1
Benjamin writes that reproductive technologies have brought about a disruption of aura, as they entail on one hand the fragmentation and manipulation of the performance and on the other hand, the detachment of one’s performance from the body and its consequent reproduction in times and spaces other than one’s own (pp.20-21). The author proceeds to draw parallels between the protagonists of theatre and politics (footnote#13). If the actor cannot help but be “conscious (…) of the audience of consumers that constitute the market” (pp.21), isn’t it the case that the politician is no longer merely speaking to the members of the Parliament? What the camera is to the actors, is the recording equipment to the politicians – it imposes the necessity to appeal to an audience of voters and stakeholders that will ensure their survival.
In short, Benjamin traces the influence of emergent media on the ‘rules of the game’ of art and politics. In our times, how have social media changed the way art and politics are conducted? If theatres and parliaments were emptied around the same time (footnote#13), which architectural spaces are being rendered redundant today and why?
2
In 1936 when Benjamin is writing, television and cinema were winning ground so performances were no longer fleeting or helplessly bound to ‘the here and now’: technological means of reproduction rendered them transportable. However, they were of course analog – film and tapes are inherently prone to material degradation. Today however, digital technologies grant all events and performances a kind of HD immortality. How has the nature of art and politics changed in our times, given the Internet’s inability to forget?
3
After defining his concept of message as different of that of content, McLuhan refers to why those are mistakenly misinterpreted or consider as one all too often. First, the content of the medium, namely its function, uses and purposes, tend to absorb all our attention (pp.392). Secondly, the medium’s message was indiscernible before the electricity – it is the ‘electric speed’ of things that revealed the total field of the medium, granting us instant awareness of the whole picture (pp395). Also, to be able to acknowledge the characteristics of the medium clearly, one has to be an external, aware observer, because the medium has “the power to impose its own assumptions on the unwary” (pp397). And the unwary are those that do not fit into ‘a man’s world’, the child, the woman, the colored person and non-western peoples. When McLuhan is writing these lines, the Vietnam war, the first televised war in history, is raging. In what ways was that war an imperialist attempt to tame and pull an eastern misfit culture into a supposedly culturally superior world of visual and typographic technology? Which were the “intellectual mistakes” (pp.402) that resulted to the Vietnam war?
This is a very worthwhile documentary where McLuhan develops his ideas thoroughly. The part where he is talking about “total war” and the hydrogen bomb is here .
