Reproduction Essay, Research Paper

Clockwork Orange and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

For Walter Benjamin, the specifying feature of modernness was mass assembly and production of trade goods, accompaniment with this transmutation of production is the devastation of tradition and the manner of experience which depends upon that tradition. While the devastation of tradition means the devastation of genuineness, of the originally, in that it besides collapses the distance between art and the multitudes it makes possible the release which capitalist economy both obscures and opposes. While trade good fetichism represents the disaffection off from use-value and towards exchange-value, taking to the assembly line building of the same & # 8211 ; as we see unrelentingly analyzed by Horkheimer and Adorno in their essay The Culture Industry. Benjamin believes that with the devastation of tradition, research lab potencies are however created. The procedure of the devastation of aura through mass reproduction brings about the “ devastation of traditional manners of experience through daze, ” in response new signifiers of experience are created which effort to get by with that daze.

“ Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is missing one component: its presence in clip and infinite, it? s alone being at the topographic point where it happens to be. This alone being of the work of art determined the history to which it was capable throughout the clip of its being. The genuineness of a thing is the kernel of all that is catching from its beginning ” when substantial continuance ceases to affair, he says, the authorization of the object is threatened. ( Think, for illustration of Alex & # 8217 ; s response to high art & # 8230 ; ) “ engineering has subjected the human sensorium to a complex sort of preparation. There came a twenty-four hours when a new and pressing demand for stimulation was met by the movie. In a movie, perceptual experience in the signifier of dazes was established as a formal rule. That which determines the beat of production on a conveyer belt is the footing of the beat of response in a movie. ” ( Motifs in Baudelaire )

Benjamin distinguishes between two sorts of experience: Erfahrung something integrated as experience, and Erlebnis, something simply lived through. Erlebnis characterizes the modern age and refers to the inability to incorporate oneself and the universe via experience. Erlebnis, so, is the signifier of experience of late capitalist economy, and our relation to trade goods is characterized by ahistoricity, repeat, sameness, reactiveness, all the classs which the Culture Industry will depict as liquidating civilization in the present post-holocaust epoch.

“ The desire of the modern-day multitudes to convey things & # 8216 ; closer & # 8217 ; spatially and humanlyis merely every bit fervent as their set toward get the better ofing the singularity of every world by accepting its reproduction. ”

The fact of this desire for the reproduction over and above the original is exactly what Horkheimer and Adorno believe is destroying civilization, for contrary to Benjamin, Horkheimer and Adorno assert that any emancipatory possibilities are re-absorbed into capitalist economy, and fascism turns out to be the dwarf in the Chess-playing machine of capitalist oriented democracy. They set out, like Poe in his article “ Maelzel & # 8217 ; s cheat participant, ” to demo that capitalist economy has a concealed motor and it is none other than fascism.

Benjamin & # 8217 ; s try “ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ” provides us with an lineation of the history of the work of art and the historical alterations, which have led to the transmutation of experience from Erfahrung to Erlebnis. It is merely in the post-modern or so called post-industrial age that the construct of liberty handed down to us from Kant, among others, begins to uncover it ideological nature. Benjamin & # 8217 ; s analysis of independent art non merely destroys our impressions of the wholistic work, but besides dispels the semblance of the creative person as nonnatural Godhead. Let us look for a minute at his comparing of the painter to the camera operator.

“ The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from world, the camera operator penetrates profoundly into its web. There is a enormous difference between the images they obtain. That of the painter is a entire 1 that of the camera operator consists of multiple fragments, which are assembled under a new jurisprudence. Therefore, for modern-day adult male the representation of world by the movie is uncomparably more important than that of the painter, since it offers, exactly because of the thoroughgoing pervasion of world with mechanical equipment, an facet of world which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to inquire from a work of art. & # 8217 ; ( Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, p. 230 )

Benjamin informs us that the sawbones and camera operator portion in common the evident act of perforating into the web of world to come up with fragments assembled under “ new Torahs, ” something which neither the magician nor the painter are capable of making. The prestidigitator and the painter refer to a wholistic totalizing representation of world. They are the manufacturers of what has become a fetishized independent work. By manner of contrast the figures of the sawbones and camera operator, and nowadays the cybernetician or familial applied scientist dip into world itself and reassemble it from the underside up. Along with the planetary accountant who is responsible for the behaviour of every portion, any possible manner of understanding the whole from these reassembled fragments is impossible. The shaper vanishes at the minute world is reassembled. “ Art escapes the gravitative pull of ritual and aura by virtuousness of its thoroughgoing technization of representation and, significantly, the complementary technization of perceptual experience itself. Other manners of representation allow their equipmentality, the residue of their technique to stay purely seeable, whereas movie, by virtuousness of its utmost technization makes the proficient facets unseeable. Film provides the semblance of a more direct apprehensiveness of world. ” Distraction replaces concentration.

“ Obviously a different nature opens itself to the camera than to the bare oculus if merely because an unconsciously penetrated infinite is substituted for a infinite consciously explored by adult male. Even if one has a general cognition of the manner people walk one knows nil of a individual & # 8217 ; s position during the fractional second of a pace. The act of making for alight or a spoon is familiar modus operandi, yet we barely know what has truly gone on between manus and metal, non to advert how this fluctuates with our tempers. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its of its lowerings and liftings, its breaks and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its expansions and decreases. The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does depth psychology to unconscious urges. ” ( 236-237 )

As automatically mediated dreams, movie and picture taking and now Virtual Reality are all about the interpenetrating of human and image with equipment ; the flight of futurism, the dreamt of metallization of the organic structure is completed in our ain epoch where it will be impossible to cognize whether one is sing world or VR. “ The equipment-free facet of world here has become the tallness of ruse ; the sight of immediate world has become an orchid in the land of engineering. ” ( 233 ) Individuality itself breaks down and the single spectator becomes tantamount to mass civilization through mass reproduction. The devastation of uniqueness renders even the western metaphysical topic obsolete & # 8230 ; it is this obsolescence of the unique which is reflected in our ain civilization of trade good obsolescence. Horkheimer and Adorno ( p. 1

26 ) rail against the emancipatory imagination of Benjamin, for “ existent life is going identical from the movies. ? For Horkheimer and Adorno this means a “ acrobatics of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imaginativeness and spontaneousness ” although as Benjamin asserts “ quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to grok [ movie ] at all. ” Horkheimer and Adorno show that however “ sustained idea is out of the inquiry if the witness is non lose the relentless haste of facts. Even though the attempt required for his response is semi-automatic, no range is left for the imaginativeness. Those who are so absorbed by the universe of the film by its images, gestures, and words that they are unable to provide what truly makes it a universe, do non hold to brood on peculiar points of its mechanics during a showing. “ ( 127 ) “ The civilization industry as a whole has molded work forces as a type unfailingly reproduced in every merchandise. ( 127 ) ”

Clockwork Orange, is a movie which analyses this procedure, “ movie forces its victims to compare it straight with world ” this is the conditioning procedure which is & # 8216 ; chosen & # 8217 ; by Alex, his officially sharp powers of observation are perverted in the forced screening of movies ( see the image at the heading of this article ) so that he equates force, and the capacity to react to violence with an & # 8216 ; unconscious & # 8217 ; associating to a feeling of decease.

Because the setup presents non a universe to research, but a screen upon which images are projected, Alex, like a captive in Plato & # 8217 ; s cave, is afflicted, willingly/unwillingly, with a type of motor palsy which makes the world test impractical him. He is reduced to a topic remotely controlled by the cinematic setup and scientific discipline. That this is perceived deliciously for the mass audience might be linked to arrested development to a province of infant-like passiveness. As inactive topics, the camera & # 8217 ; s oculus becomes our oculus, and its deformations become, perchance, the truth. It is non his head but his organic structure, which learns this connexion. ( Disk1B, 5, 27:40 ) Here, that chosen passiveness is revealed to be what it denies, Alex like us, is a willing victim. The intervention becomes a penalty because coming into contact with the intervention deviants music, the image of high civilization. Beethoven & # 8217 ; s 9th Symphony is perverted ( Disk1B chapter 5 29:25 ) by coming in contact with it & # 8217 ; s scientific usage in a conditioning intervention.

The 9th above all in Beethoven & # 8217 ; s work represents his effort to happen a universally acceptable message. The first motion reflects the & # 8216 ; despairing status & # 8217 ; of world and alludes to Tartarus ( the topographic point where the worst wrongdoers would travel in Hell ) as a symbol, the 2nd motion depicts the hunt for felicity with recreations, and the 3rd motion emotes piety a turning towards faith. The coda, in telling all that has gone earlier arrives at fulfilment. This is exactly the organisation, which Kubrick creates for his movie. We see a contrary of the development of society, we move from a cosmopolitan dystopia, toward an single fulfilment, universal in the every adult male. That this fulfilment is merely for the person and non for the multitudes is one of the drive forces of the movie.

Now, Horkheimer and Adorno ne’er truly travel off from backing high civilization ( instead than a dislocation in individualism and liberty, they seem to desire its re-incorporation, likely the consequence of neglecting to be willing to truly give up the enlightenment undertaking ) Alex with his ultra-violence represents the dislocation of civilization itself ( for illustration the gap scene with the rotter ) Alex understands the post-industrial society, he is both a merchandise of it, and a agency for its farther production. Seeking idle de-contextualized force as amusement becomes a agency of highly impermanent control, fulfilment, and emancipation from the horrors of a dystopian society in the throws of cancerous voidance of significance.

The rotter says in first scene: “ The job is there is no jurisprudence and order, there are work forces on the Moon and circling the Earth, but there is no attention taken here below. ”

& # 8211 ; Technology has progressed but left the Earth behind, no morality, and no moralss & # 8230 ; The old has failed to accommodate to the alterations ; the force of modern engineering sees its contemplation in Ultraviolence, beyond force. Labor in this age is no longer that of production, but of devastation without purpose force without a referent. Therefore we see Dim & # 8217 ; s statement after the first ultraviolence ( chapter 4 gap ) : “ We & # 8217 ; ve been working hard excessively. ” It is the outgo of energy for its ain interest. Labor in the Post-industrial age.

In traveling beyond mere force, toward ultra-violence, Alex has incorporated and mastered the post-industrial age. As a post-modern medley of eruditeness and stupidity, he is the wrong-side-out contemplation of the enlightenment topic. His linguistic communication is the comprised of uneven spots of riming slang “ a spot of itinerant talk, excessively, but most of the roots are Slavic. Propaganda. Subliminal incursion ” ( from the book. ) A clockwork orange, in the words of the Author within the book: “ A Clockwork Orangethe effort to enforce upon adult male, a animal of growing and capable of sugariness, to seep juicily at the last unit of ammunition the bearded lips of God, to try to enforce, I say, Torahs and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creative activity, against this I raise my sword-pen. ”

I & # 8217 ; vitamin Ds like to turn now to a really absorbing scene, the turning point of the movie as it were, when he murders the Cat Lady:

One will detect that the room abounds in modern art, which depict scenes of sexual strength and bondage. The Cat Women is the lone existent force of opposition to Alex, and the scene presents us with a battle between high-culture which has aestheticized force and sex into a signifier of independent art, and the really image of post-modern command, Alex, who understands all to well the significance which is obscured from the Cat Women. She inhabits a private domain, the image of enlightenment individualism ( cat adult females are ever introverts who are compulsively non-social ) in a kind of delusional orbiter from the metropolis where it is all goons. ( Note the inversion of the polis & # 8230 ; Alex brings the horror of the metropoliss into the suburbs & # 8211 ; Cyberbia ) . Denied the historical context of Art ( the ninth is & # 8216 ; misunderstood & # 8217 ; ) he really understands the significance of modern art really good so as force, in fact he turns it literally into the tools of force, she is killed, as it were by her ain instruments of aesthetic decontextualization. The sculpture Phallus ( a “ really of import piece of art, ” ritualized and de-politicized ) is made into a arm, and the scene of her decease is a about subliminal binge of modern-art.

Whereas she, as with the usage of all high-art among the Bourgeoisie, finds merely exchange value in the Phallus, phallus as pure mark, Alex initiates the violent reversal of that commodification. He turns it into a tool, here a tool of force ; what she has done is to shoot exhibition value into signifiers of art which have merely exchange value, the work of art in the custodies of the Bourgeoisie is reinjected with a type of aura, which merely lead it further in the way of losing control ( like the reinjection of aura in the automaton & # 8211 ; Maria & # 8217 ; s aura & # 8211 ; in Metropolis ) . Control is lost and the Phallus becomes a arm, a violent recontextualization by Alex. He proves to understand good this procedure. There are besides similarities here with the State & # 8217 ; s control of his head through conditioning. The province efforts to derive control by turning Alex into a automaton ( a clockwork orange ) , therefore commodifying him ( International Relations and Security Network & # 8217 ; t this the battle at the terminal for control of Alex & # 8211 ; the progressives and province? ) . His use-value is a map of his exchange-value.