1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin) Avant-Garde and Kitsch (Greenberg) The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (Adorno & Horkheimer) The Atomized Masses Caricature, surrealism, pastiche

West as a regional novel. His understanding of California has nothing to do with the grandiose versions of the West we find in history not the locus of manifest destiny, land of the rugged cowboy. Hes interested in tearing down these myths, showing how they were betrayed, or how they were illusions. Appearance vs. reality description of movie plots on p. 1.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936) Aura the unique quality attributed to an artwork which is supposed to invoke its presence in space and time. o A kind of authenticity the aura connects art to the religious, art as secular version of the sacred object in religious ritual. o Stevens & Eliot art as replacement Benjamin argues that the advent of capitalist mass production has destroyed the unique aura of art. o The mass reproduction of images of art have devalued the idea of the original. Film and photos mean that auras change b/c/o mechanical reproduction. Benjamin deploys images of breaking and shattering to explain how its affected arts aura. o He says: reproduction pries an object from its shell, destroys its auras; substitute plurality of copies for a unique existence. o Takes art to the masses rather than bringing masses to the art. o Shift from authentic value to exhibition value. He suggests film as a mass medium is engaged in this kind of mechanical reproduction as well there is no singular experience with an art object with its aura.

Clement Greenberg Avant-Garde & Kitsch - 1939 Industrialization has led to two new forms of art: a/v and kitsch. Casts these terms as polar opposites to explain art in this moment. Notes prominence of high modernist art associated with a/v and with cultural products that are less high falutin. How does the same society produce both? Avant-garde usually describes new and unusual experimental ideas in the arts, and Greenberg defines it as artworks that are internally motivated a turn inward, an investigation of its own form.

The A/V is in search of an absolute art abstract or non-objective art. Tries to create something valid on its own terms, independent of meanings or originals, so content is dissolved completely into form; content of art and literature cannot be reduced to anything but itself. Counterposes this idea of the avant-garde, which strips out meaning, with the idea of kitsch (poor taste b/c garish or sentimental). When theres an a/v we also find a rear-guard: popular art that uses for raw material the debased simulacra of genuine culture, which leads to insensibility; o vicarious experience and fake sensation demands nothing from their customers except their money.

The Culture Industry Adorno & Horkheimer: 1944. Say film, radio and magazines make up a system that is uniform in every part doesnt matter if youre a democracy, this mass culture industry is uniform across the globe. Under capitalism, all mass culture is identical movies and radio dont even need to pretend to be art, theyre just a business, which produces an ideology to justify the rubbish they produce.

These ideas resonate with West, who writes a/b Hollywood. P. 71. Sexual reproduction has given way to mechanical reproduction; instead of having sex, go to a brothel to see a production of a film. The projector breaks down right before the climax;

machinic or mechanical is often tied to the idea of brokenness, falling apart. Harry Groener is called a mechanical toy that had been overwound. Fay is mechanical in her brainstorming of movie ideas. This mechanical quality is being associated with lower-class characters: e.g., the masses. Masses can be understood in four different ways: 1) Relationship between collective and individual; part and whole, but also as a way of describing art objects as made up of tiny, individual elements. 2) Crowd as massing, which invokes politics in its reference to war, but is show up to be an illusion. 3) Theres no sense of unity in this first moment, this mob doesnt have the coherence of an angry mob going into a political movement, theyre just jumbled and disordered; all distinct, clashing in this culture and geography; 4) we find Todds interest isnt in conformity but in individuality, in lowly isolated, bitter individuals. (P. 60). Fascism as response to this atomization. Passages: p. 2-3: description of the people on the street; p. 32 description of Homer as Picasso painting; Ch. 11 44, Harrys attack when selling to Homer; Ch. 13

Faye: This elaborate gesture, like all her others, was so completely meaningless, almost formal, that she seemed a dancer rather than an affected actress Chapter 13: Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play. From in front, the stupid lines and grotesque situations would have made him squirm with annoyance, but because he saw the perspiring stagehands and the wires that held up the tawdry summerhouse with its tangel fo paper flowers, he accepted everything and was anxious for it ot succeed. While telling the story she had been full of surface animation and her hands and face were alive with little illustrative grimaces and gestures. But now her excitement narrowed and became deeper and its play internal. . . . All these little stories, these little daydreams of hers, were what gave such extraordinary color and mystery to his movements. She seemed always to be struggling in their soft grasp as thoug she were trying to run in a swamp. Her self-sufficiency made him squirm and the desire to break its smooth surface with a blow, or a tleast a sudden obscene gesture, became irresistible. Homer: Except for the Romola Martin incident . . .t he forty years of his life had been entirely without variety or excitement. As a bookkeeper, he had worked mechanically, totaling figures and making entries with the same impersonal detachment tha the now opened cans of soup and made his bed. He somehow knew that his only defense was chastity, tha tit served him, like the shell of a tortoise, as both spine and armor. He couldnt shred it even in thought. If he did, he would be destroyed. He was right. There are men who can lust with parts of themselves. Only their brain or their hearts burn and then not completely. . . .

Recap from Monday: Masses Atomized Masses a large group of ordinary people presented as a profoundly isolating experience. An isolated being and a conglomerate mass (political theory => fascism). We see this in the form of Homer Simpson who stands in for the general mass of those who came to Cali to die. The fact that homers hands, fragments of himself, are alive or have agency work as a synecdoche for his condition (part representing the whole). Homer himself is a synecdoche for the masses of which he is a part, and his hands are in turn a synecdoche for Homer as a body. His hands are part of his bodily mass, they seem to have agency in the same way that Homer is part of the masses but is this isolated individual. Todd = artist, the avant-garde. Todd is presented as a complex character as opposed to Homers simplicity and hes not interested in kitsch, but in art. He turns to Goya as an inspiration. If these two men exist on either end of the spectrum, they also have something in common: they both want Faye Groener very badly. Faye is a figure neither of work or kitsch associated with industrialism, nor is she an artist figure; rather, she represents a work of art in herself; she is the object that these two men aspire towards owning somehow. Fayes artifice, her sense of being art into the bone makes her almost purely a kind of simulacrum of a person. Faye seems to be an art object in spite of herself. Simulacrum: an image or representation of a thing rather than the thing itself. Connotation of unsatisfactory substitute or bad imitation. Faye as pure artifice: at the beginning of Chapter 13 (103). -Acting as a bodily art Being with her was like being backstage during an amateurish, ridiculous play. From in front, the stupid lines and grotesque situations would have made him squirm with annoyance, but because he saw the perspiring stagehands and the wires that held up the tawdry summerhouse with its tangle of paper flowers, he accepted everything and was

anxious for it to succeed. He found still another way to excuse her. He believed that while she often recognized the falseness of an attitude, she persisted in it because she didnt know how to be simpler or more honest. She was an actress who had learned from bad models in a bad school. And again, on P. 158: Id like to do a show on Broadway, she continued. Thats the way to get a start nowadays. They wont talk to you unless youve had stage experience. She went on and on, telling him how careers are made in the movies and how she intended to make hers. It was all nonsense. She mixed bits of badly understood advice from the trade papers with other bits out of the fan magazines and compared these with the legends that surrounded the activities of screen stars and executives. Without any noticeable transition, possibilities became probabilities and wound up as inevitabilities. At first she occasionally stopped and waited for Claude to chorus a hearty agreement, but when she had a good start, all her questions were rhetorical and the stream of words rippled on without a break. None of them really heard her. They were all too busy watching her smile, laugh, shiver, whisper, grow indignant, cross and uncross her legs, stick out her tongue, widen and narrow her eyes, toss her head so that her platinum hair splashed against the red plush of the chair back. The strange thing about her gestures and expressions was that they didnt really illustrate what she was saying. They were almost pure. It was as though her body recognized how foolish her words were and tried to excite her hearers into being uncritical. It worked that night; no one even thought of laughing at her. The only move they made was to narrow their circle about her. Her gestures didnt really illustrate what she was saying a moment of arbitrary signification. They were almost pure. She wears green, and seems to correspond visibly to her surface as if Faye is art itself and she is concomitant with her artifice. -Faye as a kind of pastiche; she is constituted by the discourses of film And on page (47) 94: Still holding her hair, so that her snug dress twisted even tighter and Homer could see her dainty, arched ribs and little, dimpled belly. This elaborate gesture, like all her others, was so completely meaningless, almost formal, that she seemed a dancer rather than an affected actress. Allusion to Yeats Among the Schoolchildren - O body swayed to music, O brightening glance/How can we know the dancer from the dance? The A/V is in search of an absolute art abstract or non-objective art. Tries to create something valid on its own terms, independent of meanings or originals, so content is dissolved completely into form; content of art and literature cannot be reduced to anything but itself.

Homer and Todd have entirely fittings orientations towards her Homer wants to own her, sponsor her; the artist figure wants to paint her at the center of the mural hes constructing. Apart from these artistic and economic orientations, they want to do more than just that they also want to consummate their sexual desires for her. For both of these men, this desire takes the form of rape fantasy violent urges towards Faye: p. (12) 68: An act of murder that would simultaneously destroy his own body. Homers relationship to faye as more obliquely depicted but we know that he had an incident with a drunken Ms. Martin when he worked at a hotel, an urge to hurt women as part of the sexual desire. The sexualized and physical violence of the novel seeks to work at all levels of society we see it across the board. P. (100) 134: The set is described as a body, but then we also see the bodies of the actors underneath it. Emphasis on mechanical nature of the body. So theres an indiscriminate quality to the violence in the novel, implying that the violence imputed here isnt just a form of casual classism; contemporary discourse animalized lower classes . . . But this articulation of violence in relation to artifice is more complicated than that. 3 purposes he might be deploying. 1) an artistic mode, a sense of the grotesque. Grotesque the kind of murals that were found in grottos, also strongly affiliated with the body, physical ugly and repulsive, and often comically so. One way he might attempt to use violence in the novel, to engage in the artistic tradition of the Grotesque, which combines empathy with disgust. 2) Everyone is acting out physically as if this is the sole measure of the human possible in this world of fakery and deception a kind of reaction or outburst to break or puncture the artificial imposition that seems to lie across the entire social world. a. This reaction seems to take a form of inertia in both senses, e.g., in Homers sluggish body and the way in which its difficult to put his body into motion but also a kind of momentum in the Groeners. 43-44 b. (inertia pertaining to moving objects or MASSES). Inertia comes from an artistic word meaning unskilled or inactive, a lack of artistry.

i. We also see the Groeners as exemplars of bad artists; they are also unskilled and have a different kind of inertia. These two forms of inertia seem to be responses to this world of artifice that gets imposed upon the bodies of these characters. 3) Attribution of causality they more they get juxtaposed the more artifice itself comes to seem violent. The way harrys body is killed off by his own performance. Culture industry spins people into a frenzy that kills them off. We can see Homers hands as an image for the idea of a bodily their automatic actions seem to relegate his character to a sense of uncontrollable impulse. (134) 160-61. A manual ballet described as a kind of automatic action the idea of endless reproduction of simulacra, of artifice; the specificity of the action refers to how the hand is kind of synecdoche, and fingers are component people of the hand; we get the masses (the people) inside the church and steeple. This leads us to religious connotation of mass as communion, receiving the body and blood of Christ. Mass comes from the word missa which means dismissal, the concluding formula of the mass in Latin, which signifies having a mission. Homers hands symbolize the body of Christ Homer seems to represent martyrdom, in the benefit of the community. 141 Gender 114