Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
By Jim Fearnley.
The following is the author’s second installment in a new three part series for 3:AM, exploring the modern relevance of Walter Benjamin. Read the first article, ‘Phantamasgoric Capitalism: Benjamin’s Arcades Today’ here.
Benjamin is right to lead off this piece by pointing out Marx’s prognostic role, and a recognition of his prescience in relation to the economy should be regarded as history’s retrospective compliment to Marx’s wisdom. Let us not forget that he identified the ‘shrinkage’ of the world caused by globalisation at a very early stage of capitalist development.
Regrettably, Marx’s record as a historiographer is less impressive and, as we argue in a separate essay on Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin’s veneration of historical materialism impeded his ability to identify the significant shortcomings associated with the pre-determinism of Marx’s view of history. It is not implausible to speculate that Marx’s erstwhile Lutheranism may have had some influence here on his later thinking.
Benjamin makes a cogent criticism of the “outmoded concepts” associated with art such as,“creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery“, a critical perspective returned to by the Situationists in their call to suppress art as the only means by which it could be realised as a universal human activity. It goes without saying that these outmoded concepts continue to do the rounds of professional artists and aspirants the world over, embodied in their self-appointed role as specialists of human self-expression.
Towards the end of the essay, Benjamin discusses two passages by Hegel in terms of beauty and religious truth. The first, from The Philosophy of History, asks whether the contemplation of beauty can be an act of non-attributed spirituality, a veneration of an aspect of God’s creation without a specifically religious referent.
In referring to the second passage, from The Philosophy of Fine Art, it appears that the answer to this question is affirmative. Benjamin goes on to trace the secularisation of the object, suggesting that its associated ‘journey’ could be summarised as; (a) cult object, (b) work of art, (c) fetishised commodity. Accessibility, increased by reproduction, desacralises, by diminishing the occult (hidden) nature of the cult object.
Benjamin ascribes a use-value to art in the context of ritual during the ‘religious stage’ of Western cultures. This begs the question as to whether symbolic value is simply an abstracted form of use value or represents a category in itself. He rightly identifies a subsequent “theology of art“, a rearguard action against the ‘democratisation’ attendant on forms such as photography, as leading to “a negative theology in the form of…pure art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorising by subject matter“, a theme to which we will later return.
When discussing the nature of film, Benjamin regards form as being capable of conveying ‘ritual identity’, and suggests that the vestiges of ritual value identifiable in (silent) film confer their own aesthetic legitimacy on the medium.
Later in the text, Benjamin suggests “authenticity“, concomitant with secularisation, increases as the “cult value” of the work shrinks. This is true in two senses, firstly, capitalist production ascribes an autonomous fetishistic power to all commodities, and thus releases them from the confines of specific ritual contexts that previously might have been necessary to express their cult value, universalising them not only in quantity as an immense accumulation of things, but also as exemplars of the generic commodity.
Secondly, because of the above tendency, authenticity is measured by uniqueness and rarity, i.e. whether or not there is only one or a few of a product. Equally, the cult/religious power of a ritual or a thing (the ‘classical fetish’) is no longer judged according to its capacity to cut across linear time and express the immanent, but by its opposite, i.e., its longevity and enduring ‘recognition’ through linear time.
When discussing the reproduction of artistic works, Benjamin states that authenticity is measured in terms of the accuracy of the reproduction of the original. He also plausibly suggests that the authenticity of an original piece of work is not an inherent quality that exists at the point of production, but accrues as the recognition of its uniqueness and its historical provenance increases over time.
Benjamin also believes that the authenticity of a work of art is compromised by the mediation involved in recording/reproducing it. His first premise for asserting this is not really comprehensible (and appears mystical), but his second, that reproduction severs the work of art from its original context and freezes the moment of creation outside the flow of time, is legitimate.
Lip service is paid to the ‘specialness’ of art, as vestige of its erstwhile status as a form of ritual power. This power is detached from social relations or significance, which helps to boost the other major aspect of art’s identity, namely its (financial) “exhibition value“. Damien Hirst is a case in point, but only as an outspoken and extreme example (who happens to be ‘complicated’ by his references to philosophical conundrums and religious themes). A banal post-modernist philosophy legitimises current artists’ defiant and greedy embrace of the art market and its rewards of money and status.
Benjamin refers to the “fairylike, marvellous, and supernatural” qualities of film, to which perhaps could be added the freedom of the moving picture in terms of its mobility, content, scope for juxtaposition, and self-conscious and knowing capture of its own process.
It is a truism that film lacks the capacity of literature to capture the inner workings of the mind as such (because of their very ‘internality’), and attempts to do so via ‘voice-over’ are often crude. However, the requirement to attempt to depict the internal workings of emotion and motivation strengthens the suitability of depicting alternative mental states pictorially, often through the creation of alternative realities in, for example, ‘psychological’ science-fiction movies.
Some films, such as Bladerunner, go further and pose wider conceptual questions regarding how we can establish what is ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ (in this case human or android/replicant) on the basis of visual evidence.
Although it is true to say that “the audience’s identification with the actor is really an identification with the camera“, there is a parallel process in operation, namely the viewer’s observation of the camera’s activity, together with the techniques and materials applied to this activity: editing, lighting, mise-en-scene, etc.
Even at the ‘elemental’ stage of the camera’s unedited observation, these variables affect how and what it captures, and this is by definition distinct from how a human observer would carry out the same act without these ancillary factors. As such, in watching an actor, we are not directly perceiving a human as visual commodity, but are privy to the output of the means of image production.
For Benjamin, the crucial difference between stage and film performance is that the former is ‘acting’, while the latter equates with a direct self-expression on the part of the actor. Is there really such a qualitative difference, or is the distinction simply a matter of degree? Equally, there is some justice in highlighting the ‘integrity’ of the stage actor’s performance over that of the screen actor, the latter of which is constructed from the accumulation and combination of camera angles, multiple takes, editing, etc.
If stage acting can lay claim to any particular qualities, they are based both on its ‘once-only, what-you-see-is-what you-get’ nature, and the fact of being ‘relational’, i.e. based on a relationship between actor and audience unmediated by technology and made more immediate by taking place in ‘real time’.
Because of the difference in physical and technical environments, the stage actor is required to externalise motivation and emotion more than the screen actor, and much has been written of the requirement placed on the effective screen actor to be minimalist in their self-expression.
Hence the curious and intriguing quality of much early film acting, from the kabuki-like demeanour of Buster Keaton, via the slapstick of Laurel and Hardy, to the stark experimentalism of Expressionist cinema. Both visuality and physicality are held at a premium, reflecting cinema’s antecedents in theatre, but the result is enduring, as it is in later film.
Benjamin wrongly terms this externalising as “aura“, unique to stage acting and conveyed by ‘liveness’ and the audience’s proximity to the actor. But this overlooks the intimate charisma that film can convey, which is often enhanced by an under-stated and specifically non-histrionic quality. The relative absence of exaggerated affect of the film actor is what creates a specifically cinematic “aura“.
The mechanised artifice of the film seeks to create a more convincing ‘naturalism’ than is possible via the grand gestures associated with stage acting, which require the suspension of disbelief regarding the fact that people never actually behave as exaggeratedly as stage actors.
Benjamin’s observation that the film-maker’s ability to re-shoot scenes destroys the “beautiful semblance” necessary for art to thrive, is equally reductive and overlooks the relationship between the perfectibility of film and the capacity of movies to reproduce performances identically, again and again. This failure to make the link between the nature of the means of production and the quality of the commodity produced is a significant omission in a work on art and mechanical reproduction.
The distinction made between the ‘holistic’ nature of painting and the fragmented, discontinuous activity of the cameraman is questionable on two grounds. On the one hand, there are memorable examples in the cinematic record of the long-tracking shot (such as Henry’s entrance into the night-club with Karen through the basement and kitchen in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas). Conversely, the process of planning, preparing, and executing much classical painting was often closely ‘project-managed’ according to the principle of the division of tasks.
However, it is true to say that through the mediation of technology, the cameraman (of still and moving images) has the greater opportunity to present their outputs as if they were closer to ‘reality’. Also, the production of mechanically (as opposed to manually) derived artefacts enables editing that is based on or influenced by elements perceptible to the recording technology, but not necessarily (before editing) the human operator of this technology.
A counter-intuitive definition of the term “tactile” is applied to film, and appears to run counter to the reality of the dominance of sight over touch in the perception of the medium. Whatever their apparently greater resemblance to corporeal experience, the visual perception of movement and change does not, of itself confer tactility.
Benjamin proposes that painting was led into crisis by its popularisation, which caused a diminution of critical assessment of the form. This leads to a conversation whose conclusions suggest popular culture inevitably tends to poor quality, as it conforms to a lowest common denominator, according to which the emotional response of the many overwhelms the intellectual analysis of the smaller constituency of the critics. This is elitism by the back door, and posits a hierarchy of validity of response (indirectly challenged by Noel Coward’s backhanded acknowledgement of the potency of “cheap” music).
Benjamin’s appeal to “tradition” in defending the aura of authentic works of art against banalisation is regressive and conservative. Indeed, his entire overall championing of aura appears to be placed in opposition to the putative agenda of the ‘masses’, who are implicitly equated with the proletariat. This position, counter-intuitive to a Marxist, suggests the inevitable intellectual tension facing the bourgeois cultural theorist who espouses a leftist political position.
As the art-spectating audience in the West slowly diversifies and atomises, images on public display are no longer governed by a commonly-shared cultural language that does not require further explanation, as would have been the case with, e.g., Christian iconography during the pre-modern and early modern periods. The current situation leads to the rise of the caption, where the visual must be contextualised and otherwise explained by the now-ubiquitous use of the textual.
Fascism on the other hand substituted an alienated proletarian mass self-representation for the possibility of individual interpretation of the image, through the creation of a spectacularised version of the collective, mediated through the leader, as in films of Nazi rallies. According to this approach, the content (footage of the disciplined multitude), aims to define the identity of the individual in their role as both audience and subservient member of the Nazi order.
Leni Riefenstahl, serial chronicler of Nazi rallies, provides the strongest possible example of aesthetics as a field entirely removed from ethical concerns, monomaniacally focussed on its own ‘vision’. According to this approach, the image is paramount, divorced from content and social context in the wider sense of these terms. Riefenstahl described herself on record as a “confirmed National Socialist“, a committed propagandist for an ideology which celebrated alienated collective values on the corpse of the authentic communism sought by the revolutionary movement that developed at the end of the First World War.
Subsequently, Riefenstahl turned her attention to a ‘purer’ form of collective identity, in her photographs of the Nuba tribe. These pictures simultaneously exoticised and championed as aesthetic object the beauty of individual Nuba, and were largely responsible for her rehabilitation by the artistic community, which was sanctioned despite the vileness of her earlier career. In art, there is no right or wrong, simply beautiful or ugly.
Both the Bolsheviks and the Nazis were adept at the presentation of inverted realities, in using language that falsely suggested that both the “Soviets” and the National Socialist German “Workers’” Party were synonymous with the proletariat. As Goebbels knew well, the lie told by the State had to be big enough to protect the interests of the State against the truth.
Regarding Bolshevik art, the “image-promoting spectacles” of a Sergei Eisenstein are no less illusory than those of Hollywood. They are both concerned with the manipulation of emotion, promotion of cultural norms, and propagation of social myths and archetypes. The only substantive difference between them is the nature of the spectacular illusion(s) being promoted: one concerned with Bolshevik heroics, the other with romantic love, etc.
In terms of the manipulation of aesthetic opportunities, the Nazis and the Fascists, while sharing the architectural vocabulary of both Stalinism and free-market capitalism (based on literally making the little person feel small), were arguably more sophisticated in their use of film and public events. Incidentally, in his comments on architecture, Benjamin implies that the act of the d érive (drift) is ultimately a passive one – the ‘drifter’ allows themselves to be acted on by their environment. This is true, but overlooks the active nature of choosing one’s route, whatever influences are brought to bear on such decisions, and however random and ‘non-directional’ the decisions might appear to be. Contingent choices causing changes of direction are choices nonetheless.
Early Russian film does not, ultimately, come any closer than any other school of film to allowing actors to “portray themselves“, but simply allows them to represent the ‘unadorned human’, most often the proletarian. This logic is retained in Italian neo-realist cinema and its use of non-professional actors, who become the spectacularised (in the Situationist sense) version of the ‘unspectacular’ (in the general sense), lending a necessarily artificial, apparently quasi-documentary authenticity to proceedings. This style is underpinned by the judicious use of urban location in films such as Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves.
Stalinist artistic values became progressively cruder and more obvious (substituting “bourgeois” for Nazism’s “decadent” in their art-critical lexicon), championing individual productivity, heroic sacrifice for the Fatherland, etc. Where the Soviet Constructivists printed the (genuine) threat “he who does not work does not eat” on dinner plates, the Nazis proclaimed that “work makes you free” over the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau and elsewhere, an altogether more insidious form of words, and one which many neo-liberal free-marketeers would willingly subscribe to in the here and now.
Equally, no approval based on a speculated innate human value of art is implied by recognising either that Riefenstahl was a highly-skilled cinematic propagandist or conceding Mussolini’s cunning in proceeding with the March on Rome after power had been formally ceded to the Fascists by the King (presenting the assumption of power as a military victory rather than a fait accompli).
To capture and extract moments in time and space, as Eugene Atget was observed to have done in his photographs of Paris, is a political act, inasmuch as the pictures are history enacted as a form of memory. These images enable us to reflect on past ambiences and interactions, and consider their trajectory from then to now and their potential onward journey to the future.
In contrast, Atget’s pictures of Versailles, although devoid of human actors as many of the Paris shots are, suggest that had the technology been available, they could have been taken at any time since the construction of the palace and its gardens, museum pieces frozen in amber.
Benjamin makes a strong case for war as representing an aesthetics of technology, elevating its capacity to subjugate and destroy the human to the ‘meta-social’ realm. It is little surprise that pro-Fascist Italian Futurism glorified war, nor that, in turn, Franco’s Falangists adopted the slogan “Viva la Muerte” (Long Live Death).
As well as ‘correcting inefficiencies’ (e.g., of over-production or mis-allocation of commodities), war also satisfies Capital’s intrinsic need for re-valorisation and the stimulation of fresh cycles of production, since it involves the mass destruction of goods, buildings, etc. Philosophically, then, war could be described as the victory of the means of destruction over the means of production, but in the short term only, since its long-term result is to stimulate fresh rounds of production.
A prescient comment is made regarding the internationalisation caused by film production, albeit in limited terms, namely sub-titling and the retention of the mother tongue of the actors. However, the implications of the phenomenon go wider than this.
For example, after the Second World War, the USA specified minimum ‘tariffs’ governing the number of US films to be shown in France, in competition with the domestic product of a fiercely independent French film industry. The penalty for non-compliance was a reduction of financial subsidies by the USA to the French State, then dealing with the consequences of war and occupation.
On a previously unimaginable scale, internationalisation, together with associated impacts on national cultures and attitudes, has been spearheaded by the free market under the auspices of the cultural industries, from the end of the Second World War. Doubtless many learned theses have been and are being written on the implications of the globalisation of the cultural values associated with these markets in terms of the reactionary polarisation of, e.g., many fundamentalist religious movements (as a minimum of Christian and Muslim persuasions) as a form of struggle.
The wider process of globalisation, in the form of colonialism, has been an integral feature of capitalism since its inception. Together with the development of the nation-state, it has enabled the accumulation of the Northern hemisphere’s value-base, which still defines the global imbalance of wealth (although developments in China and elsewhere are in the process of re-drawing the map).
Dadaism was, in many respects a fundamental, ‘non-negotiable’ critique of imperialist war and, as such, attacked the very foundations of capitalism. Initially, Benjamin’s assessment of Dadaism damns it with faint praise. In its most radical manifestations, Dada transcended the critique of art and was a form of social contestation, expressed in the form of spitting in the face of aesthetics and coherence. It attacked the elevated status of art and the ‘pleasing’, not by “distraction”, but by doing violence to language and the beautiful, as the mode of communication and aesthetic of a sick world.
The current ubiquity of, for example, Duchamp’s urinal, has now drained its subversiveness by familiarity. However, the Dadaists were probably the last or only major art movement that did not so much seek to remove the artefact from the gallery, as to demystify and de-aestheticise art as a feature of the everyday (like emptying the bladder) and set fire to the exhibition space.
However, Benjamin did acknowledge that Dada had greater aesthetic ambitions than the realisation of market value. In not allowing the eye to rest, and thus removing space and time for reflection, film is classified by him as being a Dadaist medium, assaulting the traditional aestheticist value of contemplation. However, Benjamin fails to then understand that, overall, the conceptual shock of Dada is made possible by the violence of its form and techniques.
Finally, what of the developments in the capacity of mechanical reproduction following Benjamin’s death? These have hugely enhanced the privatisation of previously collective experiences such as watching films, and have also increased opportunities for holding the aesthetic experience under private ownership as a thing, e.g., CDs and MP3s (including of concerts, DVDs (including of stage performances) etc. As such, the previous divisions between personal and collective, ‘real time’ and ‘frozen’, are elided into non-existence in the miasma of the commodity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jim Fearnley used to reach for his gun every time he heard the word ‘culture‘, but time is running out for him to participate in the suppression and realisation of art. He now finds himself on the Clapham omnibus of social space, digital hegemony, cultural unheimlichkeit, and meta-temporal immanence.
