On Benjamin on Baudelaire
p. 328: "The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were." and, where WB quotes Valery in note 63 (p. 352): "Beauty may require the servile imitation of what in indefinable in things."
Both points I’d compare to Barthes’ description of punctum in "The Third Meaning." The punctum, as Barthes describes it, is the affective sting of the image that can’t be attributed to a precise detail of its significatory functions, on either the literal of figurative levels–hence, the third meaning. In a sense, then, the punctum of an image might be related to WB’s "posthumous shock," but clearly WB is more concerned with ideas of aurality and "authenticity," where Barthes might argue that what is authentic in an image (regardless of its relation to the object represented) is the subject’s affective response to it. For Barthes, then, the affective sting or punctum exceeds language; it is a sensation of too-much-feeling that language is not large enough to accomodate–and thus too might be related to the Kantian sublime. I think Barthes here doesn’t precisely limit the power of language so much as acknowledge there are affecttive sensations that we cannot cognize linguistically. Valery, however (as cited by WB), locates that moment of affect in a failure of lanugage rather than a transcendance of it. Which is too say, contrary to Barthes, that there are things language cannot do. I know I’m splitting hairs here, but I’m trying to remain relatively concise. To whit: For Valery, affect lies in the inadequacies of language; for Barthes, affect lies in that which exceeds our linguistic experience.
p. 338: "Inherent in the gaze, however, is the expectation that it will be returned by that on which it is bestowed. Where this expectation is met […], there is an experience of the aura in all its fullness. [. . . .] Experience of the aura thus arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationships between humans and inanimate or natural objects."
My thoughts here aren’t as fleshed out as they are above, but there’s something here that helps clarify Mulvey’s "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In Mulvey, of course, the male spectator-voyeur who looks at the female form on screen is in an inevitable position of power over the female image: his gaze is unrestricted and free to make of her image what he pleases. But I think WB here clarfies the process through which Mulvey’s theory works: If experience lies in the returned gaze of an object, then obviously the mechanically reproduced image-object renders no experience–it is incapable of returning a gaze because it is, after all, only an image. So Mulvey’s spectator is doubly powerful: his is an all-consuming gaze that at once takes pleasure in the visual object while he negates the threat of his own discovery as voyeur, because (the spectator can rationalize) it’s only an image.
