Walter Benjamin's Theory of Distraction

Yesterday I was informed via Twitter that it was Walter Benjamin's birthday. And as someone who's lately needed occasions (however arbitrary) for reading, I pulled one of his books off the shelf: the third volume in a set of anthologies I've up to this point mostly ignored. (I always figured Illuminations and Reflections were sufficient surveys of Benjamin's writing.) In it, I found this fragment, a list of speculative theses and directions for thinking about the development of technology and its role in the regimes of art, perception, and politics. Not surprisingly, the anthology associates it with the composition of what is probably Benjamin's most read essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducability," and dates its writing between 1935-1936.

Theory of Distraction
Attempt to determine the effect of the work of art once its power of consecration has been eliminated
Parasitic existence of art as based on the sacred
In its concern with educational value, "The Author as Producer" disregards consumer value
It is in film that the work of art is most susceptible to becoming worn out
Fashion is an indispensable factor in the acceleration of the process of becoming worn out
The values of distraction should be defined with regard to film, just as the values of catharsis are defined with regard to tragedy
Distraction, like catharsis, should be conceived as a physiological phenomenon
Distraction and destruction as the subjective and objective sides, respectively, of one and the same process
The relation of distraction to absorption must be examined
The survival of artworks should be represented from the standpoint of their struggle for existence
Their true humanity consists in their unlimited adaptability
The criterion for judging the fruitfulness of their effect is the communicability of this effect
The educational value and the consumer value of art may converge in certain optimal cases (as in Brecht), but they don't generally coincide
The Greeks had only one form of (mechanical) reproduction: minting coins
They could not reproduce their artworks, so these had to be lasting; hence eternal art
Just as the art of the Greeks was geared toward lasting, so the art of the present is geared toward becoming worn out
This may happen in two different ways: through consignment of the artwork to fashion or through the work's refunctioning in politics
Reproducibility–distraction–politicization
Educational value and consumer value converge, thus making possible a new kind of learning
Art comes into contact with the commodity; the commodity comes into contact with art

From Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935-38. Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland et. al. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Kendrick Lamar - "Alright"

Kendrick Lamar continues his incredible streak with the new video for "Alright," one of many highlights from this year's To Pimp a Butterfly. Although I've listened to the album several dozen times, it continues to thrill and unsettle me. "Alright" appears about halfway through and features part of the heavy monologue that peppers TPAB. Throughout the album, Lamar repeatedly cites "Lucy" while discussing his fame and his experiences with depression. But this isn't simply a spiritual battle, nor should it be an individual one.

Released back in March, Lamar's album remains timely. It also remains a useful tool for thinking through intersectional issues like race and class: a guide for those of us trying to wrap our heads around what's going on across North America, where white supremacy continues to spread violence and ignorance. For more background on To Pimp a Butterfly, check out this essay by Michelle Huxtable, which remains the most thorough review I've read.

Bento's Sketchbook

The other day I picked up John Berger's short book on drawing. It's one of several titles I've collected over the past year that focus specifically on the practice of drawing, as opposed to other forms of image-making. In the field of image studies, books on photography are as plentiful as they are canonical; in contrast, drawing, or conventional illustration for that matter, rarely receives much critical attention when it comes to discussions of form and practice.

In Bento's Sketchbook Berger reflects on his own attempts to render the world around him, pairing his rough, often charming sketches with quotations from Bento (Baruch or  Benedict de Spinoza), who once kept a sketchbook and drew in it regularly. Spinoza's sketchbook, Berger admits, has never been recovered. But when the British art critic receives an unused sketchbook from a Polish printer, he finds himself imagining a spiritual union with the sixteenth-century philosopher. That union is achieved through the practice of putting pen to paper. "As time goes by," he writes, "the two of us – Bento and I – become less distinct. Within the act of looking, the act of questioning with our eyes, we become somewhat interchangeable. And this happens, I guess, because of a shared awareness about where and to what the practice of drawing can lead."

In an interview for the Paris Review around the time of the book's publication in 2011, Berger describes Bento's Sketchbook as a political book, in line with the interests and urgency that have defined his writing career. 

There was always this connection between art and all the other things that were happening in the world at the time, many of which were, in the wider sense of the word, political. For me, Bento’s Sketchbook, though it’s about drawing and flowers and Velasquez, among other things, is actually a political book. It’s an attempt to look at the world today and to try to face up to both the hope and despair that millions of people live with.

But the best takeaway from the interview occurs at its end, where Berger elaborates on one of the book's more intriguing sections. Midway through, Bento's Sketchbook draws on the analogy of riding a motorcycle to explain the way drawing diminishes distance between the artist and her subject. As your pen maintains the line of a contour, the artist is "riding a drawing" the way one rides a bike. "The challenge of drawing is this," Berger writes, paraphrasing Spinoza, "to make visible on the paper or drawing surface not only discrete, recognizable things, but also to show how the extensive is one substance." Berger compares his experience riding a motorcycle to Spinoza's work as a lens grinder; both are about fostering different ways of seeing, different forms of mediation that navigate the gravitation pull of formlessness. When this analogy is raised in the Paris Review, Berger responds (as a cyclist myself, I prefer to substitute "bicycle" for "motorbike"):

There are really two things about riding a motorbike that help to explain my passion for it. One is that the relation between a decision and its consequences is so close. And since you are so vulnerable, it demands a quality of observation that is extremely intense. This observation is not only of what is happening but also of what may happen in the very next instant. Most bikers observe ten times more than those driving four-wheeled vehicles—their actual survival depends on it!

Faith Healer - "Canonized"

"That Battle is Over"

"That Battle is Over" is a song overflowing with sarcasm, a glib survey of contemporary post-feminism – a site of conflict now dominated by what Nina Power has described as the "one dimensional woman," the feminine subject of late capitalism, where the hard won freedom of past feminist struggles culminates in the freedom to buy and the imperative to safeguard one's identity against precarious material conditions. Now Power's critique has a video to match.

Hval's song parodies the route taken by a good deal of anti-(or post)feminist discourse: gender equality has been won – that battle is over – and it's now simply up to individuals to choose the life they want. It's not uncommon for that same discursive field to privilege victim blaming, to understand power/agency as a matter of individual choice. What such discourse overlooks, in other words, are the conditions under which one's choices take place, the intersectional nature of oppression and the limitations of our current moment.

What we witness in this video are not scenes of contemporary solidarity but images of antiquated retreat: morose glimpses of conventional feminine activity. Such activity has been a crucial source of support for the proliferation of the nuclear family, not to mention white suburbia. As Hval poses her first few questions ("What are we taking care of?"), we're led into a dimly lit home, a worn-out domestic space: what has been the hidden site of work for many middle class North American women. Here, the role of caregiving demands to be performed: cooking, cleaning, attending to the needs of one's children. In the midst of these archetypes, our guide simply surveys the scene. She appears to be in uniform (a figure who has ostensibly benefitted from first wave feminism) returning from the labour force to that space which was once hers to look after.

The tinted colour palette, along with a cameo from Melissa Auf der Maur, draws parallels to the aesthetics of iconic videos from the mid-90s: videos by Hole, PJ Harvey and others, which, in their own ways, pointed to feminism's unfinished business. Despite the great progress made by women's movements, misogyny and sexism remain all to familiar. The male gaze continues to structure much of our popular culture and these videos, like Hval's, draw the viewer's externality into question. The figures who populate videos like "Violet" and "Down By The Water" are aware that they are being watched; they stare back into the spotlight that exposes them, recognizing the power of spectacle, which has become theirs to subvert. Their performances are parodic, but each one also approaches something emancipatory: an awareness of the deep power that spans across generations of mothers and daughters, a power that surpasses the residues of patriarchy and outshines its spectacles.

The video's director, Zia Anger, also provides some commentary:

I guess it goes back to '96 for me, and the ‘girl power’ mantra I've been repeating since I learned it from the Spice Girls. The female experience is far from singular (and even further from this white, suburban, American-retro dream), yet around every corner there is a common pain, a wisdom of ecstasy, and an obsession with the uncanny that we all share. Collaborating with an entirely female creative team (with the support of a few great gentlemen) gave birth to an exploration of Jenny's song and an inquiry into the sarcasm that pulses through it.

Jenny Hval's Apocalypse, girl arrives this June via Sacred Bones.

 

"No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross"

Virginia Woolf - "Craftmanship" (1937)

The only known surviving recording of Virginia Woolf is part of a BBC radio broadcast from 1937, from a talk entitled “Craftsmanship.”