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Abstract
This paper presents a reading of Walter Benjamin's much-read essay ‘The artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction'. Drawing on a Durkheimian conception of the relationship between the cult and its cult objects, I seek to differentiate (better than Benjamin himself) the notions of ‘aura' and of ‘cult value'. Thereby, I hope to contour a theoretical model for dealing with mediated sociality suitable for a postmodern reality. In this reality, de-auraticized objects – mass-produced objects and visual reproductions – proliferate concomitantly with forms of ‘cultic sociality'. First, I undertake a reading of Benjamin's essay. Second, I focus on the relation between aura and cult value. Third, I try to show the relevance of my Durkheimian approach through a critique of the Benjaminian literature and the standard readings of his essay.
Notes
All translation of foreign languages into English has been done by myself (B.S.).
In the following, I cite directly from Benjamin's Gesammelte Schriften (1989). The first numbers in the parentheses refer to the volume. The artwork essay has a complicated history and can be found in four versions in the Schriften. Unless indicated, I cite from the so-called ‘second version’ (VII. 1, 350–84); presumably the one Benjamin wanted to publish himself. This text was considered lost and only rediscovered in the archives of Max Horkheimer after his death in 1973 and was first published in 1989. This version differs in important aspects from the version earlier translated into English in the well-known text collection edited by Hannah Arendt in 1968, Illuminations (Benjamin 1968).
This central note, sketching Benjamin's mass psychology and his ‘theory of revolution’ in a condensed form, is not to be found in the ‘third version’ (I. 2, 471–508) translated into English in Benjamin (1968).
See also the essay on surrealism:
If it is the double task of the revolutionary intelligence to overthrow the intellectual hegemony of the bourgeoisie and to establish contact with the proletarian masses, then they have almost totally failed to carry out this second task. This is so since it can no longer be performed contemplatively. (II. 1, 309)
Indeed, this is one of the reasons behind Benjamin's dislike of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement. Regarding his relation to Neue Sachlichkeit, see the excurses in ‘Der Autor als Produzent’ (II. 2, 692–6) and the Kästner review ‘Linke Melankolie’ (III, 279–82).
The footnote in the ‘third version’ quoting from Brecht should be understood in this vein. Brecht writes about a future in which the concept of art will ‘call forth no recollection of what it once used to signify’ (I. 2, 484).
This is also one of the (positive) motives behind Benjamin's interest in kitsch. In contrast to autonomous art – which ‘only began two meters from the body’ (II. 2, 622) – kitsch is brought close since the masses have a concrete and practical relation to it; it ‘comforts’ them. Kitsch is an attempt artificially and industrially to preserve the ‘warmth’ of things – in a time when, due to the waning of aura, they are presumably ‘freezing’: ‘The masses demand from the artwork (which for them flows in the line of everyday articles for use) something warming. Kitsch is nothing but art with one hundred percent absolute and momentary use-value [Gebrauchs Character]’ (V. 1, 500 [K3a, 1]). Kitsch inserts itself into everyday life. Like a comforting bottle for the alcoholic, it is used like a profane object and with a clear purpose. Further, kitsch directly integrates utopian images – or collective ‘dreams’ – in the intimate tactile or bodily ‘space’ of everyday things.
Benjamin's new post-aesthetical and collectivist ‘art’ practices share their proximity to the lived life with kitsch and thus stand in opposition to the ‘abstract’ or formal avant-garde, who remains loyal to the traditional concept of autonomous art:
It goes for the emerging living forms [of popular art], in contrast [to the art of the avant-garde], that they possess something warming, useful, finally blissful, that they dialectically absorb [aufheben] the ‘kitsch’ in themselves, so that they may bring themselves closer to the masses but still conquer kitsch. (V. 1, 500 [K3a, 1])
No doubt this distinctive ‘warmth’ of the new media stem from their collective character, the distinctive ‘social’ form of their reception; their ‘immersion’ in the masses. Their critical potential, their ability to ‘conquer kitsch’, however, stems from the fact that they may accomplish this immersion without sacrificing their scientific, de-auraticizing, and ‘testing’ attitude. Also on this point, clearly, Benjamin was too optimistic. Evidently, film does not bridge the gulf between enjoyment and critique, between ‘absent-mindedness [Zerstreuung]’ and ‘examination’, the way he thought possible (I. 2, 505).
The formulations about bringing art ‘closer to’ or ‘within reach’ of the masses are frequent in the artwork essay; however, it is already to be found in ‘Kleine Photographiegeschichte’ (II. 1, 378–9) as it is to be found (as we have seen above) in the short ‘Fragment on film and kitsch’ in the Passagen-Werk (V. I, 499 [K3a, 1]).
As does Siegfried Kracauer in his writings on the new ‘superficial’ cinema culture of Berlin. See Kracauer (1977). By the same token, Adorno's skeptical attitude towards Benjamin's idea of Zerstreuung is due to an overly literal interpretation. Like Habermas does later, Adorno seems to see Benjamin's analysis more as an empirical investigation into contemporary popular culture than as an attempt at utopian ‘actualization’. See Adorno's reactions to the artwork essay in the letter to Benjamin from 18 March 1936 in Adorno (1990, 143–51, esp. 147).
Cf. Benjamin's early ascertainment that ‘the body has no definite border in the state of absent-mindedness [Geistesabwesenheit]’ (VI, 76).
In this light the following lines from the convolute on the ‘collector’ in the Passagen-Werk are ‘awakened’:
Maybe the most hidden motive of the collector could be redescribed as follows: He takes up the fight against dispersion [Zerstreuung]. The great collector is originally touched by the confused or dispersed [zerstreute] state, in which the objects in this world find themselves. (V. 1, 279 [H4a, 1])
At the end of the day, we may even say that collectors ‘collect’ – gather – themselves through the objects; in as much as it is through the objects that they participate in a ‘collectors’ cult. See also Benjamin (I. 2, 481).
‘[T]he new collective has its organs in the second technology’, Benjamin asserts (VII. 1, 360). What is important to me is not that traditional forms of technology – ‘first technology’ – rest on instrumental exploitation and mastery of nature whereas ‘second’ technologies indicate a more symmetrical relation, but rather Benjamin's stressing of the distinctively social character of the ‘second’ technologies. As a matter of fact, in contrast to ‘second’ technology, ‘first’ technology is presumably individualist in Benjamin's account. This is, evidently, spurious. Technology may indeed have its roots in imitational ritual or magical practices, but magic is in no way as individualist as Benjamin seems to think:
The elk that the human of the stone ages paints on the wall of his cave is an instrument of enchantment, only accidentally put on display in front of his fellows. It is more important that the spirits notice it. (VII. 1, 483)
Such phrases jeopardize the whole anchoring of aura in collective ritual. Note that in the ‘third version’ the wording is less ‘atomist’: ‘evidently, he puts it on display in front of his fellows; it is, however, first and foremost intended to the spirits’ (I. 2, 483).
Although Benjamin time and time again falls back into ‘subject philosophical’ and individualist templates (see the note above). Benjamin's theory of ritual often seems to rest on an Aristotelic (or aesthetical) concept of imitation (imitation of the object) and not on a sociological one (imitation of the other, mutual synchronization and attunement) – as in Durkheim (1998, 329–30).
The very same argument could be conducted on behalf of the ‘commodity’, per definition a strongly anti-auratic ‘form’. At other places Benjamin paradoxically contributes some kind of ‘special aura [eigentümliche Aura]’ to the commodity (I. 2, 671). However, such passages testify rather to a lack of suitable vocabulary for a description of the fascinating appearance of the popular or fashionable commodity (bestowed upon it by the concrete cult forming around it) than to the existence of auratic commodities.
As a matter of fact, Hansen wrote about the ‘false resurrection’ of aura already 20 years earlier. See Hansen (1987, 204).
The noteworthy exception to this neglect of the ‘concrete social’ is Habermas (1981). Habermas resorts to the concept of the ‘synthetic’, yet he does not speak about pseudo-aura, but about a ‘manipulatively manufactured cult value’. This expression is symptomatic of the fact that his reflections on this point, in contrast to in Hansen (1987, 2008) and Lindner (1978), are of a distinctively social psychological or mass psychological character: ‘The cultic spell is broken only to be synthetically renewed: mass reception becomes mass suggestion’ (Habermas 1981, 342). Significantly, Habermas legitimizes his approach with a mass psychologically informed citation from Benjamin – not stemming from Benjamin's ‘Theorien des deutschen Faschismus’ (III, 238–50), a text completely bereft of any social psychological content – but from the first ‘Pariser Brief’ (III, 489). Thus, in Habermas the concrete social basis of the cultic phenomenologies asserts itself. Yet neither does Habermas theorize on the concept of the cultic as such, nor does he touch on the phenomenological aspects that resonate with his notion of a ‘manipulatively manufactured cult value’.
Already his early concept of fetishism remains explicitly Marxist (albeit focused on reception [the sign] and not on production) and consciously anti-Durkheimian. Thus, in Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (2007), Baudrillard defines his concept of fetishism in direct opposition to an anthropological or ethnological conception of fetishism akin to the Durkheimian one developed in the article: ‘[F]etishism is not the sacralisation of this or that object […]’, but a ‘fetishism of the system as such’ (Baudrillard 2007, 101).
This is what Adorno impresses on Benjamin in his famous Hornberg letter (dated 2 August 1935); see Benjamin (V. 2, 1129).
