This is a paragraph from an essay Musil wrote about Bela
Belazs’s famous book about film, Visible Man:
The
observations that I will add in the following concern these contact and luminal
surfaces. The question of whether Film is an independent art or not, which is
the entering point for Balazs’s effort to make it one, incites other questions
that are common to all the arts. In fact film has become the folk art of our
time. “Not in the sense, alas, that it arises from the spirit of the folk, but
instead in the sense that the spirit of the folk arises from it,’ says Balazs.
And as a matter of fact the churches and the cults of all the religions in their
millennia have not covered the world with a net as thick as that accomplished
by the movies, which did it in three decades.”
As is
so often the case with these Viennese intellectuals, Musil is astonishingly sensitive to the
changes being wrought by modernity – with the wisdom; of nemesis perched on the
apocalyptic battlements. His reference
is shrewdly to religion, rather than to other forms of art – that is, his
reference is to the community of souls. The soul as Musil knew was dying out as
an intelligible part of modern life. Modernism – or perhaps one should say the industrial
system, under the twin aspects of the planned economy and capitalism – operated
as a ruthless commissar in the great purge of interiority- and in that purge,
killed, as a sort of byproduct, the humanist notion of art. In retrospect, the
whole cult of art stood on the shakiest of foundations. What was really coming
into being was something else – the entertainment complex. Film’s effect was
not some technological accident, but a phenomenon in the social logic that was
bringing us to where we are today, when the primary function of the subject is
not to think – that antique cogito – but to be entertained. Here we are now,
entertain us – Nirvana’s line should have a place of honor next to cogito ergo
sum in the history of philosophy, I am entertained, or I am not entertained –
these are the fundamental elements of subjectivity. God himself, within these
parameters, is nothing other than the first entertainer, world without end.
