technical
"The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology."
(XI)
"This passage is one of the most puzzling in the essay and it is not exactly illuminated by Zohn's translating of the proverbial 'blue flower' of German Romanticism, Novalis' 'blaue Blume' into an 'orchid'. What does Benjamin mean by the equipment-free aspect of reality'? How, one might ask somewhat bluntly, does it differ from the reality effect, the masking of technique and production which film theorists of the 1970s were to pinpoint as the ideological basis of classical Hollywood cinema? First of all, the reality conveyed by the cinematic apparatus is no more and no less phantasmagoric than the 'natural' phenomena of the commodity world it endlessly replicates; and Benjamin knew all too well that the primary objective of capitalist film practice was to perpetuate that mythical chain of mirrors. Therefore, if film were to have a critical, cognitive function, it had to disrupt that chain and assume the task of all politicized art, as Buck-Morss paraphrases the argument of the Artwork essay: 'not to duplicate the illusion as real, but to interpret reality as illusion itself."
(Miriam Hansen, Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology')
What about the relationship between technological change and social change; we were wondering about the inevitability of recuperation - the way capitalism works to incorporate new forms, potentially revolutionary or socialist forms?
"It's interesting because he introduces that essay by saying that nothing in this essay in the way of its aesthetic theory is usable by fascism which is an interesting claim.... The essay was written the year that 'Triumph of the Will' was playing in Paris, one of the most sophisticated uses of cinema to glorify a dictator. Anybody who writes enthusiastically about technology that year is mad, in a certain way. He is then brushing his contemporary history totally against the grain. That's why I think the context is so important for that article. He was not writing in the 1950's Hollywood America, he would not have written that article at that time when it was purely consumer culture industry stuff which people like his friend, Adorno, were so against. That was really a valiant argument to make, especially when the other form of technology was being used to develop bigger and better bombs that in a matter of years would be used to bomb most of the cities in Europe. Only a madman would have made that argument and he probably was a little mad.
Technological determinism it is not."
(Susan Buck-Morss, interview)
"[The essay] is usually read as technologically-determinist, and has become renowned, certainly in film studies, as a celebration of the radical potential of what was, when Benjamin was writing, the relatively new potential of film, as against older, high-cultural media (such as painting). It is this selective interpretation which is canonised, and which paves the way for use of Benjamin's work in arguments about the electronic image.[...]
Far from simply reaffirming ideas about the determining role of technology and the 'loss of the real', these writings can be used to reconsider the basis of such ideas. For my purposes, Benjamin's work offers insights into the possibility that a new technology might make certain interpretations (meanings) more available than previously: the nature of the experience of technical change; general possibility of a transformed perception and mode of attention in relation to new image technologies."
(Michelle Henning, Digital Encounters: mythical pasts and electronic presence)