Touch, Vision and Re-vision

A not very generous assessment from 1996 (though I'm struck by that the concessive "mind you" apostrophe to the reader) ...

Read Richard Shiff's piece in Public 13. Interesting take on Benjamin's notion of aura being implicated in touch and vision. Lots of restatement and little analysis. I did like the use of De Anima. Fun to find two texts that I used in my thesis used here also but somewhat different[ly]. Shiff seems to be totally unaware of Adorno's critique of Benjamin. In particular the stuff on the dialectical image. This I believe would not allow [him] to place Benjamin as an unquestioned authority at the head of an essay that essentially develops a typology. I'm not opposed to typologies per se but would love to know how & why a particular one operated. There is something a bit imperialistic about a typology that starts out from a collapse of touch & vision. Mind you I'm the one who argues for narrativity as the abstract level necessary for translation between all sensory modalities. I don't fetischize physicality & materiality which at some level Shiff does.

Makes me want to reread the piece to see if my mini-critique holds up.

And so for day 548
13.06.2008