Plasticity and Fragility

It is no coincidence that Walter Benjamin, angelic witness to late ­modernity, discusses the properties of glass in a text on experience.1 1  - Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty” [Erfahrung und Armut], trans. Rodney Livingston, in ed. Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 2 1927-1934 (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 731-736. Conceptually, this text is a companion to his less famous “Little History of Photography,” (trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, 507-530) as well as to the spectacularly well-known “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” On the “angelic” nature of Benjamin’s thought, see “On the Concept of History,” trans. Harry Zohn, in ed. Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume 4 1938-1940 (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 2003), 389-400. This well-known essay is a meditation on the disarray and disillusionment that followed the World War I. According to Benjamin, people came back from war “poorer in communicable experience,”not so much because of the violence and the extent of the conflict, but because of a significant, qualitative leap in technological deployment at the time. Indeed, the early twentieth century saw the invention or large-scale deployment of the aeroplane, plastics (bakelite), radio, the phone, the automobile, the portable camera, chemical weapons (chlorine gas, mustard gas), the instrumentalization of mass media, and so on and so forth. It is as if the violence of World War I marked a technological break that transformed the world and the possibility of having communicable experiences within it, ushering in a century characterized by speed and dematerialization—effectively summed up in the phrase “roaring twenties.” Benjamin’s word for the era is barbarism, by which one is forced “to start from scratch; to make a new start; to make a little go a long way; to begin with little and build up further.”2 2  - Benjamin, 732. Incidentally, the concept partly overlaps with what Freud called Unheimliche, the “uncanny,” as early as 1906. The prevalence of the fantastical and of spiritualism at the end of the nineteenth century has often been associated with technological discoveries of the time, particularly photography. This barbarism is a constant construction from nothing, a contingent power that presents a singular rapport with ­fragility: resilient, gathering strength from destitution, this power only becomes fragile as it hardens.

Yet, with this barbarism or this poverty, Benjamin associates glass, a modern material if ever there was one—and one that leaves no trace. Glass is indefinitely in the present, a tabula rasa for sight or experience that ­prefigures McLuhan’s famous “the medium is the message,” just as it prefigures real time and its networked monitors (a time we call, by ­extension, “live”). Glass connects as it vanishes; it unites by separating. As such, it also has to do with incommunicability, for it ­communicates ­through transparency, leading one to believe that communication is natural and immediate. As rigid as it may be, glass promotes “flow,” indifferent to the manifestations of meaning traversing it. Paradoxically, its ­incommunicable transparency renders it highly effective. Glass holds nothing, it lets ­information through while separating, prevents ­immediate physical contact while serving as an interface. Glass is hard and ­destructible, however, and one can’t easily understand how its ­fragility might represent that of our contemporaneity. We may nonetheless think of glass as the ­ancestor of plastic, and imagine glass and plastic not through the prism of the history of techniques and materials, but through a history of their usage and of what they reveal of contemporary political and spiritual life.