Age Of Mechanical Reproduction Research Articles

O Golem na era da reprodutibilidade técnica: aparato cinematográfico, homem moderno e representação

Approaching Walter Benjamin to the expressionist movement in its cinematic form and its subversive attitude, this article proposes to consider the automaton's image as an allegory in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Thus, starting from the ideal expressionist as cinematographic technique and plot, and going through the Benjamin's Theses On the Concept of History, as well as going through the various ideas contained in the work of the German philosopher concerning the work of art in the twentieth century, we will see the Golem, mystical character of the Jewish tradition represented by the figure of a giant, made from inanimate matter, coming to life in this text-screen. Life that has come to interrupt the course of a History which presents herself as a continuous line reporting only the history of the winners, ie, of the holders of political and / or social power, and ignoring the history of the subdued men, that is, of the until now obedient men. And such irruption should not only be the work of a mythical being, but also work of the man, as a proletarian in the capitalistic system, and of the cinematography as apparatus and representation.

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

This book grows out of a longstanding fascination with the uncanny status of the mother in literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, film, and photography. The mother haunts Freud's writings on art and literature, emerges as an obscure stumbling block in his metapsychological accounts of the psyche, and ultimately undermines his patriarchal accounts of the Oedipal complex as a foundation for human culture. The figure of the mother becomes associated with some of psychoanalysis's most unruly and enigmatic concepts (the uncanny, anxiety, the primal scene, the crypt, and magical thinking). Read in relation to deconstructive approaches to the work of mourning, this book shows how the maternal function challenges traditional psychoanalytic models of the subject, troubles existing systems of representation, and provides a fertile source for nonmimetic, nonlinear conceptions of time and space. The readings in this book examine the uncanny properties of the maternal function in psychoanalysis, technology, and literature in order to show that the event of birth is radically unthinkable and often becomes expressed through uncontrollable repetitions that exceed the bounds of any subject. The maternal body often serves as an unacknowledged reference point for modern media technologies such as photography and the telephone, which attempt to mimic its reproductive properties. To the extent that these technologies aim to usurp the maternal function, they are often deployed as a means of regulating or warding off anxieties that are provoked by the experience of loss that real separation from the mother invariably demands. As the incarnation of our first relation to the strange exile of language, the mother is inherently a literary figure, whose primal presence in literary texts opens us up to the unspeakable relation to our own birth and, in so doing, helps us give birth to new and fantasmatic images of futures that might otherwise have remained unimaginable.

Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Negotiating Affect in Media/Cultural Studies

Negotiating Affect in Media/Cultural Studies Greg Goldberg (bio) Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010 Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect Washington: Zero Books, 2010 Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 Media/cultural studies occupies a rare methodological position within and between the humanities and social sciences, with one foot in various theoretical traditions (e.g., literary, feminist, psychoanalytic) and the other in various object-oriented approaches (e.g. textual analysis, actor-network theory, ethnography). At its most astute, media/cultural studies scholarship sets the theoretical and the material in close dialogue, transgressing their boundary and revealing their mutual interdependence. Such productive encounters are not fortuitous, but rather are part of media/cultural studies’ foundations. This is evident in the early texts of the discipline (anachronistically curated), for example, Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, and—more recently—in the turn in media/cultural studies towards affect, which renews and extends established methodological concerns and commitments. The affective turn, as theorized by Patricia Clough, engages “bodily capacities to affect and be affected or the augmentation or diminution of a body’s capacity to act, to engage, and to connect . . .” (2007, 2). The simplicity and clarity of this characterization belies a nuanced and sophisticated challenge to a number of diverse intellectual traditions, including the anthropocentric social sciences, and meaning- and representation-centric strands of media/cultural studies. In its focus on preconscious bodily capacities—where “bodily” includes “capacities beyond the body’s organic-physiological constraints”—the affective turn asks us to take matter seriously. This is not to continue to suppose a distinction between meaning and matter as the social sciences have done, but rather to begin [End Page 242] to examine the social and political implications of their “entanglement,” as Karen Barad phrases it. Jodi Dean’s Blog Theory, Steven Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect, and Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media take up this challenge and its implications in different ways, in the process offering up compelling and varied models of accounting for the primacy of affect in contemporary society. Of the three books, Blog Theory is most critical of affect, insofar as Dean links it with a strain of pernicious contemporary sociopolitical malaise. In a similar vein to that of contemporary media scholars like Mark Andrejevic, Dean argues “that contemporary communications media capture their users in intensive and extensive networks of enjoyment, production, and surveillance” (3–4). In Blog Theory, Dean is especially concerned with and critical of networks of enjoyment. To elaborate her critique, she makes use of work by Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, and in particular Žižek’s differentiation of desire from drive. As Dean explains (following Žižek), desires target lost objects, while drives target loss itself; “drive is a kind of compulsion or force. It’s a force that is shaped, that takes its form and pulsion, from loss” (59). This distinction allows Dean to reframe the “enjoyment” we realize through participation online not as filling a desire but rather as fueling a drive. She writes, “I enter. I click. I like. I poke. Drive circulates, round and round, producing satisfaction even as it misses its aim, even as it emerges in the plastic network of the decline of symbolic efficiency” (60). Žižek’s theorization of the “decline of symbolic efficiency” is also central to Dean’s argument. Dean argues that this decline is a result, in part, of our integration into cyberspace, and threatens three things: performativity, desire, and meaning. In her explication of this threat, she proposes that there is a “gap” left behind by the symbolic which has been occupied by “images and affects” circulated through the Internet. “The result,” she writes, “is a situation of non-desire, non-meaning, and the unbearable intrusion of enjoyment.” (9). Enjoyment, in this formulation, is procured at the expense not only of meaning, but also of reason: “Drowning in [a] plurality [of media], we lose the capacity to grasp anything like a system. React and...

The Finitude of Sports Performances and the Infinite Number of Reproducible Images – A Case Study on Sporting Heroes in Twentieth-Century Germany

Modern sport regards itself as the self-evident representation of the escalation principle: faster, higher, further! As a system of social action, however, it seems to have reached its boundaries, since potentials for growth have been exhausted following the successful recruitment of women, young people and lower social classes and the triumphant conquest of distant regions of the world. The article asks whether it is possible to compensate for the social limits to the growth of sport, or even surmount them by increasing the production of images instead of increasing and intensifying social action. The study is carried out using the example of the sporting hero in Germany in the twentieth century, i.e. ‘in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (Walter Benjamin).

Pylon and the Rise of European Fascism

Pylon and the Rise of European Fascism One pair of eyes is not enough. —Franz Kafka, “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” (308) P ylon is based on events Faulkner witnessed at the opening of the ([>4,000,000 Shushan Airport in New Orleans during Mardi Gras week, February 1934 (“Big Airport for South” XX8).1 That he was shocked (electrified) by what he saw (in his sudden emergence from the histor­ ical nightmare of his stalled novel, A Dark House, into the harsh metallic light of the imminent future) we can tell as we follow the language.2 The sensibility that produces it is traceable to the consciousness of the reporter who is sent out by the editor of a mass circulation newspaper to cover the air races at the new airport. As he wanders around the airport or through the city streets at night—New Valois, Franciana, an uncanny metropolitan labyrinth akin in so many respects to the surrealists’ Paris—the novel’s narrative language is com­ mandeered by his “excited impressionism,” his obsessive notation of the vis­ ible, an essential effect of which is to make visible what is being seen for the first time by anybody (Benjamin, “Return of the Flaneur” 262).3 Though he is employed by the newspaper, he operates essentially as a subject without any official identity, an anonymous integer immersed in “the one hundred percent image space” of the metropolis (whether its old quarter or suburban airport extension [Benjamin, “Surrealism” 217]). Below I will explore the extent to which “the strength ofhis precise reaction” (Adorno 70) to an unfolding reali­ ty—its relation to a given consciousness—contributes to the novel’s antifascist, analytical power, a power flowing from the embodied consciousness of “the inner man, the psyche, the individual” (Benjamin, “Surrealism” 217). Reading Pylon in this way depends on seeing New Valois as not only a real Southern re­ gional space, but also as an imaginary world space, a site in which the essential ‘I presented an early version of this paper at the American Literature Association (Boston, May 2007) on a panel, “The Space(s) of Faulkners Pylon: Politics, Economics, Culture,” organized by Peter Lurie. My thanks to Peter Lurie and fellow panellists Taylor Hagood and David M. Earle. I also thank Randall Wilhelm for his comments on that earlier draft and Marlene Briggs for getting me to read Robert Wohl. 2This is at least my third kick at this particular can. I discuss Pylons language in “Faulkner’s Pylon: The City in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and "Pylon, Joyce, and Faulkner’s Imagination.” 3“The Surrealists’ Paris, too, is a ‘little universe.’ That is to say, in the larger one, the cosmos, things look no different. There, too, are crossroads where ghostly signals flash from the traffic, and inconceivable analogies and connections between events are the order of the day” (Benjamin, “Surrealism” 211). 97 98 Michael Zeitlin Pylon and the Rise ofEuropean Fascism patterns of an emerging global logic can be isolated and explored in miniature. Kristin Kyoko Fujie captures the sense in which I conceive of Faulkners imagi­ nary geography here: “Faulkner’s ‘true ground’ or ‘native soil’ resides neither wholly within nor wholly without.... [I]t exists in between personal, regional, and national history, private fantasy and social reality, psychic projection and historical record” (123). Given his location as an incomparable witness to the rise ofEuropean fas­ cism in the 1920s and 30s, Walter Benjamin presides over what follows: “As a German he [Benjamin, speaking of himself] has long been acquainted with the crisis of the intelligentsia, or, more precisely, with that of the humanistic concept of freedom” (“Surrealism” 207). Benjamin characterizes the emerging global political crisis in 1929 in the following terms: Mistrust in the fate of literature, mistrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of European humanity, but three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals. And unlimited trust only in IG Farben and the peaceful perfecting ofthe air force. But what now? What next? (“Surrealism” 216-17)4 The answer begins with the solitary person who walks around the metropolitan landscape and observes it closely, delving beneath its...

In the wake of trauma: visualising the unspeakable/unthinkable in Marie Darrieussecq and Hélène Lenoir

In the course of the last thirty years trauma studies has been one of the fastest growing interdisciplinary fields. Arising in part as a result of renewed medical interest in the effects of traumat...

The Globalist Dimensions of Silent Shakespeare Cinema

The Globalist Dimensions of Silent Shakespeare Cinema Greg Colón Semenza (bio) When I hear a director speaking glibly of serving the author, of letting a play speak for itself, my suspicions are aroused. . . . If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound. If what you want is for the play to be heard, then you must conjure its sound from it. —Peter Brook1 In respectful disagreement with Samuel Crowl's description of the post World War II period as "the great international phase in Shakespeare's absorption into film,"2 and in response to recent studies of current Shakespeare cinema's globalist dimensions,3 I think it worth noting that Shakespeare film has been a thoroughly international phenomenon since its inception in the late nineteenth century. Moreover, recent debates regarding the ethical and political complexity of global Shakespeare cinema are similar to those engaged by early twentieth-century theorists focused on film as a new artistic medium, who openly questioned what they saw as film's vying fascistic and revolutionary potentialities. Especially in the 1920s and 30s, film commentators as varied as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, Charles Chaplin, and Sergei Eisenstein sought to understand the ideological effects of film, whether we mean by "film" a movie's content, montage style, imagery, production, or the psychological [End Page 320] dimensions of the cinematic apparatus itself. Further, just as many of today's postcolonial and global studies scholars "generate," in Sonia Massai's terms, "either rash and under-theorized eulogies of—or skeptical responses to—interculturalism," early twentieth-century thinkers tended to fall into two camps as they struggled to negotiate film's complex hybridity (Massai 2005: 5): its uneasy and seemingly contradictory role as both a radical new art form and, in Frederic Jameson's words, the "product of the most sophisticated forms of industrial production" (Jameson 1992: xiii). How might a comparative awareness of this earlier period's fascination with Shakespeare cast light on the phenomenon of twenty-first-century global Shakespeare cinema? In this essay I contemplate ways in which our current conversation might be usefully informed by the "globalism" of silent Shakespeare cinema and the historical cinematic movement from intertitles to subtitles to spoken dialogue in multiple languages. In referencing the "globalism" of modern Shakespeare cinema, one might draw on the fact that Shakespeare films have recently been produced or shot in such vastly distant non-Anglophone locales as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, Ghana, Greece, Holland, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Madagascar, Malaysia, Mexico, Nigeria, and Yugoslavia, just to mention a few. A growing body of scholarly work focuses on such films—particularly the ideological and political implications of their Shakespearean engagements.4 In the era of silent and early sound cinema, the term "global" has a less truly international reach, though I would wager that most readers will be surprised by how global silent cinema actually was. Nonetheless, because I am using "globalism" somewhat loosely, I should begin by briefly outlining my own understanding and employment of this notoriously vague term, which immediately and inevitably evokes a rather black and white divide described well by Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake: "the space of cultural production and national representation . . . is simultaneously becoming more globalized (unified around dynamics of capitalogic moving across borders) and more localized (fragmented into contestatory enclaves of difference, coalition and resistance) in everyday texture and composition" (Wilson and Dissanayake 1996: 1). Shakespeare and film scholar Mark Thornton Burnett has usefully streamlined the two opposed lines of thought captured here: "On the one hand," he argues, "globalization allows for bonding and interconnectivity; and, on the other, [End Page 321] policies of integration dislodge, divide and even eradicate the indigenous" (Burnett 2007: 2). This binary maps rather neatly onto countless other cultural studies debates: Benjamin's hope for art in the age of mechanical reproduction or Adorno's despair over the commodification of the art form; Foucault's deterministic power system or Bordieu's moldable habitus; colonialist erasures or the solidarity of Bhabha's "join"; containment or subversion? In Shakespeare studies specifically, historicist debates about Shakespeare's own radicalism or conservativism have gradually been overtaken by more reception-oriented studies...

The Elusive Allure of “Aura”: Sample-based Music and Benjamin’s Practice of Quotation

This article discusses both sample-based and electronic music in relation to Walter Benjamin’s infamous text, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The applicability of “aura” to such music is questioned, in favour of other considerations, such as practices of collecting, remembering, selecting, and connecting. The relationships between performance, “liveness,” and technologically enabled forms of music are explored. Authors who have written about Benjamin’s text in relation to modern audio (re)production are compared and contrasted. I also reference interviews I conducted with a group of sample-based sound artists from Montréal, Canada, between 2004 and 2005. My discussion brings me to Benjamin’s use of Leonardo da Vinci’s disparaging comments about music compared with painting in the latter’s Paragone. I conclude by asserting that Benjamin’s practice of quotation is more relevant than his conception of “aura” in terms of discussing “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in relation to contemporary, reproduction-based artistic practices such as electronic and/or sample-based music.

Who Sells Out?: Petra Haden in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

In 2005, Petra Haden released her version of The Who Sell Out, notable for the meticulousness and creativity with which she mimicked the various instruments on the album, and for the fact that she produced the project with an eight-track recorder and only her own voice. This article examines the ways in which Haden’s interpretation of the classic album elevates it into the realm of “high art” while retaining its status as a commodity within the realm of popular music. Although the Who’s original recording (1967) was one of the first concept albums, its unification comes not through a storyline or characters, as with other albums of that era, but through the foregrounding of its existence as a commodity. Radio jingles for both real and fake products are interspersed among the genuine commodities of pop songs, and the cover art features the Who in fake advertisements. Haden includes the jingles and even the cover artwork in her interpretation, but the changes she makes through generating every sound with her voice provide a level of unification that the original album does not possess. Haden’s live reinterpretation (with her band the Sellouts) casts doubt on what constitutes the “authentic” version of the album, since the current lineup of the Who (two surviving members and various supporting musicians) no longer performs the material. Ultimately, Petra Haden Sings: The Who Sell Out functions as an art project that goes beyond the original album’s intent.

The Printed Illustration of Medieval Architecture in Pre-Enlightenment Europe

The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of readers a series of significant examples of texts printed prior to 1700 and illustrated with images of medieval architecture in continental Europe. British illustrations of buildings and ruins from the Middle Ages have received relevant attention from modern scholarly writers, but studies of analogous continental examples are lacking. Illustrations of medieval architecture have been little considered in most studies of the Early Modern period, as compared with those of their sixteenth-to eighteenth-century counterparts. In addition, the few studies that do exist of the interest in medieval buildings and illustration of them, prior to the ‘age of mechanical reproduction’, have generally been restricted to monographs on individual antiquarians or else have focused on Enlightenment, Romantic and Positivist criticism, and have tended to concentrate on medieval revivalism. Furthermore, with the exception of a few studies on the perception of the Romanesque, the most frequently investigated category has been the Gothic. Hence, despite the existence of some crucial works, the perspectives adopted in research into Early Modern attitudes to medieval architecture have inevitably been limited. We still lack any comprehensive overview of the architecture of the Middle Ages as a whole (that is, including the Late Antique / Early Christian era), or any studies showing genuine interest in the late Renaissance and Baroque roots of subsequent antiquarian medievalism. This article, therefore, attempts to begin to fill such a lacuna by studying the architectural aspect of those pre-Enlightenment illustrations of medieval antiquities that appeared in continental Europe, and by considering scholars’ awareness of the entire medieval millennium.

The Friendly Games—The ‘Official’ IOC Film of the 1956 Melbourne Olympics as Historical Record

In the mid-1990s, an initiative was taken by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to acquire and restore existing historical footage of Olympic Games.1 For these purposes the IOC established t...

Ekphrasis and the Creative Process in Henri Michaux's En revant a partir de peintures enigmatiques (1972)

Ekphrasis is examined here in terms of the creative process behind Henri Michaux’s En revant a partir de peintures enigmatiques (1972), a collection of prose poems inspired by the paintings of Rene Magritte. Ekphrasis will be primarily understood as a verbal description of a visual work of art; Michaux’s use of this technique will be seen to question its traditional boundaries and limitations. Analysing Michaux’s exploration of the processes of literary creation through ekphrasis in this text also highlights Magritte’s similarly playful interrogation of representation. A central concern here is the ekphrastic work’s constant struggle to dis engage from its source of inspiration whilst being in itself a prolonged engagement with this source. Michaux’s interpretation and manipulation of images (Magritte’s paintings) and the literary form (the prose poem) are also explored in terms of his dual status as artist-writer. Given that grainy photographs are the basis of Michaux’s initial encounter with many of the paintings described, what is the status of the painting and its potential to generate ekphrasis in the age of mechanical reproduction? How might the ‘visual poetry’ of Magritte be recreated or interpreted in a poetic work?

Audible identities: passing and sound technologies

At the March 2008 conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections held at Stanford University, audio historians played what they claim is the first recording of the human voice. It is a presumably female voice singing Au clair de la lune, though the distorted quality of the 10-second recording renders the words no more decipherable than the singer's gender to an untutored ear.1 The recording was made in Paris in April 1860 on a 'phonautograph' invented by Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville (aka Leon Scott), nearly 20 years before Thomas Edison patented the phonograph in 1877. Sound waves captured by a horn attached to a diaphragm vibrated a stiff brush that inscribed the pattern of waves on blackened paper. Scott wanted to produce a visual inscription of human speech but had not yet conceptualised sound as something that could be audibly reproduced; that would be Edison's contribution when he replaced Scott's paper with a more pliable and durable substance: tin foil and later wax cylinders.2 The recent recovery of Scott's early inscription foregrounds the historicity of listening itself. As many scholars have pointed out, audition is organised differently by sound technology so that how we hear, not just what we hear, changes. Hearing becomes historical not just physiological; listening becomes technique. A new form of listening entails a new concept of sound itself. 'Phonautograph' means, literally, sound writing itself (which is the subtitle of Scott's 1878 book); thus the term ignores the very machine that is reproducing the voice. 'Phonautograph' suggests that the sound is literally there, textually inscribed on the blackened paper, and thus, technically, is not a re- production. Embedded in Scott's nomenclature is the germ of the debates that sound technology has aroused in the modernist era over the relative value of - and indeed, the very distinction between - original and copy, live and recorded, authentic and mechanically produced, sincerity and fakery, reproduction and representation. The confusion of those borderlines is graphically presented in the image of the dog with his ear to the horn of the gramophone listening to 'his master's voice' (a trademark first acquired by the London Gramophone Company in 1898 and used by Emile Berliner from 1900), as well as in anecdotes, cartoons, photographs and advertisements from the time in which people mistake the talking machine for a person talking, the mimetic representation for the 'real thing'. That slippage between the Uve and the recorded, the original and the copy, is precisely the achievement of sound technology; it is not a mistake but what makes it work. In that slippage lies the key to a new, modernist understanding not just of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, but of subjectivity itself. That kind of slippage is one that I have explored elsewhere in terms of 'passing'.3 Passing has conventionally been understood, especially in the United States, as a social practice whereby an individual assumes an identity that does not by rights belong to him or her.4 Most commonly, it refers to light-skinned African Americans living, or at least socialising, as white, which is how modernists would have understood the term. More contemporary usage expands the concept to include many different kinds of identifications across apparently distinct identity boundaries. The term is often deployed in a pejorative sense, as passing is likely to be associated with impersonation, appropriation or deception. Metaphorical uses of the term (for example, as in 'he's passing as a feminist') might seem to elide the particular historical conditions that motivated passing in its first cultural sense, such as laws against miscegenation, segregated public spaces and community-sanctioned violence. Even in its original historical meaning, however, passing was far more complicated than the notion of adopting a fraudulent identity would suggest. Passing was not just a response to rigidly imposed racial boundaries; it exposed those boundaries - social, legal, corporeal - as cultural, discursive and permeable. …

From Film Restoration to Digital Emulation

Walter Benjamin laments loss of aura of original work of art in his 1936 essay, Work of Art in Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin, 1969). Artist Douglas Davis revisits Benjamin's premise in his essay, Work of Art in Age of Digital Reproduction, suggesting that mutability of original has spawned a new era of creativity (Davis, 1995). As digital records quickly replace analog records, archivists are facing new challenges in preserving, describing, and providing continuing access to these new forms of digital multi-media. Traditional archival theory has centered around paper-based records for which archives have physical custody. These records are produced on a stable, human-readable medium. Digital records, however, are technologically dependent, unreadable to human eye, and do not exist in a physical form. The preservation of these complicated records requires a rethinking of theory and practice and presents ethical challenges for which current codes of ethics provide little guidance.Moving image and other archivists have faced many of these same challenges posed by digital documents through their work with analog media. The myriad formats incorporated under umbrella term audiovisual are also plagued by obsolescence and technological dependence. In addition, as analog formats become obsolete and information must be migrated and reformatted, archivists face a number of ethical decisions similar to those faced by archives preserving digital records.Currently, Society of American Archivists (SAA) and other similar organizations provide little guidance for archivists working with records. For this reason, Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) has been working to develop its own code of ethics to establish a stronger professional identity within archival profession. The organization provides important resources including The Moving Image, a journal dedicated to crucial issues surrounding preservation, archiving, and restoration of film, video, and digital moving images (Association of Moving Image Archivists, n.d). The International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) also provides important resources, including The Journal of Film Preservation, and ethical guidelines for moving image archivists. A number of film history and theory journals (Film History, The Velvet Light Trap, and Cinema Journal) also offer outlets for archivists to publish their research. Increasingly, archivists must look outside mainstream archival literature, which focuses on text-based records.On an Archival EdgeFilm has historically been marginalized as a distinct and separate medium in archives and other collecting institutions. Examples of this notion can be found at beginnings of film history. To obtain copyright for their works, early filmmakers were required to submit paper-prints, copies of their films printed on rolls of photographic paper, to Library of Congress. Today, many archives house film and other media in their collection, but still regard these documents as distinct from textual records. A quote from journal of an early advocate of film archives, still holds true today: the film neither a print nor a book, nor-in-fact, everybody could say what it not; but nobody could say what it was (Bottomore, 1995, p. 293). As a result of this marginalization, few archives have ability to properly store, describe, and provide access to media.In her discussion of appraisal, Nancy Marrellini summarizes attitude toward archival materials:... I save it all.... I don't have equipment and resources right now-but one day I will and I'll deal with it then.... Some of stuff might be really important to someone some day-and they'll pay big bucks for using it. The cost of reformatting is too steep for us. I'll just leave it all on shelf for now and reformat things that people request. …

Sacrum in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction

In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Walter Benjamin discusses a loss of the aura through the rise of photography and cinema. The notion of aura for Benjamin represents the originality and authenticity of a work of art that has not been reproduced. But at the same time it represents connection of the realm of art to the experience of the sacrum. The article deals with the correlation between the loss of aura and the desacralisation of the contemporary world.

What's Old is NEU! Benjamin Meets Rother and Dinger

Taking the music of NEU! as its object and Walter Benjamin's “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as its theoretical touchstone, this paper performs an analysis of NEU!'s music and its contribution to the formation of a new German identity in the early 1970s. The paper concludes that, in their use of the skeletal motorik pulse of Krautrock and their ability to engender a critical positionality in the listener, NEU! produce a rubble music that takes the best from the German past and reassembles it into a roadmap for a new way forward.

A Critical Reading of Walter Benjamin´s The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

A Critical Reading of Walter Benjamin´s The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

The Production of Aura in the Gramophone Age of the “Live” Performance

�� ��� Th is essay examines the impact of mass media on the cultivation, consumption, and connoisseurship of Hindustani music in the 20th century. I propose that the gramophone transformed listening habits as it normalized the repetition of listening. Th is, paradoxically, impelled a new phenomenon known as the “live” event, which had the novel quality that it could be experienced only as a single, momentary, and evanescent instant. Consequently, for many connoisseurs in the postcolonial public, the “live” performance took on the status of a momentous event; as something that could not be preserved and therefore as something that was uniquely singular and passing. With a music now understood as resistant to capture and preservation, it became embedded with a uniquely modern aura of singularity. In this new environment, the Hindustani musician assumed a new role as a celebrated national emblem, a decided shift from his/her preindependence role as a denigrated feudal anachronism. In referring to Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay, “Th e Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” I intend only a tangential place in the dialogue that he helped to animate. Th is essay does not therefore address the very important debate about the emancipatory possibilities of mass media, as articulated by Walter Benjamin, or of their repressive eff ects, as articulated by Th eodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. 2 Nor do I presume to contribute to the exegesis of what Benjamin meant by his notion of aura, which I take here to mean a premodern ethos attached to an artwork that faded in the modern era of mass reproduction. 3 What I would like instead to describe are the unique circumstances of postcolonial India whereby a modern aura could develop, even if a premodern aura withered. Th is characterization of a contemporary aura would contravene more commonly held views among musicians, musicologists, and connoisseurs concerning the “shattering of tradition” as the central crisis of Hindustani music; a crisis that is set against the assumption of a golden age that existed either in the ancient “classical” or “feudal” past. 4 What we will instead see are the rather unique circumstances where the postindependence “present” could come to stand as a high point for this “classical” tradition even against the more commonplace statements of its decline and decay.

A Moment's Daydreaming

A Moment's Daydreaming