Susan Buck-Morss creates in her essay the concept of anaesthetics, explaining what it is, how it is created and showing some examples in which it can be productive. Her paper is also a dialogue with Benjamin’s “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”, trying to go further than him on his own arguments and giving his article a stronger ground of reality. In fact, the article rejects a pure discussion about ideas to enter the fields of cultural history and politics.
In order to define anaesthetics, Buck-Morss creates a powerful and bold notion of aesthetics, going pretty far from its current general meaning. Buck-Morss recuperates aesthetics etymological meaning to define the concept as the “sensory experience of perception” (6). …show more content…
This response numbs the organism, deadening the senses and repressing memory. Buck-Morss gives, thus, a significant role to memory as a way to be able to really perceive external stimulus. As memory becomes key for the perception of present experience, present trauma creates a constant-past experience that the body is constantly trying to face with the result of numbness and the inability to be “in touch” with reality, rather blocking it. This distance to reality has, Buck-Morss argues following Benjamin, big political consequences: “Semeone who is past experiencing is no longer capable of telling … proven friend … from mortal enemy”.
This whole definition of anaesthetics puts together Benjamin thought and neuroscience research, giving Freud’s ideas about posttraumatic stress disorder a political turn. Buck-Morss externalizes the pure “natural” cognitive reaction of the body, giving the same power to drugs, prescribed since the XIX century after anaesthetics was medicalized aided by the concept of “neurasthenia”. Adiction to drugs became then, for Buck-Morss, an important characteristic of …show more content…
Modern photography and cinema allowed this.
However, even if technology is at the origin of perception alterations, it is not the right object to blame for Buck-Morss. Following Benjamin’s dialectics in his essay about the artwork, Buck-Morss uses modern photography to get in present times the real dynamics under fascism. This happens because photography is able to capture what is hidden by Hitler’s aura, what is beyond the anaesthetic world created by the use of technology around him in that era: narcissism, the fantasy of the body as an invulnerable unity that prevents us to deal with weakness and precariousness, and eventually to
In order to define anaesthetics, Buck-Morss creates a powerful and bold notion of aesthetics, going pretty far from its current general meaning. Buck-Morss recuperates aesthetics etymological meaning to define the concept as the “sensory experience of perception” (6). …show more content…
This response numbs the organism, deadening the senses and repressing memory. Buck-Morss gives, thus, a significant role to memory as a way to be able to really perceive external stimulus. As memory becomes key for the perception of present experience, present trauma creates a constant-past experience that the body is constantly trying to face with the result of numbness and the inability to be “in touch” with reality, rather blocking it. This distance to reality has, Buck-Morss argues following Benjamin, big political consequences: “Semeone who is past experiencing is no longer capable of telling … proven friend … from mortal enemy”.
This whole definition of anaesthetics puts together Benjamin thought and neuroscience research, giving Freud’s ideas about posttraumatic stress disorder a political turn. Buck-Morss externalizes the pure “natural” cognitive reaction of the body, giving the same power to drugs, prescribed since the XIX century after anaesthetics was medicalized aided by the concept of “neurasthenia”. Adiction to drugs became then, for Buck-Morss, an important characteristic of …show more content…
Modern photography and cinema allowed this.
However, even if technology is at the origin of perception alterations, it is not the right object to blame for Buck-Morss. Following Benjamin’s dialectics in his essay about the artwork, Buck-Morss uses modern photography to get in present times the real dynamics under fascism. This happens because photography is able to capture what is hidden by Hitler’s aura, what is beyond the anaesthetic world created by the use of technology around him in that era: narcissism, the fantasy of the body as an invulnerable unity that prevents us to deal with weakness and precariousness, and eventually to