After the Women's Studies midterm aka final, I found myself slumped in a corner on the street with a ciggarette in my hand even though I apparently quit 6 weeks ago and ended up throwing up beer and sweet potatoe fries all night (shoutouts to Dr. Tapley for a powerful examination). At 5am, wiping chunks from my mouth, I asked myself, "Along with the aura, does the threat of castration also "shrivel" in the face of the mechanical reproduction of art?
In "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Laura Mulvey builds on Freud's theory that woman represents a threat of castration to man, and places it in the cinema. She argues that to reduce the threat felt by the male viewer, a number of methods must be employed. Fragmentation slices up the parts of the female body so as to not represent it as a "whole" body that exists without a penis, the woman character is often seen as slowing down the plot and is either saved my the male protagonist or done away with, and finally, fetishistic scopophilia presents an objectified version of the female body that is percieved as being unhuman and unattainable, therefore merely a fetish and not a woman. All of these methods are used in film and can be seen all over advertisements and television. With all of these mediums provided by the mechanical reproduction of art, it is possible (and most likely imparative to the male ego considering the sheer number of available mass copies) to produce, reproduce, and manipulate them to reduce the threat of castration? I'm wondering, if when Benjamins so-called "aura" was still in tact, what methods, if any were used to do the same?
Benjamin describes historical works of art, paintings and sculptures, as having an aura. That is the art's "unique existence", it's time, space, and cult value in history. Is there something about a painting of a woman that can only be seen at a specific location at a specific time that bears less of or no threat to the male phallus? Surely, fragmentation and fetishistic scopophilia can easily appear in a work of art, aura in tact, but was there a need for it before the commodifiction of art? Perhaps the commodifaction of art itself could be added to the list of threat reductions if for example the increasing number of reproduced images of the female body became less of a threatening overload and more of a desensitizing saturation (think Baudrillard here). Either way, I have lots of questions and very few answers. Any art conniseurs our there willing to offer thier expertise?
