Teaching Benjamin

"The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" (reprinted in my Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition) represents my first exposure to the work of Walter Benjamin. Since I first read it over the summer, in preparation for Dr. Rasula's course on Metropolitan Modernity, I have read many more of his short essays as well as a large chunk of The Arcades Project. It was therefore exciting to revisit this essay in the context of teaching it to a group of students, many of whom may have been experiencing Benjamin for the first time.

It became clear to me as I reread the essay (my fourth reading, I think) just how it has become such a pivotal piece of writing in so many fields. Each reading, after time has passed and outside study undertaken, brings a whole new set of ideas to the fore, possibilities for understanding which had not exposed themselves until the current moment. In this sense, Benjamin achieves stylistically and rhetorically what he sets out to achieve historically, a series of discrete "dialectal images" which constitute "the relation of what-has-been to the now" (Arcades Project 462).

Benjamin begins the essay with an appeal to Marx's theory of political economy, stating that when Marx set out his ideas regarding base and superstructure, Capitalism was still in its infancy. Benjamin asserts that only now (in 1936, almost seventy years after the publication of the first volume of Capital) can we begin to analyze the effects of the base on the formations of the superstructure. Benjamin acknowledges that Marx was acting as a prognosticator, and that his own work must also "meet certain prognostic requirements" (1052). This is one of those places where I feel like Benjamin is talking to us. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin explains that "history leads the past to bring the present into a critical state" (471). His interest in Paris in the nineteenth century (to which he dedicated a large amount of time and effort in compiling The Arcades Project) sprang from his understanding of a certain confluence between that time and his own, like a window into the past that might bring the present into clearer focus. This same window, I suspect, we sense when we approach much of Benjamin's work, and especially the "Artwork" essay. He looks back 70 years to Marx; we look back 70 years to him. And so much of what he is exploring in the "Artwork" essay has become, in true prognostic style, central to the modes of our everyday existence.

Schiller's Aesthetic Education

I recently took issue with Kant for insisting that an aesthetic education was possible, while entirely avoiding any actual explanation of such an education. I have found, in Schiller's Aesthetic Education of Man (excepted in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd Edition), an attempt to describe just such a curriculum. It occurs in his Ninth Letter, after an explanation of his conviction that Art is the "instrument not provided by the State" which might "open up living springs" of moral justice even from under the heaviest corruption (490). The fourth paragraph he begins thus:

The artist is indeed the child of his age; but woe to him if he is at the same time its ward or, worse still, its minion! Let some beneficent deity snatch the sucking betimes from his mother's breast, nourish him with the milk of a better age, and suffer him to come to maturity under a distanct Grecian sky. The, when he has become a man, let him return, a stranger, to his own century; not, however, to gladden it by his appearance, but rather, terrible like Agamemnon's son, to cleanse and to purify it. (490)

Here Schiller seems to create the vision of the Artist as Outcast that strikes me as so key to the Romantic poets and the Romantic hero alike. Schiller's Artist takes "his theme" from his own time, so it would follow that the more invested he is in understanding and internalizing the experience of his own time the more clearly he will express his theme. But "his form he will borrow from a nobler time, nay, from beyond time altogether, from the absolute, unchanging unity of his being" (490). The Artist for Schiller is necessarily political, necessarily moral, as he is charged with the task, "Impart to the world you would influence a Direction towards the good" (491).

There is something of DFW in this concept of the Artist. Wallace was so invested in the mainstream ideas of socio-normative behavior, inhabited them so fully and naturally, and yet, was continuously is reminded (and constantly reminding) of his (and our) essential isolation, alienation, disunity.

Finally, Schiller even suggests that the formal aspects of the art object are necessarily and appropriately determined by historical context:

...nothing is more common than for both, science as well as art, to pay homage to the spirit of the age, or for creative minds to accept the critical standards of prevailing taste (490).

This acknowledgment of taste as historically and culturally determined is notably absent in Kant, who is so determined toward universality and eternality that he glosses the issue of the Artist altogether.

It Won't Happen To Me

Yesterday, the high school hosted its annual pre-prom Don't Drink and Drive program for the student body. Last year's program was a refreshing change of pace: the usual scared-straight videos and parent-style lecture was replaced by a heartfelt discussion by a young man who had been paralyzed by a drunk driver, aided (because he could not, in fact, speak) by his loving mother.

This year, no such luck. Bill Richardson, a former Gwinnett County police officer, came to give his presentation about, purportedly, teens and alcohol and driving. The presentation is part of Mr. Richardson's It Won't Happen To Me campaign to reduce the number of teen deaths resulting from car accidents. (Reported accurately by Bill as "the leading cause of death among teens today".) The program was mostly what you might expect: Bill spent a long time lecturing the kids things they should already know. A lot of dontdothises and dontdothats intermingled with graphic video clips of some real car accident tragedies and even more reenacted car accident tragedies.

The worst of these videos can be seen below. It should be noted that the students had seen before during an entirely separate "don't text and drive" program delivered as part of our school-wide Advisement program.



A couple of things stand out to me about this program, and this video in particular.

First of all, don't we all know by now that Scared Straight doesn't work? Taking young toughs to the jailhouse in the hopes of frightening them away from crime forever only ends up teaching them new and more troublesome ways to look and act tough. Likewise, when the students see tragedy in a movie, they are inclined to think of it as just that: a movie. It is clear from the first moments of the above film that it is a reenactment -- a fiction. We are conditioned to percieve this distinction, even when it does not exist: on the big screen, even true events seem "unreal." It seems like creating this sort of separation between viewer and event makes more, not less, likely an attitude of indifference or insusceptibility.

That it doesn't work, to me, seems a good thing, and we should immediately turn to different methods. This sort of pathetic appeal (pun intended) is precisely the argumentative style we should be teaching kids to recognize and reject. If we learn anything from the current state of world politics, it must be that fleeting, gut-reaction emotional response should be -- indeed, must be -- no basis for the formation of opinions and plans of action. In fact, it seems like this sort of emotional conditioning might very well lead to an increase in poor decision making. If I base my negative reaction to drunk driving on my gut reaction while viewing a disturbing video, I may just as likely base my positive reaction to drunk driving on my gut reaction while totally wasted and trying to impress a girl or seem tough or save face.

Furthermore, if your intention is to persuade kids not to drink and drive, it is advisable to stay on message. Pick your battles. This program is given 3 days before prom for a reason. Mr. Richardson lost sight of the immediate goal, and a lot of his time (and mine -- this was during my planning period) could have been saved if someone had simply told him that the texting thing had been done. That what we are really worried about is drinking. Prom is right around the corner, after all.

But Bill didn't stop there. And this is what really gets me. At some point he made the leap to eating and driving, as well. He implored the students not to eat their chicken biscuits behind the wheel.

This all reminds me of the numerous Don't Do Drugs programs that I experienced as a child. Aside from the failed reasoning behind a "just say no" philosophy (an issue I explore in some depth in an earlier post), drug use prevention programs always take one too many steps. As a child, I am with you for don't do heroin, don't do cocaine, don't do marijuana -- especially if you show me some scary pictures or bring in a convict to prove the dangers. Adding cigarettes and alcohol to the mix, though, starts to muddy the waters. After all, my dad drinks alcohol. My grandfather smokes. What gives?

The program they gave my fifth grade year also went further: caffeine is a drug.

This sort of divergence from a central theme seems to risk a complete loss of effectiveness. After all, once a Georgia-born, Coca-Cola-raised raised fifth grader hears you say that he shouldn't drink caffeine, you are finished. He no longer hears a word you say, and there is a good chance that whatever you said before has also been tossed out. You have become an unreliable source. Your credibility is shot.

Ever thus to Bill and his chicken biscuits.

The real reason for this post, though, is less a polemic than a curiosity.

You see, Bill Richardson started his program by saying, "we all have said 'It won't happen to me' before, and it's important to remember that it can happen to you." Which got me thinking: nobody ever says "It won't happen to me." In fact, the very idea of anyone saying such strikes me immediately as ridiculous.

A discussion which uses "It Won't Happen To Me" as its jumping-off point surrounds nearly every great social ill of the last 20 years. Alcohol and drug addiction, domestic violence, AIDS, even diabetes: all seem at least in part to be caused by some uninformed person saying "It Won't Happen To Me" just before partaking in some ill-advised risk behavior which leads to their inevitable ruin. The following hypothetical conversations illustrate the point:

TODD (Slamming his 14th brewski): Well, I'm bored of this party. I'm leaving. Anybody need a ride?
SUE (Concerned): Todd, you're drunk! Don't you know that driving under the influence is the leading cause of death in teens?
TODD (Climbing into his hatchback): Yeah, but it won't happen to me.

TODD (Flexing his biceps): Well, it's Friday. I am going out to have anonymous unprotected sex with multiple partners.
STU: (Stepping from the kitchen): Todd, be careful. AIDS can affect anyone. If you are going to choose to have sex out of wedlock, you should really wear a condom.
TODD (Checking his high-top fade in the mirror): Nah. It won't happen to me.

Now, I understand what these activists are aiming at when they use "It Won't Happen To Me" to start their spiel. They are not referring to an actual spoken phrase, but are rather making reference to an assumed mindset that we share before we make decisions which are statistically inadvisable. They hope that by facing the mindset beforehand we can avoid it when faced with a real situation. As I said with regards to D.A.R.E., context-free, all-or-nothing social practice is at least pointless and ineffective, at worst damaging in itself. We cannot hope -- nor should we -- that something as complex and nuanced as peer group sociology and adolescent psychology can be reduced to a set of predesignated rules and regulations. To do so is at once irresponsible and unimaginative.

"It Won't Happen To Me" is a false construct. It doesn't actually exist, in our minds or elsewhere, when we are in the midst of making a crucial decision. Or, if it does exist, it is a spontaneous generation of our psyche which likely gets much more positive reinforcement than negative. When we get in the car, even entirely sober, and face the chance of being hit by another driver. When we place our money in the bank, despite the fact that banks can collapse. When we get our hair died, knowing that many dye-jobs turn out just horribly. When we squeeze again into our skinny jeans and confront the risk of an embarrassing rip. In each of these situations, undoubtedly, we must also say to ourselves, "It Won't Happen To Me." And inevitably, more often than not, we are right.