Our Phony Spell of Commodity

Yet again, the golden nugget is in action with Walter Benjamin! After reading the introduction to Benjamin, Brecht, Horkheimer, Adorno and the Frankfurt School, I thought I knew Benjamin well: the guy who “believed mass media culture could cultivate more critical individuals to be able to judge and analyze their culture, just as sports fans could dissect and evaluate athletic activities” (Durham and Kellner 2012, 28).

But following last week’s coining of the golden nugget principle, I didn’t think it would be so straightforward in the primary text. And it wasn’t. I spent an hour and a half reading and pondering the first few pages of Benjamin’s text until I came across the golden nugget for this reading, and man was it golden.

Benjamin, the alleged media guy, kept talking about art, which threw me off – until the golden nugget hit. In talking about and replication, Benjamin explains a “phony spell of commodity” (Durham and Kellner 2012, 43). BINGO! That sums up what I was trying to piece together in the first part of his primary text and bridges the gap with what was being described in the preface text by Durham and Kellner.

Benjamin is talking about the phony-ness of ‘modern’ media as technology has advanced.

A few examples: Benjamin highlights movie stars and reproduction of art as a phony commodifications. Movie stars are glorified for the fact that they face a camera that, in turn, shows their faces to millions, but they aren’t actually doing anything authentically worthy of glorification most of the time. A parallel could be drawn to reproduction of art, which Benjamin talks about at length. ‘Modern’ technology presents us with an opportunity to reproduce original masterpieces in mass: “For the first time in history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual” (Durham and Kellner 2012, 40).

Coincidentally, I have a personal experience from this last week relating to this example exactly. I just moved into my own house – the first time I’ve rented my own place. I’m paying for it completely on my own, and my landlord is allowing me to rent it out via Airbnb while I’m gone on the weekends to make some extra cash – so I need to make it look nice, and appealing to guests, yet I also need it to have my style.

My mom, an interior designer by trade, has been helping me decorate. I’m lucky to have some incredible original art pieces from friends or previous experiences, like an original Shepard Fairey Obama “Hope” print from the 2008 election and a huge plexiglass picture a friend of mine took. Yet my mom desperately wants to add stock imagery to my wall to “pull the rooms together.” And I keep saying no! I feel like stock imagery and photos/posters that are mass produced would give off the wrong connotation – that I am only putting them on my walls to make my place look nice enough for Airbnb guests, against my own style, or otherwise known by Benjamin as a “phony spell of commodity” (Durham and Kellner 2012, 43).

Is there hope for the return of authenticity?

Creative Commons License. Attribution: MyEyeSees, Flickr.

Along with movie stars and art reproduction, Benjamin is clearly critical of media like advertising, lumping it along with the others as inauthentic by stating, “One of the foremost tasks of art has always been to create a demand which could only be fully satisfied later” (Durham and Kellner 2012, 46). To me, Benjamin is saying here that art like media advertising is meant to create a demand and persuade accordingly, towards an action or belief you might not have had previously.

My summary of all this is one thing: Benjamin is telling us our postmodern society has moved further and further towards ‘fakeness,’ and because of this, we put more value on things that are real, just like I am with what goes on my wall in my new house. Much of this can be attributed to technology, but as Benjamin said, that’s likely because of our reactions to technology and not the technology itself: “Technology as not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society” (Durham and Kellner 2012, 48).

Peace,

-UA191