Clockwork Orange And The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction

Clockwork Orange and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

For Walter Benjamin, the defining characteristic of modernity was mass assembly and production of commodities, concomitant with this transformation of production is the destruction of tradition and the mode of experience which depends upon that tradition. While the destruction of tradition means the destruction of authenticity, of the originally, in that it also collapses the distance between art and the masses it makes possible the liberation which capitalism both obscures and opposes. While commodity fetishism represents the alienation away from use-value and towards exchange-value, leading to the assembly line construction of the same--as we see relentlessly analyzed by Horkheimer and Adorno in their essay The Culture Industry. Benjamin believes that with the destruction of tradition, laboratory potentialities are nonetheless created. The process of the destruction of aura through mass reproduction brings about the "destruction of traditional modes of experience through shock," in response new forms of experience are created which attempt to cope with that shock.

"Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking one element: its presence in time and space, it’s unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning" when substantive duration ceases to matter, he says, the authority of the object is threatened. (Think, for example of Alex's response to high art...) "technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training. There came a day when a new and urgent need for stimuli was met by the film. In a film, perception in the form of shocks was established as a formal principle. That which determines the rhythm of production on a conveyor belt is the basis of the rhythm of reception in a film." (Motifs in Baudelaire)

Benjamin distinguishes between two kinds of experience: Erfahrung something integrated as experience, and Erlebnis, something merely lived through. Erlebnis characterizes the modern age and refers to the inability to integrate oneself and the world via experience. Erlebnis, then, ...

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...lus (a "very important piece of art," ritualized and de-politicized) is made into a weapon, and the scene of her death is a nearly subliminal orgy of modern-art.

Whereas she, as with the use of all high-art among the Bourgeoisie, finds only exchange value in the phallus, phallus as pure sign, Alex initiates the violent reversal of that commodification. He turns it into a tool, here a tool of violence; what she has done is to inject exhibition value into forms of art which have only exchange value, the work of art in the hands of the Bourgeoisie is reinjected with a type of aura, which only lead it further in the direction of losing control (like the reinjection of aura in the robot --Maria's aura--in Metropolis). Control is lost and the phallus becomes a weapon, a violent recontextualization by Alex. He proves to understand well this process. There are also similarities here with the State's control of his mind through conditioning. The state attempts to gain control by turning Alex into a robot (a clockwork orange), thus commodifying him (isn't this the struggle at the end for control of Alex--the liberals and state?). His use-value is a function of his exchange-value.