Feast

In the doorway, sizzling onions
Punctuated by our half-open
Mouths, slowly staining purple from sauvignon
(The bottle with the forty-seven pound chicken mascot)
Moving down your neck, bruising your skin
Like a ripe, red, apple
Hearing your lungs collapse and open, faster and faster

My digits pull at your licorice hair,
Smelling the infusion of pomegranate and pears.
Fruits to overpower the permeated cumin seed and garlic
On my fingers, which move slowly down your vanilla back
Savoring each curve, lower and lower

Your eyelids part and your gaze travels the half foot to my own
Eyes that match March’s pale blue sky
Eyes that watch the browning piece of meat
We break away momentarily-
The steak needs to be turned over

An investigation of Benjamin

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The intention of this video was to analyze and question Walter Benjamin’s concepts of Fascism and aesthetics in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin argued that Fascism resulted in the introduction of aesthetics into politics. Benjamin claims that by introducing artistic and aesthetic principles and influences into politics, the product was a situation where politics could use the benefits of aesthetics to pursue a particular goal: the controlling of property while re-arranging society so as to eliminate fundamental rights in order to strengthen the single party in power. The rendering of political images aesthetic, which is to arrange and construct the messages in a way so as to achieve a goal of evicting empathy and relating in an audience, would have two effects: the first effect is that the average citizen would feel expression in politics, through the use and practice of aestheticization; the second effect is that politics and messages have a forcefulness and convincing aura about them, using a given set of aesthetic principles to help strengthen a message and evoke more response, conviction, and empathy. This video mash-up seeks to take political messages from multiple contexts and time periods, and to re-arrange them in such a way that a new message is formed, completely different from the intended messages. This effect is achieved by removing aesthetically pleasing and rhetorically powerful words and images and forcing new connections to be made between the phrases, images, and how they relate to their intentions, to each other, and to the video as a whole.
To begin the project an assortment of digital video messages were collected. The website youtube.com was the search engine and database from which the cited materials were taken. The videos were downloaded from youtube.com through the use of a computer program called Free FLV Converter. This program downloaded the video clips from youtube and converted the files into .avi format. This format should have allowed for Quicktime Pro to play the files, but it was unable to do this. The files could be read on Windows Media Player, but the particular formulation of .avi from Free FLV Converter was incompatible with the codecs that Quicktime Pro had. To solve this problem DivX was downloaded, another video viewing platform, so that new codecs could be installed. This was unsuccessful. The final solution to view and edit the video clips was to use an entirely new, advanced, multi-platform program which could interpret many different .avi files. Ultimately, the program Vegas Pro 8 was used. This program could read the particular .avi files and also edit the clips to form a new video clip. The program renders the collection of altered sound and video clips to a particular format, which was chosen to be .wmv, because Windows is a very popular platform, and is easy to burn to DVD. Youtube.com was the intended host website, but the file types this site prefers is .mpeg, so a new program called A4 Video Converter was used to convert the .wmv file from Vegas Pro 8 to a .mpeg file which could then be uploaded to youtube, the original database, to be placed into the same system as the original clips.
The videos were chosen based on key features- powerful messages of terrorism, Nazism, and Communism. My method was arranging key phrases, references and figures, such as the American presidents Obama and Bush. Portions of speeches, propaganda films from the 1950s and 40s, and interviews were taken out of their contexts and placed into a new context. These contexts were essential for the appropriate interpretation of such phrases and words. By removing the words and images from their given context, aligning the words and images alongside similarly displaced clips, and using breaks and lulls in conversational speech to connect the videos on both a subjective level and a semantic, conversational, unified level the end product is a video that discusses and shows the possible fallacies and hypocritical associations that the American society and politic might engage in.
Bejamin writes in the Epilogue to his essay, “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war”. The result of the video is a collage highlighting the war-driven mentality of American society, and the possible connection between American politics and Fascism. Fascism is understood as a single-party system seeking to organize society around a uniting cause or front so as to have control under a single ruler. The single-party system referenced is not the Democratic or Republican parties, but the war-driven party maintained for Capitalism. The video sought to draw attention to the idea of a possibly hidden group. This party, which controls many aspects of the government, includes key figures such as Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, alluded to in the mash-up when Donald Duck says “Heil” immediately before the new clip begins with the words “people like…”. This party is responsible and centrally involved in the recent wars on behalf of America, which the mash-up indicated America has been involved with since the Korean War. This is important to note because the purpose of introducing aesthetics into politics would be to introduce war. Benjamin writes that “War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system.” The movements for which Fascism seeks to bring about, a single-party system under a single leader with the end goal of preserving the nation, is done through war. War, therefore, is the primary tool of social change, of moving and altering politics, laws, economics, and society in general. Despite all of these radical changes that war can bring about, Benjamin notes that “Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system.” Despite resources and the general populace being malleable through war, the property system can be maintained and enforced. This property system can be seen as Capitalism, the privatization of endeavors for personal gain. Capitalism, the American form of economy, is the dominant, single party that rules the nation. Capitalism, which is a precise method of controlling property, is kept in place while society and politics change through the constancy of war. America exhibits characteristics of Fascism in numerous ways. The country is ruled under a single leader, a figurehead called the President, and is organized in such a way so as to preserve the “American way of life”, which is the Capitalist way of life. The preservation of the nation and the control of the masses through war are typical signs of Fascism. Benjamin’s conclusion, that “All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.” can be seen as correct on two levels concerning this video mash-up. To maintain war for over half a century, a means of convincing and controlling the masses must be in place. A system of propaganda and aestheticized politics must be in place. This would explain the control the government has had over the masses over the last half century and the country’s constant warring. If this is not true, if America does not exhibit signs of Fascism in its political and societal structure, then the video experiment still showed Benjamin’s premises as true. The result of the video, which is its own aestheticization of politics, is a video centered around and entirely about war. Whether this subject, war, is for the purpose of controlling society to maintain property control is debatable and inconclusive, however, the connections and comparisons to Fascism and Benjamin’s claims are maintained.

WORKS CITED

“Donald Duck - Der Fuehrer's Face”. 04 March 2009. Online video clip. Youtube. Accessed on 04 March 2009.

“Leftist Propaganda”.04 March 2009 . Online video clip. Youtube. Accessed on 04 March 2009.

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“Bush threatens Obama & America with New Terror Attack (Larry King Live The Last Interview)”. 04 March 2009 . Online video clip. Youtube. Accessed on 04 March 2009.

“Catapult Propaganda”.04 March 2009 . Online video clip. Youtube. Accessed on 04 March 2009.

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“State of the Union 2007”.04 March 2009 . Online video clip. C-Span. Accessed on 04 March 2009.

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