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Mar. 22nd, 2008 02:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kleenexwomanFrom Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducability":
Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.
In response to the ideas put forth here by Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti:
For twenty-seven years, we Futurists have rebelled against the idea that war is anti-aesthetic...We therefore state:...War is beautiful because--thanks to gas masks, its terrifying megaphones, its flame throwers, and light tanks--it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machine. War is beautiful because it inaugurates the dreamed-of metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine-guns. War is beautiful because it combines gunfire, barrages, cease-fires, scents, and the fragrance of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architectures, like those of armored tanks, geometric squadrons of aircraft, spirals of smoke from burning villages, and much more....Poets and artists of Futurism,...remember these principles of an aesthetic of war, that they may illuminate...your struggles for a new poetry and a new sculpture!
Humankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.
In response to the ideas put forth here by Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti:
For twenty-seven years, we Futurists have rebelled against the idea that war is anti-aesthetic...We therefore state:...War is beautiful because--thanks to gas masks, its terrifying megaphones, its flame throwers, and light tanks--it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machine. War is beautiful because it inaugurates the dreamed-of metallization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine-guns. War is beautiful because it combines gunfire, barrages, cease-fires, scents, and the fragrance of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architectures, like those of armored tanks, geometric squadrons of aircraft, spirals of smoke from burning villages, and much more....Poets and artists of Futurism,...remember these principles of an aesthetic of war, that they may illuminate...your struggles for a new poetry and a new sculpture!
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Date: 2008-03-23 11:48 am (UTC)War is beautiful. I don't think you could even say that on public television.
But, I think I can see his point. Even the mushroom cloud of a nuclear weapon exerts some kind of aesthetic attraction to the senses. I know intellectually that war is stupendously wasteful, and I know emotionally that it creates pain on an industrial scale and yet I cannot ignore war; I am drawn to watch it. Why? perhaps because war does indeed have this aesthetic beauty. Or maybe I am just that alienated still. I don't know.. is that part of the point of the first quote? That one finds an aesthetic in war in direct proportion to one's alienation from the species and from the self? A healthy person would be unable to see that aesthetic?