were omitted in the French translation, for fear that the essay would be read as an attack of Popular Front politics and that a public controversy might endanger the work of the institute in exile.10
Such an attack, however strategically encoded, seems indeed not far from Benjamin’s line of argument, even if the ostensible target of the essay was the more extreme case of belated aestheticism on the right. He sought to launch his theses in the wake of the Congress for the Defense of Culture, held in Paris June 21–25, 1935, which preceded the forming of the political alliance against fascism by bourgeois democratic parties, socialists, union politicians, and communists on July 14 of the same year.11 The congress had been convened in response to the mounting alarm among French intellectuals that after the defeat of the left in Germany fascism would also rise to dominance in France—a fear massively confirmed by the bloody riots of February 1934 in which forty thousand right-wing demonstrators threatened to take over the streets of Paris. The writers’ congress, with the exception of the famously dissenting speeches by Bertolt Brecht and André Breton, provided a cultural platform for the Popular Front that advocated the preservation of the “literary heritage,” in particular the great works of “realism”; absolute aesthetic values; socialist humanism; and an organic relationship of the artist with the community of “the people.” In terms of communist literary politics, the espousal of these ideals (by, among others, Johannes R. Becher and ex-surrealist Louis Aragon) entailed not only surrendering important Marxist positions—and the very mention of Marx—but also a turning away from avant-garde, experimental, and in the widest sense, modernist work. In that regard, the communist left merely followed suit with the suppression of such work by Stalinist cultural politics beginning in 1931, sanctioned by a more general political rapprochement between Paris and Moscow.12
In view of the cultural-political platform of the Popular Front, which Benjamin considered stuck in regressive and dangerous illusions, the artwork essay was untimely on several counts. It explicitly invoked Marxian axioms but transformed and updated them to address the current crisis; what’s more, it imbricated them—in the essay’s original versions—with the tradition that Benjamin, in the 1929 essay on surrealism, referred to as “anthropological materialism.”13 In the spirit of that tradition, the artwork essay foregrounded the question of technology, with its fundamental implications for the fate of art and sensory experience under industrial capitalism and its central role in the political confrontation with fascism. But his concept of technology was at least as indebted to Charles Fourier and other utopian socialists as to Marx.14 Moreover, where Benjamin elaborated on film as the art of technological reproducibility par excellence, he drew his examples—Chaplin, Mickey Mouse—just as freely from Western commercial film production as from Soviet cinema; by contrast, references to French poetic realism (for instance, the films of Jean Renoir, Julien Duvivier, and Marcel Carné), the type of cinema most obviously in accord with Popular Front cultural politics, were conspicuously absent.
Above and beyond the immediate target of its intervention, Benjamin’s essay still commands actuality on account of its complex temporality, which is deeply entwined with his philosophy of history.15 For the telescope as which he conceived the artwork essay combines two temporal registers. One is aimed at the nineteenth century, in particular the effects of industrialization on art and the aesthetic as brought into view by the current crisis; the other is pointed “through the blood-heavy mist at a mirage of the nineteenth century” that Benjamin was “attempting to depict according to the features that it will manifest in a future state of the world liberated from magic.”16 In other words, the historical-materialist perspective that allows Benjamin to formulate a more astute and prescient assessment of the ongoing crisis than that offered by contemporary leftist cultural politics intersects with a utopianist, in a messianic sense ahistorical, if not antihistorical, perspective that seeks in the dreams of the past the promises of a future beyond the ongoing catastrophe. Hence the very historicity of Benjamin’s theses enables them to have another actuality—and other, virtual actualities—in the present, whether indirectly, as a methodological and cognitive impulse, or substantively, inasmuch as they prompt us to trace, in their analysis of the major crisis of Western capitalist modernity in the twentieth century, both the transformations of this modernity and the legacy of its continuing impasses in the twenty-first.
Broadly speaking, if Benjamin’s theses still “reach our ears,” this is due to the way he linked his critique of the Western aesthetic tradition (primarily German and French), specifically an institution of art perpetuating notions of beautiful semblance, timeless truth, mystery, and creative genius, to a wider concept of the aesthetic that he understood, echoing Alexander Baumgarten, as the “theory [Lehre] of perception that the Greeks called aesthetics.”17 In both narrow and expanded senses, he considers the aesthetic in relation to the changing conditions of human experience (Erfahrung), a term that pertains not only to the organization of sensory perception but crucially to—individual and collective, conscious and unconscious—memory, the imagination, and generational transmissibility.18 At this point in history, Benjamin warns, the aesthetic can no longer be defined in terms of artistic technique alone, let alone by the idealist values developed in the nineteenth century. Rather, the political crisis demands an understanding of the aesthetic that relates artistic technique to urban-industrial technology and its impact on the conditions of perception, experience, and agency.
It is at this juncture that Benjamin locates the historic role of film—as the most advanced technological medium of his time that, more than any other art form, demonstrated the shift in political significance from an individual to a collective subjectivity. This role turns on the cinema’s particular, at once metonymic and reflexive, relationship with technology. As he writes in the artwork essay: “The function of film is to train human beings in apperceptions and reactions needed to deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily” (SW 3:108). And, in a less optimistic vein: “The most important social function of film is to establish equilibrium between human beings and the apparatus” (SW 3:117).
This function of film, however, is as much cognitive and pedagogical as it is remedial and therapeutic—insofar as it responds to an adaptation of technology that had already failed on a grand scale and seemed to be heading for worse. While he was more acutely aware than most German intellectuals of his generation (except, perhaps, Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger) of the centrality of technology in the struggle over the direction of modernity, Benjamin’s position on technology was at least as ambivalent as his attitude toward art and tradition. If he discerned the cinema as the foremost battleground of contemporary art and aesthetics, it was not because of a futurist or constructivist enthusiasm for the machine age, but because he considered film the only medium that might yet counter the devastating effects of humanity’s “bungled [verunglückte] reception of technology,” which had come to a head with World War I.19
The reception of technology had miscarried, in Benjamin’s view, because the capitalist and imperialist exploitation of technology, in his rendition of the familiar Marxian argument, had turned this productive force from its potential as a “key to happiness” into a “fetish of doom.”20 Whether in industrialized warfare, rationalized labor, or urban living, technology was implicated in the process that Susan Buck-Morss has analyzed as a dialectics of anaesthetics and aestheticization.21 Like Simmel and other theorists of modernity, Benjamin was interested in the nexus between the numbing of the sensorium in defense against technologically caused shock and the emergence of ever more powerful aesthetic techniques, thrills, and sensations in the nineteenth-century industries of entertainment and display (world exhibitions, panoramas, and other viewing/moving machines)—the phantasmagoria of the nineteenth century he explored in The Arcades Project. Designed to pierce the defensive shield of consciousness in the momentary experience of shock, awe, or vertigo, such hyperstimulation further contributed to the thickening of the protective shield and thus effectively exacerbated sensory alienation. By the 1930s, this dialectics of anaesthetics and aestheticization had impaired human faculties of experience, affect, and cognition on a mass scale, thereby paralyzing political agency
