Chapter V Theatricality of Moral Sentiments,Instit...
In 1936 Walter Benjamin published his “Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility,”and in 1938 Martin Heidegger gave a lecture that turned into a published essay bearing the title, “The Age of the World-Picture.”In 1992 post-structuralist theorist Samuel Weber read these two essays together in his Mari Kuttna Lecture on Film, entitled “Mass Mediauras, or:Art, Aura and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin.”For Weber, the Heideggerian world-as-picture—the pictorialization of the world, that is—“consists in a highly ambivalent oscillation of bringingforth(her-stellen) and setting-before(vor-stellen), with the aim of securing the foundations of the subject at and as the center of things”(Weber 1996:80).Aura, also designated by Benjamin as the “unique appearance of a distance, however close it may be”(qtd.in Weber 1996:87), is
never uniquely itself but always constituted in a process of selfdetachment:detachment from the self as demarcation of a self.The aura would then be something like an enabling limit, the emanation of an object from which it removes itself, a frame falling away from a picture and in its fall.(Weber 1996:87-88)(https://www.daowen.com)
The theoretic as well as historical frameworks raised by these three theorists are useful for our discussion on the moral philosophy of sympathetic sentiment proposed by Adam Smith.In a similar sense, Smith’s theory of moral sentiments is approached through a methodology that could be named as “historical analogy.”This chapter sees Smith’s economy of moral sentiments as analogous to the proliferation of print medium and mediation in the second half of the eighteenth century.This is historically as well as theoretically feasible in that both share some specific epistemological modes of uniformity and reproducibility.Sympathy is formed and communicated as if through a reading activity.In this way, reading and its cognate activities affect the emergence of a modern interiority:“bring-forth”and “settingbefore”feelings, as well as the “detachment from the self as demarcation of a self.”Reproducibility, in this sense, is more than what Weber defines as “the mediauric”:“auratic flashes and shadows that are not just produced and reproduced by the media but which are themselves the media”(Weber 1996:106).It also helps to reproduce the part of irreproducibility—that part detached and demarcated, which is identified as the “unconscious”in its mature form in another wave of the technology of writing—that of psychoanalysis—after moral philosophy and political economy.