 |
| mercado de la navidad, mexico city |
*** this essay is in response to and references Walter Benjamin's essay The work of art in the era of mechanical reproduction (1935). Here is a PDF with my highlights and marginal notes.
In these three cases, the commodified object can be something more intangible and ambiguous — even an experience. Experiences have been the objects of commodification in the west since we began seriously outsourcing industrial production to the “developing world” after WWII, leaving the “developed” Western nations largely a global upper class. I’m thinking of things like the movie and TV industries, education (charter schools), artistic practice (MFA programs), spectator sports, custom tourism packages and resorts, coffee shops, cooking classes, retreats, workshops, professional development, and the like. This experience commodification was accompanied by a shift in local working class job opportunities toward the service, care, and experience industries for Western working classes, bolstered by the portion of downwardly-mobile millennials who do not want to work in the corporate rat-race.
As regards art, I take after Lewis Hyde in “The Gift” where he asserts that artistic production should always be offered as a gift. Maybe this is a hot take, but whenever I hear the phrase “support your local artist,” I cringe, thinking that this is the wrong direction. Art should be free, above the corrupting world of monetary valuation, as I don’t agree that money can be totally equated with “value” in this nebulous, quasi-spiritual realm. (That said, I always tip the band, because that’s the world we live in.) At the root of this reaction is an utmost belief in the emancipatory and revolutionary potential in art — indeed, it is one of the few realms that possess this capacity. And reducing art to just another way to make ends meet seems another way of commodifying (potential) rebellion, bringing it into the fold of the system.
By the same token, I am wary of the professionalization making art into being a “working artist.” This effectively reifies the creative process into a taxonomic category of human, rendering it a profession interchangeable with “accountant” or “hotel facilities,” each just part of the social division of labor and being calculated into our national GDP. (This is not to discredit accounting or hotel facilities as important endeavors, so much as to maybe make the case that all of living is art, with art being the last to be commodified.)
I’m convinced of this corrosive effect of commodification, but what exactly does commodification corrode? Maybe you have the same art work either way, or you give the same Human Design reading. What’s the difference in charging for it? This is where Walter Benjamin’s notion of the aura, which he outlines in his essay The work of art in the era of mechanical reproduction, comes in handy. In rough summary, he is telling the story of what happened to art and society once the technological advancements of lithography, photography, and eventually cinema made it possible for a far wider public to encounter the reproduction of an original work, and even the creation of work that is from its inception infinitely reproducible for the masses.
For Benjamin, mechanical reproduction upends the traditional characteristics of a work of art: serving a ritual function in the realm of the “cult” or religious, having a singular presence in time and space, and being located within a specific cultural tradition. These three elements contribute to the “authenticity” of a work, as Benjamin defines it: “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (4). This definition locates authenticity in the very materiality of the work, before questions of nominal or expressive authenticity come to consideration.
When the mechanical reproduction of works of art becomes widespread, cultural shifts in the way we interact with art ripple throughout the modern world. The religious function, which ascribes to the art-object a cult value, is replaced by a political function, which ascribes to the art-object an exhibition value. The singular work located in a tradition is now disseminated throughout the world, existing in innumerable identical forms, and encountered by innumerable people in innumerable different personal contexts with no historical continuity. Our tradition becomes reproducibility, our religion becomes exhibition.
Art itself is a casualty of this historical process, and “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” (4). Aura is uniqueness, presence and proximity in a singular location, bearing a specific historical witness. The loss of the aura is loss of a certain aspect of uniqueness, and it is the loss of authenticity.
Aura does not pertain only to works of art, but to all existence that could be subject to mechanical reproduction. Every thing, and every one, is unique. I am still unique if I post a picture of myself on Facebook, but a certain aspect of my uniqueness has been diminished, as a likeness has brought my being beyond its natural bounds. For Benjamin, not only does the aura of the being suffer from this, but this loss of authenticity becomes systemic throughout society as mechanical reproduction not only becomes commonplace, but conditions the way we relate to existence regardless of whether or not it is mechanically mediated in a given moment; we internalize the effects of this mechanization, and they begin mediating autonomously through our unconscious subjectivity.
The stakes of this assault on aura are high. Benjamin is writing in the prelude to the Nazi takeover of Germany, where the third Reich employed cinema in a massively effective propaganda campaign to condition the masses to not only go along with, but to joyously join the fascist cause. What this means of mediation allows is for a general remove from life itself, and in this void grows fascism. Benjamin ends the essay with a chilling exhortation: “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art” (20).
After rereading this essay, I can identify that what links these three initial categories that stick out to me — art, healing, and spirituality — is their ritualistic nature, which has fallen under the duress of a society that seeks to commodify everything possible. I want to now break down the connection between mechanical reproduction and commodification.
Benjamin’s account of the decline of aura pins the blame on mechanical reproduction, which enacts this violence on the level of the individual art work, the way new artworks are created, in the way the society relates to art, and reality as whole. Mechanical reproduction saps the the work’s ritual value, replacing it with exhibition value, and erodes its authenticity and aura. Healing and spirituality, especially in their non-Westernified iterations, can be thought of as “arts,” and have a heritage in ritual. It is only relatively recently, since the Enlightenment, that Western healing has become thoroughly deracinated from its ritualistic roots and brought fully into the realm of rational and scientific practice. For these reasons, we can treat healing and spirituality as essentially ritualistic, and subject to the same corrosive effects of mechanical reproduction and commodification as art.
Benjamin begins to outline how mechanical reproduction plays a central role in the commodification of art. The act of mechanically reproducing a work enacts “the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage” (4). I take liquidation to mean rendering liquid in the form of money. The cult (religious, or specific) value is transposed into an exhibition (political, or exchangeable) value. This transforms the work of art into a commodity, fungible with any other commodity on the market. Thus, mechanical reproduction is not synonymous with commodification, but it is a critical step allowing for the latter to become possible and commonplace.
There is a difference between something that exists and is then commodified, and a thing that exists only as and to be a commodity. Art begins to be produced with reproducibility in mind, which means it is no longer ritualistic but exhibitionist in nature, lacking authenticity from the outset.
As regards art, I take after Lewis Hyde in “The Gift” where he asserts that artistic production should always be offered as a gift. Maybe this is a hot take, but whenever I hear the phrase “support your local artist,” I cringe, thinking that this is the wrong direction. Art should be free, above the corrupting world of monetary valuation, as I don’t agree that money can be totally equated with “value” in this nebulous, quasi-spiritual realm. (That said, I always tip the band, because that’s the world we live in.) At the root of this reaction is an utmost belief in the emancipatory and revolutionary potential in art — indeed, it is one of the few realms that possess this capacity. And reducing art to just another way to make ends meet seems another way of commodifying (potential) rebellion, bringing it into the fold of the system.
By the same token, I am wary of the professionalization making art into being a “working artist.” This effectively reifies the creative process into a taxonomic category of human, rendering it a profession interchangeable with “accountant” or “hotel facilities,” each just part of the social division of labor and being calculated into our national GDP. (This is not to discredit accounting or hotel facilities as important endeavors, so much as to maybe make the case that all of living is art, with art being the last to be commodified.)
I am also not trying to claim that any “struggling artist” who sells their works to make an income is becoming a capitalist — this situation seems more akin to a small-scale producer who owns their own means of production, which predates and can exist outside of and (to some extent) alongside capitalism. And anyway, we all have to get by. I’m thinking more about the art industry. I’m especially wary of an “artist” who creates works with the express intention of sale (as a capitalist approaches the production of whatever commodity they like — it doesn’t matter to them, because it is the money from the sale that matters). You could argue that this is the entire film/digital media industry, and Benjamin writes about how film is scary because of how capital-intensive it is, basically necessitating, as a condition of it being possible to make it in the first place, that it be commodified and sold at a profit.
At bottom, my question is, do we really want to understand making art as “productive work" (i.e. making a profit for someone)? I am an advocate for recognizing the value of the labor that goes into making art, but not making art as “work” (i.e. a job for which you are paid wages).
The peculiarity of the art-commodity (as opposed to, say, socks) is that it contains two elements: on the one hand, a person ostensibly buys a work because of the intention of the artist to convey something meaningful and beautiful (or otherwise aesthetically compelling) in that work; on the other hand, in tension with this aesthetic/sentimental attachment is the work's existence as a smart investment in an “asset” that will appreciate in value, if it is socially deemed so by the opaque and capricious machinations of the “art world.” The arbitrary and subjective nature of aesthetic appreciation means that, somewhere, there are tastemakers, and those tastemakers have a financial incentive to make certain tastes. The art-object is a strange commodity because its use-value is both in 1) its asset-capacity of storing value productively (as the work increases in value over time), as well as 2) in the totally intangible emotion evoked in the owner-viewer. It still maintains this social/sacred dimension, this “aura” of not just uniqueness but sentimental attachment and social significance, and even influence; this sentimental/social significance to the individual owner is what becomes of the cult/collective origins of art.
The peculiarity of the art-commodity (as opposed to, say, socks) is that it contains two elements: on the one hand, a person ostensibly buys a work because of the intention of the artist to convey something meaningful and beautiful (or otherwise aesthetically compelling) in that work; on the other hand, in tension with this aesthetic/sentimental attachment is the work's existence as a smart investment in an “asset” that will appreciate in value, if it is socially deemed so by the opaque and capricious machinations of the “art world.” The arbitrary and subjective nature of aesthetic appreciation means that, somewhere, there are tastemakers, and those tastemakers have a financial incentive to make certain tastes. The art-object is a strange commodity because its use-value is both in 1) its asset-capacity of storing value productively (as the work increases in value over time), as well as 2) in the totally intangible emotion evoked in the owner-viewer. It still maintains this social/sacred dimension, this “aura” of not just uniqueness but sentimental attachment and social significance, and even influence; this sentimental/social significance to the individual owner is what becomes of the cult/collective origins of art.
It can sometimes be hard to see this commodity form of art in day-to-day life. Streaming services like Spotify hide this commodity-relation in that you pay an automatic monthly fee, and you magically have all of this music at your fingertips. But what appears to be a magical land full of the creative output of your fellow humans is under the surface driven by an industry that determines what these songs sound like (producers and labels as gatekeepers with profit motive) and which ones make it to public and get promoted through music streaming platforms, all the while slicing cuts off of your subscription fee off from what eventually makes it to the artist.
My hunch is that this fully capitalized art world dynamic trickles into all but the “lowly” art that was never intended to be viewed as valuable in this scheme (I’m thinking of such intentionally low-brow forms as zines), though anything is corruptible. We see this clearly established in a hegemonic path toward “success,” like Chance the Rapper who got “discovered” on SoundCloud, went viral, got super famous, and super rich. I don’t think the reason all non-famous artists sell their work is primarily to get famous, but when that exec approaches you with that record deal, will you take it? And if you don’t because you’re music is punk as hell and fuck the system, you still get the social validation, like it or not. I have another hunch that this is what killed Kurt Cobain.
My hunch is that this fully capitalized art world dynamic trickles into all but the “lowly” art that was never intended to be viewed as valuable in this scheme (I’m thinking of such intentionally low-brow forms as zines), though anything is corruptible. We see this clearly established in a hegemonic path toward “success,” like Chance the Rapper who got “discovered” on SoundCloud, went viral, got super famous, and super rich. I don’t think the reason all non-famous artists sell their work is primarily to get famous, but when that exec approaches you with that record deal, will you take it? And if you don’t because you’re music is punk as hell and fuck the system, you still get the social validation, like it or not. I have another hunch that this is what killed Kurt Cobain.
All of this to say, the commodification of art and the professionalization of art-making makes me sad because it threatens to negate what it alone can offer, which is a respite from, and even a revolutionary challenge to, a totally commodified world.
As regards healing, I was recently invited by a friend to register for the Landmark Forum, a sort of New Agey secular self-help long weekend intensive retreat course. They are so confident in their method that they *guarantee* you will have a breakthrough, get unstuck, and level up your life, or your money back (only 6% of people ask for their money back). (I should mention, I haven’t attended the Forum, just the intro session, so this whole section is based off of my incomplete knowledge of the program.) It’s usually done in person in a theater with 50 other people, with multiple sessions offered every month around the world, but they now offer many Zoom sessions as well. I have gone back and forth now an absurd amount as to whether or not I want to enroll the the class, which costs around $700 dollars.
Apart from this being a steep price, what gives me pause about this sort of deep healing work, which aims at full self-actualization into your most “you” you, is that this vision of liberation seems to stop at the individual customer. It buys into the atomized understanding of the world, and if the vision of liberation extends to a wider social liberation of some sort, it is only a result of individual customers undergoing individual breakthroughs, in a logic of: “if we all pursue our passions, the problems of the world will regulate themselves to resolution!” It’s some sort of free market libertarian ideology with a mask of humanism. There does not appear to be any guiding ethic beyond “follow your passion, to the max!” In a strange way, Landmark seems to use the language of "negative liberty," or merely removing obstacles to free activity (in this instance, within the self), to move toward "positive liberty," or the presence of control, to be able to choose to live out one's purpose. But this is still understanding liberty in the restricted scope of the individual. The program is agnostic when it comes to what your passion is; their only duty is to liberate you and set you off into the world. This is pretty on-brand for the hippie movement, and exemplifies the way that its revolutionary energy was successfully rerouted from the political to the individual through a focus on self-expression and building an internal mind-palace or communion with nature or humanity in some apolitical sense.
As regards healing, I was recently invited by a friend to register for the Landmark Forum, a sort of New Agey secular self-help long weekend intensive retreat course. They are so confident in their method that they *guarantee* you will have a breakthrough, get unstuck, and level up your life, or your money back (only 6% of people ask for their money back). (I should mention, I haven’t attended the Forum, just the intro session, so this whole section is based off of my incomplete knowledge of the program.) It’s usually done in person in a theater with 50 other people, with multiple sessions offered every month around the world, but they now offer many Zoom sessions as well. I have gone back and forth now an absurd amount as to whether or not I want to enroll the the class, which costs around $700 dollars.
Apart from this being a steep price, what gives me pause about this sort of deep healing work, which aims at full self-actualization into your most “you” you, is that this vision of liberation seems to stop at the individual customer. It buys into the atomized understanding of the world, and if the vision of liberation extends to a wider social liberation of some sort, it is only a result of individual customers undergoing individual breakthroughs, in a logic of: “if we all pursue our passions, the problems of the world will regulate themselves to resolution!” It’s some sort of free market libertarian ideology with a mask of humanism. There does not appear to be any guiding ethic beyond “follow your passion, to the max!” In a strange way, Landmark seems to use the language of "negative liberty," or merely removing obstacles to free activity (in this instance, within the self), to move toward "positive liberty," or the presence of control, to be able to choose to live out one's purpose. But this is still understanding liberty in the restricted scope of the individual. The program is agnostic when it comes to what your passion is; their only duty is to liberate you and set you off into the world. This is pretty on-brand for the hippie movement, and exemplifies the way that its revolutionary energy was successfully rerouted from the political to the individual through a focus on self-expression and building an internal mind-palace or communion with nature or humanity in some apolitical sense.
An alternative view of liberation, the Marxist view, is that my liberation is tied up in your liberation, and that one person’s idea of liberation (let’s say, to get rich enough to buy seven yachts), may come at the expense of another person’s liberation, or even their exploitation. A revolution of thought facilitated through psychedelics is one thing, and not insignificant, but the Black Panthers and environmentalists were the true revolutionaries of the 1960s and 70s, in the sense that they wanted to liberate people and the planet from harmful systems. What bothers me about Landmark is what I read as an act of cashing in on what may well be a powerful therapeutic method with real liberatory potential, and truncating that liberation to the self.
You can tell a lot about the vibe of a program by how the chairs are set up. For Landmark, everyone faces the facilitator, the keeper of the special sauce, whose access you’ve purchased for limited time only. You can also tell a lot about a program by what they portray on their website. Landmark’s is pretty bland, like it was made with a PowerPoint template from 2004, and markets itself for corporate retreats, no doubt a significant source of income. But this may be the biggest red flag of them all: a method so open and agnostic that it can be applied to workers in a setting where the real aim is boosting productivity. This also speaks to the cravenness of corporations that would deign to penetrate so egregiously into the interior lives of their workers, under the guise of care (which may be real), with the motive of boosting efficiency and productivity (workers work better when they are unencumbered of their personal baggage).
This reminds me of how I feel about talk therapy, which has become professionalized and incorporated into the medical-expert-diagnosis-to-healthcare-provider pipeline. I do think something is warped when the person to whom you are baring your soul is being paid by the hour, and has to wrap the conversation up as neatly as possible when time is up for the week. I think education falls into this category as well, which is why I feel drawn to France’s socialized education system. Why I feel different about paying for certain things or classes (piano lessons, for example), I haven’t totally figured out yet, but it has something to do with individuals in the system that is traumatizing people (the alienation of capitalism) cashing in on treating the symptoms of people who are suffering, and not only failing to identify what I would wager is a major component of the suffering (alienation due to capitalism), but rather sewing further confusion and sapping the suffering of its revolutionary potential.
In addition, Landmark's 'marketing' model of relational 'invitations' to an intro session, during which you are 'invited' to enroll (and pay a down payment) for a Forum, feels wrong to me as well. I believe the friend who 'invited' me when he says he did so out of genuine love and an interest in sharing with me something that really helped him in his life, but at the same time, this organization relies on social bonds and the human feeling of empathy to bring in new customers, and revenue. And while many people who attend the Forum are already doing well in life and are just looking to “level up,” the rhetoric does also prey upon those who are down and out, offering a sure-fire end to their suffering. In this way, it feels manipulative, and I would argue is manipulative regardless of whether the people who paid the money are glad they did so and recommend the Forum. Landmark is not unique in this: manipulation has been woven into our social fabric, a capacity or tendency that is naturalized and normalized into everyday interactions, as we go about seeking to fulfill our desires.
I have been in a long exchange with a good high school friend about whether or not charging for healing work in this way is ethical. This friend lives in Los Angeles and makes a living working for the people who founded Human Design, and giving Human Design readings to people. Again, I do not want to come across as delegitimizing the work itself, which is immensely valuable, and deserves compensation of some sort. She is of the mind that money represents an intention or an energy exchange that can act as this compensation, but I have a gut feeling that money is a lot more sinister than that, and rather than effectively compensating, does some harm to the practitioner and the practice. To quote Augier, “Money comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek” — and, Marx continues, “capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” There is a lot to unpack in this conflation of money with energy.
All of this to say, what seismic liberation might the Landmark method catalyze if it were not organized as a quasi-pyramid scheme? The jury’s still out on if I’ll sign up, but if I do, it will be for research, I swear!!
As regards spirituality, I learned a lot at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center about how such a spiritual institution may be perturbed under the influence of the market and government, essentially being a religious commune that must also "make ends meet" in meeting the demands of the secular capitalist world (upkeep, taxes, insurance, etc). The Bodhi is officially a Wwoofing host, but you don’t have to go through the site. They rely on work-trade volunteers to staff the center for the private retreats that rent out the space in summer and fall, which is how the center makes a big chunk of its money, allowing them to keep the place running on what seems like a pretty tight budget (they also sell stuff at the farmers market). Winter and spring are the monastic study periods. Typically, people who come for the spiritual side will leave a donation, which is similar to the yogic practice of dana, which dates back hundreds of years, where you don’t pay the teacher directly, but leave a donation in a box after the class.
You can tell a lot about the vibe of a program by how the chairs are set up. For Landmark, everyone faces the facilitator, the keeper of the special sauce, whose access you’ve purchased for limited time only. You can also tell a lot about a program by what they portray on their website. Landmark’s is pretty bland, like it was made with a PowerPoint template from 2004, and markets itself for corporate retreats, no doubt a significant source of income. But this may be the biggest red flag of them all: a method so open and agnostic that it can be applied to workers in a setting where the real aim is boosting productivity. This also speaks to the cravenness of corporations that would deign to penetrate so egregiously into the interior lives of their workers, under the guise of care (which may be real), with the motive of boosting efficiency and productivity (workers work better when they are unencumbered of their personal baggage).
This reminds me of how I feel about talk therapy, which has become professionalized and incorporated into the medical-expert-diagnosis-to-healthcare-provider pipeline. I do think something is warped when the person to whom you are baring your soul is being paid by the hour, and has to wrap the conversation up as neatly as possible when time is up for the week. I think education falls into this category as well, which is why I feel drawn to France’s socialized education system. Why I feel different about paying for certain things or classes (piano lessons, for example), I haven’t totally figured out yet, but it has something to do with individuals in the system that is traumatizing people (the alienation of capitalism) cashing in on treating the symptoms of people who are suffering, and not only failing to identify what I would wager is a major component of the suffering (alienation due to capitalism), but rather sewing further confusion and sapping the suffering of its revolutionary potential.
In addition, Landmark's 'marketing' model of relational 'invitations' to an intro session, during which you are 'invited' to enroll (and pay a down payment) for a Forum, feels wrong to me as well. I believe the friend who 'invited' me when he says he did so out of genuine love and an interest in sharing with me something that really helped him in his life, but at the same time, this organization relies on social bonds and the human feeling of empathy to bring in new customers, and revenue. And while many people who attend the Forum are already doing well in life and are just looking to “level up,” the rhetoric does also prey upon those who are down and out, offering a sure-fire end to their suffering. In this way, it feels manipulative, and I would argue is manipulative regardless of whether the people who paid the money are glad they did so and recommend the Forum. Landmark is not unique in this: manipulation has been woven into our social fabric, a capacity or tendency that is naturalized and normalized into everyday interactions, as we go about seeking to fulfill our desires.
I have been in a long exchange with a good high school friend about whether or not charging for healing work in this way is ethical. This friend lives in Los Angeles and makes a living working for the people who founded Human Design, and giving Human Design readings to people. Again, I do not want to come across as delegitimizing the work itself, which is immensely valuable, and deserves compensation of some sort. She is of the mind that money represents an intention or an energy exchange that can act as this compensation, but I have a gut feeling that money is a lot more sinister than that, and rather than effectively compensating, does some harm to the practitioner and the practice. To quote Augier, “Money comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek” — and, Marx continues, “capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” There is a lot to unpack in this conflation of money with energy.
All of this to say, what seismic liberation might the Landmark method catalyze if it were not organized as a quasi-pyramid scheme? The jury’s still out on if I’ll sign up, but if I do, it will be for research, I swear!!
As regards spirituality, I learned a lot at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center about how such a spiritual institution may be perturbed under the influence of the market and government, essentially being a religious commune that must also "make ends meet" in meeting the demands of the secular capitalist world (upkeep, taxes, insurance, etc). The Bodhi is officially a Wwoofing host, but you don’t have to go through the site. They rely on work-trade volunteers to staff the center for the private retreats that rent out the space in summer and fall, which is how the center makes a big chunk of its money, allowing them to keep the place running on what seems like a pretty tight budget (they also sell stuff at the farmers market). Winter and spring are the monastic study periods. Typically, people who come for the spiritual side will leave a donation, which is similar to the yogic practice of dana, which dates back hundreds of years, where you don’t pay the teacher directly, but leave a donation in a box after the class.
So there, I am at once a student, a work-trade volunteer, and a sort of indentured servant performing unpaid labor. An advantage (for me) of this work-trade life is it avoids the mediation of wages. At the Bodhi, I get my subsistence (a place to sleep and food) directly as part of the community, which communally cooks, eats, and cleans (with some division of labor), whereas at any other job, you work for a wage and buy your subsistence on your own. The advantage of receiving a wage is that the compensation for your labor is societally liquid, meaning you can invest the money you make in other things outside of the commune. In the commune/buddhist subculture, all you walk away with as a volunteer is the experience, and the social capital at that Zen Center, allowing you to move up in the hierarchy, and which legitimizes you in the network of similar institutions. This is how people like the retreat chef get gigs — by being skilled and having good New Age networks. But the difficulty here is that, unless you climb the hierarchy in an institution, you will be a wageless work-trader forever, and either stuck in that world with no pay, or spit back out into the market with no money.
A bit of a tangent, on van life: There is an entire culture of people who do not care about accumulating wealth, and instead pursue the accumulation of experience — and not to the end of some “cashing in,” but the intrinsic value of a happy life, and perhaps a progression along a spiritual or healing path. More and more in our generation are opting for this life as we become increasingly disenchanted with mainstream life, moving into vans to avoid as many bills as possible, approximating a sort of tribal lifestyle in the interstices of late capitalism. Now, after having lived in my car for almost six months (voluntarily, thankfully), I kind of see what it’s about. For those already oppressed by the system, it is the only option. For people like me, who can choose this life of individualism and freedom, it is an opt-out of social obligations. We may see a crisis in public infrastructure if everyone would rather live in a van in the woods not paying bills than pay for grad school to work 55 hours a week as a classroom teacher. And we’re in the golden age (or already past) where gas is cheap enough and there are still parking spots in paradise.
A bit of a tangent, on van life: There is an entire culture of people who do not care about accumulating wealth, and instead pursue the accumulation of experience — and not to the end of some “cashing in,” but the intrinsic value of a happy life, and perhaps a progression along a spiritual or healing path. More and more in our generation are opting for this life as we become increasingly disenchanted with mainstream life, moving into vans to avoid as many bills as possible, approximating a sort of tribal lifestyle in the interstices of late capitalism. Now, after having lived in my car for almost six months (voluntarily, thankfully), I kind of see what it’s about. For those already oppressed by the system, it is the only option. For people like me, who can choose this life of individualism and freedom, it is an opt-out of social obligations. We may see a crisis in public infrastructure if everyone would rather live in a van in the woods not paying bills than pay for grad school to work 55 hours a week as a classroom teacher. And we’re in the golden age (or already past) where gas is cheap enough and there are still parking spots in paradise.
 |
| mercado de la navidad, mexico city |
***
For Benjamin, mechanical reproduction upends the traditional characteristics of a work of art: serving a ritual function in the realm of the “cult” or religious, having a singular presence in time and space, and being located within a specific cultural tradition. These three elements contribute to the “authenticity” of a work, as Benjamin defines it: “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced” (4). This definition locates authenticity in the very materiality of the work, before questions of nominal or expressive authenticity come to consideration.
When the mechanical reproduction of works of art becomes widespread, cultural shifts in the way we interact with art ripple throughout the modern world. The religious function, which ascribes to the art-object a cult value, is replaced by a political function, which ascribes to the art-object an exhibition value. The singular work located in a tradition is now disseminated throughout the world, existing in innumerable identical forms, and encountered by innumerable people in innumerable different personal contexts with no historical continuity. Our tradition becomes reproducibility, our religion becomes exhibition.
Art itself is a casualty of this historical process, and “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” (4). Aura is uniqueness, presence and proximity in a singular location, bearing a specific historical witness. The loss of the aura is loss of a certain aspect of uniqueness, and it is the loss of authenticity.
Aura does not pertain only to works of art, but to all existence that could be subject to mechanical reproduction. Every thing, and every one, is unique. I am still unique if I post a picture of myself on Facebook, but a certain aspect of my uniqueness has been diminished, as a likeness has brought my being beyond its natural bounds. For Benjamin, not only does the aura of the being suffer from this, but this loss of authenticity becomes systemic throughout society as mechanical reproduction not only becomes commonplace, but conditions the way we relate to existence regardless of whether or not it is mechanically mediated in a given moment; we internalize the effects of this mechanization, and they begin mediating autonomously through our unconscious subjectivity.
The stakes of this assault on aura are high. Benjamin is writing in the prelude to the Nazi takeover of Germany, where the third Reich employed cinema in a massively effective propaganda campaign to condition the masses to not only go along with, but to joyously join the fascist cause. What this means of mediation allows is for a general remove from life itself, and in this void grows fascism. Benjamin ends the essay with a chilling exhortation: “Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art” (20).
After rereading this essay, I can identify that what links these three initial categories that stick out to me — art, healing, and spirituality — is their ritualistic nature, which has fallen under the duress of a society that seeks to commodify everything possible. I want to now break down the connection between mechanical reproduction and commodification.
Benjamin’s account of the decline of aura pins the blame on mechanical reproduction, which enacts this violence on the level of the individual art work, the way new artworks are created, in the way the society relates to art, and reality as whole. Mechanical reproduction saps the the work’s ritual value, replacing it with exhibition value, and erodes its authenticity and aura. Healing and spirituality, especially in their non-Westernified iterations, can be thought of as “arts,” and have a heritage in ritual. It is only relatively recently, since the Enlightenment, that Western healing has become thoroughly deracinated from its ritualistic roots and brought fully into the realm of rational and scientific practice. For these reasons, we can treat healing and spirituality as essentially ritualistic, and subject to the same corrosive effects of mechanical reproduction and commodification as art.
Benjamin begins to outline how mechanical reproduction plays a central role in the commodification of art. The act of mechanically reproducing a work enacts “the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage” (4). I take liquidation to mean rendering liquid in the form of money. The cult (religious, or specific) value is transposed into an exhibition (political, or exchangeable) value. This transforms the work of art into a commodity, fungible with any other commodity on the market. Thus, mechanical reproduction is not synonymous with commodification, but it is a critical step allowing for the latter to become possible and commonplace.
There is a difference between something that exists and is then commodified, and a thing that exists only as and to be a commodity. Art begins to be produced with reproducibility in mind, which means it is no longer ritualistic but exhibitionist in nature, lacking authenticity from the outset.
To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics. (6)
The result, it seems, is that the more rooted in mechanical reproduction, the more susceptible to commodification the work becomes. In this new form of exhibited art, “the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental” (7), raising the question that, while it may look pretty, is it still art? It seems as though the function of the work becomes central to the question of whether or not the work is “art” by Benjamin’s traditional standards.
Concomitant with this revaluation of the work and new question of function comes a change in the way the public relates to the art. Benjamin writes about the audience becoming “experts.” By this, I think he means that the traditionally strict division between artist and viewer starts to erode, that the democratization of viewing art leads to a democratization of producing it: “At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer. As expert, which he had to become willy-nilly in an extremely specialized work process even if only in some minor respect, the reader gains access to authorship… Literary license is now founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property” (12). Both audience and producers begin relating to art as “testers,” segmenting a work or performance to be judged on quality against an established standard, rather than in its own unity and in its tradition.
What we see here are the traces of the dialectical development of history: a new technology is introduced that changes the way people interact with art, and this not only leads to a new way of creating art, but of interacting with the world. Mechanical reproduction serves as the catalyst in our society toward generalized commodification. Art is being produced with profit motive, the audience is relating to it as an expert consumer. In the new mass culture,
Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion. With regard to the screen, the critical and the receptive attitudes of the public coincide. The decisive reason for this is that individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the film. The moment these responses become manifest they control each other. (14)
What Benjamin describes here is not only a symbiotic relationship between production and consumption, but a fusion of the two into one process. Our society has developed into one big “free” market in which artists, healers, spiritual guides operate as independent contractors competing for attention and funds of a general public that chooses what they want. Where once there were few writers and many readers, there is now a glut of writers and written material, especially in the context of the internet, which removes institutional gatekeepers and allows individual readers to both read and write in their own niches and echo chambers. The same applies to healing work and spiritual work; the content fills into the shape of the form.
Jumping forward to today, this Jacobin article breaks down the ways in which the art world, fashion brands, and finance capital have become intertwined. It’s a great illustration of Benjamin’s point that art has lost its ritual value in exchange for pure exhibition value, which is easily commodifiable. It also illustrates a similar process of dialectical inter-influence of the masses and the industry. The author identifies the 1980s as the tipping point when “high art” became more accessible to the masses: prices for art works balloon, as they become another form of financial asset for finance bros to speculate over; this boosts wider popular appeal, driving revenues for museums and art dealers, interested in reaching wider (wealthier) audiences; in turn, popular tastes influence artists aimed at creating spectacles for “middle culture” that will draw large crowds, as well as galleries and investors in their speculations of what will take off, as they gatekeep what works gain acclaim and a place in the fair or museum. This leads to ever more extravagant art fairs and a merging of art and capital to the point where they become indistinguishable. Who knows, maybe art is becoming a more lucrative speculative market than property.
NFTs (non-fungible tokens) attached to digital art pieces pose an entirely new set of questions that Benjamin’s essay is ill-equipped to handle, given the paradigm shift that has occurred as a result of the internet. NFTs allow for the complete liquidation of digital art works. A digital work represents the extreme end of total mechanical reproducibility, and NFTs allow for the artificial limiting of the work to belonging to just one “original” owner, approximating uniqueness. NFTs also allow for the work to exist as pure value: “NFTs, while retaining the positive associations of class and style associated with art, are really nothing more than assets with an associated JPEG, transformed into the frictionless commodity that capitalists have always wanted.” I imagine there are people do much more in-depth research on this thread, and I want to dig into it.
With the near-total commodification of rebellion, it becomes difficult to create any art that effectively challenges the forces of domination that willingly engulf and monetize it. At its worst, art becomes “a tool of capital accumulation and social domination.” I think this is what Brecht was warning of in footnote 9 in the Benjamin essay:
If the concept of ‘work of art’ can no longer be applied to the thing that emerges once the work is transformed into a commodity, we have to eliminate this concept with cautious care but without fear, lest we liquidate the function of the very thing as well. For it has to go through this phase without mental reservation, and not as noncommittal deviation from the straight path; rather, what happens here with the work of art will change it fundamentally and erase its past to such an extent that should the old concept be taken up again—and it will, why not?—it will no longer stir any memory of the thing it once designated. (22-3)
Here, Brecht is advocating for a strict division between art-as-commodity, which must relinquish its claim on its history and ritual function, and the concept of the "art work," which must be protected against being lumped in with commodified art.
There is an eerie resonance between the prestige of a brand or an art fair and the aura of a work of art. It makes me think of how something like Landmark probably has a marketing person to manage the brand image. The portion of the essay where Benjamin discusses the plight of the film actor can perhaps help us make sense of this similarity. The film actor experiences a self-segmentation and inability to connect with the audience quite viscerally, for purposes of proposing a question regarding how to relate mechanical mediation and commodification:
The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera, as Pirandello describes it, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s own image in the mirror. But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported? Before the public. Never for a moment does the screen actor cease to be conscious of this fact. While facing the camera he knows that ultimately he will face the public, the consumers who constitute the market. This market, where he offers not only his labor but also his whole self, his heart and soul, is beyond his reach. During the shooting he has as little contact with it as any article made in a factory. This may contribute to that oppression, that new anxiety which, according to Pirandello, grips the actor before the camera. The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity.
In this instance, we are dealing with the screen actor, whose relation to the public is mediated by the technical apparatus of the film camera, and the raw material of their performance undergoes a process of selection and revision (a revision of reality) before it is presented to the audience-market. As a result of this mediation, the actor becomes alienated from their aura, and their personality itself becomes a commodity. It is unclear here whether the public is already a market of consumers, or if this transformation has already taken place. I find this the most compelling way to understand contemporary stardom and fame, which is now permutating through the medium of social media into somewhat of a different beast from classic Hollywood or Beatlemania, where we all become producers/consumers (pro-sumers) of our personal brands, and we are all simultaneously the commodities whose data is being harvested by social media platforms to sell to advertisers. My question is, if we swap out the actor for a yoga teacher, removing the mechanical mediation, but keep the public-as-market context, what becomes of the aura of the yoga teacher, or of the yoga practice itself? The social relation becomes one of a market transaction, and I’m wondering if this commodification of an existing tradition enacts a similar destruction of aura. If so, the very fabric of life has become subject to the same corrosive effect of mechanical reproduction.
***
To reiterate, my intent here is not to propose that artists and healers should offer their labor and services for free or be deemed morally compromised. My lack of a solution for this problem I've raised reflects the reality that there is no ethical consumption, or production, under capitalism, how many of us are forced to compromise our values for survival. The artist who sells their paintings or the yoga teacher who charges for classes just to get by don't have great options: monetize, get a "real job," or poverty. This is not a moral failing of the individual; it is a moral failing of the system.
Some questions for the future: Do we live in an era where aura is always already dead before we’ve even undertaken to create something or interact with someone, or is there still some aura to salvage? Maybe it’s not so dire if aura in its traditional form dies away, or morphs into something new. Surely, some of the art made today enriches our lives; personally, I find this to be the case more often when it's a doodle from a friend, as opposed to a multi-million dollar piece in a museum, though viewing the latter offers an opportunity for a different, perhaps more cynical and cerebral, encounter with an art-object that is not devoid of value (the ritual of contemplating the end of capitalism?).
As for art’s collusion with contemporary fascism, as well as the potential it has to pose a challenge to a regime of global-finance-induced stratification and domination, I haven’t lost all hope yet for art, as well as healing and spiritual practice, as liberatory forces. Even in their commodified forms, I think we're better off pursuing these passions than not; for if we cease, what is left? There are people all over the world keeping their traditional cultures alive, and creating spaces for communal expression and experience. We just need to continue thinking of art and practice in different terms, outside of the museum or MFA, outside of the published novel or MCU blockbuster, outside the corporate yoga studio. I’m looking more toward the art and practice that slips through or intentionally dwells in the cracks, flies under the radar in the abandoned warehouse or the mountain commune, that allows for people to experience a glimmer of humanity, and opens some space for an expansive-liberatory being and revolutionary imagination.
 |
| mercado de la navidad, mexico city |
