YouTube, Politics and the (de)Fetishization of Art & Technology
"Human kind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached a point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism."
(Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction')
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"The sort of distraction that is provided by art represents a covert measure of the extent to which it has become possible to perform new tasks of apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are to evade such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important tasks where it is able to mobilize the masses."
(Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction')
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Writing these statements in 1939 in his third and final version of the essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ , Walter Benjamin proclaims his grave discontent with humanity, as well as his great expectations for art. It is art as a medium for political motivation that could prove mankind’s saving grace. Adversely however, the “aestheticization of politics” – the manipulation and concealment of undemocratic forces under the guise of art’s aesthetics – has the potential to undermine humanity’s ability to perceive and act accordingly.
Straddling his essay between these two axioms, Benjamin grounds his notion of art in another concerning matter, technology. Equally bipolar is the ambiguous fate technology has for man. The pendulum of technology sways between salvation and annihilation, poison and antidote. For Benjamin the question is (and perhaps always will be): is technology not a “fetish of doom but rather a key to happiness?” This fetishization of technology is what constitutes technology’s sacred bond with war, a relationship to which is “proof that society was not mature enough to make technology its organ.”
At the time of Benjamin’s writing, the twentieth century marriage between technology and art had progressed to produce the forms of film and television. Benjamin’s thesis posited that the rise of new forms of technologically produced art was related to what he justified as the de-aurafication of art. It was this de-aurafication, or defetishization of art by means of its technological reproducibility, that disclosed for Benjamin art’s potential to affect a political consciousness in the masses; one that could protect them against political manipulation of the arts.
Today, we find art’s union with technology in a not so dissimilar fashion as it was in Benjamin’s era, with film, television, radio and print still making up the mainstay of its offspring; however a new prodigal son has emerged – the Internet. The Internet, not so much an art form in itself, is the transformation of all these other mediums – film, television, radio and print – into one comprehensive network of media sites operating in one mode, the digital. One of the sites that represent wholeheartedly this transformation is YouTube – an online compendium of digital videos that exponentially expand the distributive possibilities of film and television, and hence, in terms of Benjamin’s notions on art, affects their potential political ramifications.
The question thence becomes: how do today’s art mediums of technological reproducibility, specifically YouTube – as a prolific remediator of audiovisual content – come to affect the political consciousness of the masses, by way of the further de-aurafication of art? In order to do this, it is necessary to trace Benjamin’s original thesis, in terms of the notion of art’s de-aurafication and the subsequent effect it has on the political perception of the contemporary public. I will analyze YouTube’s potential in assisting to create an apperception – through its breakdown of traditional hierarchies of meaning-formation and capital control – that allows man to better engage in political life; specifically his ability to form a political consciousness, mediated by Benjamin’s notion of the “optical unconscious”. Through this discussion, we will come to see how technology can become absorbed into the subject’s ontology, that is his being, in such a way, that propagates his ability to critically participate in society and hence, politics.
A Short Description of YouTube
Firstly though, due to its relative adolescence , it’s essential to illustrate in relevant detail, the Internet-based medium that is YouTube. YouTube is an online platform that allows for the uploading (by registered users) and streaming (by any user) of video content. The content that comprises its vast catalogue is a mixture of remediated material – digitized (and at times edited) from its original film, video or television source – and original user-produced material. Access, that is the uploading and streaming of content, is free of charge and need not take place within a particular time schedule; hence, viewing is asynchronous. Uploaders can create their own virtual channel, whereby subscribers to a particular channel are notified, through email and when logging-in to YouTube, of new content from that particular uploader. Videos are assigned tags , which are keywords that designate an association significant to the video. The search function on YouTube, thus corresponds search results in order of relevance to the tags supplied by the uploader. Another significant function is the ability for Internet surfers to embed YouTube’s videos in emails or other websites, such as Blogs, online forums, networking websites and personal homepages. YouTube facilitates this by supplying the particular hypertext so that a user can copy it and paste it in another website, (if the latter permits). The video however, even when remediated across other websites, will always have the YouTube emblem in a corner of the frame. Due to bandwidth, the limit of a video’s duration is ten minutes and the limit for data size is 100 megabytes (hence, these small forms of Internet video are often referred to as clips). What we see in this short description is a reconstitution of the relationship between author and audience – on the lines of meaning-formation and capital control – that I will flesh out below.
Aura and its Decline
To talk of the aura of an artwork is to attribute it a valuation in terms of its traditional and cultural authenticity. Authenticity derives from the artwork’s singularity, a presence delineated by space and time: “the here and now of the work of art – its unique existence in a particular place… underlies the concept of its authenticity.” The “here and now” of the object and viewer contribute towards a sacred relationship between the viewer and the object. Benjamin, borrowing from Freud, refers to the object in this mode as fetishized. This underlies Benjamin’s perspective that art, in its first form, primarily manifested itself from cultish and religious expression. Such expression undermines the meaning of an artwork, ascribing to it a transcendental otherness that the everyday person cannot comprehend. By dissolving the sanctity of art, characterized by its singular presence, and hence, cultic and ritualistic value, technology brings art into the realm of the profane – the public. It is precisely technology by “replacing the work many times over” that it brings about a “publicization” of the sphere of art, facilitating public access, and hence, “substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence.”
Benjamin’s definition of aura ascribes significance to the singularity of space and time in the artwork’s viewing, thus the mechanical reproduction of film and television breaks down the spatial and temporal logic of the aura. However I argue, that even in cinema and television, the logic is not entirely disposed of. Just as there is an authorial supposition of the painting’s exhibition space, there has to be something said about the authority of the cinema’s space, the photographer’s gallery, the habituation and ritualization of the living room television, and hence the petit-fetishization of these forms of media. Meaning becomes affected by the space; for instance laughter in the cinema has a knock-on effect, producing a stronger physical reaction in individuals in contrast to solitary viewing. Collective viewing affects meaning, to the degree that audience members see themselves as, what Benedict Anderson terms, an “imagined community” , having an unsaid affinity, on the basis of their simultaneous viewing. The same can be said of television, especially event television, such as sports, live concerts or election results. Commenting on the rise of Internet media, techno-scientist Nicholas Negroponte prophesized, “We'll all live very asynchronous lives… The idea that we collectively rush off to watch a television program at 9:00 p.m. will be nothing less than goofy.” This has the effect of greater individuation, as people learn to form meaning free of coercive externalities. For Negroponte’s idealism, this would culminate in the disappearance of whole collectives: “In the distant future, the need for cities will disappear… The evolutionary life of the nation-state will turn out to be far shorter than that of the pterodactyl.”
YouTube has the ability to nullify the aura of presence, by remediating content through the Internet directly to the individual private viewer. The specificity of a time and a place is forsaken for the ease of reception. All of the authorial encodings, which manipulate meaning, that are attached to an artwork’s exhibition – that is, the aura – are substituted for the user’s own personal and private time and space. Because streaming is instantaneous and at the user’s pleasure, viewing is asynchronous. The user isn’t limited by a TV schedule or a cinema’s timetable. Viewing can be repeated as many times as wanted, without the need of a recording device, and the time lag implicit in using one. Hence, unlike television or cinema, the user can scrutinize the image as much as he wants and conversely, as little as he wants.
The Publicizing and Politicizing of YouTube
This leads to the ability of YouTube to dislocate commercial intentions, which marks a key distinction between it and other technological mediums on and offline. Media theorist Michael Bugeja suggests that the progression of new media technologies has run parallel to the onslaught of new commercial target markets. Referencing Marshall McLuhan’s optimism for technology, Bugeja says, “[i]nstead of a global village, we inherited a global mall so divisively market-driven, that we brand ourselves by the companies (not the human company) we keep.” YouTube’s form however, doesn’t allow for the insertion of marketing material. The advertising that takes up television breaks and the beginning of cinema screenings is forgone. Hence, YouTube marks a discord from the usual commercial bombardment that constitutes the experience of virtually all other mediums. In a December 2006 article in Wired magazine, the owners of YouTube deemed that placing a commercial before or after the video streams would be “fatally intrusive.” The only option, which has not been implemented thus far, would be to place an advertisement to the side of the video, embedded in the webpage. However, according to Wired, because of the user-ability to place YouTube-hosted videos on other websites, the vast majority of stream counts do not actually originate from YouTube’s website. It is YouTube’s form that suspends the power of market-driven meaning, hence removing the commercial function prevalent in many contemporary mediums of art.
This leads us to the breakdown of another hierarchal structure, namely the capital one. Benjamin noticed the ease to which literate individuals could become published, given the space set aside for “letters to the editor”. Almost thirty years before Roland Barthes proclaimed the “death of the author” , Benjamin said, “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character... [as] the reader gains access to authorship.” Technology functions to breakdown the author-public relationship. “Broadcast Yourself” is YouTube’s slogan – now everyone can. Alan Kirby, a professor of English, comments on this breakdown of authorship in the wider online community: “[W]hat is central now is the busy, active forging work of the individual who would once have been called its recipient. In all of this, the viewer feels powerful and is indeed necessary.” What is relevant particularly to YouTube, is this transformation from viewer to author; not just for authors of user-generated content, and the uploaders of film and television content, but for the remediating users, the users that copy and paste hypertext, embedding videos in emails, Blogs, personal pages and MySpace comments . The user forges a path by which one can trace his independent activity. His consumption becomes a form of production itself. He becomes an author in his receptivity.
For Benjamin, this would account for the politicizing, or the publicizing of technologically reproduced art. The breakdown of the author-public axiom showcases the optimistic pole in Benjamin’s thesis for technology’s pseudo-Marxist fate – that is, as technology progresses, it deconstructs capitalist modes of production, opens up barriers to entry, and furthers the ability for the masses to produce for themselves. As we’ve seen, YouTube facilitates this breakdown to an enormous extent. However, one can read further into YouTube’s political charge as a failure in capital itself. Because YouTube is free for all users, employing its mechanism of dissemination places no burden of cost onto the user. In fact, due to the infringement of copyright, which may be involved, in the uploading of remediated television and film content, the burden of cost/loss is displaced unto the original owners of capital. YouTube hence, brings art out of its privileged capitalist hierarchal structure, just as film brought art out of the hierarchal system of religious meaning and bourgeois social values. Ownership becomes liquid. However, this is not to take away from the apparent legal implications involved in MySpace’s remediation of copyrighted material. But, as one online journalist noted:
"YouTube is a stage for everyone, including traditional media companies, filmmakers, record labels, movie studios, comedians and more. With the shift happening in digital media entertainment and a new clip culture evolving, professional content creators are recognizing the potential of promoting themselves and their programming on YouTube to reach a vast, new audience. As such, YouTube has evolved into a powerful monetization and promotional platform."
YouTube is forcing the leaders of media industry to rethink their philosophy on authoritative ownership and distribution towards a more publicly driven doctrine. The politicization of the structures of old media, along with the de-aurafication of art’s mechanisms of meaning-formation, open up a space to discuss the implicit effect this has on the public’s apperception.
A New Apperception
In order to place art within a wider political discourse of public apperception, Benjamin emphasizes the totalizing effect that these structural changes in form and meaning-formation can have on the very faculties of perception: “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception.” As we’ve seen, by removing the fetish of aura imposed on the meaning-formation of an artwork, a new object relation is born, whereby the object castrated from the realm of the sacred, is primed for critical scrutiny. This mode of perception manifests itself in the desire to “get closer”:
"[It is] the desire of the present-day masses to 'get closer' to things spatially and humanly, and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness by assimilating it as a reproduction."
This process of assimilation – the bringing of the artwork into the order of technology and science – deepens in the subject an apperception, habituated out of a critical stance towards experience. YouTube exemplifies this facet of reproductive technology, where every conceivable video past and present, is brought into the digital and disseminated for close inspection. A key to this new experiential mode is found in film’s ability to “distract”. In his essay ‘Reception in Distraction’, Howard Eiland focuses on this impression of technological media:
"[T]he cinema is the authentic Übunginstrument, or training device, for the sort of reception in distraction which is coming into being in all areas of contemporary art, and which is symptomatic of a new kinetic apperception, one opened out and agitated, as it were, jolted."
The potential for YouTube to distract is exemplary. According to the technology consultancy firm Accenture , 38% of Americans want to create and share online content. The mass integration of YouTube into the public media sphere, allows the masses to absorb a technological fairground of attractions and distractions, where the user can play out virtually any conceivable theme or ride for up to ten minutes, and then move-on. This “reception in distraction” leads to an enhancement of Erfahrung, a type of experience whereby perception becomes integrated into the individual’s experiential framework. Erfahrung is contrasted to Erlebnis , which is a psychic response to shocks , that causes the subject to reject any experiential material, alienating him from a deeper understanding of his relationship with technology and art. “Reception in distraction” and Erfahrung are something akin to Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect [verfremdungseffekt], whereby the audience members are jolted into active reception, as opposed to lulled into passivity. YouTube’s formal structure castrates the audience from the traditional logic of passive reception. The ten-minute limit makes for content that is specifically distractive and a-repetitive in nature. The YouTube user is no longer consumed, as he is by the banal narratives of Hollywood cinema, but forces the image to comply with his own faculties of reason and experience. If not, he will simply switch it off and find a new distraction. In a sense, he forces the art and technology to comply with his own being, the full extent to which “involves [his] whole sensorium, as illuminated by memory (for the experience in ‘intoxicated experience’ is long experience – Erfahrung).” YouTube, deployed over time, is a collection of “intoxicated experiences”, whereby the user’s memory is furnished with multiple distracted and engaged viewings. As mentioned above, the embedding of hypertext allows the user to create digital footprints across the Internet. A user’s digital footprint within YouTube’s website actually materializes itself in the function “Viewing History”, which catalogues the history of videos streamed by a particular user; a far cry from having to save ticket stubs and archive TV guides.
The Optical Unconscious
This new engagement of man’s apperception with art underlies what Benjamin calls the “optical unconscious”:
"[I]t is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. 'Other' above all in these that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to space informed by the unconscious… It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious."
Benjamin’s “optical unconscious” is an evolutionary mediation of the ancient faculty of mimesis. Mimesis was “the gift of producing similarities and therefore also the gift of recognizing them” . We imagine the child, or the native of an animistic culture, as having a highly developed mimetic faculty, being able to find similarities and transcendental meaning in all objects, such that there was an aura-filled relationship with all objects, not just artworks . However, such an ability brought about in the subject a sense of “cosmic being” – oneness with the universe and an understanding of things in relation to all other things. Benjamin’s argument is that the ancient human faculty of mimesis has been transmuted into technological mimesis – that is, technological reproducibility; and hence, technology, in the way it has changed man’s apperception, can potentially disclose to him an understanding akin – however technologically adapted – to that developed by the highly mimetic native – the “optical unconscious”. Michael Taussig, in his highly idiosyncratic essay, ‘Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds’, develops this notion of the “optical unconscious” in its relation to “profane illumination”:
"This capacity of mimetic machines to pump out contact-sensuosity encased within the spectrality of a commoditized world is nothing less than the discovery of an optical unconscious, opening up new possibilities for exploring reality and providing means for changing culture and society along with those possibilities. Now the work of art blends with scientific work so as to refetishize, yet take advantage of marketed reality and thereby achieve 'profane illumination'."
Thus, the camera for Benjamin opens up a surrealist potentiality for technology, to penetrate the physiognomic qualities of objects, to bring that which was sacred into the realm of profanity, by dipping into the “optical unconscious” by means of "profane illumination"
YouTube manifests itself as the digital semblance of this “optical unconscious” – an unconscious encyclopedia of imagery that extends infinitely into time and space, precisely because it does not exist in time and space. Like the image matrix that constitutes the individual’s memory, specifically deep memory [Erfahrung], YouTube constitutes a vast network of monads that lie in association with one another. Pulling at the thread of one image illuminates the trace of an infinite number of others. By highlighting a tag and streaming a video, YouTube’s search mechanism brings into the foreground a plethora of other associated images, just as Freud’s unconscious reveals itself by means of word-association. An unconscious word-image constantly tempers the individual’s ability to form meaning, to scrutinize art, and reaffirm its own potentiality. YouTube, as a corpus of memory, attends to the mystical third-eye, “[the] hallucinatory eye, a roller-coastering of the senses dissolving science and art into a new mode of truth-seeking and reality testing.” YouTube, perhaps, makes space for a techno-mystical sense of oneness with the world, where one’s being is constituted by one’s ability to sift through the online unconsciousness.
Conclusion
How does this expression of experience affect the public’s political consciousness? What are the implications of YouTube’s form, in the way that it demolishes aura, deconstructs experience and meaning, and altogether brings about a relationship between man, art and technology that is somewhat surreal? Krzysztof Ziarek’s essay, ‘Artwork in the age of Electronic Mutability’, depicts the de-aurafication of art in the context of the wider political project of art “after aesthetics”. He stresses the significance of art’s form in order to bring about a rethinking of art in the political:
"[I]t is form understood as the inscription and reconfiguration of social antagonisms that make it possible for art to be socially critical. This form is not simply differentiated from content or themes, but, instead, must be seen as tracing itself upon both formal and the material aspects of art, making both the work’s content and its formal organization the scene of the reinscription, and thus of the critique, of social praxis."
YouTube facilitates a reinscription at both the level of form and content. The hierarchal structure of production and dissemination has been dissolved to the point that the traditional organizers of capital have had to rethink for themselves the economic, artistic and social configurations of their mediums. The content is becoming increasingly user-generated, breaking down traditional barriers of entry based on the binary of author-public. The public is becoming its own author, even unintentionally so, through placing digital footprints across the Internet. Both of these distinct reconfigurations converge to undermine the authority of meaning-formation and the experience granted by media consumption, by reshaping the relationship between the public, art and technology. Part of this relationship, is the revelation of technology operating at art’s core, the disclosure of art as tekhne, the ancient Greek locution that means both art (as artifice) and technology (as artificial); and hence the possible opening up of a ontological-technocratic potentiality for art. What I infer by this is in the way that man now absorbs tekhne into his ontology, increasing his ability to produce art publicly, as well as his perception and experience of art, thus enhancing his faculties of reason and conversely his ability to be political. As Ziarek points out, “the instant of art’s liberation from the strictures of its aesthetic formation coincides with the possible disappearance of art’s distinctiveness and its progressive merger with technology.” Art’s political potentiality comes from its ability to remove itself from the hierarchy of capital, thus inscribing in the social, a new logic of capital production and in the individual, a new experience of meaning-formation.
To go back to Benjamin’s quote at the beginning of this essay; Benjamin premised that it was the failure of individuals, that necessitates a reliance on art to ”tackle the most difficult and most important tasks where it is able to mobilize the masses.” In the context of my argument for YouTube, the work of art is coming to prove, not just Benjamin’s hopeful project for art, but also his fatalistic trust in technology. In the context of art’s convergence with technology, we come to see YouTube as extending arts diminishing aura and producing in man, “matur[ity] enough to make technology its organ” – a maturity that will allow man to absorb art in such a way as to use it for social and political praxis and stave of the dual threats, in Benjamin’s mind, of fascism and annihilation. However, technology is always both antidote and poison. So the question becomes: what remnants of art’s and conversely technology’s fetish remain?
Bibliography
Alan Kirby, ‘The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond’, Philosophy Now, Anja Publications, London, Nov/Dec 2006
Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Walter Benjamin and Art, Continuum, New York, 2005
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso, London, 1983
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, John Willet (tr.), Hill and Wang, London, 1978
Bob Garfield, ‘YouTube vs. Boob Tube’, Wired, Issue 14.12, Dec 2006, [Internet] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/youtube.html [Date Accessed: 16/5/2007]
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan (eds.), Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2003
Michael Bugeja, ‘Electric Cabaret’, Ecologist, London, Dec 2006/Jan 2007
Michael Taussig, ‘Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds’, in Mimesis & Alterity: a Particular History of the Senses, Routledge, New York, 1993
Miguel Helft, ‘Google Calls Viacom Suit on YouTube Unfounded’, New York Times, May 1 2007 [Internet] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/technology/01google.html [Date Accessed: 16/5/2007]
Nicholas Negroponte, ‘Beyond Digital’, Wired, Issue 6.12, Dec 1998, [Internet] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.12/negroponte.html [Date Accessed: 16/5/2007]
Samuel Rose, ‘YouTube Politics’, Smart Mobs, [Internet] http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2006/11/03/youtube_politic....html [Date Accessed: 16/5/2007]
Simon Cooper, Technoculture and Critical Theory: in the service of the machine?, Routledge, New York, 2002, p. 56
Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, reprinted in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Edmund Jephcott (tr.) and Peter Demetz (ed.), Schocken Books, New York, 1986
Walter Benjamin, ‘Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia’, 1929, available online [Internet] http://www.generation-online.org/c/fcsurrealism.htm [Date Accessed: 17/5/2007]
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, Edmund Jephcott (tr.) Third Version, reprinted in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (eds.), Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003
(Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction')
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"The sort of distraction that is provided by art represents a covert measure of the extent to which it has become possible to perform new tasks of apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are to evade such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important tasks where it is able to mobilize the masses."
(Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction')
-
Writing these statements in 1939 in his third and final version of the essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ , Walter Benjamin proclaims his grave discontent with humanity, as well as his great expectations for art. It is art as a medium for political motivation that could prove mankind’s saving grace. Adversely however, the “aestheticization of politics” – the manipulation and concealment of undemocratic forces under the guise of art’s aesthetics – has the potential to undermine humanity’s ability to perceive and act accordingly.
Straddling his essay between these two axioms, Benjamin grounds his notion of art in another concerning matter, technology. Equally bipolar is the ambiguous fate technology has for man. The pendulum of technology sways between salvation and annihilation, poison and antidote. For Benjamin the question is (and perhaps always will be): is technology not a “fetish of doom but rather a key to happiness?” This fetishization of technology is what constitutes technology’s sacred bond with war, a relationship to which is “proof that society was not mature enough to make technology its organ.”
At the time of Benjamin’s writing, the twentieth century marriage between technology and art had progressed to produce the forms of film and television. Benjamin’s thesis posited that the rise of new forms of technologically produced art was related to what he justified as the de-aurafication of art. It was this de-aurafication, or defetishization of art by means of its technological reproducibility, that disclosed for Benjamin art’s potential to affect a political consciousness in the masses; one that could protect them against political manipulation of the arts.
Today, we find art’s union with technology in a not so dissimilar fashion as it was in Benjamin’s era, with film, television, radio and print still making up the mainstay of its offspring; however a new prodigal son has emerged – the Internet. The Internet, not so much an art form in itself, is the transformation of all these other mediums – film, television, radio and print – into one comprehensive network of media sites operating in one mode, the digital. One of the sites that represent wholeheartedly this transformation is YouTube – an online compendium of digital videos that exponentially expand the distributive possibilities of film and television, and hence, in terms of Benjamin’s notions on art, affects their potential political ramifications.
The question thence becomes: how do today’s art mediums of technological reproducibility, specifically YouTube – as a prolific remediator of audiovisual content – come to affect the political consciousness of the masses, by way of the further de-aurafication of art? In order to do this, it is necessary to trace Benjamin’s original thesis, in terms of the notion of art’s de-aurafication and the subsequent effect it has on the political perception of the contemporary public. I will analyze YouTube’s potential in assisting to create an apperception – through its breakdown of traditional hierarchies of meaning-formation and capital control – that allows man to better engage in political life; specifically his ability to form a political consciousness, mediated by Benjamin’s notion of the “optical unconscious”. Through this discussion, we will come to see how technology can become absorbed into the subject’s ontology, that is his being, in such a way, that propagates his ability to critically participate in society and hence, politics.
A Short Description of YouTube
Firstly though, due to its relative adolescence , it’s essential to illustrate in relevant detail, the Internet-based medium that is YouTube. YouTube is an online platform that allows for the uploading (by registered users) and streaming (by any user) of video content. The content that comprises its vast catalogue is a mixture of remediated material – digitized (and at times edited) from its original film, video or television source – and original user-produced material. Access, that is the uploading and streaming of content, is free of charge and need not take place within a particular time schedule; hence, viewing is asynchronous. Uploaders can create their own virtual channel, whereby subscribers to a particular channel are notified, through email and when logging-in to YouTube, of new content from that particular uploader. Videos are assigned tags , which are keywords that designate an association significant to the video. The search function on YouTube, thus corresponds search results in order of relevance to the tags supplied by the uploader. Another significant function is the ability for Internet surfers to embed YouTube’s videos in emails or other websites, such as Blogs, online forums, networking websites and personal homepages. YouTube facilitates this by supplying the particular hypertext so that a user can copy it and paste it in another website, (if the latter permits). The video however, even when remediated across other websites, will always have the YouTube emblem in a corner of the frame. Due to bandwidth, the limit of a video’s duration is ten minutes and the limit for data size is 100 megabytes (hence, these small forms of Internet video are often referred to as clips). What we see in this short description is a reconstitution of the relationship between author and audience – on the lines of meaning-formation and capital control – that I will flesh out below.
Aura and its Decline
To talk of the aura of an artwork is to attribute it a valuation in terms of its traditional and cultural authenticity. Authenticity derives from the artwork’s singularity, a presence delineated by space and time: “the here and now of the work of art – its unique existence in a particular place… underlies the concept of its authenticity.” The “here and now” of the object and viewer contribute towards a sacred relationship between the viewer and the object. Benjamin, borrowing from Freud, refers to the object in this mode as fetishized. This underlies Benjamin’s perspective that art, in its first form, primarily manifested itself from cultish and religious expression. Such expression undermines the meaning of an artwork, ascribing to it a transcendental otherness that the everyday person cannot comprehend. By dissolving the sanctity of art, characterized by its singular presence, and hence, cultic and ritualistic value, technology brings art into the realm of the profane – the public. It is precisely technology by “replacing the work many times over” that it brings about a “publicization” of the sphere of art, facilitating public access, and hence, “substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence.”
Benjamin’s definition of aura ascribes significance to the singularity of space and time in the artwork’s viewing, thus the mechanical reproduction of film and television breaks down the spatial and temporal logic of the aura. However I argue, that even in cinema and television, the logic is not entirely disposed of. Just as there is an authorial supposition of the painting’s exhibition space, there has to be something said about the authority of the cinema’s space, the photographer’s gallery, the habituation and ritualization of the living room television, and hence the petit-fetishization of these forms of media. Meaning becomes affected by the space; for instance laughter in the cinema has a knock-on effect, producing a stronger physical reaction in individuals in contrast to solitary viewing. Collective viewing affects meaning, to the degree that audience members see themselves as, what Benedict Anderson terms, an “imagined community” , having an unsaid affinity, on the basis of their simultaneous viewing. The same can be said of television, especially event television, such as sports, live concerts or election results. Commenting on the rise of Internet media, techno-scientist Nicholas Negroponte prophesized, “We'll all live very asynchronous lives… The idea that we collectively rush off to watch a television program at 9:00 p.m. will be nothing less than goofy.” This has the effect of greater individuation, as people learn to form meaning free of coercive externalities. For Negroponte’s idealism, this would culminate in the disappearance of whole collectives: “In the distant future, the need for cities will disappear… The evolutionary life of the nation-state will turn out to be far shorter than that of the pterodactyl.”
YouTube has the ability to nullify the aura of presence, by remediating content through the Internet directly to the individual private viewer. The specificity of a time and a place is forsaken for the ease of reception. All of the authorial encodings, which manipulate meaning, that are attached to an artwork’s exhibition – that is, the aura – are substituted for the user’s own personal and private time and space. Because streaming is instantaneous and at the user’s pleasure, viewing is asynchronous. The user isn’t limited by a TV schedule or a cinema’s timetable. Viewing can be repeated as many times as wanted, without the need of a recording device, and the time lag implicit in using one. Hence, unlike television or cinema, the user can scrutinize the image as much as he wants and conversely, as little as he wants.
The Publicizing and Politicizing of YouTube
This leads to the ability of YouTube to dislocate commercial intentions, which marks a key distinction between it and other technological mediums on and offline. Media theorist Michael Bugeja suggests that the progression of new media technologies has run parallel to the onslaught of new commercial target markets. Referencing Marshall McLuhan’s optimism for technology, Bugeja says, “[i]nstead of a global village, we inherited a global mall so divisively market-driven, that we brand ourselves by the companies (not the human company) we keep.” YouTube’s form however, doesn’t allow for the insertion of marketing material. The advertising that takes up television breaks and the beginning of cinema screenings is forgone. Hence, YouTube marks a discord from the usual commercial bombardment that constitutes the experience of virtually all other mediums. In a December 2006 article in Wired magazine, the owners of YouTube deemed that placing a commercial before or after the video streams would be “fatally intrusive.” The only option, which has not been implemented thus far, would be to place an advertisement to the side of the video, embedded in the webpage. However, according to Wired, because of the user-ability to place YouTube-hosted videos on other websites, the vast majority of stream counts do not actually originate from YouTube’s website. It is YouTube’s form that suspends the power of market-driven meaning, hence removing the commercial function prevalent in many contemporary mediums of art.
This leads us to the breakdown of another hierarchal structure, namely the capital one. Benjamin noticed the ease to which literate individuals could become published, given the space set aside for “letters to the editor”. Almost thirty years before Roland Barthes proclaimed the “death of the author” , Benjamin said, “the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character... [as] the reader gains access to authorship.” Technology functions to breakdown the author-public relationship. “Broadcast Yourself” is YouTube’s slogan – now everyone can. Alan Kirby, a professor of English, comments on this breakdown of authorship in the wider online community: “[W]hat is central now is the busy, active forging work of the individual who would once have been called its recipient. In all of this, the viewer feels powerful and is indeed necessary.” What is relevant particularly to YouTube, is this transformation from viewer to author; not just for authors of user-generated content, and the uploaders of film and television content, but for the remediating users, the users that copy and paste hypertext, embedding videos in emails, Blogs, personal pages and MySpace comments . The user forges a path by which one can trace his independent activity. His consumption becomes a form of production itself. He becomes an author in his receptivity.
For Benjamin, this would account for the politicizing, or the publicizing of technologically reproduced art. The breakdown of the author-public axiom showcases the optimistic pole in Benjamin’s thesis for technology’s pseudo-Marxist fate – that is, as technology progresses, it deconstructs capitalist modes of production, opens up barriers to entry, and furthers the ability for the masses to produce for themselves. As we’ve seen, YouTube facilitates this breakdown to an enormous extent. However, one can read further into YouTube’s political charge as a failure in capital itself. Because YouTube is free for all users, employing its mechanism of dissemination places no burden of cost onto the user. In fact, due to the infringement of copyright, which may be involved, in the uploading of remediated television and film content, the burden of cost/loss is displaced unto the original owners of capital. YouTube hence, brings art out of its privileged capitalist hierarchal structure, just as film brought art out of the hierarchal system of religious meaning and bourgeois social values. Ownership becomes liquid. However, this is not to take away from the apparent legal implications involved in MySpace’s remediation of copyrighted material. But, as one online journalist noted:
"YouTube is a stage for everyone, including traditional media companies, filmmakers, record labels, movie studios, comedians and more. With the shift happening in digital media entertainment and a new clip culture evolving, professional content creators are recognizing the potential of promoting themselves and their programming on YouTube to reach a vast, new audience. As such, YouTube has evolved into a powerful monetization and promotional platform."
YouTube is forcing the leaders of media industry to rethink their philosophy on authoritative ownership and distribution towards a more publicly driven doctrine. The politicization of the structures of old media, along with the de-aurafication of art’s mechanisms of meaning-formation, open up a space to discuss the implicit effect this has on the public’s apperception.
A New Apperception
In order to place art within a wider political discourse of public apperception, Benjamin emphasizes the totalizing effect that these structural changes in form and meaning-formation can have on the very faculties of perception: “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception.” As we’ve seen, by removing the fetish of aura imposed on the meaning-formation of an artwork, a new object relation is born, whereby the object castrated from the realm of the sacred, is primed for critical scrutiny. This mode of perception manifests itself in the desire to “get closer”:
"[It is] the desire of the present-day masses to 'get closer' to things spatially and humanly, and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness by assimilating it as a reproduction."
This process of assimilation – the bringing of the artwork into the order of technology and science – deepens in the subject an apperception, habituated out of a critical stance towards experience. YouTube exemplifies this facet of reproductive technology, where every conceivable video past and present, is brought into the digital and disseminated for close inspection. A key to this new experiential mode is found in film’s ability to “distract”. In his essay ‘Reception in Distraction’, Howard Eiland focuses on this impression of technological media:
"[T]he cinema is the authentic Übunginstrument, or training device, for the sort of reception in distraction which is coming into being in all areas of contemporary art, and which is symptomatic of a new kinetic apperception, one opened out and agitated, as it were, jolted."
The potential for YouTube to distract is exemplary. According to the technology consultancy firm Accenture , 38% of Americans want to create and share online content. The mass integration of YouTube into the public media sphere, allows the masses to absorb a technological fairground of attractions and distractions, where the user can play out virtually any conceivable theme or ride for up to ten minutes, and then move-on. This “reception in distraction” leads to an enhancement of Erfahrung, a type of experience whereby perception becomes integrated into the individual’s experiential framework. Erfahrung is contrasted to Erlebnis , which is a psychic response to shocks , that causes the subject to reject any experiential material, alienating him from a deeper understanding of his relationship with technology and art. “Reception in distraction” and Erfahrung are something akin to Bertolt Brecht’s alienation effect [verfremdungseffekt], whereby the audience members are jolted into active reception, as opposed to lulled into passivity. YouTube’s formal structure castrates the audience from the traditional logic of passive reception. The ten-minute limit makes for content that is specifically distractive and a-repetitive in nature. The YouTube user is no longer consumed, as he is by the banal narratives of Hollywood cinema, but forces the image to comply with his own faculties of reason and experience. If not, he will simply switch it off and find a new distraction. In a sense, he forces the art and technology to comply with his own being, the full extent to which “involves [his] whole sensorium, as illuminated by memory (for the experience in ‘intoxicated experience’ is long experience – Erfahrung).” YouTube, deployed over time, is a collection of “intoxicated experiences”, whereby the user’s memory is furnished with multiple distracted and engaged viewings. As mentioned above, the embedding of hypertext allows the user to create digital footprints across the Internet. A user’s digital footprint within YouTube’s website actually materializes itself in the function “Viewing History”, which catalogues the history of videos streamed by a particular user; a far cry from having to save ticket stubs and archive TV guides.
The Optical Unconscious
This new engagement of man’s apperception with art underlies what Benjamin calls the “optical unconscious”:
"[I]t is another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. 'Other' above all in these that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to space informed by the unconscious… It is through the camera that we first discover the optical unconscious."
Benjamin’s “optical unconscious” is an evolutionary mediation of the ancient faculty of mimesis. Mimesis was “the gift of producing similarities and therefore also the gift of recognizing them” . We imagine the child, or the native of an animistic culture, as having a highly developed mimetic faculty, being able to find similarities and transcendental meaning in all objects, such that there was an aura-filled relationship with all objects, not just artworks . However, such an ability brought about in the subject a sense of “cosmic being” – oneness with the universe and an understanding of things in relation to all other things. Benjamin’s argument is that the ancient human faculty of mimesis has been transmuted into technological mimesis – that is, technological reproducibility; and hence, technology, in the way it has changed man’s apperception, can potentially disclose to him an understanding akin – however technologically adapted – to that developed by the highly mimetic native – the “optical unconscious”. Michael Taussig, in his highly idiosyncratic essay, ‘Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds’, develops this notion of the “optical unconscious” in its relation to “profane illumination”:
"This capacity of mimetic machines to pump out contact-sensuosity encased within the spectrality of a commoditized world is nothing less than the discovery of an optical unconscious, opening up new possibilities for exploring reality and providing means for changing culture and society along with those possibilities. Now the work of art blends with scientific work so as to refetishize, yet take advantage of marketed reality and thereby achieve 'profane illumination'."
Thus, the camera for Benjamin opens up a surrealist potentiality for technology, to penetrate the physiognomic qualities of objects, to bring that which was sacred into the realm of profanity, by dipping into the “optical unconscious” by means of "profane illumination"
YouTube manifests itself as the digital semblance of this “optical unconscious” – an unconscious encyclopedia of imagery that extends infinitely into time and space, precisely because it does not exist in time and space. Like the image matrix that constitutes the individual’s memory, specifically deep memory [Erfahrung], YouTube constitutes a vast network of monads that lie in association with one another. Pulling at the thread of one image illuminates the trace of an infinite number of others. By highlighting a tag and streaming a video, YouTube’s search mechanism brings into the foreground a plethora of other associated images, just as Freud’s unconscious reveals itself by means of word-association. An unconscious word-image constantly tempers the individual’s ability to form meaning, to scrutinize art, and reaffirm its own potentiality. YouTube, as a corpus of memory, attends to the mystical third-eye, “[the] hallucinatory eye, a roller-coastering of the senses dissolving science and art into a new mode of truth-seeking and reality testing.” YouTube, perhaps, makes space for a techno-mystical sense of oneness with the world, where one’s being is constituted by one’s ability to sift through the online unconsciousness.
Conclusion
How does this expression of experience affect the public’s political consciousness? What are the implications of YouTube’s form, in the way that it demolishes aura, deconstructs experience and meaning, and altogether brings about a relationship between man, art and technology that is somewhat surreal? Krzysztof Ziarek’s essay, ‘Artwork in the age of Electronic Mutability’, depicts the de-aurafication of art in the context of the wider political project of art “after aesthetics”. He stresses the significance of art’s form in order to bring about a rethinking of art in the political:
"[I]t is form understood as the inscription and reconfiguration of social antagonisms that make it possible for art to be socially critical. This form is not simply differentiated from content or themes, but, instead, must be seen as tracing itself upon both formal and the material aspects of art, making both the work’s content and its formal organization the scene of the reinscription, and thus of the critique, of social praxis."
YouTube facilitates a reinscription at both the level of form and content. The hierarchal structure of production and dissemination has been dissolved to the point that the traditional organizers of capital have had to rethink for themselves the economic, artistic and social configurations of their mediums. The content is becoming increasingly user-generated, breaking down traditional barriers of entry based on the binary of author-public. The public is becoming its own author, even unintentionally so, through placing digital footprints across the Internet. Both of these distinct reconfigurations converge to undermine the authority of meaning-formation and the experience granted by media consumption, by reshaping the relationship between the public, art and technology. Part of this relationship, is the revelation of technology operating at art’s core, the disclosure of art as tekhne, the ancient Greek locution that means both art (as artifice) and technology (as artificial); and hence the possible opening up of a ontological-technocratic potentiality for art. What I infer by this is in the way that man now absorbs tekhne into his ontology, increasing his ability to produce art publicly, as well as his perception and experience of art, thus enhancing his faculties of reason and conversely his ability to be political. As Ziarek points out, “the instant of art’s liberation from the strictures of its aesthetic formation coincides with the possible disappearance of art’s distinctiveness and its progressive merger with technology.” Art’s political potentiality comes from its ability to remove itself from the hierarchy of capital, thus inscribing in the social, a new logic of capital production and in the individual, a new experience of meaning-formation.
To go back to Benjamin’s quote at the beginning of this essay; Benjamin premised that it was the failure of individuals, that necessitates a reliance on art to ”tackle the most difficult and most important tasks where it is able to mobilize the masses.” In the context of my argument for YouTube, the work of art is coming to prove, not just Benjamin’s hopeful project for art, but also his fatalistic trust in technology. In the context of art’s convergence with technology, we come to see YouTube as extending arts diminishing aura and producing in man, “matur[ity] enough to make technology its organ” – a maturity that will allow man to absorb art in such a way as to use it for social and political praxis and stave of the dual threats, in Benjamin’s mind, of fascism and annihilation. However, technology is always both antidote and poison. So the question becomes: what remnants of art’s and conversely technology’s fetish remain?
Bibliography
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Labels: art, aura, capital, internet, marxism, mimesis, new media, optical unconscious, poltics, technology, television, walter benjamin, youtube
posted by Daniel Grove at
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