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Actuality, Antinomies

While Kracauer’s early writings on film, mass culture, and modernity have barely entered English-language debates, Benjamin’s presence in these debates seems hopelessly overdetermined. During the past three decades, his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936) may have been quoted more often than any other single source, in areas ranging from new-left theory to cultural studies, from film and art history to visual culture, from the postmodern art scene to debates on the fate of art, including film, in the digital world. In the context of these invocations, the essay has not become any less problematic than when it was first written, nor has it always acquired new meanings.

“Benjamin is enjoying a boom, but does he still have actuality?”¹ This question is inevitable at a time when our political, social, and personal lives seem more than ever to be driven by developments in media technology, and thus by an accelerated transformation, disintegration, and reconfiguration of the structures of experience. Indeed, if we pose the question of Benjamin’s actuality in light of the tremendous changes associated with digital technology, it could easily be argued that his theses concerning the technological media, in particular their proclaimed revolutionary potential, belong to an altogether different period than ours, and that his major prognostications have been proven wrong, at the latest with the advent of the digital and the global consolidation of capitalism.² But to reach such a conclusion is perhaps not the reason we read Benjamin today.

To begin with, Benjamin’s own, avowedly esoteric concept of Aktualität (evoked in the above quotation) should caution us not to measure him against a standard defined by the inexorable advance of media technology, especially if the latter is posited as an epistemic if not ontological apriority rather than a development inflected by economic and political conditions and cultural practices. Fusing a messianic notion of Jetztzeit, or time of the Now, with the project of a materialist historiography, Benjamin’s concept of actuality sets itself off against any unreflected contemporaneity, be it the market-driven new or the ostensibly neutral upto-date of its intellectual proponents.³ For Benjamin, actuality requires standing at once within and against one’s time, grasping the “temporal core” of the present in terms other than those supplied by the period about itself (as Kracauer put it), and above all in diametrical opposition to developments taken for granted in the name of “progress.”⁴

Whether we dismiss Benjamin in the name of current media theory or try to assimilate him to it, we would miss out on much of his contribution to a theory of modern culture. Benjamin’s concern with film and technological media is inseparable from, on the one hand, his philosophy of history, which pivots on the question of modernity, and, on the other, his theory of the aesthetic, which encompasses both the organization of sensory perception, understood historically, and the fate of art and artistic practice in the narrower sense. In his persistent efforts to interrelate those domains, the cinema came to figure as the linchpin between the transformations of the aesthetic and the impasses of contemporary history. Unless we keep in view these larger stakes of Benjamin’s project, we cannot fully grasp what lent his reflections on film and the technological media and their paradigmatic impact on art and culture such prescience for decades to come. In tracing the complex and oft en contradictory logic of this project, we may gain a more nuanced and more realistic purchase on his actuality for film and media theory today.

Questions of modernity, the aesthetic, and technological reproduction are nowhere as tightly entwined as in the artwork essay. As is often pointed out, Benjamin conceived of the essay in conjunction with his vast work on nineteenth-century Paris, The Arcades Project. Their common focus, articulated most clearly in the 1935 exposé of the latter, was the effects of industrial capitalism on art and the reorganization of human sense perception. He considered the essay “most intimately related” to the historiographic project, less in terms of subject matter than in its function as a methodological device: that of an epistemological “telescope,” the building of which led him to discover “some fundamental principles of materialist art theory.”⁵ In a letter to Max Horkheimer, he described the artwork essay as an effort “to determine the precise point in the present to which my historical construction will orient itself.”⁶ Far from assuming a stable observation platform (which he imputed to hermeneutical historicism), this “vanishing point” in the present was defined by the ongoing crisis—the triumph of fascism in Germany and the threat of its expansion in France, the collapse of an existing socialist alternative with the reign of Stalinism—and the challenge to imagine an all-but-impossible future.⁷ “If the project of the book is the fate of art in the nineteenth century, this fate has something to say to us only because it is contained in the ticking of a clock whose striking of the hour has just reached our ears.”⁸ The heightened stakes of the situation made Benjamin discover, as he wrote to Gretel Karplus (later Adorno) around the same time, “that aspect of art in the nineteenth-century that only ‘now’ becomes recognizable, in a way in which it has never been before and will never be again.” And he calls this discovery a “decisive example” of his concept of the “ ‘Now of recognizability [Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit],’ ” a “very esoterically” understood concept around which “crystallizes” his theory of cognition.⁹

The crescendo of the time machine, the tolling of the bell, the pairing of danger and cognition—such imagery attunes us to the rhetorical form of the artwork essay: a set of militant theses defined by their tactical, interventionist value rather than their validity as an empirical account, a partisan manifesto rather than a presumably neutral scholarly treatise. If Benjamin’s theses claim actuality for the time they were written, they do so because they were also, in the Nietzschean sense, untimely. This was not lost on Max Horkheimer, who recognized that Benjamin’s “fundamental statement” was directed at the “problematic of the French situation,” that is, the issue of the (in)adequacy of the cultural politics of the Popular Front against the threat of fascism; he therefore insisted on its swift publication in French in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the organ of the Institute for Social Research, then being published in Paris. At the same time, Horkheimer saw to it that passages referring explicitly to Marx and communism, along with the methodological first section, were omitted in the French translation, for fear that the essay would be read as an attack of Popular Front politics and that a public controversy might endanger the work of the institute in exile.¹⁰

Such an attack, however strategically encoded, seems indeed not far from Benjamin’s line of argument, even if the ostensible target of the essay was the more extreme case of belated aestheticism on the right. He sought to launch his theses in the wake of the Congress for the Defense of Culture, held in Paris June 21–25, 1935, which preceded the forming of the political alliance against fascism by bourgeois democratic parties, socialists, union politicians, and communists on July 14 of the same year.¹¹ The congress had been convened in response to the mounting alarm among French intellectuals that after the defeat of the left in Germany fascism would also rise to dominance in France—a fear massively confirmed by the bloody riots of February 1934 in which forty thousand right-wing demonstrators threatened to take over the streets of Paris. The writers’ congress, with the exception of the famously dissenting speeches by Bertolt Brecht and André Breton, provided a cultural platform for the Popular Front that advocated the preservation of the “literary heritage,” in particular the great works of “realism”; absolute aesthetic values; socialist humanism; and an organic relationship of the artist with the community of “the people.” In terms of communist literary politics, the espousal of these ideals (by, among others, Johannes R. Becher and ex-surrealist Louis Aragon) entailed not only surrendering important Marxist positions—and the very mention of Marx—but also a turning away from avant-garde, experimental, and in the widest sense, modernist work. In that regard, the communist left merely followed suit with the suppression of such work by Stalinist cultural politics beginning in 1931, sanctioned by a more general political rapprochement between Paris and Moscow.¹²

In view of the cultural-political platform of the Popular Front, which Benjamin considered stuck in regressive and dangerous illusions, the artwork essay was untimely on several counts. It explicitly invoked Marxian axioms but transformed and updated them to address the current crisis; what’s more, it imbricated them—in the essay’s original versions—with the tradition that Benjamin, in the 1929 essay on surrealism, referred to as “anthropological materialism.”¹³ In the spirit of that tradition, the artwork essay foregrounded the question of technology, with its fundamental implications for the fate of art and sensory experience under industrial capitalism and its central role in the political confrontation with fascism. But his concept of technology was at least as indebted to Charles Fourier and other utopian socialists as to Marx.¹⁴ Moreover, where Benjamin elaborated on film as the art of technological reproducibility par excellence, he drew his examples—Chaplin, Mickey Mouse—just as freely from Western commercial film production as from Soviet cinema; by contrast, references to French poetic realism (for instance, the films of Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier, and Marcel Carné), the type of cinema most obviously in accord with Popular Front cultural politics, were conspicuously absent.

Above and beyond the immediate target of its intervention, Benjamin’s essay still commands actuality on account of its complex temporality, which is deeply entwined with his philosophy of history.¹⁵ For the telescope as which he conceived the artwork essay combines two temporal registers. One is aimed at the nineteenth century, in particular the effects of industrialization on art and the aesthetic as brought into view by the current crisis; the other is pointed “through the blood-heavy mist at a mirage of the nineteenth century” that Benjamin was “attempting to depict according to the features that it will manifest in a future state of the world liberated from magic.”¹⁶ In other words, the historical-materialist perspective that allows Benjamin to formulate a more astute and prescient assessment of the ongoing crisis than that offered by contemporary leftist cultural politics intersects with a utopianist, in a messianic sense ahistorical, if not antihistorical, perspective that seeks in the dreams of the past the promises of a future beyond the ongoing catastrophe. Hence the very historicity of Benjamin’s theses enables them to have another actuality—and other, virtual actualities—in the present, whether indirectly, as a methodological and cognitive impulse, or substantively, inasmuch as they prompt us to trace, in their analysis of the major crisis of Western capitalist modernity in the twentieth century, both the transformations of this modernity and the legacy of its continuing impasses in the twenty-first.

Broadly speaking, if Benjamin’s theses still “reach our ears,” this is due to the way he linked his critique of the Western aesthetic tradition (primarily German and French), specifically an institution of art perpetuating notions of beautiful semblance, timeless truth, mystery, and creative genius, to a wider concept of the aesthetic that he understood, echoing Alexander Baumgarten, as the “theory [Lehre] of perception that the Greeks called aesthetics.”¹⁷ In both narrow and expanded senses, he considers the aesthetic in relation to the changing conditions of human experience (Erfahrung), a term that pertains not only to the organization of sensory perception but crucially to—individual and collective, conscious and unconscious—memory, the imagination, and generational transmissibility.¹⁸ At this point in history, Benjamin warns, the aesthetic can no longer be defined in terms of artistic technique alone, let alone by the idealist values developed in the nineteenth century. Rather, the political crisis demands an understanding of the aesthetic that relates artistic technique to urban-industrial technology and its impact on the conditions of perception, experience, and agency.

It is at this juncture that Benjamin locates the historic role of film—as the most advanced technological medium of his time that, more than any other art form, demonstrated the shift in political significance from an individual to a collective subjectivity. This role turns on the cinema’s particular, at once metonymic and reflexive, relationship with technology. As he writes in the artwork essay: “The function of film is to train human beings in apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily” (SW 3:108). And, in a less optimistic vein: “The most important social function of film is to establish equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus” (SW 3:117).

This function of film, however, is as much cognitive and pedagogical as it is remedial and therapeutic—insofar as it responds to an adaptation of technology that had already failed on a grand scale and seemed to be heading for worse. While he was more acutely aware than most German intellectuals of his generation (except, perhaps, Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger) of the centrality of technology in the struggle over the direction of modernity, Benjamin’s position on technology was at least as ambivalent as his attitude toward art and tradition. If he discerned the cinema as the foremost battleground of contemporary art and aesthetics, it was not because of a futurist or constructivist enthusiasm for the machine age, but because he considered film the only medium that might yet counter the devastating effects of humanity’s “bungled [verunglückte] reception of technology,” which had come to a head with World War I.¹⁹

The reception of technology had miscarried, in Benjamin’s view, because the capitalist and imperialist exploitation of technology, in his rendition of the familiar Marxian argument, had turned this productive force from its potential as a “key to happiness” into a “fetish of doom.”²⁰ Whether in industrialized warfare, rationalized labor, or urban living, technology was implicated in the process that Susan Buck-Morss has analyzed as a dialectics of anaesthetics and aestheticization.²¹ Like Simmel and other theorists of modernity, Benjamin was interested in the nexus between the numbing of the sensorium in defense against technologically caused shock and the emergence of ever more powerful aesthetic techniques, thrills, and sensations in the nineteenth-century industries of entertainment and display (world exhibitions, panoramas, and other viewing/moving machines)—the phantasmagoria of the nineteenth century he explored in The Arcades Project. Designed to pierce the defensive shield of consciousness in the momentary experience of shock, awe, or vertigo, such hyperstimulation further contributed to the thickening of the protective shield and thus effectively exacerbated sensory alienation. By the 1930s, this dialectics of anaesthetics and aestheticization had impaired human faculties of experience, affect, and cognition on a mass scale, thereby paralyzing political agency and the collective ability to prevent the deployment of technology toward self/destructive ends.

In delineating the place of film and the technological media in Benjamin’s account of modernity, I therefore want to reactivate a trajectory between the alienation of the senses that preoccupied Benjamin in his later years and the possibility of undoing this alienation that he began to theorize beginning with One-Way Street (1923–26; 1928), and I will do so through his concepts of innervation, mimetic faculty, optical unconscious, and Spiel (play, performance, game, gamble). He assigns film a key role in this trajectory because, on the one hand, film participates in the pathologies of industrial-capitalist technology at large, inasmuch as it subjects the sensorium to yet more shock and compounds the effects of defensive numbing with an aesthetics of phantasmagoria; and because, on the other, film provides a medium of experience that, more effectively than the traditional arts, enables both a sensory recognition of human self-alienation and a nondestructive, mimetic adaptation of technology. Put another way, the alienation of the senses that abets the deadly violence of imperialist warfare and fascism can be undone only on the terrain of technology itself, by means of new media of reproduction that allow for a collective and playful (that is, nonfatal) innervation of the technologically transformed physis.

As I hope to show, the problems that Benjamin addressed and the solutions he variously proposed elude classification in either techno-utopian or media-pessimistic terms. His speculations on film and mass-mediated culture still speak to our concerns because the problems he articulated and the antinomies in which his thinking moved persist in the globalized media societies of today—in different forms and on a different scale, to be sure, but with no less urgency and no more hope for easy solutions. His actuality consists, not least, in the ways in which the structure of his thinking highlights contradictions in media culture itself, now more so than ever.

My approach in this respect shares the emphasis on the antinomic structures in Benjamin’s work that critics have described in various ways, following his own observation that his thinking, like his life, “moved by way of extreme positions.”²² Benjamin’s “radical ambivalence” (John McCole) or “ontology of extremes” (Irving Wohlfarth) was not just a matter of his temperament and friendships but also the mark of a methodical, tactical self-positioning within the contemporary intellectual field at a time of major upheaval and crisis.²³ If his epigrammatic, at times authoritarian style rarely admitted ambivalence within one and the same text (unlike Kracauer’s rhetorical staging of ambivalence), Benjamin was capable of unflinchingly switching positions from one essay to the next, to the point of assigning to identically phrased observations diametrically opposed valences.²⁴ Rather than mere inconsistency, I consider such position-switching a radical attempt to think through the implications of the contradictory developments he confronted, guided by an experimental, performative attitude acutely aware of the risks involved in each position.

At the risk of being reductive, let me tentatively describe the antinomic structure of Benjamin’s thinking with regard to the technological mass media. Position A welcomes the then-new media—photography, film, gramophone, radio— because they promote the “liquidation” of the cultural heritage, of bourgeois-humanist notions of art, education (Bildung), and experience that have proved bankrupt in, if not complicit with, the military catastrophe and the economic one that followed—at any rate inadequate to the social and political reality of the masses after the failed revolution of 1919. At this historic crossing, Benjamin turns his back on the decaying aura, the medium of beautiful semblance that cannot be salvaged anyway, and tries to promote “a new, positive concept of barbarism,” most radically in his programmatic essay “Experience and Poverty” (1933), which finds the contours of such a new barbarism in the contemporary “glass-culture” (Loos, Le Corbusier, Klee, Scheerbart, Brecht) broadly associated with the Bauhaus and the vernacular of Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity (SW 2:732, 734). (This liquidationist, presentist, collectivist position, commonly taken to be the message of the artwork essay, has for a long time dominated Benjamin’s reception in cinema and media studies, from Brechtian film theory of the 1970s through cultural studies.)

Position B, formulated in the wake of the Nazis’ rise to power and in view of the “approaching war” (which Benjamin foresaw as early as 1933) and to be found in his essays on Baudelaire, Proust, and Leskov, laments the decline of experience, synonymous with “the demolition of the aura in immediate experience of shock [Chockerlebnis].”²⁵ The decline of experience, Erfahrung in Benjamin’s emphatic sense, is inseparable from that of memory, the faculty that connects sense perceptions of the present with those of the past and thus enables us to remember both past sufferings and forgotten futures.²⁶ On this account, the media of audiovisual reproduction merely consummate the process inflicted on the human sensorium by the relentless proliferation of shock in Taylorized labor, urban traffic, finance capital, and industrial warfare, by further thickening the defensive shield with which the organism protects itself against excessive stimuli and thus numbing and isolating the faculties of experience. Moreover, by vastly expanding the archive of voluntary memory or conscious recollection, the technological media restrict the play of involuntary memory. What is lost in this process is the peculiar structure of auratic experience, that is, the investment of the phenomenon we experience with the ability to return the gaze—a potentially destabilizing encounter with the other. What is also lost is the element of temporal disjunction in this experience, the intrusion of a forgotten past that disrupts the fictitious progress of chronological time.

But Benjamin’s positions on film and mass-mediated modernity cannot be reduced to the antinomy of “liquidationist” versus “culturally conservative” (McCole), nor to the antinomic opposition of “distraction” versus “destruction” (Gillian Rose).²⁷ For both positions hook into each other in ways that may generate the possibility of change, but may just as well turn into a mise-en-abîme. The problem Benjamin recognized is that each position contains within itself another antinomic structure whose elements combine with those of its opposite in either more or less destructive ways. The most disastrous combination was currently pioneered by fascism, while alternative possibilities were eroded, in different ways, in the liberal capitalist media and Stalinist cultural politics. In the fascist mass spectacles and glorification of war, the negative poles of both positions outlined above combine to enter into a lethal, catastrophic constellation. That is, the atrophy of perceptual and cognitive capabilities resulting from the defense against industrially generated shock described in position B is compounded with the technologically enhanced monumentalization of aesthetic effects, the aestheticist perpetuation or, rather, simulation of the decaying aura whose rejection defines position A. Thus, in the fascist mise-en-scène of nationalist phantasmagoria and war, “a sense perception altered by technology” reaches a degree of “self-alienation” that makes humanity “experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure” (SW 3:122).

In view of this constellation, the historical trajectory of shock-anaesthetics-aestheticization analyzed by Buck-Morss looks less like a dialectic than an accelerating spiral or vortex of decline, culminating in a catastrophe that only the revolution or the Messiah could stop. The crucial question therefore is whether there can be an imbrication of technology and the human senses that is not swallowed into this vortex of decline; whether Benjamin’s egalitarian, techno-utopian politics could be conjoined with his emphatic notion of experience turning on memory and temporality; and whether and how the new mimetic technologies of film and photography, in their imbrication of “body- and image-space,” could be imagined as enabling the “collective innervation” of technology he discerned in the project of the surrealists (SW 2:216, 217).

In what follows, I delineate Benjamin’s reflections on film as both an aesthetic phenomenon with its own logics and a medium through which he registered salient tendencies and contradictions of mass-based modernity. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to the artwork essay—its history of reception, its textual and rhetorical strategies, and the resulting conceptual limitations. In particular, I put into question the liquidationist tenor of the essay (especially in its familiar third, 1939 version)—and, by implication, the facile reproduction of this tenor in the essay’s standard reception—along with the politically progressive purchase derived from it. The subsequent chapters move outward from the textual body (or bodies) of the artwork essay, focusing instead on key concepts either present in all versions, such as aura, self-alienation, and the optical unconscious, or cut from the second (first typewritten) version of 1936, such as innervation, play, and, not to be forgotten, the figure of Mickey Mouse. I will trace these concepts through Benjamin’s work of the surrounding period, particularly his writings on surrealism, hashish, photography, and the “mimetic faculty,” on Proust, Kafk a, and Baudelaire, as well as the Arcades Project. One of my goals is to defamiliarize the artwork essay, rethink its claims more generally, and make it available for different readings. The other, larger goal is less a faithful reconstruction of what Benjamin said about film and the technological media (though that, too) than an attempt to extrapolate from his observations and speculations elements of a Benjaminian theory of cinema, of a media aesthetics and politics in his expanded sense of both terms, that might still claim actuality.

THE ARTWORK ESSAY: TEXTUAL STRATEGIES, CONCEPTUAL CASUALTIES

There was never a time when Benjamin’s artwork essay was not controversial— from the moment the typewritten, “second” version (the first was a handwritten draft) arrived on Horkheimer’s desk and provoked Adorno’s substantial response of March 18, 1936; through the cuts imposed by Horkheimer on the essay’s first publication—translated into French by Pierre Klossowski—in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (vol. 5.1, 1936); to the revised, “third” German version, which remained a work in progress as late as 1939 and appeared only posthumously in Illuminationen (1955), edited by Adorno and Friedrich Podszus.²⁸ There it rested until the late sixties when Benjamin’s writings were discovered by the German new left and student movement.²⁹ The artwork essay became something of a red flag, in a literal sense, held up as a revolutionary alternative to Horkheimer and Adorno’s pessimistic critique of the “culture industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; 1947). Part of the ongoing revival of the repressed legacy of left ist debates of the 1920s and ’30s, the essay—along with other Benjamin texts written under the influence of Brecht, such as “The Author as Producer” (1934)—offered students a different vision of intellectual and cultural practice than that represented by their teachers, even and especially scholars on the left affiliated with the Frankfurt School. Adorno in particular was attacked for his mandarin stance, and he soon became the target of a persistent polemic against the textual and interpretive monopoly of Benjamin’s Frankfurt editors, with charges of censorship pointing back to the institute’s handling of Benjamin’s more explicitly Marxist and Brechtian writings of the 1930s.³⁰ These controversies set the pattern for the more genteel quarrels to come, with critics and friends asserting the priority of a primary, singular identity for their elusive subject, be it that of Jewish-messianist, Brechtian modernist, surrealist, esoteric man of letters and elegiac critic of modernity, materialist historian, media theorist, or deconstructionist avant-la-lettre.

With the English-language publication of selected essays by Benjamin in Illuminations (1969), some of the earlier terms of reception were replayed and expanded.³¹ Within film theory, the artwork essay was soon assimilated to debates on Brechtian cinema that took place during the 1970s in the British journal Screen and elsewhere; its particular blend of Marxism and formalism, different from yet complementing the simultaneously rediscovered writings of the Russian formalists, made the essay part of a genealogy for “political modernism.”³² Its reputation as a revolutionary and popular alternative to Horkheimer and Adorno’s pessimistic-elitist analysis of the culture industry became a topos in English-language reception across the disciplines, from new-left theories of mass culture to Cultural Studies.

During the past two decades, the essay has gained renewed currency in the field of film history, specifically with efforts to situate early cinema (from the 1890s to the 1910s) in relation to the perceptual, aesthetic, and cultural transformations associated with modernity.³³ Such efforts have in turn provoked criticism of the essay itself, in particular its assumption of the historical mutability of human sense perception, leading to a dispute over the usefulness of the very category of modernity for an empirically and stylistically oriented film history.³⁴ To the extent that they are concerned less with the correctness of Benjamin’s politics of film and media culture than with the questions he raised and the historical and theoretical perspectives he opened up, these debates provide a useful background for the following.

My discussion of the artwork essay in this chapter implicitly responds to some of the more common assumptions about the essay (largely based on the familiar third version published in Illuminations), especially the misreading of its revolutionary politics as an endorsement of proletarian, if not popular, culture and its concomitant concepts of the masses and distraction. These assumptions derive, in no small measure, from problematic aspects of the text itself, its rhetorical and conceptual operations, which I will trace in some detail. The point of my discussion is not a matter of getting the artwork essay “right” as against oversimplified readings and appropriations, but of clearing a space for more productive ways of reading it.