gcraighobbs /201 /1010

10/10 - Ideology of Media

Reflections on Benjamin and Aarseth

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Walter Benjamin’s classic text The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction forces Marxist praxis upon art history in a wonderfully vicious manner. Benjamin’s end game is the refutation of fascism vis-à-vis the politicization of art history. This makes for a compelling read, and his text continues to inspire me as an artist decade after decade. Through Hegelian means, Benjamin’s elucidation of art history and the role of emerging technologies in its morphogenesis is both seductive and revolutionary.

It is difficult to critique The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - a text so dense in art, philosophy, politics, history, and conjecture. But I do take issue early on when Benjamin states, “for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitic dependence on ritual.”

I would rephrase this sentence, “for the first time in world history, a mechanism exists to sever the ties between ritual and systems of control such as the church, the state, the RIAA and the MPAA. That mechanism is reproduction. A ritual of reproduction designed to replace outmoded concepts of productivity. Its methods include sampling, noise, re-appropriation, re-cycling, copyright infringement, hacking, and system entropy.”

Ritual, of course, also serves a key function in spiritual practices emerging at the intersection of technology, culture, and nature. Practices which pay homage to sectarian pursuits outside of the destructive tendencies of organized religions. And though emerging rituals – informed as much by ancient traditions as by digital technology – can just as easily engender the same power dynamics of organized religion, they at least embark from fertile ground void of thousands of years of sexual oppression and bloodshed.

Benjamin predates the mechanical art practiced by organizations such as Psychic TV, Indymedia, and You_Tube, although his essay clearly presages ensuing global movements of ritual technology and the decentralized information hierarchy. Today, the proletariat reveal their interests, desires, and opinions daily. But I sometimes wonder if that is necessarily a good thing.

I must commend Benjamin for his bold rejection of fascism. In this sense, his political half-life is extended indefinitely. For fascism is indeed alive and well in America. However silent, its spiked claws are buried deep in the flesh of everyday Americans. We can blame George Bush for this, or ourselves. I guess it depends on how you define yourself as an “American”. Either way, it would do us well to heed Benjamin’s prophetic statement,

“Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.”

We All Want to Change the World

Espen Aarseth in his essay We All Want to Change the World sets out on a path not unlike Benjamin. He updates the argument, draws it out, and attempts to “revolutionize” the terms of discussion though structuralist analysis of digital nomenclature.

Aarseth’s elucidation of ideology is perhaps the sole aspect of his project I respect. The subconscious, tacit, collective worldview, transparent, seeing and feeling before thinking notion of ideologues he borrows from Althusser and Kavanagh. This critique of “digital culture” is one I think Aarseth could explore through a broader application of Hegelian dialectics and a deeper analysis of computing, in general.

The problem rests with Aarseth’s lightweight approach. Resting his key argument upon 3 words alone – interactivity, hypertext, virtuality – mining the safest vestibules of philosophy, history, and semiotics with barely a hint of politics. Aarseth would be advised to polish up on his Nietzsche, Heidegger, Kant, and Adorno.

I can accept his attempts to reclaim media from the “new”, I can accept the need to clarify and expand upon the term “interactive”, and I can honor his cursory knowledge of computing history enough to accept clarification of the term “hypertext”. (Aarseth does situate himself “in the know” with a chronological history of modern networking – email, usenet, linux, sms, etc.)

But I firmly disagree with Aarseth’s statement, “The virtual as a communicative mode parallel to stories, represents something truly new (?): an innovation not only of technology but of how we interpret and represent the world.” (Note: My ?, not his.)

After taking the new out of new media, Aarseth’s above quote stands in direct contradiction to his ideological enterprise, revealing once again the compulsion of the critic to become the ideologue. I can hardly blame him. It is an unfortunate by-product of the intellectual enterprise and of subject/object language itself.

In the end, I feel talked down to by Aarseth. I simply do not need a re-definition of terms which work perfectly in the colloquial sense. Words like hypertext and interactive. In this way, Aarseth attempts to expound upon ideas I would originally credit to Benjamin, a man who knows what side he is on.

And that is the problem, Aarseth suffers from a limp wrist, or at least a bogus understanding of what is, and what isn’t “real”. I will conclude my short rant with two examples.

In the first, Aarseth states, “To imply that there is functional or cognitive equality between human and machine is ludicrous.” I suggest Aarseth posit that question to Kasparov. Displaying characteristics of fight-or-flight behavour in his chess battle with IBM’s Big Blue, it is clear that in this instance the computer has not only taken on an anthropomorphic character for its contendor, but that its functional and cognitive superiority in an assigned task – winning at chess – is now proven. Aarseth might also want to ask this question of a robot on an assembly line previously occupied by the proletariat.

The problem here for Aarseth is that he resorts to a certain wholistic worldview when, and only when, it is convenient. When speaking of computers, we are speaking in material – not spiritual - terms. A material reality that intersects with our cognitive function as humans. And when a computer – the by-product of human intellect and material reality - can complete with a human on a segmented task (such as chess), then that object has been imbued with human intellect which can, and will, compete with a human.

The second is as follows… Regarding Aarseth’s disillusion with the academic use of the term “interactivity,” he comments on, ”its unfortunate tendency to equate human qualities with machine capabilities.” And suggest that this undertaking is futile.

The desire to imbue machines with human characteristics is the driving force behind robotics, artificial intelligence, and androids in space movies. The desire to imbue humans with machine capabilities is the driving force behind capitalism, religious dogma, and war mongers. That these bedfellows – scientists and dictators – seek to create the ultimate man/machine and use it to destroy the human race, supplanting us with genetically engineered clones and artificial life forms: that should not confuse Espen Aarseth. But it does.