Page 46 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Walter Benjamin’s ‘Work of art’ essay 31
the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which
reality has so to speak seared the subject’ (Benjamin 1985a: 243).
Likewise, in Kracauer the genius particular to photography is to be
found in the ‘tiny spark of accident’ that captures a ‘moment of
futurity responding to the retrospective gaze’ (Kracauer, cited in
Hansen 1987: 209). Barthes ([1957] 1973) describes this quality of
photography using the terms punctum and studium. The studium
designates the general environment portrayed in a photograph – a
family scene, the military associations immediately understood from
the picture of a soldier and so on. The punctum is the contingent,
inessential detail whose particularity overspills the bounds of the
studium’s more general message – the fact the soldier may have a
large ear lobe and so on. Benjamin viewed this interruption of the
traditional processing of meaning through cultural associations and
contemplation as a liberating political development. According to
the culture industry thesis, it has proved to be the exact opposite. As
Jameson points out above, the rise of the punctum in the age of
mechanical reproduction creates an instant reflex that undermines
sustained thought. The state of distraction that underwrote Ben-
jamin’s revolutionary faith in the new media of his time appears
deeply naive in the face of a current mediascape that prides itself
upon the generation and clever manipulation of such instant
reflexes.
Koch suggests that Benjamin’s assertion that film offers the
audience the chance to become active in relation to what they are
witnessing: ‘is dubious because it excludes the possibility that the
apparatus itself might be perceived to be a naturalized fetish with
which the audience identifies – less on the level of an instrument
with which to test the actor than on the narcissistic level of an
enormous extension of the perceptual apparatus’ (Koch 2000:
207–8). In other words, the ability of media technologies to act as an
extension of our senses (as explored by McLuhan in Chapter 4)
becomes an end in itself – it creates a culture of greedy eyes.Itisin
such a scenario that the actual content of programmes diminishes in
importance and not only are images mechanically reproduced, but
so too is their subject matter:

Take the truly awful Dallas-Dynasty family of programmes …
They are etherealized characters whose simple binary opposi-
tions – family/non-family, men/women, sex-power/money-
power – may be the vehicles for any fantastic perambulation.
And their circle is closed: each opposition complements the
other and resists the other. There is no synthesis, and therefore
no exit (and therefore as we’ve found no end to the series).
(Inglis 1990: 152)

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