other works (especially the Arcades Project and the Baudelaire), in close relationship with his political theory of experience and with its original historical materialism (§ 4). The third part of the essay, finally, concerns the contemporary metamorphosis of aura, in relation to art practice and digital interfaces that shape social life (§ 5).

Di che aura parliamo? Aura, ovvero della meravigliosa modifica della nozione stessa di arte

Benjamin does not see or does not want to see the new “aura” that makes the art of cinema “art” which stays as the central feature of the totally renewed statute of artistic activity in the age of mechanical reproduction. In his essay of 1936, Benjamin acquires the arguments of all those authors who, between the first and second decades of the Twentieth century, had described this art and his new aura: Paul Valéry, George Duhamel, Léon Pierre-Quint, Luigi Pirandello, Bertolt Brecht, Rudolph Arnheim. It is an art for the mass that has a positive but also negative side in individual perception. Benjamin considers the new man – be it mass-man (the audience) or man-tool – recruitable for a coming revolution, but at the end of the essay he raises a question concerning the whole of contemporary art from the Dada movement to the present time: how could this completely renovated art possibly escape exploitation by those who produce it and drive it since then?

Aura, sguardo e intersoggettività

This essay tries to rethink Benjamin’s notion of “aura” through the consideration of two authors such as G. Didi-Huberman and D. Costello. The aim is not to distinguish between auratic and postauratic (or non-auratic) works of art, but to rethink the problem of aesthetic perception in the age of mechanical reproduction. More specifically, Costello and Didi-Huberman point out the relation between “aura” and “subjectivity”: on the one hand, the intersubjective (and ethical) nature of an “authentic” (i.e., auratic) experience; on the other hand, the presence of the aura nowadays in the “interplay of gazes” between the (subject-)work and the (subject-)spectator. Works of art are indeed characterized by a “two-fold” or aesthetic “transcendence” – they are at once both inside and outside my world – which enables them to resist the reification into reproducible commodity.

"Kunstwerk" in the age of holography

In 2007 one auction shocked collectors and artists: Two art works of Rudie Berkhout were offered for one thousand dollars on eBay. The closing down of museums for holography in Cologne, New York and Washington DC paid a big price of respect for true art. Benjamin's vision about "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" found a new expression in abuse and ignorance. Beautiful sculptures of Art are reduced to "Holograms" like Rudie's "Cairo Aspect" placed in a rummage sale, covered by fingerprints of ignorance.

Charlie Chaplin in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Reflexive Ambiguity in Modern Times

Charlie Chaplin produced Modern Times in the midst of social upheaval and professional peril: the Great Depression called into question the optimism that had surrounded the ‘Machine Age,’ and the success of talking motion pictures threatened Chaplin’s cinematic career as a silent filmmaker and star. These factors have influenced a critical consensus that views Modern Times as resorting to exhausted Chaplin formulas and shying away from social criticism. In light of a careful reading of the reflexive gestures in Chaplin’s film and of primary documents of the period, Howe questions this consensus. Instead, his analysis interprets the reflexivity in Chaplin’s film as representations of production and consumption that emphasize the dynamism that these two economic forces exerted on society as a whole and on Hollywood in particular. The film’s double reflexivity, Howe concludes, establishes a parallel between Chaplin’s dilemma as a filmmaker and the equivocal cultural attitudes toward the influence of industrial technology on economics, politics, and aesthetics because both derive from the tension between technological change in society and the technological basis of art in the early twentieth century. In that intersection of forces, Modern Times reflects not only Chaplin’s own political and aesthetic concerns, but also the complex meanings that technology had acquired in both the production of culture and the culture of production.

Aura, cult value, and the postmodern crowd: a Durkheimian reading of Walter Benjamin's artwork essay

This paper presents a reading of Walter Benjamin's much-read essay ‘The artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction'. Drawing on a Durkheimian conception of the relationship between the cult and its cult objects, I seek to differentiate (better than Benjamin himself) the notions of ‘aura' and of ‘cult value'. Thereby, I hope to contour a theoretical model for dealing with mediated sociality suitable for a postmodern reality. In this reality, de-auraticized objects – mass-produced objects and visual reproductions – proliferate concomitantly with forms of ‘cultic sociality'. First, I undertake a reading of Benjamin's essay. Second, I focus on the relation between aura and cult value. Third, I try to show the relevance of my Durkheimian approach through a critique of the Benjaminian literature and the standard readings of his essay.

An Art Novel for the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Blaise Cendrars's Dan Yack

This article considers Blaise Cendrars's novel Dan Yack (1929) as a variation on the art novel genre, arguing that it rewrites and adapts well-worn art narratives — most notably various iterations of the Pygmalion myth — in order to question the nature and function of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. The first part of the novel investigates traditional art forms, especially sculpture, and describes the failure of the sculptor Sabakoff to attain the Pygmalionesque dream of divine creative power. The second part apparently advances the mechanical art forms of sound recording and cinema as alternative modes of representation more responsive to modern experience; but these too are seen to fail to breathe life into the work of art, producing no more than a sterile imitation of reality and, in the case of cinema, endlessly rehashing past narratives. This pessimism about art is also brought out through the novel's intertexts, which insist on the dangers and limits of artistic creation. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, the article suggests that this pessimism may be tempered somewhat (though certainly not eliminated), since Cendrars's text itself provides a model of an art that works to make the impoverished experience of modern life meaningful by relating it to tradition.