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AESTHETICIZATION OF POLITICS:
BENJAMIN, FASCISM, AND COMMUNISM
Benjamin on ‘aestheticized politics’
Benjamin wrote the sound-bite about the fascist connotations of the aestheticization of
politics that serves the left as a condensed argument. Yet, Benjamin’s thoughts on this
issue are not as clear-cut as his slogan suggests. His esoteric formulations provide
theoretical ammunition both for a variety of conceptions of aestheticized politics, from
the prevalent left critique against the aestheticization of politics, to my contrasting
argument that the problem is not that politics is aestheticized, but the ways that it is
aestheticized, by fascism and capitalism. In this essay I make my own effort at
interpreting Benjamin’s meaning, while paying attention to and evaluating some of the
main competing interpretations.
Given that ‘the connection between the “aestheticization of politics” and fascism
has become … a commonplace’, as Martin Jay says, one might expect there to be a fairly
clear-cut and commonly accepted conception of that connection.1 Yet, given the diverse
conceptualizations of fascism as aestheticized politics, it becomes even more apparent
that the critical charge of ‘aestheticization’ resists focus, threatens incoherence and ‘loses
any rigor as an analytical model’.2 This is the case because politics is not so much
aestheticized as already aesthetic, and because there are multiple forms of articulation
between politics and aesthetics. The main point I aim to establish in this essay is that it is
possible and plausible to derive from Benjamin not only a critique of fascist aesthic(ized)
1
politics but also an alternative conception of a ‘communist’ or radical democratic
aesthetic politics, a conception that is immanent in the contradictory conditions of
technologically mediated politics of capitalist societies. In spite of Benjamin’s categorical
condemnation of aestheticized politics, his sound bite is better read as explicit
condemnation of a particular (reactionary fascist) type of aesthetic(ized) politics and
implicit commendation of another (progressive communist) type.
So what does Benjamin mean by the ‘aestheticization of politics’? His key
comments, placed in the epilogue to his famous essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its
Technological Reproducibility’, require some unpacking.3 The first point to note is that
he does not mean it as a synonym for fascism. While ‘The logical outcome of fascism is
an aestheticizing of political life’, it does not follow that the outcome of aestheticizing
politics is fascism, which is often the way the statement is understood. Benjamin writes
instead that ‘All efforts to aestheticize politics culminate in one point. That one point is
war’. However, the structure of his argument means that it is only ‘the aestheticizing of
politics, as practiced by fascism’ that culminates in war, so that logically room is left for
other practices of aestheticized politics. In that case, the ‘politicizing [of] art’ by
communism could be one of those practices, an alternative organization of the categories
of politics and aesthetics rather than a reversal of a causal flow.4 ‘Benjamin failed to
recognize’, Richard Wolin writes, ‘that in practice an aestheticized politics and a
politicized art are, at least formally speaking, equivalents’.5
2
But fascism is not only a political and economic response to capitalist crisis, as in
dictatorship and corporativism, but also an aesthetic one. The aesthetic aspect enters
Benjamin’s account in that fascism ‘sees its salvation in granting expression to the
masses - but on no account granting them [property] rights’. This expressionist aesthetic
has a virtual or phenomenalistic sense, in that it does not change the conditions of class
division and unequal property relations, but appears to address social conflict. It is
accompanied by the fascist conception, exemplified by Marinetti, of war both as beautiful
though destructive (‘war .. enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of
machine-guns’) and as human mastery of technology for its own purposes. Furthermore,
fascist war is ‘the consummation of l’art pour l’art’, referring to the sense of aesthetic
autonomy. War also gratifies ‘sense perception altered by technology’, a distorted form
of ordinary sense perception that is elevated into an Olympian, ‘contemplation’ which is
so detached that ‘self-alienation has reached the point where it [humankind] can
experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure’.6 In the epilogue alone
there are a cluster of meanings of aesthetics – (inauthentic) expression, (destructive or
disharmonious) beauty, autonomy (of politics as an aestheticized practice from material
and ethical concerns), elevated (anti-material) sensuousness. There is significant overlap
between this set of meanings of aesthetics and Welsch’s network of traditional
aesthetics.7 It is significant for my argument that Benjamin focuses on certain aesthetic
concepts and meanings, those of the German Idealist aesthetic tradition, when
characterizing the fascist aestheticizing of politics, because this again implies that other
forms of aesthetic(ized) politics are possible.
3
However, this initial presentation offers only limited illumination of Benjamin’s
meaning, as the epilogue has to be understood in light of the preceding essay (as well as
the essay in relation to his other work). His notion of aestheticized politics relates not
only to a nexus of fascism, war, technology and idealist aesthetics, touched on above, but
also includes in that nexus the changing character of art, especially in relation to its
‘aura’, and of the human sensorium, or sensory perception. The artwork essay belongs to
a series of essays written by Benjamin in the 1930s about the relationship between art and
technology, so that at first blush ‘there appears to be a disproportion between the question
of what constitutes a work of art and the political issues of fascism and communism’.8
The following account demonstrates the proportion between those issues, and in doing so
demonstrates both the complexity and specificity of Benjamin’s understanding of
aestheticized politics. My exposition attempts to deal in turn with the themes of war,
technology, technological reproducibility and the work of art, aura, the arts of
technological reproducibility, and the relationship between arts and the masses, although
the richly interwoven fabric of Benjamin’s thought and writing defies any neat
separations.
War
A key precursor to Benjamin’s remarks in the epilogue about aestheticized politics
leading to war is his review essay, ‘Theories of German Fascism’, where the connection
between war and technology is baldly stated as: ‘Any future war will also be a slave
revolt of technology’. 9 Benjamin understands fascism and the ‘imperialist war’ that
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ensues from it as a response to a structural contradiction in capitalism between the
development of technology as a force of production and the relations of production,
especially property relations. The horror of war is ‘determined by the discrepancy
between the enormous means of production and their inadequate use’. War is the
‘unnatural use’ to which the ‘productive forces … impeded by the property system’ are
put, war being ‘an uprising on the part of technology, which demands repayment in
“human material” for the natural material society has denied it’.10 As Ansgar Hillach
explains, in Benjamin’s Marxist schema the ‘increase in productive forces accompanied
by socio-economic limitations’ is woven into a figure of social ‘energistic’ relations, in
which war is a ‘regressive release of energies’.11 War is thus symptomatic of a more
widespread ‘misalignment between the technological dynamic and the mode of social
ordering’ that had become destructive by the twentieth century not only in war, but also
in the general dysfunctionality of accelerated technological production for human needs.12
However, the logic of Benjamin’s argument is that there is a ‘natural use’ for productive,
technological forces that will or could come about when society is ‘mature enough to
make technology its organ’, and effect a ‘harmonious balance’ between humanity and
technology.13 Benjamin does not hold that technological developments are themselves
responsible for the descent into war, which he instead ascribes to the discrepancy
between technological and social arrangements.
If imperialist war is the regressive release of technological, productive forces,
why is it the culmination of aestheticized politics? It is so because of the way that fascism
simultaneously abuses technology, art and the masses, the way it directs and releases
5
social energies. Fascism is a way of diverting both the energies of technological
productive forces and ‘proletarianized masses’ into the destructive expenditure of war:
‘only war, makes it possible to set a goal for mass movements on the grandest scale while
preserving traditional property relations’.14 The diversion of the energies of the masses is
achieved aesthetically, that is, both through a particular kind of expressionist, idealist,
autonomous and auratic aesthetics and by means of the modern, technologically
reproducible arts, which are more often referred to as mass media. Benjamin explains that
German fascism as an ideology expresses German nationalism, which turns losing the
First World War into an ‘inner victory’ for the ‘perfect reality’ of a mystical ‘eternal
Germany’. According to fascism, war is ‘the highest manifestation of the German
nation’, a recreation of heroism even though mechanized, technological warfare
‘dispenses with all the wretched emblems of heroism’.15 Fascism, in effects, aestheticizes
war by returning to it a ritual, cultic and auratic value that technological developments
have taken away from both war and art.16 Fascism, says Benjamin, uses technology to
‘recreate the heroic features of German Idealism’, which according to Hillach means that
in war social action is aestheticized as symbol and expression of ‘the essential interior’,
of a metaphysical basis to life and as ‘a substitute satisfaction’ for the masses and for ‘the
repressed need for … [collective social action] driven back into subjectivity’.17 In
fascism, the idealist aesthetic of autonomous subjective freedom is expressed externally
and technologically.
Technology
6
The articulation of aesthetics and technology is crucial to this understanding of fascism,
in that technology should be ‘mediated by the human scheme of things’ to use and
illuminate ‘the secrets of nature’ but instead is applied mystically ‘to solve the mystery of
an idealistically perceived nature’.18 As Esther Leslie notes, Benjamin follows Marx’s
understanding of nature as mediated through human history, as an ‘anthropological
nature’ that ‘has no existence other than through the process of human history’. In that
1 . Martin Jay, ‘“The Aesthetic Ideology” as Ideology; Or, What Does It Mean to
Aestheticize Politics?’, Cultural Critique, 21 (Spring 1992), p. 42.
2 See Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde
(Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1993), p. 135.
3 . Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility:
Third Version’, trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, Selected Writings: Volume 4,
1938-40, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, (Belknap Press: Cambridge, MA,
2003), pp. 251-83.
4 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, pp. 269-70.
5 . Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Columbia University
Press: New York, 1982), p. 184.
6 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, pp. 269-70.
7 . See Figure 1 in the Introduction.
8 . Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (Routledge: London,
1998), p. 93.
9 .Walter Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays “War and
Warrior”, edited by Ernst Jünger’, New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979), p. 120.
10 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 270.
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sense, nature is itself ‘technological’, including ‘not only the creaturely and physical, but
also the man-made, cultural and historical’.19 In contrast, fascism’s ‘idealistically
perceived nature’ is at once supposed to be human (or German) essential nature
unmediated by human history but given in a mythical history, and yet is also a nature that
is expressed technologically in machinic warfare. It thus becomes possible for war to
become beautiful in Marinetti’s words because it appears as if in war humanity is using
technology to fulfill its natural destiny and in doing so blends harmoniously with
technology: ‘War … establishes man’s domination over the subjugated machine … it
inaugurates the dreamed-of metallization of the human body’.20 But in this fascist
articulation of war, technology and aesthetics, technology is not under collective social
11 . Ansgar Hillach, ‘The Aesthetics of Politics: Walter Benjamin’s “Theories of
Fascism”’, New German Critique 17 (Spring 1979), p. 103.
12 . Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto Press: London,
2000), p. xi.
13 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 270; Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism’, p. 120.
14 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 269.
15 . Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism’, pp. 121-25.
16 . ‘[I]n gas warfare it [society] has found a new means of abolishing the aura’. Benjamin,
‘Work of Art’, p. 270.
17 . Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism’, p. 126; Hillach, ‘The Aesthetics of
Politics’, p. 104-6.
18 . Benjamin, ‘Theories of German Fascism’, pp. 126-27.
19 . Leslie, Walter Benjamin, pp. 155-6.
20 . Marinetti quoted in Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 269.
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control but is in revolt against its abuse, while humankind is so alienated from its
potential for collective action that it enjoys its own destruction.
Benjamin is unequivocally opposed to the destructive abuse of technology in the
First World War, the imperialist war in Ethiopia that Marinetti describes, and the war he
senses will come as a result of the Nazi rise to power. But Benjamin is no enemy of
technology, of the technologically reproduced arts, of the engagement of sensuousness in
politics and, I would argue, of aesthetic politics per se. So, how should technology be
used by society, and how should it be articulated with aesthetics? As Leslie says, ‘So
much hangs off Technik’, meaning the difference between the German word and the
conventional English usage of ‘technology’. The former includes ‘the ‘material hardware,
the means of production and the technical relations of production’, covering the senses of
technique and technical as well as technological.21 The third version of Benjamin’s
artwork essay omits a significant distinction drawn in the second version between ‘first
Technik’ and ‘second Technik’, which was itself a shift from the first version’s distinction
between first and second nature. Leslie explains that Benjamin anticipates ‘a
harmonization or dialectical interpenetration of the person and technology in techno-
consciousness’, not a restoration of humanity to its pristine nature but ‘an augmented
nature’.22 Indeed, for Benjamin technology is ultimately not nature’s opposite but a ‘truly
new configuration of nature’.23
21 . Leslie, Walter Benjamin, pp. xii-xiii.
22 . Leslie, Walter Benjamin, pp. 156-7.
23 . Benjamin quoted in Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, Critical Inquiry 24
(Winter 2008), p. 364.
9
Technik replaces nature because social development draws humanity further away
from what might be called its ‘natural’ state. This distancing is also given in the shift
from first to second Technik, which for Benjamin is marked not by its technical
development but the difference between first and second Techniks’ respective ‘orientation
and aims’: ‘Whereas the former made the maximum possible use of human beings, the
latter reduces their use to the minimum’, the former tending towards sacrifice, the latter
to automation. Although Benjamin associates first Technik with ritual and magic, he
claims that it ‘really sought to master nature, whereas … [second Technik] aims rather at
an interplay between nature and humanity’. The reasoning behind this is that without the
development of technological productive forces, first Technik had no prospect of
‘liberating human beings from drudgery’. But on its own, neither will the second Technik,
which can only play between nature and humanity, making technology a social organ,
when ‘humanity’s whole constitution has adapted itself to the new productive forces
which the second technology has set free’. In other words, only when the discrepancy
between productive forces and social relations has been resolved would the ‘currently
utopian goals’ of freedom from drudgery (as utopian as ‘a child who … stretches out its
hand for the moon as it would for a ball’) give way to solutions to ‘vital questions
affecting the individual’. As Benjamin adds in a footnote, bringing humanity and
technology to play is the ‘aim of revolutions’ which are ‘innervations of the collective’.
Far from regarding technology as a reified enemy of humanity, Benjamin considers
communism to be the successful harmonization of the two, one in which humanity is not
10
so much in control of technology or nature, as master of its own ‘elemental social forces’.
24
Miriam Hansen explains that this distinction between first and second Technik
distinguishes Benjamin’s approach from ‘Frankfurt school critiques of technology’ that
‘assume an instrumentalist trajectory from mythical cunning to capitalist-industrialist
modernity’. Second Technik appears to be concerned primarily with domination of nature
only from the perspective of first Technik, for which there is an existential need to
dominate nature, and in bourgeois culture’s ‘fetishizing an ostensibly pure and primary
nature as an object of individual contemplation’. Under capitalism and fascism, humanity
is regressively attached to a non-existent first nature, in an effort to reverse the historical
process of technological development. For Benjamin, in contrast, the ‘issue is not how to
reverse the historical process but how to mobilize, recirculate, and rechannel its effects’.
25 In his materialist understanding of human and natural history: ‘The way in which
human perception is organized – the medium in which it occurs – is conditioned not only
by nature but by history’.26 There is a materialist history not only of social and
technological development but also of human nature, including human modes of
24 . Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility:
Second Version’ trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland and Others, Selected Writings:
Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Belknap Press:
Cambridge, MA, 2002), pp. 107-8, p. 124, fn. 10.
25 . Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street’, Critical
Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999), p. 320, p. 325.
26 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 255.
11
perception or the sensorium. There can be no ‘restoration of the sensorium to an
instinctually intact, natural state’ but should be a history of the sensorium that includes
‘mutations of the physis caused/enabled by technology’.27 According to Caygill, ‘all
experience for Benjamin is technological, since the term technology designated the
artificial organization of perception’. It is not then a question of contrasting human sense
experience and perception with its technological mediation, but regarding technology as a
patterning of experience that is itself ‘reciprocally subject to change in the face of
experience’.28
The key to a progressive channelling of the effects of technology on a humanity
that changes with it, says Hansen, is innervation, which Benjamin considers collectively
as revolution. She explains his concept of innervation in relation to a ‘neurophysiological
process that mediates between internal and external, psychic and motoric, human and
mechanical registers’. It is an ‘empowering’ rather than ‘defensive mimetic adaptation’, a
‘two-way process’ that constructs a ‘porous interface between the organism and the
world’ rather than shielding the organism from the world. According to Hansen,
innervation will bring about interplay between humans and second Technik only ‘if it
reconnects with the discarded powers of the first, with mimetic practices that involve the
body’. The second Technik is distanced from human beings but the first makes full use of
them, their bodies and senses, including in practices such as yoga mediation whose
‘imbrication of physical and mental energy harks back to a ritualistic, premechanical
conception of the technical’. The expanded notion of technology employed by Benjamin
27 . Hansen, ‘Benjamin and Cinema’, p. 325, p. 322.
28 . Caygill, Colour of Experience, p. 96.
12
includes what Foucault would later call techniques or technologies of the self which are
‘forms of bodily innervation’ that can rebalance the relationship between humanity and
technology.29 Benjamin does not only refer to pre-modern and individualized practices
but holds hold that the technologies of the reproducible arts, especially film, have the
potential ‘to establish a balance between humans and technology’. He puts his hope in
‘the possibility of countering the alienation of the human sensorium with the same means
and media that are part of the technological proliferation’ of aestheticization.30 As Hansen
writes, Benjamin’s attitude to the new medium of film, as to much else in modernity, is
alert to its ‘failed opportunities and unrealized promises’, through a ‘redemptive
criticism’.31 The hope for redemption depends on collective innervation that connects and
balances bodily, psychic and productive energies with the powers of both first and second
Technik.
Benjamin’s vision of the potential relationship between technology, humanity and
nature, all of which play and develop in relation to each other, glimmers through the
cracks of the actuality of capitalist and fascist abuse of technology and nature, or ‘the
catastrophic effects of humanity’s (already) “miscarried … reception of technology”’.32
Under fascism, the potentiality of the second Technik is repressed by using it as first
29 . Michel Foucault, ‘Technologies of the Self’ in Luther Martin, Huck Gutman and
Patrick Hutton (eds) Technologies of the Self (Tavistock: London, 1988), pp. 16-49.
30 . Hansen, ‘Benjamin and Cinema’, p. 317, p. 321, p. 319, p. 312, p. 335.
31 . Miriam Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: “The Blue Flower in the Land of
Technology”’, New German Critique, 40 (Winter 1987), p. 182.
32 . Hansen, ‘Benjamin and Cinema’, p. 312, including a quotation from Benjamin.
13
Technik, as a form of ritual linked to myths of Aryan blood and soil, about an
unchanging, essential nature. Under these circumstances, and especially in war,
technology confronts humanity ‘as an uncontrollable force of “second nature,” just as
overwhelming as the forces of a more elementary nature in archaic times’.33 The contrast
between progressive and regressive uses of technology is drawn by Caygill as one
between ‘a concept of experience which responded to changes in technology, and one
which used technology in order to monumentalize itself’. Fascism resists changes in
experience, and by refusing to change property relations adheres to ‘monumentalised
existing social relations’. In contrast is the use of technology ‘to promote the
transformation of experience itself’, which entails transforming social relations to suit the
development of technological forces of production.34 As we shall see, there is a close
parallel between the way fascism abuses technology and the way it abuses aesthetics, or
the arts that are technologically reproducible. Just as there is for Benjamin a potential,
progressive, communist relationship of humanity to technology that is countered by an
actual, regressive fascist abuse, so is there a similar contrast between communist and
fascist articulations of aesthetics and politics.
Technological reproducibility and the work of art
The connection between Benjamin’s attitude to technology and aesthetics runs through a
key concept of the artwork essay, namely technological reproducibility. On this point too
there is a contrast drawn between the progressive potential of reproducibility and its
33 . Leslie, Walter Benjamin, p. 157.
34 . Caygill, Colour of Experience, p. 95, p. 97.
14
capitalist and fascist abuse or ‘miscarried reception’. The basic idea of technological
reproducibility is quite straightforward. Whereas the Greeks could reproduce artworks
only by casting and stamping, woodcuts and lithography paved the way for photography
that subsequently ‘freed the hand from the most important artistic tasks’, while film
extended the reproduction of what the camera could capture to include sound. The
significance of the development of technological reproducibility is fourfold: first, it
‘transformed the entire character of art’; second, it ‘withers’ the ‘aura’ of the artwork,
detaching the object ‘from the sphere of tradition’; third, it ‘revolutionizes’ ‘the whole
social function of art’; and fourth, it ‘changes the relation of the masses to art’.35 All four
points are closely related and all allow for differing ‘receptions’ or responses.
Technological reproducibility changes the traditional concept of art as the manual
production of original objects that have ‘unique existence in a particular place’, or a ‘here
and now’ that grants art objects their ‘authenticity’ or ‘quintessence’. Reproduction
jeopardises ‘the authority of the object’ by substituting ‘a mass existence for a unique
existence’.36 Understood as a unique, authentic object, the work of art maintains authority
over its reception by appearing to be unchanging and eternally valid, requiring the viewer
to appreciate its context and history. As Caygill puts it, Benjamin associates continued
adherence to the traditional concept of art with monumentalism, a ‘refusal to
acknowledge the passage of time within a work of art’.37 On this view, the
transmissibility or passage of a work of art through history is already a form or
35 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 253, p. 258, p. 254, p. 257, p. 264.
36 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, pp. 253-4.
37 . Caygill, Colour of Experience, p. 94.
15
reproducibility, but one that is denied by the emphasis on origin. The uniqueness and
authenticity of the work of art relates to its ‘embededness in the context of tradition’ and
its service in rituals, ‘first magical, then religious’, or its ‘cult value’. While it seems odd
that the ritualistic use value of art would still have any purchase in modernity, Benjamin
notes that the secularization of cult value involves its displacement by authenticity in the
sense of the ‘empirical uniqueness of the artist or his creative achievement’, or the
replacement of objects of piety with beautiful images, commented on by Hegel.
Benjamin partly characterizes the shift in the transformation of art’s nature in
terms of the accentuation of exhibition as opposed to cult value, which includes a shift
from monumentality to ‘transitoriness and repeatability’. The reproducible artwork is
designed to be reproduced, to be detached from a unique situation, to be able ‘reach the
recipient in his or her own situation’ rather than in its unique setting, like a recording of a
symphony or a photographic negative, which can also pick up sights and sounds the ear
and eye might miss. The transformation of art by technological reproducibility above all
means that the media of reproduction, such as photography and film, become arts. They
seem not to be arts only from the perspective of their cult rather than exhibition value, but
these questions of perspective are for Benjamin intimately related to ‘the mass
movements of our day’, to fascism and communism. Rather than mourning the loss of
authenticity nostalgically, Benjamin argues that the technical reproducibility of art also
has a positive social significance that is most evident in film, namely, ‘the liquidation of
the value of tradition in the cultural heritage’.38 The conditions for the (re)production of
38 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 256-67, p. 272, fn. 12, p. 272, fn.13, p. 255, p. 254, p.
253.
16
art make it possible for art to break away from its role in reproducing the social authority
of tradition, including the hierarchies and social distinctions sanctioned by it. However,
this possibility will be realized only if the response to technological reproducibility is as
revolutionary as is the technology itself, or if the social conditions and the forces of
production are aligned.
Aura
The ‘aura’ of the artwork that withers because of technical reproducibility (that being the
second of four significant outcomes of technological reproducibility) as a concept
encompasses originality, authenticity, uniqueness, tradition, and eternal and cult values.
On the face of it, the artwork essay is about the ‘decay of the aura’ in art, but perhaps it is
more accurate to say the essay turns on the responses to that decay. Benjamin’s
immediate aim is to ‘neutralize a number of traditional concepts - such as creativity and
genius, eternal value and mystery’ that serve fascism and replace them with ones that are
adequate to assess ‘tendencies of the development of art under the present conditions of
production’ and which ‘are useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands’. The
traditional concepts refer back to aura, reconnecting art to its ritual function. Benjamin
quickly characterizes some modern developments of art and aesthetic discourse, those
which assert the autonomy of art from moral, economic as well as ritual purposes, as
responses to the loss of aura. First came ‘the doctrine of l’art pour l’art’, followed in turn
by a ‘negative theology, in the form of an idea of “pure” art, which rejects not only any
social function but any definition in terms of a representational content’. Fascism is ‘the
17
consummation of “l’art pour l’art”’, because it takes the bourgeois ideology of aesthetic
autonomy to extremes, pursuing the aesthetic value of beauty through war and turning
death into an object of aesthetic contemplation.39
Benjamin’s concept of aura is more complicated than this quick summary
suggests, precisely because it does break with traditional aesthetic concepts that in his
view are residues of a superstructure lagging behind transformations of the base. The
essay is often read as a critique of fascism’s attempt to return the aura to art and hence as
a complete rejection of aura. In Hewitt’s words, Benjamin’s ‘model of aestheticization
rests upon a stigmatization of fascism as (aesthetic) anachronism, as a false restoration of
art’s aura’ and as a ‘decadent and reactionary’ aesthetics’.40 But Hansen points out that
across his work ‘Benjamin’s attitude to the decline of the aura is profoundly ambivalent’.
Although in the artwork essay Benjamin does focus on the way in which technological
reproducibility undermines the traditional aesthetics that is complicit with fascism by
eliminating aura, Hansen claims he more consistently ‘tries to redeem an auratic mode of
experience for a historical and materialist practice’. 41 In order to use the concept of aura
to ‘reconceptualize experience’ and ‘counter the bungled (capitalist-imperialist)
adaptation of technology’, Benjamin has to ‘blast … to pieces’ the received occultist and
theosophist meanings of aura in order to be able to use it as a broader, non-aestheticist
term that is not opposed to technological reproducibility.42 This would also give aura a
39 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 252, p. 256, p. 270.
40 . Hewitt, Fascist Modernism, p. 24.
41 . Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience’, pp. 186-67.
42 . Hansen, ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, p. 338, p. 357.
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sense that unbound it from fascism and aligned it instead with a progressive relationship
with technology.
Other than as a term encompassing traditional aesthetic concepts, aura is variously
defined in the second and third versions of the artwork essay as: ‘A strange tissue of
space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be’. Only the
latter half of the phrase is included in the third version and expressly related to natural
objects, such as ‘a mountain range on the horizon’. Aura is thus about temporal and
spatial experiences, related to something being in a unique ‘here and now’, or giving rise
to a unique experience. Film as non-auratic art offers new experiences of space and time
that are appropriate to the development of human perception and technological forces of
production. The Greeks were compelled ‘to produce eternal values in their art’ because
they could not reproduce them, thus attributing the highest aesthetic value only to
artworks that were perfected at the very time and place of their creation. In contrast, film
is ‘the artwork most capable of improvement’, the finished product being selected from
an excess of footage then edited and assembled in a manner that means it could always be
reassembled differently.43 Film thus destroys art’s aura of eternal value, also
demonstrating that art, human perception, productive forces, and the relation between
humanity and nature are not fixed and eternal like a sculpted monument but are capable
of transformation and improvement over time. Just as communism transforms frozen
social relations, so does film undo monumental aura, while each ‘affirms the flux of
identity and the permanent revolution of the organization of experience’.44
43 . Benjamin, “Work of Art: Second Version’, pp. 104-5, pp. 108-9..
44 . Caygill, Colour of Experience, p. 103.
19
Hansen derives a second definition of aura from Benjamin’s ‘On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire’: ‘a form of perception that “invests” or endows a phenomenon with “the
ability to look back at us”’.45 As in the artwork essay, Benjamin claims that ‘photography
is decisively implicated in the phenomenon of the “decline of the aura”’, because it
‘records our likeness without returning our gaze’, or looking back at us as a human
would. ‘Experience of the aura thus rests on the transposition of a response common in
human relationships to the relationship between inanimate or natural object and man’.
The experience is the same as Proust’s version of involuntary memory, and ‘comprises
the “unique manifestation of a distance:’, being ‘inapproachable’.46 So, to go back to the
first definition, auratic experience can be distant although near (in time and space)
because it cannot be approached or taken hold of. As Hansen explains, auratic experience
or returned gaze in the encounter with the non-human ‘takes possession of us’ and
‘confronts the subject with a fundamental strangeness within and of the self’, or ‘with an
external, alien image of the self’. 47 Benjamin’s essay on Baudelaire delves into the
latter’s lyrical poetry as a way of conjuring beauty among the shocks, fragmentation and
ephemerality of urban modernity. Just as Baudelaire finds beauty in shocking modernity,
so does Benjamin find in the shocking encounter of auratic experience ‘self-recognition
qua self-alienation’ and a ‘field of force’ set up between the polarities of distance and
45 . Hansen, ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, p. 339. See Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire’ in Hannah Arendt (ed.) Illuminations: Walter Benjamin, Essays and
Reflections (Schocken: New York, 1969), p. 188.
46 . Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, p. 188.
47 . Hansen, ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, pp. 344-5, p. 347.
20
nearness. This is one might say a redemptive shock, a moment of ‘disjunctive temporality
and self-dislocating reflexivity’ in which it is possible to ‘both remember and imagine a
different kind of existence’. The question then is whether the arts of technical production,
such as film, can ‘reactivate older potentials of perception and imagination that would
enable human beings to engage productively, at a collective and sensorial level, with
modern forms of self-alienation’. 48 Certainly, the fascist use of those arts that return to
cultic practices in respect of both leaders and masses, presenting the latter with spectacles
of beautiful semblance for contemplation, obstructs such a reactivation.
Arts of technological reproducibility
Yet, at points Benjamin seems to argue that the arts of technological reproduction are
inherently progressive because they are anti-auratic. Photography, a ‘revolutionary means
of reproduction’, he says ‘emerged at the same time as socialism’, as if the former
necessarily conforms to the latter, except for early portraits. Photographs, quite simply,
are detached from their ‘here and now’, from the time and place in which they were taken
(thus requiring captions) and the perspective of an individual viewer is replaced by a
technical apparatus. Film differs immensely from theatre because, among other things,
the presence of the camera in place of the audience means that ‘the aura surrounding the
actor is dispelled – and, with it, the aura of the figure he portrays’. The actor’s
performance in film is also detached from the here and now of the performance, because
it is not ‘a unified whole, but is assembled from many individual performances’, recorded
by an apparatus that changes the position of viewing with camera angles and close-ups,
48 . Hansen, ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, p. 354, p. 344, p. 337.
21
under technical conditions such as lighting, then reassembled as a montage, through
editing.49 In the film studio, ‘the work of art is produced only means of montage’ and has
‘escaped the realm of “beautiful semblance”’, meaning traditional and idealist
aesthetics.50
The hopes Benjamin has for the new arts of technological reproducibility vary
between the second and third version of the essay, the third seeming more optimistic than
the second in terms of the expert capacities of the audience, though both versions claim
that it is ‘inherent in the technology of film … that everyone who witnesses these
performances does so as a quasi-expert’.51 In the third version, the audience is said to
have ‘empathy with the camera’, with the apparatus that subjects the performance ‘to a
series of optical tests’, thus permitting ‘the audience to take the position of a critic …
This is not an approach compatible with cult value’.52 The audience thus seems to identify
with the technological process of filming and editing, or the production of the artwork,
and can thus be critical about the way the film has been made.53 In the second version the
parallel passage has the actor performing ‘before a group of specialists’, being tested by
49 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 256, p. 260, p. 261.
50 . Benjamin, “Work of Art: Second Version’, p. 110; Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 261.
51 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 262; Benjamin, “Work of Art: Second Version’, p. 114.
52 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 259-60.
53 . This form of criticism is thus different to the sort of critical interpretation of media
output that audiences are said to conduct because they view it from a different social
perspective to the producers, or when they appropriate different meanings from it than the
allegedly hegemonic meaning.
22
‘a body of experts’, as in a work-related aptitude test. The urban audience identify not
with the apparatus but the performer ‘taking revenge on their behalf’ on the sort of
industrial apparatus to which many of them are subjected daily, ‘not only by asserting his
humanity … against the apparatus, but by placing that apparatus in the service of his
triumph’.54 Chaplin in particular seemed to be a master of performing non-theatrically,
‘chopping up expressive body movements into a sequence of minute mechanical
impulses’ that ‘render the law of the apparatus visible as the law of human movement’.55
In doing so, he performs the possibility of constructing human subjectivity in concert
with a technological modernity that disrupts traditional forms of authentic subjectivity.
The film actor thus demonstrates a productive alignment between technology and
humanity, one not achieved between humanity and industrial technology because of the
misalignment of social relations and forces of production. In the second version of the
essay, Benjamin ascribes to the reproducible arts a role akin to second technology in
general, in that the ‘primary social function of art today is to rehearse that interplay
[between nature and humanity … The function of film is to train human beings in the
apperception and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives
is expanding almost daily’. Audiences, the masses, have little experience of the
individual creation of a unique object, but they do of technological production and
industrial apparatus. In this light: ‘The most important social function of film is to
establish equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus’.56 Film does this in part
by rehearsing the ‘shock effects’ of modernity such as those experienced by ‘each
54 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art: Second Version’, p. 111.
55 . Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience’, p. 203.
56 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art: Second Version’, pp. 107-8.
23
passerby in big-city traffic’, thereby providing a way for humanity to adapt itself ‘to the
dangers threatening it’.57 As Caygill explains, reproducible arts ‘can serve in modern
societies to master the elemental forces of a technological second nature’, and as ‘a site in
which to explore possible futures of the relationship between technology and the human
which will create unprecedented experiences’.58
Benjamin maintains that ‘as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be
applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead
of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics’.59 The change in
the social function of art is the third of the four significant impacts of technological
reproducibility listed earlier. According to Wolin, Benjamin means that art becomes ‘an
instrument of political communication’, but that is only one aspect of the ways in which,
as Caygill says, art ‘serves to adapt humans to nature and nature to humans’ and now
does so ‘by means of technology allied to politics’ rather than magic.60 He also
categorises three different perspectives in Benjamin’s artwork essay on the political
function of the reproducible arts, especially film, in relating humanity with technology
and nature and giving rise to new experiences: ‘as a site for experimentation’; ‘as an
occasion for tactile critical enjoyment’; and ‘as a form of cathartic inoculation’.61
57 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 281, fn. 42.
58 . Caygill, Colour of Experience, p. 107.
59 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, pp. 256-57.
60 . Wolin, Walter Benjamin, p. 189; Caygill, Colour of Experience, p. 107.
61 . Caygill, Colour of Experience, p. 114.
24
Cathartic inoculation, discussed only in the second version of the essay, occurs in
relation to ‘the dangerous tensions which technology and its consequences have
engendered in the masses at large – tendencies which at critical stages takes on a
psychotic character’. But certain films, themselves part of this dangerous
‘technologization’, such as ‘American slapstick comedies and Disney films’, as well as
film figures that depict the darker unconscious, such as Mickey Mouse and Charlie
Chaplin, can immunize the masses against ‘sadistic fantasies and masochistic delusions’
by encouraging ‘a therapeutic release of unconscious energies’ through ‘collective
laughter’ at the ‘grotesque events’ they contain. In a footnote, Benjamin qualifies his
remarks, noting that fascism easily appropriates the simultaneous ‘comic and …
horrifying effect’ of, and the ‘acceptance of bestiality and violence as inevitable
concomitants of existence’ in such films. 62
The ‘tactile critical enjoyment’ experienced through film relates to Dada, the
contrast between tactility and contemplation, distraction, and architecture. Benjamin
credits Dadaism with trying to produce the effects that film was to produce later,
annihilating aura by producing artworks that ‘they branded as reproduction’ and which
were not amenable to the traditional, bourgeois aesthetic attitude to artworks of
‘contemplative immersion’. Film requires a different aesthetic attitude which Benjamin
labels ‘distraction’ (Zerstreuung), a word that also means amusement as well as
dissipation. He means by this not inattention but ‘heightened attention’ that is induced by
film’s ‘physical shock effect’, the ‘percussive effect’ of ‘successive changes of scene and
focus’ and the interruption of images by each other.63 This is the sort of shock identified
62 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art: Second Version’, p. 118, p. 130, fn.30.
25
above that confronts the viewer with something alien to itself, such that film is the
aesthetic (but also technological) counterpart to ‘industrial modes of production and
transportation’.64 Both Dada (morally) and film (physically) shock the viewer by ‘taking
on a tactile … quality’, requiring not a cerebral, detached consideration but a physical,
engaged response.65 As with most of Benjamin’s concepts, there is both a ‘dialectical
movement’ and ‘constituted ambiguity’ to shock, as both ‘the stigma of modern life,
synonymous with the defensive shield it provokes and thus with the impoverishment of
experience’ and also a therapeutic moment of recognition that opens the way for
‘reclaiming collective and anthropological … experiences’.66 Just as some form of
technology (the reproductive arts) is a way of transforming the failed capitalist reception
of technology, so is a form of shock the appropriate response to modernity as a series of
shocks.
The model for the tactile response to art is architecture, which can be appreciated
optically, but for the most is received through ‘use’ and ‘habit’. The role of reproductive
arts in rehearsing new relations between humans and technology is pertinent at this point
too, in that ‘the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception’ that take ‘their cue
from tactile reception’ or ‘reception in distraction’, find in film their ‘true training
ground’. Such tactile reception is critical in that ‘the evaluating attitude requires no
attention’, because evaluation occurs through use and enjoyment: ‘The audience is an
63 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 267.
64 . Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience’, p. 184.
65 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 267.
66 . Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience’, p. 210-11.
26
examiner, but a distracted one’.67 Again, this suggests a very different form of aesthetic
judgment to that of traditional aesthetics, which eschews sensuous enjoyment, a point that
Benjamin makes in the second version when he remarks that film is also central ‘for the
theory of perception which the Greeks called aesthetics’, referring to back to the sensuous
sense of aisthesis.68
The third perspective on the artwork identified by Caygill concerns film’s
representation of the new human environment: ‘Our bars and city streets, our offices and
furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories’. In the third version of the
artwork essay Benjamin writes only of the positive aspects of the unconscious processes
in film’s mediation of experience of the urban environment, sidestepping the psychotic
reaction to technology. Film techniques such as close-up and slow motion further ‘insight
into the necessities governing our lives’ by altering experiences of space and time,
revealing aspects of modernity to the camera’s ‘optical unconscious’ that are not given to
the conscious, seeing eye. 69 Central to film’s experimentation with experience is ‘its
radical restructuration of spatial and temporal relations’, as a counterpart to industrial and
urban modernity’s experiences of time and space.70 Together with the psychotic response
to technology countered by cathartic inoculation, Benjamin’s account of the unconscious
processes is also dialectical, alert to the actualities as well as potentialities.
67 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 267-69.
68 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art: Second Version’, p.120.
69 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 265-66.
70 . Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience’, p. 184. See also Caygill, Colour of
Experience, p. 112.
27
It is worthwhile to add to Caygill’s three categories or social functions of the
technological artwork, extending Benjamin’s comments on tactility and the aura, a new
or potential relation to things that is covered by the term mimesis. As mentioned above,
this concept is central to delineating a progressive relation between humanity and
technology in general. Hansen argues although Benjamin does not use the notion directly
in the artwork essay, vestiges of his earlier writing on the mimetic faculty are at work in
it. In contrast to the Platonic sense of mimesis as the copy of an original or a likeness, in
Benjamin’s usage mimesis refers to similarities between phenomena, similarities or
correspondences that the human mimetic faculty both recognizes and produces.
Similarities are distinguished from sameness, as in identical copies. Mimesis overlaps
with aura in that it also speaks of a sensuous, embodied encounter between the human
and non-human, specifically human imitation of nature, as in children’s game. In
particular, ‘it envisions a relationship with nature that is alternative to the dominant forms
of mastery and exploitation, one that would dissolve the contours of the subject/object
dichotomy into reciprocity’. The mimetic faculty is also similar to aura in that, with the
countless reified sameness of things under capitalist, technological production of
commodities and technological reproducibility of images, it appears to be decaying,
though it may also be transforming. It is transforming through ‘non-sensuous similarity’,
as in the ‘correspondence between a person’s moment of birth and the constellation of
stars’, meaning figurative correspondences. Benjamin hoped that such figurative and
generally literary figurations, as in Proust’s involuntary memories, would engender
images or experiences that would reveal, through a distorted perception, the ‘therapeutic
28
alienation between environment and human beings’, between humans and the reified
world of commodified sameness as well as technological, mechanised production. 71
According to Hansen, by the time of the artwork essay Benjamin had lost
confidence in the political potential of such figurative correspondences. The changed
perception of the masses which caused the decay of aura is marked by a ‘sense of
sameness in the world’ that ‘extracts sameness even from what is unique’ and an urge …
to get hold of an object … in a facsimile …, a reproduction’ that ‘differs unmistakably
from the image’ or figuration.72 Subtle differences between similarity and sameness have
sunk, while, Hansen claims, Benjamin identifies ‘sameness’ with the proletarian masses,
tasking film with ‘a positive identification with masses’. Some of the remnants of
mimetic figuration she finds in the artwork essay are synonymous with the shock effect
off aura, of things returning the gaze. Yet, she overlooks a key example of mimesis in the
third version of the essay when she dismisses the audience’s identification with apparatus
as congealment of ‘polytechnic education, popular expertise and a pseudo-scientific
notion of “testing’ which cannot be dissociated from its industrial-capitalist origin’.73 It is
precisely this ‘empathy with the camera’ and adoption of a testing attitude that
demonstrates through a playful mimetic inhabitation of reproductive technologies and
industrial relations techniques how people can have a non-instrumentalist relationship
71 . Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience’, p. 196, p. 207, p.
72 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 255.
73 . Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience’, p. 206, p. 202. Writing nearly twenty
years later, in ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, Hansen herself discusses film’s auratic shock effects
without referring to mimetic figuration.
29
with technologised nature. It is not the actuality of industrial capitalism that determines
the shape of Benjamin’s argument, which also navigates towards revolutionary and
transforming possibilities immanent in current conditions.
Hansen’s discussion of mimesis in the artwork essay is back on track when she
points to ‘the mimetic capability of film … [that] extends to specific techniques designed
to make technology itself disappear’.74 Benjamin’s argument seems to oppose to
Hansen’s view when he claims that film ‘offers a hitherto unimaginable spectacle’ and
that ‘the equipment-free aspect of reality has become the height of artifice’. This claim
sounds like the familiar critique of the reality effect of photography and film, for
presenting a world that appears real and yet is a technological illusion, thereby repeating
the ideological inversion of commodity fetishism and capitalism. But according to
Benjamin, it is this ‘equipment-free aspect of reality’ that people ‘are entitled to demand
from a work of art’. In other words, the interplay between humanity and technology,
technology and nature, does not require the elimination but ‘the height of artifice’,
because the potential imbrication of social energies with productive forces will occur ‘on
the basis of the most intensive interpenetration of reality with equipment’, just as much as
film or mediated reality does. By contrast, ‘the vision of immediate reality’ has become
‘the Blue Flower in the land of technology’, meaning ‘the unattainable object of the
romantic quest’.75 Human and technological development precludes the possibility of a
non-technologised human reality, but film rehearses the pleasure people can take in a
technological reality that serves their rather than capital’s purposes.
74 . Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience’, p. 203.
75 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 263-64; ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience’, p. 204.
30
In accord with the dialectical structure of Benjamin’s argument that acknowledges
potentialities and actualities, both versions of the essay deny that film and reproducible
arts in general currently fulfil a new social function in a progressive manner. The ways
that reproducible art may be articulated with politics are not necessarily revolutionary,
just as the ways in which humanity may be related to technology will not be
revolutionary if social structure is out of step with the forces of production. As Caygill
puts it, the articulation of politics and democracy ‘may result either in the intensification
of democracy or in the use of the new technology for auratic ends, effectively
subordinating politics to ritual,’ just as ‘the changes in the character of experience’ can
lead ‘either to transformation or catastrophe’ .76 In Benjamin’s words: ‘So long as
moviemakers’ capital sets the fashion’ and ‘until film has liberated itself from the fetters
of capitalist exploitation’, film will have no ‘revolutionary merit’ other than ‘criticism of
traditional concepts of art’. Capitalist film regains the aura through ‘the cult of the movie
star’ and the ‘magic of the personality’ that derives from ‘the putrid magic of its own
commodity character’. Similarly, in the politics of bourgeois democracies the
reproducibility of the presentations of leaders, their subjection to exhibition value and
recorded appearances before the masses rather than other elected representatives in
parliament, means that they are tested not so much by the public as ‘a new form of
selection – selection before an apparatus – from which the star and dictator emerge as
victorious’. In this prescient comment, Benjamin captures a good deal of the critique of
mediatised politics, organised as ‘an immense publicity machine’ that favours ‘the
exhibition of controllable, transferable skills’ and that speaks more to the ability of a
76 . Caygill, Colour of Experience, p. 109, p. 116.
31
candidate to win an election than govern, and enables populism and demagoguery to
dominate the parliamentary process. It is significant that Benjamin’s remarks about
aestheticized politics appear in a discussion of a shift from ‘auratic art’ to ‘mass media’,
because so many contemporary complaints about aestheticized politics refer to
mediatised politics. But his comment refers more precisely to the growth of fascism in
parliamentary rule and fascism’s ‘corruption’ of the revolutionary opportunities’ of the
reproductive arts for ‘the class consciousness of the masses’. 77
Art and the masses
The fourth significant impact of technological reproducibility is on the relation between
art and the masses. Although Benjamin does not use the terms himself, Caygill remarks
that his approach ‘questions the distinction between high and low art’.78 Art has become
media art for the masses, a political force detached from older aesthetic categories and
values, under changed conditions of production. The fourth of the developments wrought
by technological reproducibility is a changed relation between the masses and art, a
development that is most clearly marked by the divergent responses to it, the actuality of
fascism and the possibility of communism. Firstly, the ‘mass existence’ of reproduced
artworks that replace the ‘unique existence’ of traditional artworks not only shatters
tradition and aura but also gives art such as film increased ‘social significance’. Given
that this process is ‘intimately related to the mass movements of the day’, the shift of
77 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 261; p. 277, fn. 27; Benjamin, Work of Art: Second
Version’, p. 113-14. The third version tones down the anti-capitalist language.
78 . Caygill, Colour of Experience, p. 92.
32
art’s social function from ritual to politics is also invoked. Secondly, the conditions of
reception have changed from individualized contemplation of objects or their reception in
‘a manifoldly graduated and hierarchically mediated way’ in churches and at court, to
‘simultaneous collective reception’, as in film theatres. Individual reactions are
concentrated into a mass and once manifest ‘regulate each other’. 79 Collective and hence
political as well aesthetic reactions to art become more prevalent under technological
reproducibility.
As the new audience for art, the masses do not restrict themselves to detached
aesthetic judgment. Their ‘progressive reaction’ to ‘a Chaplin film’ for example is instead
‘characterized by an immediate, intimate fusion of pleasure –pleasure in seeing and
experiencing – with an attitude of expert appraisal’. Benjamin does not denigrate this
mass pleasure, nor does he object to the public’s ‘backward attitude’ to art in which he
himself finds progressive insight, such as surrealism. His attitude here cannot be
dismissed as populist bad faith, because he is certainly not claiming that the public
always reacts progressively or that it is immune to the appeal of the cult of the star or the
dictator. However, in this case he is making a claim for an actualized possibility of a
progressive reaction, rather than a potential immanent in film’s relation to the masses,
one that depends on the audience’s identification both with Chaplin’s triumph over the
apparatus and with the apparatus as a critical, testing technology.
There is also a cultural populist or at least anti-elitist element to Benjamin’s point
about how since the end of the nineteenth century ‘the distinction between author and
79 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 254. p. 264.
33
public’ has been losing its ‘axiomatic character’ as more readers turn into writers and
more people gain expertise ‘in a highly specialized work process’. The technical division
of labour makes experts of more people as ‘specialized higher education’ gives way to
‘polytechnic training’. Benjamin criticises Aldous Huxley’s elitist complaint about the
‘vulgarity’ brought about by the technological reproducibility of ‘inordinate quantities of
reading-matter, seeing-matter, and hearing-matter’. 80 In effect Benjamin argues in favour
of the potentially democratizing effects of mass cultural production and circulation on the
character of ‘literary competence’, extending into what today would also be called media
literacy. The same reasoning applies to his observation that ‘the greatly increased mass of
participants has produced a different kind of participation’, which involves not only
these new forms of literacy or expertise and the coincidence of the public’s ‘critical and
uncritical attitudes’ in their distracted examination of mass artworks, but also ‘the human
being’s legitimate claim to be reproduced’. The last point refers initially to the
appearance of people in newsreels and more significantly in Soviet films in which people
‘portray themselves – and primarily their own work process’. 81 But the right to be
reproduced means more than banal ‘vox pop’ and earnest socialist realism; it does not
mean simply that the public or the masses have a right to self-representation. Rather, as
Joel Snyder explains, they have a right to exhibit themselves in their environment: ‘Film
will show man [sic] in an environment re-made (reproduced) and managed by himself’.82
Through the technological production of artificial realities, film demonstrates to workers
and the public in general that just as film produces reality, its own environment and
nature, so can humanity in its technological interplay with nature, ‘when humanity’s
80 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 264, p. 262; Aldous Huxley quoted on p. 278, fn. 29..
81 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, p. 267, p. 264, p. 262.
34
whole constitution has adapted itself to the new productive forces which the second
technology has set free’. The progressive and potentially revolutionary character of film
is again tied to its rehearsal of humanity’s use of technology, but the right to be
reproduced also refers to humanity’s role in producing and reproducing itself, in
changing its own nature, through interaction with technology. The collective that is
innervated through revolutions is ‘the new, historically unique collective which has its
organs in the new technology’.83 This is a collective that makes itself in reproducing
itself: ‘With the new techniques of technical reproduction, construction takes the place of
representation’, notes Caygill, so the right to be reproduced is the collective’s right to
be.84
It would thus be revolutionary to enhance the control of the collective but
differentiated proletarian masses before whom performers are aware that they stand when
also confronting the apparatus, such as through ‘the expropriation of film capital’ or the
socialization of the means of cultural production (which would be an appropriate way of
understanding what the ‘politicization of art’ means if it were not so reductive of all
Benjamin’s implied meanings). However, ‘capitalist exploitation of film obstructs the
human being’s legitimate claim to being reproduced’, leading instead to ‘the involvement
of the masses through illusionary displays and ambiguous expectations’. 85 Instead of
allowing the self-reproduction of a collective, fascism mobilizes the ‘mass as an
impenetrable, compact entity’ in the way that it reproduces the masses, in ‘great
ceremonial processions, giant rallies, and mass sporting events, and in war’. Use of the
camera enables ‘the masses to come face to face with themselves’ in a ‘bird’s-eye view’
35
of mass assemblies and in the ‘counterpart’ to the cult of the star, namely ‘the cult of the
audience’. The masses come face to face with themselves, but they do not return their
own look, instead regarding themselves as an object for contemplation. There is no
auratic shock of the strangeness of the mass to itself, but the aura of the mass’ unique and
eternal nature. Fascism abuses the possibilities of technological reproducibility and its
arts ‘in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into serving the production of ritual
values’ and at the same time violates the masses by treating them as an auratic artwork. 86
The revolutionary potential of the new relation between art and the masses is perverted.
Two types of aesthetic(ized) politics
The potential for an alternative relation between humans and technology, nature, each
other, art (or mass media) and politics would come through the communist response to
the decay of aura, in the politicization of politics. As stated above, Benjamin devotes
most of the artwork essay to analysing the conditions under which aura decays and
exploring the potential of technologically reproducible art, rather than condemning it and
the fascist response to it. So, although he appears to say almost nothing about the
communist politicization of art, he actually provides an outline of a new relationship
between the masses, technology and technologically reproducible arts. However, he does
not refer to it as a communist aestheticization of politics, while his rhetoric insists on the
polar opposition of fascism and communism. Even if Benjamin implicitly outlines a
communist imbrication of aesthetics and politics, it cannot be denied that he explicitly
36
decries fascist aestheticized politics without referring to any other sort of aestheticized
politics.
Andrew Hewitt’s study of Futurism and Marinetti in particular indicates some of
the shortcomings of a generalised critique of fascism as aestheticization. He notes that
‘from a broadly left perspective “the aestheticization of political life” comes to mean the
masking of class struggle under a façade of aestheticized social unity’, when analyses
focus on connecting ‘outmoded notions of aesthetic harmony and balance to fascist
notions of the organicist State’.87 Hewitt’s key point in relation to Benjamin is to reject
his opposition between the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics,
arguing that ‘aestheticization and politicization become synonymous, or co-originary’.88
Claiming to read Benjamin against the grain, though actually reading him dialectically as
he should be, Hewitt realises that the difference between the fascist and communist
responses to the crisis of art and modernity in general is given in Benjamin’s distinction
between the actual way capitalism and fascism recreate aura in film, and his otherwise
favourable treatment of the ‘liberating potential of technologies of reproduction’. Both
participate in the same logic because both grasp that with reproducibility comes a
‘phenomenological mutation of the concept of origin’, such that reproduction (Hewitt
says representation) is ‘essential and primary, rather than incidental and secondary’. In
other words, with technological reproduction, reality itself changes, as film and other
media are able not only to represent reality, but to ‘reconstitute the thing itself, including
the ‘essentially reproducible masses’. There is thus a certain, uncomfortable ‘“truth” of
87 . Hewitt, Fascist Modernism, p. 135.
88 . Hewitt, Fascist Modernism, p. 86.
37
fascism’ in respect of politics and democracy’ which is that ‘politics … is … an
aesthetic’, and that the audience that constitutes the public before whom politics is played
out is an aesthetic construct. Conceptions and critiques of aestheticization that treat it as
an ideological veil over reality miss the extent to which reality has changed. The
difference between ‘the construction of the spectacle’ and ‘the new, historically unique
collective which has its organs in the new technology’ is thus not a difference between
one being aesthetic and the other political, but the way in which each is constructed
aesthetically and politically.89 The upshot is that, following the logic of Benjamin’s
argument, there is not on the side of fascism aestheticized politics and on the side of
communism politicized aesthetics, but on each side a response to the ways in which the
crisis of modernity unravels the conceptual distinctions between aesthetics and politics
and redraws the boundaries between cultural value spheres. Benjamin’s ambiguity about
the relation between technology and humanity, technological reproducibility, the decay of
aura, and the relationship of the masses to the technologically reproducible arts is
ambiguous because of the different ways in which the boundaries between politics and art
are effaced in actuality and potentially. Yet, he does urge that the boundaries between the
cultural spheres should be overrun in the ‘politicization of art’. Both fascism and
communism reorganize the cultural value spheres, ending their separation, but do so in
different ways. In other words, both fascism and communism could be considered as
aesthetic(ized) politics. As a way of summarising the differences between these two
models of aesthetic politics, as characterised by Benjamin, a clear contrast is drawn
heuristically in the table below. The table also serves as a conclusion, illustrating that
fascism is not synonymous with aestheticized politics, that fascism is not the only form of
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aesthetic(ized) politics, and that modern conditions of aestheticization contain the
potential for a progressive, even revolutionary form of aesthetic politics.
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Aesthetic(ized) politics
Fascist Communist
Actual (failed opportunity, catastrophe) Potential (unrealized promise,
transformation)
Regressive Progressive
Monumental, eternal Transitory, improvable
Unique, authentic, whole, ‘autonomous’ Reproducible, assembled
Cult value Exhibition value
Ritual Revolutionary
Contemplation, detachment Immersion, tactility, distraction
Distance Closeness
Aura as magic or monument Aura as (redemptive) shock
Idealist and subjectivist aesthetics Sensuous aesthetics (pleasure and critique 82 . Joel Snyder, ‘Benjamin on Reproducibility and Aura: A Reading of “The Work of Art
in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility”’ in Gary Smith (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy,
History, Aesthetics (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1989), p. 171.
83 . Benjamin, Work of Art: Second Version’, p. 108, p. 124, fn. 10.
84 . Caygill, Colour of Experience, p. 109.
85 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art’, pp. 262-3.
86 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art: Second Version’, p. 115, p. 129, fn. 24, p. 113; Benjamin,
‘Work of Art’, p. 282, fn. 47, p. 269.
89 . Hewitt, Fascist Modernism, p. 170, p. 166, pp. 168-69, p. 192, p. 176; Benjamin,
‘Work of Art: Second Version’, p. 124, fn. 10..
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combined)
Symbolic, ‘beautiful semblance’ Mimetic (imbrication of humanity and
technology)
Representation Construction
Traditional Experimental (restructuring experience of
time and space)
Denial of human/technology interplay
(misalignment of technology and society,
abuse of technology)
Rehearsal of human/technology interplay
(equilibrium of humanity and technology)
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Notes
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