Soul-less/( ˈsəʊllɪs)/[sohl-lis](Zine)

Critical Media Theory

Over my upcoming years as a Design and Technology student The New School I’m going to explore the role of art and visual culture in our post-post modern society in an interdisciplinary manner. These explorations will, eventually, lead to a Bachelor’s thesis in these fields of the critical encounter with the technologies of the 21st century and their effects on the human soul.

Based on the work of various writers, philosophers, anthropologists, designers, artists, and technologists I’m going to investigate the human experience in the age of the mechanical reproduction and digitalization, its unconscious and metaphysical implications on the human soul, and the ways speculative work such as abstract art, poetry, and philosophy might be able to help us to progress from the excess of the enlightenment we find ourselves in – not back to the pre-rational, but towards a trans rational; A synthesis: the reconciliation of science and spirituality. Away from the distant analysis of quantitative qualities, towards a genuine encounter with the spirit of the object, the spirit of the human, the spirit of oneself.

Soul-less is a Zine that summarizes my analysis of some of the first works by Max Weber, Walter Benjamin and Nadia Seremetakis I’ve been investigating for these purposes.

Most people would refer to “technological process” as a good thing, something worth pursuing. After all, it allowed for the human standard we live by in the 21st century, or at least is paving the way for those not there yet: It allowed for a society that is rapidly advancing and getting smarter about … about everything! In fact, we’re getting so smart that we’re consistently rendering our achievements from only a few years ago obsolete. The current state of technology always produces the next, even better generation of technology, and as the speed of this technological progress increases, the level of sophistication increases in the technology that builds it. New technology is replacing the old, and Max Weber would say that as technology progresses, it produces a sense of alienation when it comes to our connection to the world around us. Now, what does he mean by that? What does he mean when he states that as the older piece of technology is rendered obsolete a piece of our own lives is rendered obsolete as well?

Every generation grows up with its musicians, authors, toys, fashion, and a general aesthetic of life. This aesthetic surrounds us in the form of fashion, advertisements, architecture, cars, and songs, but as we continue to take our steps on the “narrow strip of ‘now’ facing down wave upon wave of the future” (Woolf), these things “fall into the raging torrent beneath” (Woolf) and fade away, become a thing of the past. Whatever connection we had to these things of our past; they are gone now. Max Weber would say that with every special thing washed away by the progress of society, we have one less thing to feel connected to in the world. As technology progresses the human species it subverts the current world as it is, and as much as we praise this evolution since the dawn of the enlightenment, we must acknowledge that it subverts the things that have meaning to us as well.

Now, to put this in a bit of context, and disarm the notion that I’m sounding like some ultra-orthodox conservationist, let’s point out what all this technological progress, the result of the enlightenment absolutely delivered on: increased levels of health, wealth and efficiency, throughout all layers of our societies. The idea that lead to this place of health, wealth and efficiency was that if we would take the scientific rational that helped us understand the universe a little better and applied it to things like agriculture, the economy, government, the farming of animals, manufacturing of consumer goods; if only we look at it scientifically and trust the numbers and data, there wasn’t any process that couldn’t be made more efficient to how it was done in the pre-modern world.

In the pre-modern world, all these gears of a functioning society were usually carried out by tradition. There were rituals and ceremonies people have come up with over the years that not only commemorated the whole process but also allowed for humans to feel a sense of connection to these aspects of maintaining their collective lives. But in the modern world, Weber would say, where making things as efficient as possible has become the chief priority, these traditions, ceremonies, and rituals started to become unnecessary inefficiencies. People of modernity had to accustom themselves to the idea that in order to make things as efficient as possible they had to get rid of any sort of human feeling that got in the way of making the numbers look as good as possible.

Now, as a citizen of a capitalist society, the question becomes if that is really such a bad thing as the picture I’ve been painting here seems like. These unprecedented levels of efficiency allowed for EVERY SINGLE THING I hold of importance. It allowed me to think free, be free, live free. It allowed for self-reliance, and everything Emerson and all the others connotated with that. It allowed for my apartment with a central heating system and the cure for all deathly deceases that ever existed right downstairs. It allowed me to live a life of a king, with a private chef and personal driver at my disposal at all times. Thank you gig economy! Can all this really be such a bad thing? What else? What is there that we not already have?

Well, what IS there that we not already have? Everything that is about to come. The problem? With everything about to come, everything that is will be rendered obsolete. And that, as we’ve discussed above, includes ourselves as well. See, Weber would say that the modernist notion of applying science and rationality to all issues of society is an example of humanity trying to achieve some sort of world mastery. The question that plagues the people of modernity is when every day needs to be a day moving towards progress, to a place where no civilization has EVER gone before; when everything shall be made as rational and efficient as humanly possible, do we end up creating societies that live in the illusion of having everything there is, and at the same time feel utterly disconnected and completely empty inside?

We are “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.” (Max Weber)

The work of Walter Benjamin is everything but an easy entrance-point into philosophy; his texts are loaded with references to Kant, to Marx, to 19th century German literary criticism, and so much more; his language often times considered incomprehensible. And yet, Benjamin is one of the most elusive thinkers of the early 20th century and his texts on topics such as the philosophy of history, German literature and the role of art are considered foundational elements for every artist, writer, and philosophical thinker that came after him. His most famous work is, of course, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” but without a proper introduction his critique of modernity can often sound completely irrational or counterintuitive. So, in order to build this necessary foundation, I think it is appropriate to start looking at one of his earlier texts, “The Task of the Translator.”

The basic premise, of course: Benjamin is exploring the exact job of someone translating a text from one language into another. He’s investigating the seemingly flat exercise of making written texts accessible to people of another language. Everyone speaking a second language knows first-hand that often times there are words for which is there is none in the other language. Different cultures think differently about things and there are a thousand different ways to describe these nuances in another language, none of which being a complete accurate representation of the original. When thinking about different translators trying themselves at the literary bourgeois and fighting over who’s is the most accurate one it only seems logical that there must be better and worse ways to translate.

To address this foundational question, Benjamin argues that the task of the translator is NOT to make the translation as accessible as possible for the reader in the new language, for as this would render the nuanced essence of every work of art obsolete. In Benjamin’s words, “No poem is intended for the reader. No picture for the beholder. No symphony for the listener. In appreciation for a work of art or art form consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful.” It is an easy exercise to argue with this from the viewpoint of today’s age, and Benjamin does so in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” but for the sake of his argument, consider the role of art as a form of self-expression; an exercise in which the viewer does not play a role to be considered.

It is here where I’d like to bring in another of Benjamin’s interests: German literary criticism in the 19th century. To understand why such an oddly specific topic of interest to Benjamin, let’s consider the piece of literature, the book, a symbol that denotes a particular meaning. Books (both fiction and non-fiction) give meaning to people, they shape people’s experience and understanding of reality and thus affect the culture of their time. But Benjamin is quick to point out that it is not just books that render our experiences, everything around us is, in fact, denoting meaning as well. The gentrification of our cities is a wonderful example for that: We tear down buildings of a time that has passed and replace them with something much more efficient, stylistically upgraded, and comfortable for the person of modernity. For Benjamin, the question would be if this new building, this symbol of a new time amounting to a new physical reality, does this change the personal experience of the people who see it? Does reading the world around us influence on us at the same level that reading a book does? This gets the classic philosophical question how the introduction of new technologies shapes the experience of people. This involves everything from fire to electricity to the space shuttle, but one of the most famous takes on this topic stems Benjamin when he writes about photography; the technology that allows us to depict and represent reality.

Before the photograph (and everything that followed since), the only medium that allowed for this visual representation of reality was the painting, and as far as this medium has developed over time, paintings are difficult and expensive to produce and thus not accessible to most people throughout history. That is to say: Most people had never engaged with a visual representation of reality; their understanding of the world came merely from the places immediately adjacent to them.

But along came the photograph and all of this started to change. People started to take photos of themselves, their loved ones and all places visited, representing everyone and everything they could get a hold of. It was a miracle. Beyond this initial excitement though, beneath the surface of this new technology that allowed us to depict and represent reality to a degree of unseen accuracy, there’s still an undeniable degree of loss that occurs. There’s a difference between seeing a picture of a mountain and standing in front of it yourself. The same way that a translated text will never be able to transfer the same level of linguistic and cultural nuances as the original, a photograph of a person will never replace the bodily experience of standing in front of her real self. Benjamin addresses this with what he calls the “aura” of a moment or a piece or artwork.

“A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance no matter how close it may be. While at rest on a summer’s noon, to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour become part of their appearance— this is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains or that branch.”

There is no picture out there that could possibly capture the quality of this shadow the branch is casting on me on such a hot summer’s noon. There is an immediacy to my experience of this cooling shadow because we’re subject and object co-existing at a particular moment in space and time, while at the same time maintaining a distance towards each other. It’s this unique experience bound to the physical distance of subject and object that allows for what Benjamin calls the “aura” of a moment or a piece of art, and as the role of the photograph is to reduce that distance (it can capture reality and make it exist outside of space and time) it inherently loses this aura. The photograph successfully decreases distance and demystifies the represented reality in an accessible way, but if we forget about the loss that is inherent to this demystified reality (which now surrounds us at all times), we might just loose the aura of ourselves as well.

“The peeling away of the object’s shell, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose senses of the sameness of things has grown to the point where even the singular, the unique, is divested of its uniqueness by means of its reproduction.”

To Benjamin, the technologies introduced during the age of the mechanical reproduction of things has “divested the uniqueness” of things. Consequentially what is happening is we are destroying the aura of ourselves, the world and works of art, and as our experience adapts to these new circumstances, we adapt our expectations of reality. Walter Benjamin argues that over time, as the mass-produced and objects become the expected norm, we don’t even seem to miss their aura that has been commodified away.

And with that, let’s try to approach “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Again, many of Benjamin’s arguments might seem counterintuitive at first, but the more we try to relate them to our present experience in a world of social media, NFTs and the Metaverse, the less irrational they become. Walter Benjamin’s work on the interplay between technological innovations and the sensory experience and subjectivity of the individual in an age where new technologies are introduced faster than ever before and are completely mediating our relationship with reality might just be at the height of their relevance up to this day.

Let’s consider act of storytelling for a moment. Throughout most of human history, stories, mythologies, and knowledge was passed on through the spoken word. People would gather around a person, a storyteller, and collectively receive the wisdom preformed to them. These stories were told many times, of course, but they naturally changed their shape and form over time. You could generally tell the same story, but it would never be an exact copy of all the details that came before.

This sociological reality changed, of course, as the Gutenberg Press transferred mythology onto the printed page. Soon, people were reading novels, which is in stark contrast to the collective experience of receiving a story as a collective activity. Benjamin says that it is no coincidence that this shift towards the individual activity of sitting down and reading novels that feature individual protagonists contributed to the solitary, the individualistic lifestyle of the industrial middle class. To Benjamin, the novel promoted a sense of deliberate concentration, a skill he considered of utmost importance when distilling wisdom from a story; wisdom that would then inform philosophical and political viewpoints of the reader.

But time moved on and Benjamin points to the newly emerged cinema in which he sees a training ground for the citizen of modernity. Now people are, once again, receiving stories as an audience in a collective way (as opposed to the individualistic experience of diving into a good novel by yourself), but with the difference that this collective experience has now become mass reproducible.

This new age of the mass reproducibility of art changes several key premises about the way art is conceived, which, to Benjamin, changes what art is altogether. See, within a capitalist society, the artist always has to consider profitability as the end goal in order to survive, which in turn leads her to consider how reproducible, distributable and sellable the artwork is going to be. To Benjamin, this commodified relationship between the observer and the artist has real consequences for both parties that present themselves with a dramatic poignancy in this new era of moving pictures on a screen. In the case of the novel or a painting, the viewer is creating their own space-time, allowing for deliberate and concentrated observations of the artwork, but in the case of the film and many other forms of art in this age of mechanical reproduction, images are coming at you so rapidly that it renders the opportunity for a reflective moment near to impossible. Benjamin describes this difference as two different modes of thought: Someone who concentrates on a work of art is absorbed by it, whereas a distracted mass of people absorbs the work of art.

“Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it. He enters into this work of art the way legend tells of the Chinese painter when he viewed his finished painting. In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art. This is most obvious with regard to buildings. Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction. The laws of its reception are most instructive.”

For Benjamin it was clear that the way the mechanical reproduction has changed the point of visual culture and thus the way we perceive ourselves and our modernist world has rendered the modes concentration and deliberation obsolete. Being able to concentrate is just not as useful of a skill in the metropolitan societies we live in today, leaving a life in a constant state of distraction as the strategy of most people’s choice. This comes not as a surprise, as for the average person trying to deliberately concentrate on the experience they’re having in a metropolitan life where your bodily senses are constantly being fragmented and interrupted by the fleeting inputs across a multi-sensory landscape would not only be overwhelming but simply impossible. To Benjamin, the constant sensory bombardment and lack of stillness of modern life requires this different mode of thought to be able to absorb it properly. The world no longer absorbs us into it but it is us, the members of the distracted masses, who absorb the world around us, and to Benjamin, film and videos serve as the ultimate training ground for the people of modernity, the people who have to live immersed in this distracted reality while still needing to passively absorb meaning as they go about their life. Distracted masses of people within a capitalist society are not getting their mythology from a deliberative concentration about things but rather appropriate things based on unconsciously formed habits.

“Even the distracted person can form habits. What is more, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction first proves that their performance has become habitual. The sort of distraction that is provided by art represents a covert measure of the extent to which it has become possible to perform new tasks of apperception.”

By living in a state of distraction, we appropriate the world based on the habits that we happen to form; one of which being a particular world view we happen to adopt, and Benjamin is concerned about the possibilities that came with delivering what he saw as bourgeois ideology to the masses through the medium of moving images. He even goes as far as arguing that this was a mass reproducible delivery system keeping people distracted and absorbing a story that could at best pacify their discontent with their places within society and at worst render people into foot soldiers in the regime of a mass murderer. See, art throughout history has typically been connected to some sort of religious underpinning or tradition; the role of art was not to be mass reproduced and sold. Now that this changed, the meaning of art was freed from its constrains and could take any shape it wanted to be. The only critic was the distracted consumer art tried to please. But as this means that art can be appropriated and reproduced in any way we want, Benjamin argues that the work of art has moved away from the cult work of art, towards the exhibitionist work of art. Art in modernity is meant to be displayed, and whenever a piece of art is displayed, it intrinsically becomes political.

It was only 4 years after Benjamin published these arguments that the Nazi regime officially declared war while using the cinema as a medium to deliver whatever messages necessary to pacify and contain the masses.

“The word for senses is aesthisis; emotion-feeling and aesthetics are respectively aésthima and aesthitiki. They all derive from the verb aesthanome or aesthisome meaning I feel or sense, I understand, grasp, learn or receive news or information, and I have an accurate sense of good and evil, that is I judge correctly.

[…] Aésthima, emotion feeling is also an ailment of the soul, an event that happens, that impacts on one viscerally through the senses; it also refers to romance, love affair.

[…] The senses represent inner states not shown on the surface. They are also located in a social-material field outside of the body.

[…] Thus the sensory is not only encapsulated within the body as an internal capacity or power, but is also dispersed out there on the surface of things as the latter’s autonomous characteristics, which then can invade the body as {perceptual experience. Here sensory interiors and exteriors constantly pass into each other in the creation of extra-personal significance.

[…] The senses are meaning-generating apparatuses that operate beyond consciousness and intention. The interpretation of and through the senses becomes a recovery of truth as collective, material experience The senses are also implicated in historical interpretation as witnesses or record-keepers of material experience.

[…] There is a corporate communication between the body and things, the person and the world, which points to the perceptual construction of truth as the involuntary disclosure of meaning through the senses.”

[…] The sensory landscape and its meaning-endowed objects bear within them emotional and historical sedimentation that can provoke and ignite gestures, discourses, and acts—acts which open up these objects’ stratigraphy. Thus the surround of material culture is neither stable nor fixed, but inherently transitive, demanding connection and completion by the perceiver. Performance can be such an act of perceptual completion as opposed to being a manipulative theatrical display? Performance is also à moment where the unconscious levels and accumulated layers of personal experience become conscious through material networks, independent of the performer. However, the mode and content of completion, connection with the sensory artifact is not determined in advance, it is not a communication with a Platonic essence, but rather it is a mutation of meaning and memory that refracts the mutual insertion of the perceiver and perceived in historical experience and possibly their mutual alienation from public culture, official memory, and formal economies.

[…] Here sensory memory, as the meditation on the historical substance of experience is not mere repetition but transformation which brings the past into the present as a natal event. In this moment the actor is also the audience of his/her involuntary implication in a sensory horizon. This can be a moment of sensory self-reflexivity and because it is located within, and generated by, material forces, we can begin to see how material culture functions as an apparatus for the production of social and historical reflexivity.

[…] Re-perception is the creation of meaning through the interplay, witnessing, and cross-metaphorization. of co-implicated sensory spheres. Memory cannot be memory confined to a purely mentalist or subjective sphere. It is a culturally mediated material practice that is activated by embodied acts and semantically dense objects.

[…] Memory is the horizon of sensory experiences, storing and restoring the experience of each sensory dimension in another, as well as dispersing and finding sensory records outside the body in a surround of entangling objects and places.

[…] The particular effacement of sensory memory in modernity, is mainly a consequence of an extreme division of labor, perceptual specialization and rationalization. The senses, in modernity, are detached from each other, re-functioned and externalized as utilitarian instruments, and as media and objects of commodification. The carving out and partitioning of separate domains of perceptual acquisition also authorizes the sheer literality of sensory experience. The literal is a symbolic logic produced by the scientific rationalization of the senses and/or by a culture of specialized consumption. The result is the privatized sense organ (see Jameson 1981; Harvey 1989; Crary 1991). The literality of the thing, as its most digestible and commodifiable dimension, allows hyper-consumption. Literality, as a cultural code, prescribes and insures norms of limited, functional and repetitious engagement with the disposable commodity unit. The paradox is that, in the repeated performance of consumption, the commodity form, despite its episodic character and the ongoing obsolesce of the new, is elaborated as the dominant perceptual logic of things. In the high turn-over of commodity experiences, each object, each material experience, is the absence of the other and the sensory investment it provoked. Each episode of consumption is relatively absolute and quickly totalizing because it never lingers long enough in the senses as social memory to be stitched into a historical fabric with the others it has displaced.

[…] Within this framework, the article invested with surplus memory and meanings becomes a separate and distinct(monadic) memory-form in-it-self; it carries within it the sensorial off-print of its human use and triggered desires; when it is discarded and rendered inaudible, an entire anthropology is thrown away with it.

[…] As a sensory form in itself, the artifact can provoke the emergence, the awakening of the layered memories, and thus the senses contained within it. The object invested with sensor) memory speaks, it provokes re call as a missing, detached yet antiphonic element of the perceiver.

[…] Sediments of sensory memory stratify the artifact as depth, forming a diachronic volume, from which all historical matter, *valued and devalued, may seep as expressive material culture. The memory of the senses runs against the socio-economic currents that treat artifacts and personal material experiences as dust. Dust is created by any perceptual stance that hastily traverses the object world, skims over its surface, treating it as a nullity that casts no meaning into our bodies, or recovers no stories from our past.

[…] Sensory memory is a form of storage. Storage is always the embodiment and conservation of experiences, persons and matter in vessels of alterity. The awakening of the senses is awakening the capacity for memory, of tangible memory; to be awake is to remember, and one remembers through the senses, via substance.

[…] If matter was to be subjected to immediate consumption, there would be no senses, no semiosis, and no memory. The senses defer the material world by changing substance into memory. The return to the senses (experiential or theoretical), therefore, can never be a return to realism; to the thing-in-itself, or to the literal. In realism, matter is never deferred, but supposedly subjected to total consumption. When the child returns to the senses, this passage will always be mediated by memory, and memory is concerned with, and assembled from, sensory and experiential fragments. This assemblage will always be an act of imagination–thus opposed to the reductions of realism.

[…] If matter was to be subjected to immediate consumption, there would be no senses, no semiosis, and no memory. The senses defer the material world by changing substance into memory. The return to the senses (experiential or theoretical), therefore, can never be a return to realism; to the thing-in-itself, or to the literal. In realism, matter is never deferred, but supposedly subjected to total consumption. When the child returns to the senses, this passage will always be mediated by memory, and memory is concerned with, and assembled from, sensory and experiential fragments. This assemblage will always be an act of imagination–thus opposed to the reductions of realism.

[…] In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the process of collecting, staging and displaying exotica, archaicized the past and domesticated cultural otherness.

[…] The parlor / museum encapsulates western modernity’s petrifaction and consumption of ethnological and historical difference. In parlor sites, items of older periods and other cultures which had their particular aromatic, tactile, and auditory realities were desensualized and permitted a purely visual existence. In this process, vision itself was desensualized and subsequently metaphorized as and reduced to a transparent double of the mind unmediated by any material, spatial and temporal interference (Corbin 1986; Foucault 1979; Fabian 1983). The taming of difference through sensory neutralization, fabricated a false historical continuity between past and present through the cover of dust.

[…] Fieldwork depended on spatial instruments such as the political geography of colonial pacification and tribalization. These spatializing grids were reinforced by parlor-like sensory orientations and homogenizing representational strategies that privileged vision-centered consumption of ethnographic experience, the reductive mapping of cultural traits, and the narrative genre of a static ethnographic present (Clifford 1988; Fabian 1983). This flattening of cross-cultural sensory experience into visual diagrams and atemporal spatial metaphors exported in the parlor to the field site and transformed the latter into an open air museum.

[…] Commensality can be defined as the exchange of sensory memories and emotions, and of substances and objects incarnating remembrance and feeling.

[…] In this type of exchange, history, knowledge, feeling and the senses become embedded in the material culture and its components: specific artifacts, places, and performances. In processes of historical transformation and/or cross-cultural encounter, divergent sensory structures and commensalities can come into conflict with each other, and some are socially repressed, erased or exiled into privatized recollection and marginal experience. These dynamics indicate profound transformations in a society’s relation to material culture and to systems of knowledge bound up with the material.

[…] The history of the senses in modernity (see Corbin 1986; Vigarello 1986; Gay 1984; Crary 1991) can be understood as the progressive effacement of commensality; that is, of a reflexive cultural institution that produced and reproduced social knowledge and collective memory through the circulation of material forms as templates of shared emotion and experience. In modernity, commensality is not absent but is rendered banal, functional, or literal and increasingly reserved for the diversions of private life.