some excerpts from the 2 papers i finished. (still working on my proust paper!)
from WHY BERGMAN IS FILMING: A LOOK AT PERSONA
I want to argue that this crisis of faith in art results out of Bergman’s discovery that art is just another language, with its own rules and signs that deceive and make the perfect communication impossible. As an auteur, Bergman enters the symbolic order with his cinematic language.
The ideal in the mirror, for Alma Elisabeth, for Elisabeth a perfect communion with an other, is impossible unless the subject is destroyed in the process. This process of identification with the other, directing the subject, makes it impossible to separate ego from the other as it is already the other, hence the analyses attempting to treat Elisabeth and Alma as two different people, or two sides of the same psyche, are not different intrinsically.
The identification between Alma and Elisabeth which will result in aggression begins as Alma tries to master speech which her ideal other in the mirror, Elisabeth is thought to be mastering by keeping silent. Alma tries to appropriate language to gain mastery over Elisabeth, but that only results in her losing the mastery of her own self caught up in the desire of the other.
What Elisabeth was refusing was in fact nothing, as the film, and human life, is about making sense of this nothingness. But as Lacan points out, “the more the signifier signifies nothing, the more indestructible it is.” (“Psychosis” 185) Hence the only thing left for Elisabeth, the audience, the director and all subjects, is to repeat after Alma; “Nothing.”
from THE WORK OF ART IN THE AGE OF INFINITE REPRODUCTION
In the industrial society analyzed by Benjamin, the culture industry operated along the model of centralized production and mass distribution, (Hardt and Negri 299) whereas today, there is increasing “competition among transnational corporations to establish and consolidate quasi-monopolies over the new information infrastructure.” (300) Thus, the democracy and equality promised by new information technologies are under constant threat by the corporate monopolies as the new legal framework promoted by these corporations in terms of regulating and controlling intellectual property demonstrate.
The question of the distinction between the commodities for everyday use and artistic objects could not be posed before the advent of mechanical reproduction which destroyed the ritualistic aura of art that clearly distinguished it from other artifacts. It is no surprise that avant-gardes, and their successors, the pop-artists of the 1960s like Andy Warhol, producing in a market-dominated society blur the distinction between ordinary commodity objects and art objects as a conscious and/or unconscious critique of capitalist society in their art. The basic problem caused by treating art as intellectual property lies in the difference between the utility of everyday objects and artworks. (Kembrew) The artworks become intellectual property because they supposedly function in a way different than other commodities. In other words, the Campbell soup itself is not a commodity worth of millions of dollars, unless it is painted, and in the Factory, by an individual, like Andy Warhol and promoted by media and art industry.
The stripping of the supernatural aura of the artist, as Foucault emphasizes, becomes difficult where artist instead of being treated as a producer or an individual part of the same society as everyone else, is treated as a prodigy. By providing examples of alternative utilization of digital means of production, like hacking, alter-globalization movements or forms of art, I have tried to show how the potential of Internet and digital media of annihilating inequalities of property and copyright laws based on its control, is being used by artists, or rather individuals. The inclination, as it was in Benjamin’s time, is to utilize technology in ‘unnatural ways’ and hopefully it is through alternative cultural production by using the same sources that we’ll be able to reverse this trend.
