We can read in this passage the displacement of the "certitude" of the author, that "legal
ownership of the means of production" that disappears with the development
of technology. Here we can see citation as a direct response to the
concentration of capital, or capitalist structures where legal owners are
excluded from management. As a citational writer then Benjamin steps in to an
advanced form of capitalist management, but we can also note that the loss the
"legal owners," or traditional authors, undergo results in their
becoming "socially useless" or in effect idlers, entering back into the work/idleness dialectic on the other side. Even so, the evolution of these
various certitudes, juridical, authorial, takes on immense significance in the
modern appearance of the "authoritarian" state, which, according to
Horkheimer here, seems to step in to fill the power vacuum left behind by
capital. That said, we once again note that the theorization of
authoritarianism announces itself as citational, particularly with the many
ellipses, giving the impression of Benjamin chopping up Horkheimer's text for
his own purposes, displacing the authorial certitude of the very theorization
of the displacement of certitude, not only thrusting Horkheimer into the
position of idler but by extension problematizing this theory of the
development of authoritarianism, which to the extent that it blames
developments such as the loss of certitudes like authorship for repressive
government runs contrary to the potential of the citational method by which the
Arcades Project is operating. Benjamin
seems clearly to be interested in the "shattering of long experience"
with which this passage opens, but it's the way in which it leads to the
manifestation of the flash of "immediate experience" that seems compelling. One point of
this passage then is to exhibit how these forces can be not only variously
interpreted, but also used for very real and disagreeable ends (to say the
least).
No comments:
Post a Comment