 Miklos
Legrady, cultural revolution, acrylic
on canvas, 2005 18" x 24" - 45.72cm x 60.96cm
I’m
going to hurt your feelings and it’s going to upset you, but Walter Benjamin did
not say what you think he said, nor what they said about him, nor what we
learned in school. It is hard to believe we held illusions as articles of
faith for decades, but then think of medieval monks in flea-ridden cassocks who
counted angels dancing on the head of a pin. We’re
not that far ahead; we also hold political beliefs that look plausible at the
moment but seriously need corrections on the basis of fact.
At
the core of Benjamin’s argument is that which
withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. He’s wrong in that books are made by mechanical reproduction yet stories and
authors retain their aura as much as any work of art. Munch's The Scream is known
from reproduction yet remains haunting, as haunting as any Raven perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door. Without its aura, an image is
illustration, not art. Benjamin's
error comes from a materialism which says that the only meaning of art
lies in an accurate rendition of reality, the essence of art is pictorial
reproduction.
Some find Benjamin complex
and difficult; there’s reason for that but not what we'd expect. When we read something that contradicts our
expectations, we generally skip that sentence; here we eventually find
ourselves with shreds and hanging chads. The difficulty in reading
Benjamin is not intellectual comprehension; it is in matching what we read to what
he’s supposed to have said: we must censor the text to meet our expectations.
Many of us stop reading when unable to reconcile such contradictions between
fact and fiction, and so we leave Benjamin behind as "difficult." It
is near impossible to interpret Benjamin according to the mythology woven in
his name.
Walter
Benjamin has been praised as an early Marshall McLuhan, a social scientist able
to discern the cultural effects of media. Yet on reading the text we find a
political message that strays from the truth and then ignores it. Where we
thought “The Work Of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was research
similar to today's academic scholarship, it is in fact Marxist propaganda. History
reminds us that Marxists saw truth and accuracy as useful when convenient; we cannot
read Benjamin innocently when the work has political priorities.
Walter
Benjamin's thesis insists that all we can ask of art is to reproduce reality.
He writes that authorship, creativity, and aesthetics are outmoded Fascist
concepts, and the only valid art is that made by the working class for
political use. Benjamin is himself writing propaganda without concern for accuracy.
He shares flawed assumptions, fact and fiction twisted to fit political theory;
the reductions, contradictions, and leaps of faith are obvious.
Benjamin
rejected aesthetics whereas science shows that beauty and its complex
differentiations are crucial for mental health. In the 1970s Abraham Moles and
Frieder Nake analyzed links between beauty, information processing, and
information theory. Physicist Paul Dirac said that if one works at getting
beauty in one's equations, and if one has a really sound insight, one is on a
sure line of progress. Denis Dutton was a philosophy professor and the editor
of Arts & Letters Daily. In his
book and Ted Talk called The Art Instinct,
he suggested that humans are hard-wired to seek beauty. “There is evidence that
perceptions of beauty are evolutionarily determined, that things, aspects of
people and landscapes considered beautiful are typically found in situations
likely to give enhanced survival of the perceiving human's genes.”
One Communist writer who later left the party in disillusionment was Arthur
Koestler. In The God That Failed
and The Invisible Writing he
described the logical contradictions and resulting sacrificium intellectus that Communist writers suffered. The
resulting emotional damage may well explain Benjamin's catastrophic failure of
morale and his subsequent suicide in a moment of crisis.
Arthur
Koestler wrote of Benjamin's death in France during the 1940s in The Invisible Writing. “Just before
we left, I ran into an old friend, the German writer Walter Benjamin. He
was making preparations for his own escape to England. He has thirty
tablets of a morphia-compound, which he intended to swallow if caught: he said
they were enough to kill a horse, and gave me half the tablets, just in case. The day after the final refusal of my visa, I learned that Walter Benjamin,
having managed to cross the Pyrenees, had been arrested on the Spanish side,
and threatened with being sent back to France the next morning. The next
morning the Spanish gendarmes had changed their mind, but by that time Benjamin
had swallowed his remaining half of the pills and was dead.”
Miklos Legrady legrady@me.com
Published April 4, 2017.
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