Mimesis as a defensive reflex is the essence of factory labor: “[W]orkers learn to coordinate their own ‘movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton.’”7 Exploitation is not only economic, but cognitive. The factory system injures every one of the human senses, paralyzing the imagination of the worker. His or her work is “sealed off from experience”; memory is replaced by conditioned response, learning by “drill,” skill by repetition: “practice counts for nothing.”8 Perception becomes experience only when it connects with sense-memories of the past; but for the “protective eye” that wards off impressions, “there is no daydreaming surrender to faraway things.”9 Bombarded with fragmentary impressions, this protective eye sees too much—and registers nothing. Thus the simultaneity of overstimulation and numbness that is characteristic of the new organization of the human sensorium, which now takes the form of anaesthetics. Benjamin understood the October Revolution of 1917 in terms of this trauma of wartime destruction, as the “first attempt of mankind to bring the new body [of technology] under control.”21 His exposure and conversion to what he called a “radical Communism” was the result of his love relationship with Asja Lacis, a Latvian actress and stage director who worked with Brecht (and whom he met in Capri in 1924). The cultural avant-garde of which Lacis was a part seemed to him to differ decisively from Jugendstil’s dream-form of revolution. Eschewing escapist phantasmagorias, revolutionary art confronted the shock of modern experience directly and, taking its lead from film montage, it made out of fragmentation a constructive principle. Rather than retreating to private environments ornamented with designs inspired by the natural world of flowers and organic life, it affirmed industrial technology as the new “nature,” and placed itself, like a corps of engineers or laboratory scientists, at the service of social transformation. This avant-garde viewed culture not as a compensation for industrialization, but as its actualization. Benjamin understood the October Revolution of 1917 in terms of this trauma of wartime destruction, as the “first attempt of mankind to bring the new body [of technology] under control.”21 His exposure and conversion to what he called a “radical Communism” was the result of his love relationship with Asja Lacis, a Latvian actress and stage director who worked with Brecht (and whom he met in Capri in 1924). The cultural avant-garde of which Lacis was a part seemed to him to differ decisively from Jugendstil’s dream-form of revolution. Eschewing escapist phantasmagorias, revolutionary art confronted the shock of modern experience directly and, taking its lead from film montage, it made out of fragmentation a constructive principle. Rather than retreating to private environments ornamented with designs inspired by the natural world of flowers and organic life, it affirmed industrial technology as the new “nature,” and placed itself, like a corps of engineers or laboratory scientists, at the service of social transformation. This avant-garde viewed culture not as a compensation for industrialization, but as its actualization. It is plausible to argue that the fate of the twentieth-century avant-garde “proves” that art is impotent politically, dependent on power, of whatever sort, and vulnerable to appropriation by the status quo. It is equally plausible to claim that twentieth-century art and architecture has had its own history, undergoing a transnational, indeed global development, impervious to political boundaries and independent of political events. But to be true to Benjamin, who rejected all approaches to the history of art as a separate discourse, our story should be one of politics, not art. Its construction would mean ripping pieces of the past out of traditional narratives “with a seemingly brutal grasp” in order to salvage them from the debris of the cultural meaning-systems of this century. It would mean bringing these pieces together, not in a linear narrative, but in constellations that set the political tendencies of the present into question. So let me suggest a concluding version of that story, which will bring us back to the city, dreamworld and catastrophe.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:27:01 +0000
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