Tom Gunning

Gunning

Not to the discredit of Gunning's writing, but I fear I might have joined the ranks with that insufferable camp of skeptics marching to the credo "There's nothing new under the sun!" During the passages describing the "drying up of experience and its replacement  by a culture of distraction", my first impulse was to completely accept this argument (126). I believe our modern generations had surely fostered a uniquely grotesque culture-less and lifeless environment, replacing the meaning and excitement of pre-industrial life with the monotony of manufactured industrial life. I came so close to believing that in this modern era we had vested so much of what was missing in our lives in the "phantom embrace" of cinema and aesthetic attraction.
Then I remembered the famous opening lines to one of my favorite works of literature:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
I feel that writers like Kracauer, who envisioned the age of cinema as a particularity in relation to the rise of the "cult of distraction" and "pure externality" (the response to a central lack in the life of its audience, particularly that of the working masses), are romanticizing the past. I find it hard to believe that we (humans) were all leading particularly meaningful and conscious lives before industrialization/modernization/cinema. Aesthetic attraction and forms of spectacle have always accompanied civilization. The same things have not always been attractive throughout the ages, but there were nonetheless attractions. I see no reason why we should single the modern experience as fragmented though the succession of attractions when Augustine was writing of the phenomenon of curiositas versus voluptas in the 4th century (124). Humankind, for as long as there has been entertainment, has straddled the line between voluptas (the pure pleasure that accompanies the contemplation of beauty) and curiositas (the disease of curiosity, the desire for knowledge for its own sake, the reason monsters and anything out of the ordinary are shown in theatres, and the power to lead astray) (124).
-James Ghaleb