Yuri Ivanovich Pimenov, Disabled Veterans, 1926.
Walter Benjamin on World War I: “A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.” “This immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale, that is, in the spirit of technology. But because the lust for profit of the ruling class sought satisfaction through it, technology betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath.”
Education of the Movements of the Wounded Soldier,” from Jules Amar, The Physiology of Industrial Organization (1918).
Henry Ford on mass production: The production of the Model T required 7,882 distinct work operations, but, Ford noted [in his 1923 autobiography], only 12% of these tasks—only 949 operations—required “strong, able-bodied, and practically physically perfect men.” Of the remainder—and this is clearly what he sees as the major achievement of his method of production— “we found that 670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one-legged men, two by armless men, 715 by one-armed men and ten by blind men.” ///
Walter Benjamin’s understanding of modern experience was neurological. It centered on shock. Benjamin wanted to investigate the “fruitfulness” of Freud’s hypothesis, that consciousness parries shock by preventing it from penetrating deep enough to leave a permanent trace on memory, by applying it to “situations far removed from those which Freud had in mind." Freud was concerned with war neurosis, the trauma of “shell shock” and catastrophic accident that plagued soldiers in World War I. Benjamin claimed that this battlefield experience of shock had become “the norm” in modern life. Perceptions that once occasioned conscious reflection were now the source of shock impulses which consciousness must parry. Nowhere was this defensive reflex more apparent than in the factory, where (Benjamin cited Marx) “workers learn to coordinate their own ‘movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton.’” “Independently of the worker’s volition, the article being worked on comes within his range of action and moves away from him just as arbitrarily.” Exploitation was here to be understood as a cognitive category, not an economic one. The factory system, injuring every one of the human senses, paralyzed the imagination of the worker, whose labor was “sealed off from experience”; memory was replaced by conditioned response, learning by “drill,” skill by repetition: “practice counts for nothing.” Under conditions of modern technology, the aesthetic system undergoes a dialectical reversal. The human sensorium changes from a mode of being “in touch” with reality into a means of blocking out reality. Aesthetics—sensory perception—becomes anaesthetics, a numbing of the senses’ cognitive capacity that destroys the human organism’s power to respond politically even when self-preservation is at stake. Someone who is “past experiencing,” writes Benjamin, is “no longer capable of telling . . . proven friend . . . from mortal enemy.”
- Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000. p. 103-104
