The Age of the Digital Reproduction (oh where, oh where, has the Original gone?)

I was teaching a class today,

and some of my students were doing

a presentation on Allen Ginsberg's

Howl.

They were excited.

So was I.

They told me they had videos of Ginsberg

reading.

But,

the video they showed was a trailer

for a current movie called

Howl,

It was not Ginsberg; it was

a representation of 

Ginsberg.

"But it's so good," they said,

with eyes sparkling 

with the energy of students

who have just discovered

the Beat Generation.

"And besides,"

they added, eyes

still sparkling,

"James Franco is so cute."

I found a video with Ginsberg,

a zany, crooked-eyed,

aging hippy,

and showed it to them.

"You should at least know what 

he looks like,"

I insisted

 "He's an icon of an age."

And everyone wrote that down.

( thefind )

After class,

I went to my office,

accompanied

by a student who has missed

almost 1/3

of the semester.

(Right now, 

I love opening

my office door; I have

a live wreath in there,

and whenever

I open 

the door,

I get a blast of pine scent,

and it reminds me of youth,

and the fact that somewhere,

people actually have the time to get ready

for Christmas.)

I opened the door

and I and

my student entered,

and she said,

"Oh, it smells just like one of those

scented candles."

No, she did not say

"It smells like pine,"

didn't acknowledge

the needles dropping on the floor;

she said

it smells like something

built to reproduce

the scent of pine.

I said nothing.

She showed me a draft

of a paper

that was late,

and almost

totally plagiarized,

cut and pasted

from every website

she could find

in a quick Google search,

and for a moment, I silently wondered:

is it really worth

chastising her?

She is, after all,

a child of the age

that revels in 

reproductions,

as long as the reproduction

is performed well. 

In such an age,

is copy and paste

really a sin?

But I pointed out to her

that I would probably google

a sentence out of each

of her paragraphs,

and I would probably 

find

what she copied,

and she got really quiet.

( flyingcloudgifts )

Walter Benjamin foretold it

when he recognized his age

as the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:

we live in the Age After

the Age of Mechanical Reproduction;

we live in the Age

of Digital Reproduction,

where the Original

is a nostalgic

black and white film clip

performed

by someone who hadn't even been born

when the original 

occurred.

And can we really criticize it?

If the reproduced performance

produces a resonance

in the heart 

that is real and Original,

is it really

all that bad?

The Original

flits

somewhere near the edges

of the reproduction,

and the closest we can get to it

is the voice,

is the trace,

of the untraceable.

~ ~ ~

a tomato is a tomato is

I am making a salad tonight,

and wondering why I bought

those damned tomatoes.

I really don't like American tomatoes

from the grocery store,

they are the blandest,

most vaguely structured

replicas

of tomatoes that I have ever

tasted.

But I bought some.

1.

You see, I had this extraordinary experience

a week or so ago,

when I made a recipe that called for

"heirloom tomatoes."

( ediblediaries )

so I ate a bit of an heirloom

tomato

and thought:

hot damn, now that's a tomato!

Yeah, we're talking

red, firm, juicy surprising

tomatoey tomato 

~ ~

To tell the truth, I suspect

that deep in the annals of history

someone rewrote 

the story,

and said it was an apple,

because I am certain 

that the fruit

that Eve offered to Adam

was a tomato.

I mean really:

an apple is no big deal:

an apple is

an apple is an apple,

but

a tomato,

if it's really a tomato

is something to talk about.

What was that texture?

What was that taste?

And that surprising fluidity

amidst all the hardness?

A tomato make you aware

of fluids 

and non-fluids

and surprising tastes

that you never thought you would enjoy,

but yes, yes, you do, don't you--

Tomatoes are dangerous.

Eating a good tomato

makes you want to eat another,

whereas

eating a good apple

helps you shit better.

2.

You know,

I can't help but notice

that when I flip through

Blogger

(and I do)

I find I'm surrounded

by happy families.

Now, I have

nothing against happy families,

I come from one,

and

I wish I had one,

but

I don't.

I trudge

endlessly through time, dreaming

of just one more good

tomato.

But in America,

tomatoes suck,

because American tomatoes are reproductions of tomatoes,

not tomatoes.

They are generally present to represent

"tomato"

(ie: the signifier, idea of tomato)

As some American chefs and mothers

might say:

just drop in a tomato for color.

And that is essentially 

what many American tomatoes have become:

color.

( ecoscraps )

3.

So,

a few weeks ago,

this recipe called for

"heirloom tomatoes,"

so I got them and while constructing,

I nibbled

and thought

hot damn, that's a tomato

$3.29 a pound

It was such a wonderful discovery, though,

that today I bought two

made a salad,

and now I eat it,

anticipating

the taste of tomato

There it is, but

it's not so strong; still

it would pass 

as a modest homegrown.

The only other way I could get the taste of tomato

is to grow my own

But I don't have time.

This is the problem with America

4.

America is the land of reproductions

gone amuck.

Brittney Spears is nothing but

 ( bittenandbound )

Madonna to the next degree;

Jakob Dylan is his daddy's son,

just goin' his own way

( spinner )

Green Day reminds me an awful lot
of U2, but I still kind of like them

Washington DC is
an imitation of Athens Greece,
and
like many Americans citizens,
New Amsterdam
lost sight of the city it imitated
because of a name change,
though the traces
of the original intent
still linger.

5.

Essentially,
America inherited
the compulsion to reproduce
even as it contained
a spirit that wouldn't settle
for the error of its fathers --

to put it another way:
nearly every group that moved
to America
did so because
something wasn't working out at home,
so they wanted to do it
their own way

But so many came to America and immediately sought
to reproduce
their impressions
of the best their father gave them.

That is the essence of the American split personality:

Americans are idealists
who want something better
but
Americans are trapped
in the compulsion to imitate
the best their father gave them;

unfortunately,
America began identifying too much
with the compulsion to imitate
and too little
with the compulsion to be bold and
to leave the unrealistic demands of the father
and create something better

to the point where America is just full of
empty signifiers
and bad tomatoes.

6.
A month or so ago,
I wrote about my coincidental connection
with the German philosopher
Walter Benjamin.

One of Benjamin's most influential writings
is called
"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."
That article helps me a little
in explaining what is happening
in America:

In 1936,
Benjamin contemplated how
mechanical reproduction
(ie: cameras & cinema)
could have a resounding impact on original art
(and ultimately, originality itself)

As he says,
"The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object
from the domain of tradition.  By making many reproductions
it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence."

Now, of course if we consider
a piece of art
like the Mona Lisa,
even if we're standing in front of it,
we're already looking at
an act of reproduction:
DaVinci looked (we imagine)
at an actual woman
and reproduced her appearance on canvas.

The original, that Lisa
is dust today, but
that fabulous fabrication endures
and because it manages to capture a certain
spark - a certain
authenticity -
that painting has come to represent,
over time,
genius.
And over time, too, it has gained
more and more value
because it is an original,
and appropriately featured at
an artistic mecca.

Now, back to Benjamin:
as he so accurately foretold,
one does not have to follow the arrows
at the Louvre to behold the
Mona Lisa anymore;

one can buy it on a t-shirt,
or simple Google it.
Many are content to eyeball
Mona Lisa's reproduction,
a multitude of times removed from its hallowed source
so much so
that she has becoem fodder for defacement
or belittlement,
proving Benjamin's claim
that reproductive technology depletes the almost religious
"aura" of an original piece of art,
and with, it the value of originality itself.

( lovelywallpaper )


And what do we have left?
A multitude of imitations
of an inspired
imitation
on t-shirts
coffee cups
refrigerator magnets
busses,
posters,
advertisements  --

Benjamin sees this as inherently political, because
it turns artwork into commodities,
and I would have to agree:
artwork today is often produced to be reproduced,
as that's where the big money is.

~ ~ ~

As American film and television
became such a dominant force
in the 20th century, the same
became
true of people:

Bette Davis,
Mae West,
Marilyn Monroe,
Clark Gable,
George Clooney, even
Andy Griffith
Archie Bunker
Bill Cosby -
all became prototypes,
images to imitate
by a public impressed by impressive imitation.

7.
The scary thing is: now,
some of the dominant public figures are not even real;
they are cartoon characters, line
drawings filled in with confused
stereotypes
that people actually think
are authentic and real

( topnews )

( ringdrangonz )


A bit like a grocery store tomato,

these figures are just vague outlines

of people,

several times removed from

the flesh and bone creatures that may

have inspired them,

and imminently much cheaper to produce

than a television show with actual actors.

8.
O.K., so I don't 

have any answers to this rather lengthy

diatribe, but it is something

that I have wanted to say --

because I think America is such an important piece

in the puzzle of what humanity is all about,

but America seems to have gotten lost,

in a spooky hall of mirrors

and yes,

bad tomatoes -- but the real sin is:

people keep buying them,

and keep being content with color as opposed 

to taste; taste being the final effect 

of prolongued original attempts

at reproducing an original

authentically.

Roll Over Benjamin

Yeah,

it's been awhile since I've written one of my lengthy

thoughtful entries,

mostly because I'm writing other stuff right now,

in other places,

that demands a terrific amount of

brain energy.

*

I seem to have taken blogging perhaps

a little too seriously.

In the meantime,

folks get tons of hits,

and make, like, lots of money

for producing blogs that feature stuff like this:

see more Celeb Look-A-Likes

(Nancy Pelosi looks like E.T.)

see more Celeb Look-A-Likes

(Helen Thomas looks like Yubaba from Spirited Away)

This all comes from a website rather artistically titled:

totallylookslike.com

A couple weeks ago, I mused about how the day upon which

I entered my current life

was the anniversary of Walter Benjamin's death.

Walter Benjamin is the author of 

"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"

a work that challenges us to contemplate how technology 

has altered the way we look at reproductions 

(because so many reproductions are available)

and, likewise, originals.

I've been thinking for awhile that we in the U.S.A. in particular

live in a world of reproductions gone amuck.

I really do want to write a longer entry on that.

But for now, I offer 

totallylookslike.com

as an example and a sample of how

we are intrigued by the likeness

and not by the original,

and furthermore,

we in the USA love likenesses

that belittle the original.

Reproduction gone amuck

We've moved far too far from our source

Makropoulos & The Angel of History

1.

The date that I claim as my birthday in this current

era of my life is also reported to be the day on which

Walter Benjamin chose to die.

Not in the same year, mind you.

Many sources report that Benjamin died 9/27/1940.

I claimed my current identity 18 years later, on 9/27

precisely.

This is a neat date because it's really

a repetition of the same number:

9

Ten is the number of absolute completion,

but nine is the number of accomplishments 

coming close to completion;

it is a very human number:

it wants to celebrate its 

accomplishments,

but it's not perfect

yet.

Nine is a mysterious number;

a number of plenty;
the number of months
a human female nurtures a child
inside her body,

it is a Motzkin number (I never knew

that before);

It is voluptuous, a triple three,

a shade away from etenity,

yeah,

9 is me.

2.

Walter Benjamin is best known for a couple of things:

He wrote a very influential essay called "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," which I'll talk about later this week.  I hope.

What I'd like to talk about a little right now is his article called "Theses on the Philosophy of History," because it is directly related to the character of Makropoulos:

(see wikipedia on "The Turk")

The First Thesis by Benjamin:

The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.

Makropoulos - this cyber-facade behind which I hide - is nothing more than a Mechanical Turk - an apparatus constructed to move the pieces of a complex narrative I'm trying to weave about history, time, mirrors and theology.

(from: Benjamin, barglow.com )

Benjamin's Thesis number IX  (yeah, that's right, that's a nine):

Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit, ich kehrte gern zurück, denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit, ich hätte wenig Glück. Gerherd Scholem,  ‘Gruss vom Angelus’

(My wing is ready for flight,  
I would like to turn back.
If I stayed timeless time, 
I would have little luck. )

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Makropoulos is the Angel of History: a textual incarnation of a literary figure who has been wearily plodding from lifetime to lifetime, not because she has artfully avoided death, but rather, because she has been unable to die.

She watches the wreckage gather.  It horrifies her, and gives her great pain.  She has seen the causes of the wreckage, she has seen them in a continual cycle.  And it wearies her and worries her.  All she can do is write.  It is true, she seeks to "awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed." 

3.

A woman burdened with 424 years of life, and a library of knowledge and experience
in her head
is inherently historical,
even if she does not want to be.
Her every word is
historical,
even if she does not want it to be.

Her - I mean my impulse to speak of history,

and especially the beginning of history,

parrallels the compulsion to

retain the image of the past which unexpectedly appears to a man

(or woman)

singled out by history 

at a moment of danger.

The danger affects both the content of the tradition

and its receivers.

A moment of danger surrounds us,

so apparent in the Signs of the Times:

in the Gulf bleeding oil,

in the thoughtless wars

and thoughtless deaths,

fueled by greed for oil

that bleeds in the Gulf,

in the mutant fish washing up on 

beaches all over the world,

in the plunging stock market

in the howl of my deaf cat,

in the chatter of the birds,

in each human's insistent urge to serve their selfish needs:

these are the symptoms

of dangerous times.

3a.

I don't want to be interpreted

as apolocalyptic, 

not in the sense of those who

forecast gloom.

But neither can I advocate

complacency,

because complacency is the most

sinful of sins.

So is pretending this is all a 

passing phase,

or trying to get things back

to the way they were.

Those are errant games,

and they assure an

ongoing reign

of evil.

They are, for lack of a better word,

the manifestation

of the presence of Antichrist.

We, all of humanity, are

in essence,

the embodiment of Antichrist.

Our continued collective destruction

of each other

and of the planet

embodies the destructive force 

that all of history has feared.

Likewise, collectively,

we can be 

the Messiah,

if we develop 

our minds and our actions

towards our own

peaceful advancement and preservation.

Jesus will come as the Scholar in the Age of the Grid,

if we all opt to be scholars.

The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer,

he comes as the subduer of Antichrist

Only the historian will have 

the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past

who is firmly convinced that 

even the dead will not be safe from the enemy

if he wins (Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History,

thesis number VI)