The author as a producer

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The author as a producer. Address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris on April 27, 1934 is an essay by Walter Benjamin that is based on a draft for a lecture that presumably did not take place.

In his influential essay, Benjamin calls for artistic work to concentrate on transforming institutions and the production apparatus as a whole, rather than supplying it. The text became relevant again in the course of the debate about forms of participation in Web 2.0 .

Summary

In this essay, Walter Benjamin discusses the tense relationship between ideology and aesthetics - between "tendency" and "quality" in literature - and he claims that there is a direct correlation between politically correct tendency and literary quality, according to Elizabeth A. Papazian in her summary at the beginning of a 2003 post. She goes on: According to Benjamin, a writer must recognize that his or her work serves certain class interests and that the more progressive type of writer recognizes that choice and takes the side of the proletariat. It is not enough, however, to go through a revolutionary development in his personal attitude towards contemporary production conditions: the author must become a producer who thinks through his work and his relationship to the literary means of production in a really revolutionary way. His mission - like that of the Soviet writer and photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Tretyakov - is not just to report, but to fight, not to act as an observer, but to actively intervene. Quoting Brecht, Benjamin explains that such an author should no longer focus on individual experience, but instead work on transforming institutions as well as the apparatus of production of literature. In fact, this cultural transformation was already well under way at the time: As Benjamin writes: “that we are in the midst of a tremendous remelting process of literary forms, a remelting process in which many of the contradictions in which we were used to thinking could lose their clout. “By citing examples from journalism, photography, music and theater, he traces the ongoing development of new, hybrid genres that are poured out of the glowing mass of traditional forms, with the result of a corresponding literaryization of all living conditions. One of the desired results is the revision of the relationship between author and reader.

Individual aspects

Benjamin sees the epic theater by Bertolt Brecht and works by the composer Hanns Eisler as examples of how the "functional relationship between stage and audience, text and performance, director and actor" can be changed (especially the cooperative didactic play, The Measure ), because "Both try to dissolve the contrast between producers and audience and not to supply the production apparatus," said Rosa Reitsamer in a contribution from 2005.

This lecture was "an attack on the left-wing intelligentsia in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s", said Gerald Raunig in 2004. Benjamin's intention, inherent in the text, is to criticize above all those varieties of socialist realism that use "contentist-agitational strategies" work. With this point of view, Benjamin represented a minority position, with a focus on technology and the organizing function of art practice. Benjamin is therefore of the opinion that as long as the production instruments as well as the forms and apparatus of production remain unchanged, the technology and function of art practice cannot be changed.

In a contribution from 2004 , Boris Buden emphasizes that it is not the attitude of a work of art to the production conditions of its time that is the decisive factor, but rather its position in them . Benjamin mean here the function that the literary technique of works has in the literary production conditions of his time. On the one hand, Buden takes the view that Benjamin's thesis is formulated in the form of a question that reads: How does a work of art stand in its production relationships? However, the original question to which Benjamin's text answered was how the work stood in relation to the social production conditions of its time, according to Buden.

In their introduction to literary theory in 2013, Tilmann Köppe and Simone Winko are of the opinion that Benjamin's question about literary activity in relation to the production conditions of a time "transfers the Marxist categories to the author and his work." based on Marxism and ideology criticism, to investigate the relationship between authors and the apparatus of production (Benjamin's term) and how they relate to the ruling class. With Benjamin, the task of authors is always defined politically and standards for determining and evaluating this task are normatively formulated and derived from leading categories.

reception

Benjamin's text was read a lot again in the course of the debates whether Web 2.0 really makes more participation possible. Brecht also took the position that “media consumers should become producers. The producers should therefore adopt the medium - at that time still the radio - and spread their own opinion. The proletarian participation gave hope for a change of the prevailing opinions and a participation of the minorities in the shaping of public opinion ", so Deborah Schmidt in her contribution to feminist publics in Web 2.0 from 2011. However, more opportunities for participation do not automatically result," that everyone has the same entry requirements, and certainly not, that this participation is more emancipatory and deals with content in a more socially critical manner. "

Reitsamer criticizes the fact that Benjamin only refers to male producers in his article. She sees this as a view that was common in the 1930s, but which neither then nor now corresponded to reality.

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Gerald Raunig: The author as a traitor , in: republicart.net , 10/2004 (as pdf) preprint from Gerald Raunig: Art and Revolution. Artistic activism in the long 20th century , table of contents Turia + Kant, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-85132-425-0
  2. ↑ a b c Rosa Reitsamer: Moments of Reorganization in Popular Culture , in: republicart.net 02/2005 (as pdf) (discusses “Moments in the history of popular culture that can be read as approaches for a reorganization in the sense of Benjamin. ")
  3. ↑ a b Deborah Schmidt: Feminist publics in Web 2.0. Possibilities and limits of feminist participation on the Internet , feministisches-institut.de, August 1, 2011
  4. ↑ a b See archived copy ( memento of the original dated October 4, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.texturen-online.net
  5. ↑ Elizabeth A. Papazian: Reconstructing the (Authentic Proletarian) Reader: Mikhail Zoshchenko's Changing Model of Authorship, 1929-1934 . In: Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History , Volume 4, Number 4, Fall 2003 (New Series), pp. 816-848, doi : 10.1353 / kri.2003.0061 Abstract
  6. ↑ Benjamin explains his use of the term “ technology ” as follows: “With the term technology I have named the term that makes literary products accessible to a direct social, and thus a materialistic, analysis. At the same time, the concept of technology represents the dialectical starting point from which the sterile opposition between form and content can be overcome. And this term of technology also contains the instruction for the correct determination of the relationship between tendency and quality, which we asked about at the beginning. ” ( Memento of the original from October 4, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and still Not checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.texturen-online.net
  7. ↑ Boris Buden: Benjamin's “The Author as Producer”: A re-reading in the post-communist East. Translated by Therese Kaufmann, in: transversal - eipcp multilingual webjournal , 12/2004
  8. ^ Tilmann Köppe and Simone Winko: Newer literary theories . An introduction. 2nd, updated and expanded edition. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2013. Table of contents ISBN 978-3-476-02475-6 , p. 157.