Reception in distraction

Boundary 2

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 51-66

  Eiland, Howard ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33646241891     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-30-1-51     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (38)

1. "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," trans. Harry Zohn, in vol. 4 of Benjamin, Selected Writings (hereafter cited parenthetically as SW) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2003).
2. Walter Benjamin, "Der Autor als Produzent," in vol. 2 of his Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 697;
3. "The Author as Producer," trans. Edmund Jephcott, in vol. 2 of Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 778.
4. Bertolt Brecht, Schriften zum Theater, ed. Siegfried Unseld (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1957), 170;
5. Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 203. Hereafter, these works are cited parenthetically as ST and BT, respectively.
6. Walter Benjamin, "Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik" (1919), in vol. 1 of Gesammelte Schriften, 99;
7. "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism," trans. David Lachterman, Howard Eiland, and Ian Balfour, in vol. 1 of Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 172.
8. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Robert Langbaum (New York: New American Library, 1964), 95-96, 111 (act 3, scene 3, lines 88-90 and 95; act 5, scene 1, line 61). In Prospero's epilogue, the spell of art entails freedom for artist and audience alike.
9. Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, vol. 5 of his Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982);
10. The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Hereafter, The Arcades Project is cited parenthetically as AP. References are to Benjamin's system of filing his materials by convolute (for example, Convolute M) and item number (for example, 1,5 or 12a,2).
11. Concerning the difference between Benjamin and Brecht on this point, see Miriam Hansen, "Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology," New German Critique 40 (winter 1987): 218-19.
12. On Benjamin's conception of the artwork as reflecting historical changes in the mode of human sense perception, a conception deriving in part from the art historian Alois Riegl, see Michael W. Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamin's Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), 156-58.
13. Walter Benjamin, "Theorie der Zerstreuung" (ca. 1935-1936), in vol. 7 of his Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 678-79;
14. "Theory of Distraction," trans. Howard Eiland, in vol. 3 of Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 141-42.
15. In Walter Benjamin: Zwischen den Stühlen (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1981), 273, Werner Fuld associates the motif of distraction with the idea of freedom.
16. Siegfried Kracauer, "Kult der Zerstreuung" (1926), in Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 313;
17. "Cult of Distraction," in The Mass Ornament, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 325. Subsequent references to this essay and its translation are cited parenthetically by page numbers only.
18. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage (1937-1940), trans. Michael Glenny (London: British Film Institute, 1991), 231.
19. I am quoting here from Jacques Rivière's description of the choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky. See "Le Sacre du Printemps" (1913), in The Ideal Reader, trans. Blanche A. Price (New York: Meridian, 1960), 138. Rivière says that Nijinsky approached "each object according to its own orientation. The way in which Nijinsky has treated the movements of groups shows the same effort to espouse details, to discover and bring out individual orders. By breaking the movement and bringing it back to the simple gesture, Nijinsky has put expression back into dance. Acid and hard, . its contours have been . dulled by no culinary art .; there are no . poetic blendings; there is no trace of atmosphere" (136, 137, 139, 125).
20. See Sergei Eisenstein, "Perspectives" (1929)
21. "The Dynamic Square" (1931), both translated by Jay Leyda, in Film Essays, ed. Jay Leyda (1968; reprint, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 41, 61.
22. Sergei Eisenstein, "The Unexpected" (1928), in Film Form, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1949), 27.
23. On montage as the unity of sequence and simultaneity, see Eisenstein, Towards a Theory of Montage, 86; on the problem of (continuous) transition, see 192.
24. Louis Aragon, Paysan de Paris (Paris: Gallimard, 1926), 60;
25. Paris Peasant, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (Boston: Exact Change, 1994), 47. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically by page numbers only.
26. On the "nominalist" context for montage theory, see Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), 231-34 (Stimmigkeit und Sinn, "Krise des Sinns");
27. Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 154-56 (Coherence and Meaning, "The Crisis of Meaning").
28. Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville Plaice and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 8, also 3, 205, 335.
29. "Conversation with André Gide," trans. Rodney Livingstone, in vol. 2 of Benjamin, Selected Writings, 94.
30. "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," trans. Harry Zohn, forthcoming in vol. 4 of Benjamin, Selected Writings).
31. See also vol. 6 of Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, 1938-1940, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000), 65.
32. Benjamin's theory of reading, as conditioned on the primacy of the present, echoes Nietzsche in particular. On the necessity of interpreting the past from out of the highest energy of the present, see section 6 of "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben" (1874), part 2 of Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, in vol. 1 of Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1980), 250-51;
33. On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, trans. Peter Preuss (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1980), 37-38.
34. See also Henri Bergson, Matière et mémoire (1896; reprint, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1939), 170;
35. Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone, 1991), 153.
36. For Benjamin, the present moment wakes to itself only insofar as it awakens in itself a past. This dialectic is elucidated by Irving Wohlfarth in an unpublished paper, "Erwachen aus dem zwanzigsten Jahrhundert?" delivered at Barcelona in September 2000. "It is his own day and age .," writes Wohlfarth, "that makes it possible for the historian to focus his lens on the past .; and only by this roundabout way back into the past does his own day and age come into view. To write history is to determine the present-day; both activities are forms of dream interpretation" (my translation). The Benjaminian conception of awakening out of and into the dream may be compared to the Heideggerian conception of Entwachen. See Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976), 32: "So ist das Erwachen aus der Seinsvergessenheit zu ihr das Entwachen in das Ereignis."
37. The term Bildraum appears at the end of Benjamin's 1929 essay "Der Sürrealismus," in vol. 2 of Gesammelte Schriften, 309-10;
38. "Surrealism," trans. Edmund Jephcott, in vol. 2 of Selected Writings, 217-18.