Walter Benjamin
The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
Or THE DARK PHOENIX SAGA:
I didn’t agree with all of the specifics in the observations and can’t place many of the references in this work, but I do think he is a great thinker and a gentle man. In the writing he makes some strong points about public to private psychology and the mechanism of the technologies that influence them.
I do see that personal relationship has been supplanted through the mechanism of explicit reproduction. Starting with print matter, there has been a shift of human touchstones away from shared experience to an objective other (which has become known as the media). This has created a new language of social image and personal identification. For instance, since the creation of media, when making an acquaintance instead of referencing your personal life in relation to theirs, the common experience of sitcoms (and the commercials around them) takes precedence as a premade language of interaction. This causes a break in effective use of personality, because personality is based on a larger one-way interaction with media and not a dialogue that is immediate and participatory.
Benjamin’s speaks of this when “addressing the camera”, the camera machine creates a context of time and space, it can place represented action into existence anywhere at any time and these actions (since they come from a machine) seem to be an objective touchstone. So the way a thing is viewed in a social context becomes the definition of its use and meaning, more than it use within a personal interaction (you know your G.I. Joe through a TV show and not as the experience of a plastic doll sitting in your living room).
Masses are then created by a singular point of reference; this point does not change or changes so slowly that it is perceived as a fixed thing between people. With the making of mass identity people instinctually attempt to interact and influence the mass social identity that has entombed them. They can do this either by representing themselves as themselves within the identity (the soviet film reference), or positioning an enhanced reality, one of promise and psychological extrapolation (the futurist/Nazism reference). The counter point to a mass identity is the fulfillment or perceived fulfillment of these pathologies, so in the 20th century there was nation war.
War became the fulfillment of a singular aesthetic of the individual’s nation. War contained the embodiment of what they saw as whom they can and want to be. Corporatist consumerism takes the place of war in the 21st century. The pathologic fulfillment of Nazi/Facist aesthetic need is seen as granted by the physical act of purchasing. It is used to fulfill the emotional promise of media and therefore ourselves since we view the self through the lens of media. It is inherently a distant prospect because the represented reality (the social touchstone of TV, movies and so on) always keeps ahead of us.
These representations are a cumulative expression of selective human notions and not traditional places of identity (they make real, words and not what they represent). Example: when New York is portrayed in film you turn a corner and move from Brooklyn to Manhattan, this is done by pasting together selected images of circumstances with a completely different original order (like they are doing today (Sunday) down the street). This emphasizes one group’s concept as to what New York is and can be. This concept is then showed around the world and creates a cultural language that IS New York, it is the place that everyone is moving to. END Example.
Different technologies create and allow for the interactions that define the space in which people live aesthetically and verbally. There is no change in social-psychological space because there is a pervasive ability to be in a quasi space all the time. The lines between public and private are blurred creating a personal stagnation in social relation and technique. Example: when you go to a party you enter what is a psychologically public space but you can function within a private space by talking on your cell phone. Or conversely at home you can be in a public space by watching TV or interacting online. END Example. In both public actions a one sided conversation takes place you are addressing or being addressed by an assumed mass public that is a created convention. So with no immediate dictates of physiological action or reference, media is reemphasized as the solid space in which to interact. Just as in the dark phoenix saga, where Jean Grey is manipulated by a fictional world (created at the hands of Mastermind) to unleash the dark phoenix side to her abilities. The corporatist media has created a fictional environment tailored to the production of a skewed mass identity. And using what she and we think as normal emotive responses to the fictional scenery, we have the ability to support what we hate and destroy what we love…………
But Thanks to Stan Lee and Walter Benjamin.
Hope springs eternal.
