Essay Summaries
The following are short and dense responses written during the research process. They are meant to cut to the meat of the matter.
“Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changed of apperception, finds in the film its true meaning of exercise.” “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Schoken, 1968: pg. 19
In his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, Walter Benjamin describes how mass production and mass consumption, technological advancements, and a capitalist grip on culture have all culminated into a new artform, film. First and foremost, film is produced through a process of depersonalization and commodification of both actor and audience. The actor is estranged from their marketplace (the cinema) while they work on sets surrounded by equipment and months away from project completion, like a factory worker who does not ever see the whole product for which they are working on a part, nor do they ever witness the selling of his work. The actor commodifies the “movie star” as their own personality and as an opportunity, incentivizing the audience to produce their own acting work, creating a competitive market that captivates audience attention. Benjamin explains probably the most influential change film has made in art; from concentration to distraction. Film has the capacity to both keep its audience's thoughts halted as their minds are forced into constant distraction and to subconsciously form habits through the perception repetitive messages – and to entire masses of people at once.
“The principle dictates that he should be shown all of his needs as capable of fulfillment, but that those needs should be so predetermined that he feels himself to be the eternal consumer, the object of the culture industry.” “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” from Theodor Adorno (1944), pg. 25
From working class consumers to the most powerful sectors of industry and the few who hold their power, Theodor Adorno explains the implementation of the culture industry in entertainment as a system which controls economic hierarchy, content creation, and the consumers themselves in his essay “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass deception”. The culture industry’s products are ones of sameness, rigorously checked by their producers for sameness in that they posit human desires perfected, but not accomplished. Consumers are essentially baited into a perpetual need for more content while also learning to repress individual desires; all as daily preparation to go back to work. If ever a new producer emerges with true variety unlike the “tried and true” products that the culture industry constantly rebrands and sells to the public – the power of advertising makes sure that only sellers who are already powerful will attain success.
“But this sharp delineation, this exclusive concentration on one aspect of validity alone, and the exclusion of aspects of truth and justice, breaks down as soon as aesthetic experience is drawn into an individual life history and is absorbed into ordinary life.” Jürgen Habermas, Modernity versus Postmodernity (1981), from Art In Theory, 1900-2000: an anthology of changing ideas, Blackwell, 1992: 1000-1008
In his essay, “Modernity versus Postmodernity”, Jurgen Habermas explains how the Enlightenment era prerogative of refining arts and sciences into a beneficial element of everyday life and culture has developed into what we now know as Modernity; separate and autonomous fields of study dominated by experts, isolated from the people and problems of everyday life. Neo-Conservatives like Daniel Bell posit that the dissatisfying abstraction that modernism “infects” culture with can only be cured by unifying disparate aspects of modern culture with religious faith, much like pre-enlightenment living. Habermas, however, has a much simpler solution; to reunite modernity with everyday life and people, art and works of modern study must be reappropriated into the context of the everyday. To view art from a common, public eye would be to redirect modernism as an isolated study to one which is directly concerned with culture and its people.