benjamin fascism and communism

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)

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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

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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.


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.


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.

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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.


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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.

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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.

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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.



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.

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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..


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


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.



60 . Wolin, Walter Benjamin, p. 189; Caygill, Colour of Experience, p. 107.


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




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.


68 . Benjamin, ‘Work of Art: Second Version’, p.120.


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.


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.


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.


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..


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



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

38

aesthetic(ized) politics, and that modern conditions of aestheticization contain the

potential for a progressive, even revolutionary form of aesthetic politics.

39

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.



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..

40

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)

41

Notes

42

benjamin fascism and communism

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