The Collector and the Critic

Benjamin’s work balances, often with paradoxical results, tensions between aspects of experience: the experiences simultaneously of being too late and too early (too soon) in the temporal dimension (c.f. Hamlet’s “the time is out of joint”) and being both distant and close (in the spatial dimension), and anyway of being both temporal and spatial.    The concept of “aura,” which is one of Benjamin’s most influential contributions, is best understood in terms of these tensions or oscillations.  He says that “aura” is a “strange web of space and time” or “a distance as close as it can be.”  The main idea is of something inaccessible and elusive, something highly valued but which is deceptive and out of reach.  Aura, in this sense, is associated with the nineteenth century notions of the artwork and is thus lost, Benjamin argues, with the onset of photography.  At first photographs attempted to imitate painting but very quickly and because of the nature of the technology photography took its own direction contributing to the destruction of all traditional notions of the fine arts.  The stamp and the book are the two images that perhaps best indicate what is at stake.  The enigmatic value that a stamp has for the collector is superseded by the more communal and critical value suggested by the knowledge of books, although books too are objects for the collector.  Both must be set against the bank-note, which simply circulates in a system of exchange and has no value beyond its system.  Finally it is film that is most suggestive for Benjamin.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility

Benjamin addresses the phenomena of moving images in cinema and newsreel in his 1936 essay “The Work of art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility.”  It is strongly recommended as one of the clearest and most far-reaching of all Benjamin’s works.  It is a rigorously dialectical argument, clearly influenced by his ongoing engagement with Marxism and written with an audience in mind already familiar with the works of his friend Theodor Adorno.  Dialectical thinking involves moving through contraries without ever letting one term gain precedence over its other—or apparent opposite—as most oppositional thinking tends to do.  In dialectics each term only has significance in relation to its apparent contrary or other.  Benjamin begins by assuming the main tenet of dialectical materialism, which states that the the means of production determine the nature of cultural production, or, more technically, the substructure determines the superstructure.  However, he goes on to show that the superstructure changes much more slowly than the substructure, with the effect that cultural phenomena always lag behind the conditions that produce them.  For this reason, he is observing the conditions of present culture at the point of their earliest development and with an eye for the present state of productive (and reproductive) technologies.  His mode of observation (as he puts it) is designed to draw attention to changes in the conditions of production as a way of intervening in the process.  His theses are, thus, regarded as weapons in the war against fascism.

Main Points:

Two modes of observation are regarded as modes of action, the fascist or reactionary and the progressive or revolutionary.  To the fascist mode belongs the attempt to render politics aesthetic, manifested in propaganda as well as by Hitler’s mass rallies and, ultimately, in war, as expressed by Marinetti and the futurists.

Technical/mechanical conditions of reproduction replace earlier conditions of producing and consuming artworks.  Photography does not gradually culminate in the moving images of cinema, but implies cinema and foreshadows it from the beginning, just as the camera obscura foreshadows the fixed image of the photograph.

The destruction of “aura” in mechanical reproduction signals the passage from the artwork as cult (i.e., as a religious object) to the artwork as exhibit (in museum and inevitably in cinema).  The transitions in question occur over vast historical reaches, beginning with cave drawings (magic), moving through religious iconicity (altar paintings and cathedrals), to the post-renaissance cult of beauty.  At each of these stages the cult value of “magic” (occult value) remains the deciding factor in the ideological value of the artwork.  The final stage involves the transition from all residual cult associations to exhibition value (this of course is capitalism’s gradual and then sudden contribution to the development of world history).  One exhibits (puts on display or into performance). 

Aura implies authenticity but there is no authenticity without its destruction in mechanical reproducibility (i.e., the idea of authentic art only emerges when authenticity is a threatened species of artwork).  Reproducible art replaces authenticity with an added extra—unheard of perceptions are made possible.

Aura (the eliminated term) is explained in analogy with the experience of nature (a mountain range or the shadow of a branch perceived in a unique moment) superseded in the experience of mechanically reproduced images, for which, however perfect they are as images, are missing the point of presence—the presence of the object—that gives it its aura.  The difference is like the loss of the presence of the actor in the passage from stage to screen.  But cinema makes so much more possible than the stage can do.  The elimination of aura implies the loss of any the sense of unreachable (divine, mysterious, transcendental) distance.

So the mode of sense perception is irrevocably changed.  The movie takes over from the epic poem the function that architecture has always played: an object is presented for simultaneous collective experience.  The masses have reactionary responses to art (i.e., to Picasso) and progressive ones (e.g., to Charles Chaplin).  The future of a technical mode can be glimpsed in the desire it awakens (e.g., to reproduce images in an increasingly detailed way—with sound and, ultimately, of course, in colour).  And quantity is transmuted into quality: “The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation.”

BACKGROUNDS

Continental Philosophy: Messianism and Marxism

Benjamin draws together a number of strands that have provoked a range of responses, including those of Jacques Derrida, who as in his other readings painstakingly reproduces Benjamin’s texts while highlighting the mystical aspects, to leave a rather magnificent affirmation of absolute alterity (which means otherness). You can find out about Derrida’s Messianic Principle here.

Messianism: each moment in time presents a unique revolutionary possibility.

Franz Rosenzweig (Star of Redemption from 1921), Gerschom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida each have a role in the tradition of Jewish thought in the 20th century.  

Marxism: a materialist conception of history (and the love affair with Asja Lacis)

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (and The Frankfurt School); Georg Lukacs; Bertold Brecht each have a part to play in the tradition of 20th century Marxist Aesthetics

Continental Philosophy: The tradition, especially in Germany, from Immanuel Kant and including the German Romantics (Goethe and the Schlegel Brothers) F. W. J. Schelling and G. W. F. Hegel to 20th century philosophy, Edmund Husserl and his prodigious student Martin Heidegger (whose work compares in striking ways with that of Benjamin).