Inspired by “The Net (30)”
How his thinking about mass production might have implications everywhere.
Chetan is right: the thought of Walter Benjamin is a wellspring of brilliance, and Benjamin deserves a wider and deeper reading. The Arcades Project amazed me a decade ago, and I find it hard not to reference “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in every conversation about art. Theory Underground in a recent discussion with Cadell Last reminded me of the genius of Karl Jasper, and that is yet another thinker who I fear I have not given the attention he deserves. The days are too short…
Here, inspired by “Net (30),” I wanted to make a point regarding “mass reproduction” and how the way it can cause art to lose “aura” might apply more widely to other fields. For Benjamin (with whom Walker Percy agreed), now that it is possible to see pictures of the Mona Lisa anywhere in the world, when we see the original, it no longer has the same “aura”; in fact, we can be disappointed. The painting is duller than we thought, and the museum crowded. Is this what everyone was excited to see? Disheartened, we might leave the gallery wondering why everyone was so adamant that the painting was “beautiful,” which can lead us into concluding that “beauty is subjective” and simply “an elitist practice.” This can contribute to the loss of beauty, as discussed in “On the Objectivity of Beauty,” which arose from a discussion between me and Thomas Jockin regarding the severity and consequences of this problem.
Michelle noted how seeing pictures of the Mona Lisa everywhere can make us feel like we “ought” to go see it, and yet those very reproductions can lessen the “aura” of what we feel like we “ought” to see. There is an irony here, for what confirms something is worth seeing may reduce the power and beauty of the thing we feel we should go see. If this is the case, works of art may make us feel tricked, and this might supercharge the feeling that “beauty is a trick” and “there’s no such thing as beauty,” which I feel will be extremely consequences. Why exactly is the case is hopefully made well enough by The Fate of Beauty.
In “The Net (30),” we started discussing how “mass reproduction” might not just negatively impact art, but also politics, education — everything. Alex Ebert’s work came up on how things which refuse to die become “cancerous,” and indeed it does seem that what is “mass reproduced” can become pathological. Benjamin argues this well regarding paintings and music, and perhaps a reason he become so interested in architecture is because that field seems more immune to the dangers of mass reproduction and more able to maintain an atmosphere and “aura” in which experiences of beauty and “something more” can be maintained and incubated (as needed for us to avoid totally defining ourselves according to the zeitgeist of the day, which makes us more susceptible to Deleuzian “capture”). Hard to say, but the point is that I think Ebert and Benjamin overlap in their thinking.
There was a time when politicians were considered “statesmen” and politics an honorable field (as discussed by thinkers like Jonathan Rauch); there was a time when colleges were revered as almost sacred spaces of higher education; there was a time when a trip was considered a special occurrence; there was a time when journalists were respected. Now, politics has seeped into all areas of our lives, and politicians are despised; now, everyone feels pressure to attend college, and college is thought of as a propaganda machines; now, people can travel anywhere easily, and so travel and new places are treated like flavors of ice-cream; now, the news is not trusted. All of these areas are examples where “mass reproduction” were introduced, and as a result the industry, field, or institution was ruined. Malcolm Muggeridge notes in Christ and the Media that, had it been around, Satan would have tempted Jesus in the wilderness with a Global Broadcasting Network, suggesting that there is something about easy wide-disruption that destroys a message or initiative. Has most of society fallen into this “fourth temptation?” Perhaps.
When college is everywhere, it feels like we need to go, and yet because college is everywhere, its quality seems to lower; because politics is everywhere, we feel like we should be involved, and yet because politics is everywhere, it is corrosive and ineffective; and so on. There is something about “spreading” that seems to cheapen, though “why exactly” might be a question which deserves a book to answer. Perhaps there is something about “spreading” that removes, lessens, and/or deconstructs metaphysical values precisely so that the thing being spread is open to more people? For example, perhaps the idea that college is for “higher learning” is reduced to “opening opportunity” so that even people who don’t like reading Aristotle can find a place there; perhaps the idea of politics is reduced from “maintaining the greatness of the nation” to “serving the people” precisely so that people do not feel limited by a single definition of “greatness”; and so on. And indeed, “the greatness of the nation” might lead to racism, war, and worse, so there are times where “metaphysical alterations” can prove to be a good thing; at the same time, there is also a risk with them. Similarly, this paper is not meaning to claim that abundance is bad or necessarily corrosive, but rather that abundance requires conditioning so that we can handle it — but whether that conditioning occurs or not will be up to us.
I might be overfitting the word “reproduction” in all of these circumstances, for media more so “produces” endless content, but the point is that when something is spread, multiplied, or the like, something terrible can happen to it. It’s like a mutation, and both Leopold Kohr and Nassim Taleb come to mind in warning about the dangers of entities growing and/or expanding too much. But how can we stop this growth? If its good to be informed, it’s good to watch more news; if politics matters, it’s good for everyone to be involved in politics — and so on. And so here we see how “rationality” itself might be part of the problem, leading us into the “suboptimal results” of “Nash Equilibrium”-situations, suggesting the need for a distinction between “the true” and “the rational,” as discussed throughout O.G. Rose…
Anyway, for a thing to grow is not merely for the thing to become larger: the act of growing, multiplying, or the like seems to change the thing. The terms logos, mythos, and pathos are used often in online conversations today, notably thanks to the work of Alexander Bard, and we discussed at “The Net (30)” how all of these might cause trouble when they are “too big” or “mass (re)produced.” When logos is overly-multiplied, we get the destruction of “autonomous rationality”; when mythos is omnipresent, we get the superstition of primitive religion; when pathos takes over, we stumble into Postmodernity and encounters with “The Real” which we cannot handle. We must balance the three, but how in the world can we figure out how to do that if “rationality” is part of logos and prone to slip us into “Nash Equilibria?” If logos determines the balance, isn’t logos in control? Indeed, this is a problem the work of O.G. Rose wrestles with…
Mass reproduction, spread, growth, and the like seems to make things “spurious infinities” versus “true infinities,” to reference the thought of Hegel, which can transform things into effacements. Reversing this transformation will not be easy and suggests that we ourselves must become the kinds of beings who are “conditioned” to experience “true infinity” in the things around us. How do we accomplish this? Well, work and practices, the likes of which Hegel can help us think and discover (as discussed in The Absolute Choice).
Chetan raised an interesting question on at what point does a reproduction of a work of art replace the original work of art, and we all considered if perhaps the problem with “mass reproduction” is that it doesn’t reproduce enough: if we really took things to the extreme, perhaps this would somehow create a new kind of “aura” — or else we might be flirting with an Accelerationism, say as discussed in Nick Land. Perhaps new AI technologies which generate pictures will solve our dilemma, for thought they “mass produce” art, I wouldn’t say that they “mass reproduce” art: what we see is a flood of new and unique images, an endless flow of “one-of-one”-ness. Is this good for art or bad for it? Will a world in which people find it easy to create art lead to people appreciating it more? Will more people come to believe that they can be creative (versus all the people who don’t try because they say, “I’m not creative”)? Will this be good for society or lead to the death of art once and for all? I don’t know, but Hegel would have us not wonder about it: instead, Hegel would have us condition ourselves today so that we might be ready for what comes. Thinking about the future is not concrete enough.
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