Darko Štrajn, from Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification Within Mass Culture, Politics and Aesthetics Scientific Monograph

darko štrajn from walter benjamin to the end of cinema 29 digitalna knjižnica ■ digital library uredniški odbor ■ editorial board igor ž. žagar jonatan vinkler janja žmavc alenka gril from walter benjamin to the end of cinema identities, illusion and signification within mass culture, politics and aesthetics Darko Štrajn pedagoški inštitut 2017 Content 9 Acknowledgements 11 Foreword 15 1: Dialectics of Aura 17 Benjamin‘s Notion of Mass Culture and the Question of Emancipation 19 Contours of Benjamin‘s Concept of Mass Culture 21 Beyond Mechanical Reproduction 25 Benjamin‘s Aspect1 26 Change in the Mode of Participation 28 The Mystery of Non-mystery 30 Orchid in the Land of Technology 33 Changing the Mind 35 Cultural Ideology 37 Perception of Perception 40 The Politics of Differences 45 2: Transitions: Ways of Politics 47 Defining the Ideology of Extremism 47 A Kind of Aliens 49 Patterns of the Past 54 Clash of Identities 5 from walter benjamin to the end of cinema 61 A Distant View in Michelle Pfeiffer‘s Smiling Eyes 61 The Paradox of Tradition 62 Culture and Transition 64 Looking from the Perspective of an Object of a Case Study 67 Transition Over the Barriers of Identity 73 The Pleasure to Forbid Pleasure 74 Sexuality as a “New” Social Issue 75 Conservatism and Traditionalism vs Freedom of Choice 77 Pleasure Against Nation, Nation Against Pleasure 79 Microscopic Human Being 80 Sexual Pleasure is Male 83 3: Transformations: Ways of Art 85 Counter-identification and Politics of Art 85 The Ineffable 88 Reversal of a Perspective 93 Making Statements 95 On Digital Exposures 95 Double Exposure 97 Shanghai Twins 100 Ocean Without a Shore 101 Information Accelerator 103 The Principle of Montage and Literature 105 Döblin‘s Hesitant Acceptance of Film 106 Reading Berlin Alexanderplatz 109 Montage and De-montage 110 Fassbinder‘s Alexanderplatz 114 In the Age of Digital Montage-collage 117 Deleuzian Delusionary Dividualism 119 4: Balkan Cinema 121 Robar-Dorin‘s Mirror: Rams and Mammoths in the Context of Yugoslav History 122 Nationalism and Ethnicity 124 Ethnicity in the Balkans under Communism 127 Images of Nationalism 131 Love of Our Own Soil 139 Troubled History 6 content 141 Cinematic Road to a Redefinition of the Balkans 144 Political Epistemological Break 147 Small Cinematographies, which became Parts of World Cinema 149 Some Examples 153 Shifted Signifiers 155 5: The End of Cinema 157 Identity in a Notion of the Eastern and Western European Cinema 158 Identity with a Difference 159 Suicide at the Seashore 162 European Modernity: Decentring Identity 165 Sand Castle 169 Memory and Identity in Film 171 Bergson‘s Memory 173 From Memory to Identity to Ethnology 179 Immediacy as an Attribute of Cinema as Art 180 Film as Art in Epstein’s Vision 182 Writing of Forms 187 Transcending Cinema as the Art of Mass Culture 187 Dialectics in the Digital Age 189 Reality 191 Towards the Digital 195 Conclusion 197 Ontology of the Virtual 201 Summary 201 Aura, Culture and what Becomes from Form? 205 Extremism, Perceptions, Transformations and Sexuality 208 Art and Society 211 Questions of Cinema 219 Povzetek 221 Bibliography 229 Index 7 Acknowledgements Since this book is a product of many years of reflections, discussions, con- ference presentations and writing of journal articles, there are many colleagues, friends and institutions to whom I am indebted for inspiration and encouragement. I am especially thankful to late Janez Kolenc and Janez Jus- tin – two broadminded scholars of the Educational Research Institute (Peda- goški inštitut) in Ljubljana, who sadly passed away too early and with whom I spent many hours of sharing ideas and thoughts. I am grateful to Bogomir Novak, who still helps me a lot to not forget both colleagues and their open minds. I am indebted to all the women and men of Educational Research In- stitute, who understood that my larger theoretical interests in such fields as aesthetic, cultural studies, media and film studies and politics make up part of embedding the educational research in the theoretical and social contexts. No matter how well one can learn English, there are always problems of transferring ideas from one language thought structure to the other. Since some of the texts in this book were written at different times, I received help from quite a few “native speakers”. I am thankful to Fred Liss, who lived in Ljubljana in 1990s, and who helped me a lot in my early attempts to write texts in foreign language. Donald Reindl improved the texts, which were published in New Review for Film and Television Studies and Compar- ative Literature (Primerjalna književnost). For the bulk of copy-editing of the book, I am very grateful to Jason Batson. Finally, I feel obliged for all the help to three refined scholars and re- viewers of this book Saša Vojković, Dan Hassler Forest and Andrej Šprah. 9 Foreword In the first and second decade of the 21st Century, mass culture strongly expanded thanks to new hardware and software, which make above all the Internet tick. Nonetheless, great improvements such as high definition dis- plays, the accessibility of television programmes and the growing practises of small audio-visual productions made possible by cheap and high quality equipment, have had their own impact. What used to be just the mass reproduction of goods and aesthetic products is currently becoming the mass production of roles and positions of participation in a vast stream of social, scientific, cultural, political and media communication. Virtually everyone can have their part in segmented exchanges on all imaginable levels of in- teractions of texts, pictures, movies, gestures, music, statements and sometimes even new ideas. How much this expanded and multiplying activity, enabled by technology, which includes the “hidden” software, qualifies as a new leap or revolution with far-reaching effects in the social reality can be established only in retrospect. Still, no matter whether we have to deal here with, just an expanded pre-existent mass culture or some new mode of social relationships, there are many visible consequences for which prop- er names and notions are on the way to be invented. Moreover, this holds true for a critical analysis, which aims at a vision of emancipation as well as for the analysis, which aims at nothing since the practice of emancipation is reduced to just gestures of subversion, breaks, shocks, discontinuities or strategies of inflating illusions of fragmented realities. Illusionary expecta- 11 from walter benjamin to the end of cinema tions and projections of technological changes seem to be a clear effect of a demise or severe weakening of once strong actors in the field of emancipation struggles such as trade unions, left wing political parties and pub- lic intellectuals. Considering various discourses on a different level, we can see that such a phenomena as political populism and an explosion of false news as the main and most banal agency of the post-fact world causes the mass culture to look almost like a natural disaster. It is interesting that after the shocking American presidential elections results in November 2016, both expressions denominating massive practice of the uncontrolled as well as manipulated communication and perception became “viral” themselves. It looked as if the Epimenides’ paradox of the liar had become “operation- al” in the mode of communicative behaviour; since the world is such that everybody lies, each and every one should join in the game of social net- works of unlimited lying. The performative gesture behind acts of “publish- ing” on Facebook or Twitter is based on the tacit claim by authors: “I am a liar” and then the reading of messages turns into the checking of who is the more “true liar”. If I take as a hypothesis that we have to deal with some structural or qualitative change or a quantitative leap within mass culture, then I would claim that we are at the beginning of something new in Deleu- zian terms or we are at the brink of the event as the eruption of the unpre- dictable in Badiou‘s sense of the word. The transformation of mass culture, which contains a multiplicity of changes in the orders of the world, comprising of institutions from factory to education, politics and aesthetic productions, bring about a change in mass participation within a society. Therefore, as much as one can feel pessimistic due to the above mentioned recent phenomena, one should think about Walter Benjamin, who at the time of the dawn of Nazism had not given up his idea of the emancipatory potential of mass culture: “The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator” (Benja- min, 1969: p. 239). However, his idea was not (as some critics do sometimes surmise it) that the mass culture functioned as an automatic emancipatory mechanism. He well indicated the scary counter-emancipatory potentials within it, which was, in his time, demonstrated by rising Nazism. His ap- peal to communism to “politicize art” (cf. Ibid: p. 242) clearly points to a dialectics of involvement of so-called masses or multitudes into antagonisms of the social processes. 12 foreword I first read Benjamin‘s essays in the early 1970s, when his oeuvre – about three decades after his later texts were written – had been increasingly rec- ognised for its insights and style. Whatever I was working on throughout the times of my journalistic and research work in such fields as film theo- ry, education, philosophy and cultural studies, Benjamin’s “method” was manifestly or secretly reminding me about the epistemological machin- ery that unavoidably produces an aestheticized reality.

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