(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

BENJAMIN IN THE AGE OF NEW MEDIA
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concept of tactility and the haptic body in contemporary media aesthetics.
For Benjamin’s aim when stressing the ballistic aspects of cinematic spectatorship
was to advocate the bursting asunder of the nineteenth-century
bourgeois subject, whereas the phenomenological aspirations of contemporary
media theory are profoundly dedicated to pursuing a new kind of
techno-humanism, an enriched and enriching notion of the human subject
self-reflexively aware of its own often quite fluid extensions and interactions,
its bodily boundaries, its perceptual mechanisms, and its forms of
affection and self-affection. Benjamin’s fascination with tactility reflected
his hope that new media would frame the legacy of bourgeois individualism
and resituate the viewer within a post-bourgeois, post-individualist,
and post-humanist realm of political action and emancipatory exteriority.
Much of what has been written in recent years on the physiology
of perception in the age of new digital media, on the other hand, aims
at situating the subject as one actively seeking to frame and reframe its
perceptions of the world, to develop new sensory connections and maps
of its surroundings, and thus relaxing — instead of exploding — the
hardened contours of subjectivity. The new medium of mechanical
reproduction in Benjamin was to redeem the perceiving subject from
itself and merge it into a post-aesthetic collective of at once distracted
and highly attentive social players. The phenomenological turn in contemporary
media aesthetics, by contrast, understands experiences with
new media ensembles as a springboard for exploring the variegated processes
of human perception and for embracing the aesthetic as a principal
modality of maneuvering the world with our senses and assimilating
this world to our contingent and aleatoric movements through space.
Unlike Benjamin, contemporary media theory does not think of tactile
seeing as a mere product of a subject’s being subjected to ballistic
attacks and destructive assaults. Instead, it wants to show how we need
to explore tactility and embodiment as the inevitable source of a richer,
more complex, less constrained, and fundamentally expanded notion
of the human subject — its perceptions, its bodily self-identity, and its
relationship to other human subjects.
IV
But what about the bodies of those not looking at the screens but standing
in front of the camera and delivering their corporeality for future
or real-time acts of spectatorship? How does mechanical reproduction
in Benjamin’s understanding affect an actor’s sense of embodiment,
and how does this differ from what cinema in an age of comprehensive
digitization does to pro-filmic events (empirical events taking place in
front of the camera) and forms of embodiment? How far can we push
Benjamin’s thoughts on acting in front of cinematic cameras in order