4 - Tradition

Summary

Walter Benjamin's comparison between the cinema and the conveyor belt in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” encompasses more than a comment on the accelerated and automatized rhythm of modern life. At the core of the essay is the issue of the structure of experience, which Benjamin considers to have changed under modernity. He distinguishes between experience integrated in tradition, or what he refers to as Erfahrung, and experience in isolation, for which he uses the term Erlebnis, and claims that the former has become inaccessible. Modern life, with its industrialization processes, expanding cities and loss of rituals, subjects us to a series of perceptive shocks, which challenge our traditional structures for making sense of the world. Since we fail to insert these shocks in our collective memory, we tend to process them as fragmented impressions:

The greater the shock factor in particular impressions, the more vigilant consciousness has to be in screening stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less these impressions enter long experience [Erfahrung] and the more they correspond to the concept of isolated experience [Erlebnis].

Modern individuals, in other words, have developed a coping mechanism, or “shock defense,” to deal with the overload of new stimuli, which, Benjamin argued, the cinema and conveyor belt epitomized.

For Susan McCabe, a Benjaminian “shock defense” is exactly what is at work in Stein's portraits. “Like Benjamin's cinematic ‘conveyer belt’ with its mechanical repetition,” she argues, “Stein's writing reproduces a shocked body.” Shock after shock, the body is asked to process what is happening; attention goes in overdrive, memory is compromised and with each resuscitative jolt occurs a new instant. Stein's writing, then, “forgets itself as it perambulates” and continuity is torn to shreds. Yet such a reading sits uneasily with how Stein frames her portraits in “Portraits and Repetition.” Rather than having fragments express a disintegrated modern experience, she wanted to make “a whole portrait.” What she finds in the cinema is the cue to make “not many things but one thing.” Turning to the early portraits themselves, furthermore, readers might find the a-narrative quality of the texts shocking, but the bodies Stein portrays are less in shock than engaged in an ongoing living.