On Rereading. Again.
I’ve been intermittently concerned, over the last weeks, with questions of repetition, particularly surrounding the scholarly impetus to reread and rewrite. Now I’m replaying those concerns, as I find myself teaching Adorno & Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry” and Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” for what must be the eighty-fifth time.
There’s not much getting around it—the two essays are sufficiently key to almost any culturalist or materialist approach to media theory that they are a necessary starting point for half of my classes. The catch is that media studies majors here, who generally take more than one class from me, get Frankfurt-schooled in multiple fashion. I don’t think that’s a bad thing—in fact, I exhort my students who have read these essays before to re-read them carefully, with new eyes (figuratively, that is) each time—but there comes a point in my (re-)teaching when I could use a little shot in the arm, a little refresher of my own.
I’m planning to re-read, yes. But I’m afraid I’ve been through the essays so many times that I can’t step back from them enough to see them afresh. So here’s my call for help, for those of you who work with these essays: what’s the most important thing in them that you feel too often gets overlooked? What have I, lo these eighty-four previous sessions, missed?
4 September 2003, 5.59 pm
a&h the relation to and understanding of fascism, in short the scaryness of its context and how that is somewhat disguised
b the non-transcendent nature of an artifacts aura(though some argue aura is transcendent, i think you learn otherwise in the arcades project)
4 September 2003, 8.42 pm
In one of my recent re-readings, Benjamin’s discussion of “unconscious optics” really blew me away.
I’m teaching “The Storyteller” next week, for the first time, so any suggestion there would be welcome.
5 September 2003, 6.23 am
parallelly, sometimes contraposing benjamin’s optics and virilio’s vision can be fruitful
5 September 2003, 6.58 am
Manovich does that in “The Language of New Media,” but I’m suspicious of some of his claims there. I don’t think that Benjamin is privileging distance in the “Work of Art” essay when he talks about the aura, but you’re right, it is an interesting comparison.
5 September 2003, 7.14 am
Great thoughts—particularly the question of the “unconscious optics.” I’m going to have to look more closely at that. I also like the question of the transcendance of the aura; it had never occurred to me that it could be read as transcendant, and now I think I understand a bit more my students’ frequent conclusion that the aura is a good thing that we’re losing (i.e., mass culture=bad).
Conveniently enough, we’ll be reading Virilio at the end of the semester, so we’ll make the parallel then…
9 September 2003, 8.20 am
KF,
There is the tactic of close reading through “electro-mechanical” reproduction: a chunk of Benjamin in English run through the Babblefish translator to another language and then back again to English. It certainly reveals spots worthy of reconsideration.
There is a ramble through Benjamin’s sexual politics in the construction of the concept of “aura”. See http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/S2I.HTM
Love to read more about how the students approach rereading.