Bloggrokker (Scott) Benjamin

I believe I've read this Walter Benjamin essay in at least three or four prior classes, and written a great deal on it thus far. This time around, for originality's sake, I'm going to zero in on an idea Benjamin refers to and, hopefully, link it back through to a postmodern something buzzing around in the back of my head.
Benjamin concludes that aesthetically-rendered politics result in war. He then deferes to the Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti for emphasis, who himself writes "War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalllization of the human body." Dreamt-of metallization of the human body? Here comes the riff.
Marinetti's really on to something here. This metalization fantasy goes back almost as long as we do. Specifically, I believe along with the futurist, as long as our concept of war. Consider bodily armor. Throughout history, real-estate junkies known as emperors and warlords decked out their soldieries in variants of metal bodies as soon as the technology to whip up such metal bodies reached feasibility. Once such metal bodies were whipped up to do a real-estate junkie's conquest-ridden bidding, an image-seed planted itself in the human cultural memory; an image of a metal man, later a mechanical man, created for eternal servitude.
Tweak your positron matrices, everybody! Karel Capek made himself a "neologod" from the idea--we're onto robots.
You know the roll call--Robby the Robot, R2D2 and C3PO, Rosie from The Jetsons, Twikki of Gil Gerard-era Buck Rogers fame, etc., etc. Eyeballing this list, it seems the nearer things got to the Postmodern Age, the dream of metallized men and women--of perhaps creating a race of Homo metallicus--revealed itself as the dream of creating the simulacra of the dream, the metallized minions marching their way through the hyper-cultural Xerox machines of film and tv.
(And yes, I know the exceptions--NASA's astro-robots, Honda's ASIMO, and LEGO's Mindstorms kit--which is really effin' cool for the geekerati among us. Still, the dominant images of robots remain highly screen-specific.)
Then came 2001's HAL 9000. A minimalist red dot with the soothing tenor of a sentient Zoloft pill, a detached, decentered voice--a voice returning us to the absent center, and rightly so. HAL 9000--more an AI than a robot; still, a logical evolution--sweepingly ushered in the postmodern fear of amok technology.
Enter distraction. Robots are making a comeback as harmless entertainments--what Honda and LEGO are up to, for instance. But nowhere is this more evident than in amusement parks, those playful bastions of urbane urbanism, an entertainment industry which is constantly embracing robotic technology as continually as it offers up distraction from the everyday world. Disney's audio-animatronics leap to mind; nothin' like the Hall of Presidents to slip android-heavy fears of a future Disney-backed candidate into the mind.
Oh, the Chinese! They're considering erecting a Bruce Lee-themed amusement park, complete with high-tech "Lee-bots" roaming the premises. Perhaps Westworld never ran on Shanghai screens? Still, along with the work of Walt's legions, it's a mighty exemplar of the amusement industry's long affair with robotics.
Back to distraction. I see a link connecting the distraction offered through the Disneylands and Coney Island descendants of the world to the dream of metallization. High-intensity mechanical rides engender hyperstimulus. This hyperstimulus is something of a completed circuit--the mechanized rides supplying the physical turbulence, and human sense-perceptions processing the turbulence as experience. I see this as similar to the mind-body split--the mind is human, the body is mechanized. Seeing it in such a way, amusement parks and their cadre of high-intensity thrills, to riff on William Gibson's prevalently po-mo term cyberspace, are an ancestral concept--I'll call it "cybernetic-space." This hyperstimulated physical space offers a subconscious distraction playing into the dream of metallization, tilling the soil of a supposed inner cyborg, removing the concept only slightly from Marinetti's war-metallization. After all, King's Island and Six Flags are waging a battle to blow your concentration to smithereeens.
And, amusement parks consisting of lunatic architecture, and architecture being an art form, what becomes of Benjamin's idea of aura? Although Benjamin asserts architecture is an art form of collective distraction in its reception, which is agreeably in line with the distracting nature of amusement parks, I believe, too, these "cybernetic-spaces" retain their auras as they retain the element of ritual. Amusement parks are po-mo churches, hyperstimulated temples, spheres of techno-religious pilgrimage. Just as pre-postmodern places of worship dealt in fueling the faithful with ideas of an Afterlife in the Clouds, amusement parks gas up the masses with the dream of metallization, a Posthumam Eternity of Endless Entertainment.
And, as more and more amusement parks rely on a co-dependence with major film studios, i. e. Universal Studios, postmodern promises of Endless Entertainment stretch into misty infinities.
If you don't believe me regarding the ritualism of amusement parks--if you are indeed one among the unfaithful--just look at any old black-and-white photo of the hoi polloi streamng along the pier into Coney Island. It's a Meccan mockery.