Anxieties over technology in Yugoslav interwar music criticism: Stanislav Vinaver in dialogue with Walter Benjamin

Abstract

In Paris in late 1935, the exiled German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin completed the first version of his well-known 'artwork essay', The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. In that essay, Benjamin famously welcomed the loss of 'aura' in art, the mystique, quasi-religious quality of unique, original, authentic, and aesthetically autonomous works of art, due to the advent of mass reproduction of artworks on an industrial scale, especially in the new arts of photography and cinema, rendering many of those quasi-religious qualities of 'auratic' art obsolete. Benjamin welcomed this in accordance with his leftist, anti-fascist political agenda, hoping that the loss of 'aura' would open art to politicization, communism's (or, at any rate, Benjamin's) response to fascism's aestheticisation of politics. That same year, 1935, in Belgrade, the capital of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the Serbian-Jewish poet, intellectual, and literary and music critic Stanislav Vinaver wrote an essay titled Mehanička muzika (Mechanical Music). In his essay, Vinaver focused on the advent of technical reproduction in and its effects on music, an art largely ignored by Benjamin. Unlike his more famous contemporary, Vinaver was alarmed by the new technologies of radio and the gramophone record and their perceived negative impact not only on traditional music, performed live on traditional, acoustic instruments, but on organic life in general, replacing it with a mechanical surrogate carried by the waves of a dehumanizing technology. Vinaver's views were probably shaped by his passionate championing of modernism in Serbian and Yugoslav literature and music alike, which is evident not only in Mehanička muzika, but also in his criticism in general. Two more important factors may have also been the influence of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, Vinaver's one-time professor at the Sorbonne, and his valorisation of intuition in thought and artistic creativity, as well as Vinaver's somewhat nostalgic view of music as the only true and self-referential art, a view reminiscent of the re-conception of music in the early German Romantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, F. W. J. Schelling, and Arthur Schopenhauer, later taken up and elaborated by such disparate figures as the German music theorist Eduard Hanslick, English essayist Walter Pater, and Vinaver's own modernist hero Arnold Schönberg. Ironically, although Vinaver shared much of Benjamin's leftist politics, he did not see such a positive potential in the mechanical reproduction of music, but, perhaps, only another sign of humanity's headlong March toward self-destruction in a total war, on the wings of an aestheticised technology and instrumental reason run amok, no longer serving humanity but turning against it.