The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin, translated by J.A. Underwood

    I don't usually include essays on here, but I read this as a way to kick off a unit on media studies. It was a little tough to understand, but a very thought-provoking piece written in the mid-1930s about how photography, film, and recorded sound were changing the nature of art at that time. I think it is extremely interesting to read today, as the internet and social media continue to change the nature of art in such different ways. The essay is densely packed with important ideas that I'll discuss below.

    Aura refers to the uniqueness of art in its place and sort of its genuineness, as I understand it. So, something that "art" needs to deal with in the age of mechanical reproduction is that when a photo is printed twenty times, no individual print is more "genuine" than the others, whereas a great painting, copied by another artist, retains an aura of authenticity. Art was also originally "embedded in the context of tradition" through worship. So, art wasn't always for another person's viewing. Art originated to fulfill spiritual needs. A caveman drawing an elk on the wall might show it to his friends, but he also expected that spirits might see it. Or a medieval craftsman carving details high up on a cathedral would know that no passerby would see them, but that God would. With the advent of perfectly reproduceable art, with no "aura" to distinguish the original or the genuine piece, art is thrown into a crisis, illustrated by disputes about whether or not photography is art. But, writes Benjamin, the question is not whether photography is art, but how it changes the nature of art. In the modern era, writes Benjamin, art is underpinned not by ritual, as in the past, but by politics.

    Religious art was viewed for the purposes of provoking a spiritual experience, and therefore was not to be taken lightly. Statues of the Madonna, for example, would only be revealed at certain times, and some works of art were only allowed to be seen by certain people, like the Ark of the Covenant. But with religious ritual removed from art, opportunities for displaying art proliferated. 

    Benjamin writes that fascism allows the masses to express themselves through the spectacle without actually having their needs or wants addressed. The mass protest or rally is best captured through photography, and especially in the bird's eye view, which normal people rarely experience. With the advent of aerial photography, or just tall enough buildings, it makes more sense to hold mass rallies and have them photographed to show the popularity of certain ideas. Moreover, fascism seeks to grant the masses a spectacle to serve as a sort of distraction from real needs. It uses art as a way to divert attention. Communism, on the other hand, rather than aestheticising politics, politicizes aesthetics. Benjamin doesn't elaborate too much on that, but I take it to mean that Communists instead assert control over artistic media to turn them into propaganda.

    One thing that Benjamin notes in a footnote is from Aldous Huxley's Beyond the Mexique Bay, in which Huxley uses some rough math to assert that there is a proliferation of art in the modern era, but that the bad art has increased more than the good art. The media have allowed for the creation of more art, but only allowed for a creation of talented people to a lesser extent. I am not sure that is true. In my experience the current era (90ish years later) is full of bad and good art, but above all is characterized by individual art. Art is so commodified now that we don't even refer to people as artists so much as they are "content creators." We have sort of tacitly acknowledged that whatever it is people are doing on Vine, Tiktok, Instagram, etc. is not art, but "content." However, it is getting more reach than art ever was. It is normal for a ten second video made by some random person to get millions of views--this happens to different videos every day. More people are seeing this "content" than ever saw the Mona Lisa for the first hundred years after it was painted. So this "content" is going to be more influential than any "art" ever was. I think that has changed the nature of art. Whereas photography forced the world to expand the definition of art, social media has narrowed the definition, turning art into something more purposeful and thought provoking, and separating mere diversion into a separate category of content for the masses. 

    When we watch this "content," I would say most people are of the opinion that we are not doing ourselves any favors. You hear people call it rotting, or refer to it as screen time, which we use apps on our phones to try to diminish. People try to keep their kids from having too much screen time, which usually doesn't even refer to TVs but just to social media and games on smartphones and tablets. But it is so attractive, like junk food but for attention. What will the result be? I think the aggregate result of the proliferation of accessible information consumption and creation will be more trash creation and consumption in the short term, but over decades, people are becoming more knowledgeable, getting good and bad information the would have never had before. Now, the problem is not being uninformed, but misinformed. We can take for granted that there is now a constant stream of information being consumed by billions of people all the time through their social media.

    I wonder whether AI will alter this trend. Before AI, the trend for information was for a reduction in the influence of experts and an increase in the amount of non-experts' influence. Knowledge was becoming decentralized--anyone could create a video or a post and have it go viral, and the cause of virality was rarely whether the information provided was true or thoughtful, but whether it spawned engagement. To go viral, a post only needs to get engagement, which it can get by being entertaining, outrageously wrong, controversial, or extremely negative. However, with AI, I wonder whether people will just turn to asking Claude or ChatGPT their important questions about history, science, etc., and therefore we would see a return to the influence of experts whose data was harvested by LLMs. 

    Maybe AI will lead to a divergence in knowledge or information like "content creation" has split art from content. People will use AI seemingly more like they would use a Google search, and consume content more for entertainment purposes. But maybe that entertainment will also misinform people who will never actually consult their AI tools for an answer. The result then would just be more general misinformation and an overall lowering of the quality of information, as the creators of content become the ones in control over public knowledge. This democratization probably leads to a flattening of knowledge. With experts unable to serve as gatekeepers of knowledge, more information and misinformation spreads around, bringing up the general knowledge level of the people who were the least informed while reducing the knowledge level of those who were most informed. Now that you can find anyone on the internet to agree with you on any given thing, people can connect with each other over shared interests, but those connections are mediated by machines. Like how Benjamin talks about the actor and the audience versus the actor and the camera and the audience, the more people will socialize through the internet, the more that real-life connections will diminish. We will end up adapting to an "internet society," and lose physical connections. 

    I think that this will also lead to a flattening of the quality of communication. In-person communication is the most effective way to communicate. It would be at the top of a metaphorical ladder, followed by videochatting, phone calls, emails, etc. When people can communicate through other media more, that increases the amount of total communication, but it also transfers some part of the real-life communication to a lower form of communication. So communication is increased, but high-quality communication is somewhat diminished. With everything getting flatter, our social structures will probably also get more democratic. It will be harder for "experts" or the rich or the powerful to rule over a population that is better informed than they were before because the top 10% of society will also be worse informed than they were before. It will be harder for people in the halls of power to rule over the people who aren't because people will have fewer conversations in those halls of power while people outside will have more communication with one another through media. Those forms of communication, which can be forms of organization, will flatten power relationships as the upper rungs of society diminish in the qualities that make them the upper rungs of society while the bottom rungs get access to the same sources of information and means of communication they have.

    Okay, that was a big rant that I wrote out all at once. No clue if it makes sense. Not reading it back, but clicking "publish."

Games Criminals Play: How You Can Profit by Knowing them by Bud Allen and Diana Bosta

    This was a pretty interesting book all about lessons that should be learned if you are ever going to work in a prison. I don't plan on doing that, but in the criminal justice system, many people become prisoners, so it's interesting to read about. The book mainly talks about schemes that prisoners use to try to "down a duck," which I guess is 80's terminology for finding a correctional officer to manipulate into bringing contraband into the prison. Mostly, the lessons are to keep things professional, and to keep things in the open. No secrets. Interesting book, but it felt a little dated in its terminology and language.

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder

    Bloodlands is an important book, and Timothy Snyder obviously knew it was important when he was writing it. The book contextualizes the Holocaust, WWII, and the Great Purge in the USSR to show how the same people perpetrated and suffered from the same horrors in the "Bloodlands," roughly the area stretching from the older version of Poland up through the Baltics to Tallinn and Petrograd/St. Petersburg, and East through Ukraine. Today, It's mainly Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, with some of Russia. This is the region where, in the late 1930s and the 1940s, people had to choose between Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia. 

    After World War One, the three powers that partitioned Poland in 1795, Austria-Hungary, Prussia/The Second German Empire, and Russia, had all collapsed, allowing Poland to re-emerge. Poland was in a weird situation since it had been ceded by Tsarist Russia to the Germans, but then the Germans fell, and it came under threat from revolutionary Russia. It defeated the USSR in a war from 1919-20, led by Joseph Pilsudski, and ensured its independence, whereas Ukraine and Belarus were conquered. But over the 1920s, Poland was destined to grow relatively weaker than Russia and Germany. There was really nothing the Poles could do. They were smaller than both countries, less technologically advanced, and also dealt with the fact that, like the Germans, they were stuck in the middle of Europe, surrounded by other states that would be happy to take pieces off of Poland. The only policy available to Polish leaders was to use alliances to obtain non-aggression pacts with their neighbors. They got one with the USSR in 1932, which allowed Stalin more room to maneuver in his own western borderlands, where he was putting down rebellion against failed agricultural collectivization and "de-kulakization" that was starving the citizens of the USSR. I noticed that in the chapter, "The Soviet Famines," Snyder gives particular attention to Ukraine, without using the term Holodomor. I'm interested in that because it shows a sort of dissenting position against what had been official Ukrainian rhetoric on Stalin's starvation policies, while also paying particular attention to Ukraine. In Stalin, Stephen Kotkin specifically argued that Ukraine was not particularly targeted by collectivization, and that per capita deaths were actually higher in Kazakhstan than in Ukraine. However, since Snyder focuses on the "Bloodlands" that do not include Kazakhstan, and since Ukraine had the highest number of total deaths, I think his focus still makes sense.

    As collectivization ended and Stalin began the Great Purge, to find people to blame for the millions of failures of collectivization, the Nazis took power and opened the first concentration camps, which primarily focused on killing the physically and mentally handicapped. They opened camps at Dachau and Lichtenberg in 1933, Sachsenhausen in 1936, Buchenwald in 1937, and Flossenberg in 1938. When taking relative populations sizes into account, the Soviet Gulag system was still 25 times bigger than the German concentration camp system at this point. The Nazis were nowhere close. What becomes clear is that the two terrors of Stalinism and Nazism differed in their approach. Stalinist terror was at its worst in peacetime, when he had total control of his people. Hitler's terror was worst in wartime, when expediency created a twisted logic of killing, in which it made sense to enact the Final Solution during, not after the war. These opposite approaches to killing are illustrated by the fact that in 1937 and 1938, 267 people were sentenced to death in Germany, whereas 378,326 were sentenced to death in the kulak operation alone in the Soviet Union. The USSR's killing was more legalistic than the Nazi killing. But like Nazi terror, Stalinst terror was largely national. Chapter 2 of the book largely focuses on anti-Ukrainian terror and chapter 3 on anti-Polish terror.

    When the Germans invaded Poland, they invaded the most Jewish country in the world, and added massive numbers of Jews to their empire. He tripled the number of Jews in Germany from a little over 330,000 to nearly a million, and if you counted the Jews of the occupied General Government, there were another 1.5 million Jews. Lodz alone had 233,000 Jews, more than Berlin (82,788) and Vienna (91,480) combined. Warsaw had more Jews than all of Germany combined. But the Germans weren't the only ones to invade Poland in 1939, the USSR also did so simultaneously. The Soviets quickly began a "lesser Terror," killing 21,892 Polish citizens, 8% of whom were Jews, and deporting tens of thousands more to Kazakhstan before the winter of 1939-40. In June of 1940, the Soviets deported another 78,339 people from Poland, 84% of whom were Jewish. Jews were caught in the middle of this massive clash of ideologies and empires, one of which wanted to wipe the Jewish people off the map, and the other of which wanted to erase Jewish identity from people's minds. The Poles were also caught in the middle, and the two major powers both targeted Polish leaders for destruction. Snyder writes:

In eastern Europe the pride of societies was the 'intelligentsia,' the educated classes who saw themselves as leading the nation, especially during periods of statelessness and hardship, and preserving national culture in their writing, speech, and behavior. The German language has the same word, with the same meaning; Hitler ordered quite precisely the 'extermination of the Polish intelligentsia.' ... It was the intelligentsia who was thought to embody this civilization, and to manifest this special way of thinking. [para. break] Its mass murder by the two occupiers was a tragic sign that the Polish intelligentsia had fulfilled its historical mission.

    June 22, 1941, is the beginning of the worst phase of the calamity that should really be considered as an eastern European apocalypse. On that day, the Germans invaded the USSR, and that invasion would result in tens of millions dead. Snyder points out that from 1933-38, the Soviets did almost all the killing in the Bloodlands, and that from 1939-41 it was balanced. But from 1941-45, it would be "the Germans who were responsible for almost all of the political murder."

    Germany, in World War One, tried to challenge Britain, for control of the seas. Seeing the Kaiser's failure, in World War Two, Hitler tried to challenge Russia for control of the vast lands that would become the Bloodlands. Hitler saw them as a frontier for his empire, necessary not to compete with Britain for control of Europe, but to compete with America for control of the world. If Hitler's aim had been to rule Europe, it would have been best achieved by waiting. Germany needed only to stay united to become the richest and most powerful country on the continent. But his goal was world hegemony, and he saw that the country most likely to assume world hegemony, the United States, had done it thanks to an enormous frontier that it could fill. Hitler wanted to do to the Jews and the Slavs what the Americans had done to the Native Americans, but he lacked the diseases to do so. Instead, his plan for the Final Solution began as a plan for a reservation in Eastern Poland, the Lublin Plan, which was abandoned by November 1939 as too complicated. It transformed three more times. The next was a consensual plan to send the Jews to the Soviet Union, which Stalin rejected in February 1940. Then the plan was to deport the Jews to Madagascar, but that required British cooperation, and the British fought Germany after Poland's conquest. Finally, after invading the Soviet Union, the plan became to exterminate the Jews, and then the Slavs, by starvation. By the end of 1941, no government in history had ever ruled over so many Jews as Germany. It's plans for eastward expansion to match American westward expansion a century prior required the same extermination of the people already living there, and the only plan going into the invasion of the Soviet Union in summer 1941 was starvation. However, once Operation Barbarossa began, the Germans began an improvised extermination: first with bullets, then with vans that put exhaust back into their passenger compartments, then with stationary vans with exhaust into rooms filled with Jews, and then with gas chambers, using a pesticide known as Zyklon B.

    Under the Nazi regime, there could be three places Jews would go: ghettos, concentration camps, and death camps. Ghettos locked Jews into specific blocks of cities and could put Jews to work. They largely characterized the first year or two after the Germans invaded Poland. Concentration camps came about quickly as work camps designed to produce munitions and other goods for Germany. And death camps were extermination centers. Auschwitz was a rare combination of the two that is well known for its concentration/work camp side. Few of the death camps are well remembered because they were all liberated by the USSR, which suppressed the Jewish-specific parts of WWII historical memory, and because there were so few survivors of the death camps to tell their story (at Treblinka, only 50 survived while 780,863 were murdered). Six major facilities were established and functioned from December 1941 until November 1944: Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz. West of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line, the core of the killing was done in Operation Reinhard, gassing 1.3 million Polish Jews in 1942. It ended with Auschwitz, where two hundred thousand Polish Jews and seven hundred thousand other European Jews were gassed, mostly in 1943 and 1944. Gassing was chosen as the best way to exterminate Jews once deportation was understood to be impossible. East of Molotov-Ribbentrop, mass shooting was more common.

    One of the social phenomena that made gassing millions of Jews possible was the division of society throughout the war. Obviously, national and religious divisions were paramount, isolating Jews from Poles, Catholics from Atheists and Russian Orthodox. But within the ghettos, the Germans also made use of Jewish police forces, and divided those who could work from those who could not. This way, even after it became clear that the Germans were exterminating Jews, once already completely under the Germans' control, Jews vied to be kept alive for labor at selections. This created a social division between those Jews who had papers and those who did not. People believed that their families could remain in the ghetto with the right work papers, and much energy was spent in the hunt for the right documents instead of on resistance. In most ghettos, people wouldn't come together en masse until it was clear that the ghetto would be liquidated, and then everyone, knowing that they all shared the same fate, would rise up. But even then, ghetto uprisings were never successful in preventing a ghetto's liquidation, merely delaying liquidation a few days and merely guaranteeing a different type of mass murder on a different day.

    One really interesting aspect of this book is that, like how it combines its analysis of both German and Soviet conquest and occupation, it also extends its analysis past the Second World War. The ethnic cleansing continues as the Germans and Poles are both forced by the Soviets to the west, into a reduced Germany and a shifted Poland. For the Germans, it was new, and for the Poles, it was just a continuation of what they'd already been facing during the war. Snyder ends the books with a really interesting historiographical discussion of his influences, Hannah Arendt and Vasily Grossman, and of the errors in the popular imagination of the Holocaust. He reminds the reader that the majority of those killed never saw a gas chamber, and that Auschwitz is really primarily known due to being the furthest west of the death camps and the fact that it had a work camp attached to it, where a lot of people survived to tell their story. Now that the iron curtain has fallen, it is important to unite the "Bloodlands" into the historical understanding of the Holocaust, because that story was not well-known before the 1990s. This book is an incredibly important work in bringing that story out.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In German prisoner-of-war camps for Red Army soldiers, the death rate over the course of the war was 57.5%, whereas the death rate in POW camps for western soldiers was less than 5%.
• Snyder writes that on any given day in the second half of 1941, the Germans shot more Jews than had been killed by pogroms in the entire history of the Russian empire.
• The Soviets paused their advance just east of the Vistula river from early August 1944 until January 1945. This doomed Polish resistance fighters and Jews alike by design. Stalin wanted the Polish resistance to be killed so that they couldn't resist him later on. Once they restarted the offensive in January, it only took two weeks to liberate Lodz and Auschwitz.

 

 

Un verdor terrible por Benjamín Labatut

    Un verdor terrible explora la historia de la ciencia y como se alterna en sus capacidades de promover y extinguir la vida. Labatut muestra como el mismo hombre puede inventar el gas de cloro, que mata a miles durante la Primera Guerra Mundial, y tambien el fertilizador con nitrogeno, que salva las vidas de milliones. Y como el mismo compuesto químico se usa para crear ambos el Zyklon B y el azul de prusia, amado de los pintores. Labatut usa las vidas personales de cientifícos para dramatizar al narrativo, y no pude resistir en pensar como Thomas Kuhn disentiría de este narrativo basado en la epifanía.

    El libro se acaba con un anecdota de como los árboles limones mueren. En su última cosecha, el limón pare una sobreabundancia de limónes, hasta que se rompen las ramas de estar sobrepesadas. Me parece que el propósito de esta anecdota es argumentar que el florecimiento de las ciencias en el siglo XX es una subreabundancia, que otorga mucho, pero que también presagia el fin de todo.