Dance of Values: Reading Eisenstein's Capital
Dance of Values: Reading Eisenstein's Capital
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价值观之舞：读爱森斯坦的《资本论》
DOI：
10.1162/grey_a_00251
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发表时间：
2018
期刊：
影响因子：
0.3
通讯作者：
Elena Vogman
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Elena Vogman
“民主的危机应该被理解为政治人的论述条件的危机。”这就是沃尔特·本杰明在1935年描述的，在“技术可复制的时代”，新的中间政权的决定性的政治后果。从此以后，呈现的政治问题将由呈现的审美条件决定。2换句话说，关键在于政治人物的能见度，因为本雅明认为“广播和电影不仅改变了专业演员的功能，同样也改变了那些像政治家一样在这些媒体面前展示自己的人的功能。”3本杰明的文本唤起了一面扭曲的镜子，在这面镜子中，政治家看起来越小，他的形象就越大。因此，当代资本主义的复制条件产生了“一种新的选择形式”--一种“冠军、明星和独裁者成为胜利者”的机制。4同样的技术复制条件使艺术和文化得以传播，一方面与资本主义生产条件和法西斯政权的崛起密不可分。本杰明并不是第一个从这种关系中获得批判性分析的人。在发表《艺术作品》的七年前，谢尔盖·艾森斯坦在他的日记中撰写了一篇文章--其中的元素出人意料地在本杰明的论文中得到了回应。使用蒙太奇作为一种形态工具，艾森斯坦从三个视觉成分中构建了他的论点：在右边，我们看到了美国棒球运动员卡彻小姐的蒙面面孔Das Sportgesicht。左边是俄罗斯国际红色援助组织(Mezhdunarodnaia Organizatsia Pomoshchi Bortsam Revolutsii；MOPR)的反资本主义海报。在他们的上方，艾森斯坦从《苏联艺术》杂志上剪下了一段插图，阐述了不同历史时期的艺术技巧与各自意识形态的相互关系。这个片段唤起了这两个不同形象之间的关系：工业资本主义的艺术家们不是偶然地如此热情地在风景上工作，然后是在静物上，在物体上，创造了时代的风格，把商品变成了拜物教。人们不能把形式上的创新与艺术的主题和思想内容分开。
“The crisis of the democracy should be understood as crisis of the conditions of exposition of the political man.” 1 This is how Walter Benjamin, in 1935, describes the decisive political consequences of the new medial regime in the “age of technological reproducibility.” Henceforth, the political question of representation would be determined by aesthetic conditions of presentation. 2 In other words, what is at stake is the visibility of the political man, insofar as Benjamin argues that “radio and film are changing not only the function of the professional actor but, equally, the function of those who, like the politician, present themselves before these media.” 3 Benjamin’s text evokes a distorting mirror in which the political man appears all the smaller, the larger his image is projected. As a result, the contemporary capitalist conditions of reproduction bring forth “a new form of selection”—an apparatus before which “the champion, the star, and the dictator emerge as victors.” 4 The same condition of technological reproduction that enables artistic and cultural transmission is inseparably tied to the conditions of capitalist production, on the one hand, and the rise of fascist regimes, on the other. Benjamin was not the first to draw an impetus for critical analysis from this relationship. Seven years before the “Work of Art” essay, Sergei Eisenstein assembled a composition in his journal—elements of which surprisingly echo in Benjamin’s thesis. Using montage as a morphological tool, Eisenstein constructs his argument out of three visual components: on the right, we see “Das Sportgesicht,” the masked face of an American baseball player, Miss Catcher. On the left appears an anticapitalist poster of the Russian International Red Aid (Mezhdunarodnaia Organizatsia Pomoshchi Bortsam Revolutsii; MOPR). Above them, Eisenstein places a cutout from the journal Soviet Art that addresses the interrelation of artistic techniques from different historical periods with their respective ideologies. This fragment calls forth the relation between the two heterogeneous images:“Not by chance did the artists of industrial capitalism work so passionately on landscape, then on still life, on the object, creating the style of the epoch and transforming commodity into fetish. One cannot separate formal innovation from the subject and the ideological content of art.” 5 The mask over the sportswoman’s face corresponds