delineating the place of film and the technological media in Benjamin’s account of modernity, I therefore want to reactivate a trajectory between the alienation of the senses that preoccupied Benjamin in his later years and the possibility of undoing this alienation that he began to theorize beginning with One-Way Street (1923–26; 1928), and I will do so through his concepts of innervation, mimetic faculty, optical unconscious, and Spiel (play, performance, game, gamble). He assigns film a key role in this trajectory because, on the one hand, film participates in the pathologies of industrial-capitalist technology at large, inasmuch as it subjects the sensorium to yet more shock and compounds the effects of defensive numbing with an aesthetics of phantasmagoria; and because, on the other, film provides a medium of experience that, more effectively than the traditional arts, enables both a sensory recognition of human self-alienation and a nondestructive, mimetic adaptation of technology. Put another way, the alienation of the senses that abets the deadly violence of imperialist warfare and fascism can be undone only on the terrain of technology itself, by means of new media of reproduction that allow for a collective and playful (that is, nonfatal) innervation of the technologically transformed physis.
As I hope to show, the problems that Benjamin addressed and the solutions he variously proposed elude classification in either techno-utopian or media-pessimistic terms. His speculations on film and mass-mediated culture still speak to our concerns because the problems he articulated and the antinomies in which his thinking moved persist in the globalized media societies of today—in different forms and on a different scale, to be sure, but with no less urgency and no more hope for easy solutions. His actuality consists, not least, in the ways in which the structure of his thinking highlights contradictions in media culture itself, now more so than ever.
My approach in this respect shares the emphasis on the antinomic structures in Benjamin’s work that critics have described in various ways, following his own observation that his thinking, like his life, “moved by way of extreme positions.”22 Benjamin’s “radical ambivalence” (John McCole) or “ontology of extremes” (Irving Wohlfarth) was not just a matter of his temperament and friendships but also the mark of a methodical, tactical self-positioning within the contemporary intellectual field at a time of major upheaval and crisis.23 If his epigrammatic, at times authoritarian style rarely admitted ambivalence within one and the same text (unlike Kracauer’s rhetorical staging of ambivalence), Benjamin was capable of unflinchingly switching positions from one essay to the next, to the point of assigning to identically phrased observations diametrically opposed valences.24 Rather than mere inconsistency, I consider such position-switching a radical attempt to think through the implications of the contradictory developments he confronted, guided by an experimental, performative attitude acutely aware of the risks involved in each position.
At the risk of being reductive, let me tentatively describe the antinomic structure of Benjamin’s thinking with regard to the technological mass media. Position A welcomes the then-new media—photography, film, gramophone, radio— because they promote the “liquidation” of the cultural heritage, of bourgeois-humanist notions of art, education (Bildung), and experience that have proved bankrupt in, if not complicit with, the military catastrophe and the economic one that followed—at any rate inadequate to the social and political reality of the masses after the failed revolution of 1919. At this historic crossing, Benjamin turns his back on the decaying aura, the medium of beautiful semblance that cannot be salvaged anyway, and tries to promote “a new, positive concept of barbarism,” most radically in his programmatic essay “Experience and Poverty” (1933), which finds the contours of such a new barbarism in the contemporary “glass-culture” (Loos, Le Corbusier, Klee, Scheerbart, Brecht) broadly associated with the Bauhaus and the vernacular of Neue Sachlichkeit, or New Objectivity (SW 2:732, 734). (This liquidationist, presentist, collectivist position, commonly taken to be the message of the artwork essay, has for a long time dominated Benjamin’s reception in cinema and media studies, from Brechtian film theory of the 1970s through cultural studies.)
Position B, formulated in the wake of the Nazis’ rise to power and in view of the “approaching war” (which Benjamin foresaw as early as 1933) and to be found in his essays on Baudelaire, Proust, and Leskov, laments the decline of experience, synonymous with “the demolition of the aura in immediate experience of shock [Chockerlebnis].”25 The decline of experience, Erfahrung in Benjamin’s emphatic sense, is inseparable from that of memory, the faculty that connects sense perceptions of the present with those of the past and thus enables us to remember both past sufferings and forgotten futures.26 On this account, the media of audiovisual reproduction merely consummate the process inflicted on the human sensorium by the relentless proliferation of shock in Taylorized labor, urban traffic, finance capital, and industrial warfare, by further thickening the defensive shield with which the organism protects itself against excessive stimuli and thus numbing and isolating the faculties of experience. Moreover, by vastly expanding the archive of voluntary memory or conscious recollection, the technological media restrict the play of involuntary memory. What is lost in this process is the peculiar structure of auratic experience, that is, the investment of the phenomenon we experience with the ability to return the gaze—a potentially destabilizing encounter with the other. What is also lost is the element of temporal disjunction in this experience, the intrusion of a forgotten past that disrupts the fictitious progress of chronological time.
But Benjamin’s positions on film and mass-mediated modernity cannot be reduced to the antinomy of “liquidationist” versus “culturally conservative” (McCole), nor to the antinomic opposition of “distraction” versus “destruction” (Gillian Rose).27 For both positions hook into each other in ways that may generate the possibility of change, but may just as well turn into a mise-en-abîme. The problem Benjamin recognized is that each position contains within itself another antinomic structure whose elements combine with those of its opposite in either more or less destructive ways. The most disastrous combination was currently pioneered by fascism, while alternative possibilities were eroded, in different ways, in the liberal capitalist media and Stalinist cultural politics. In the fascist mass spectacles and glorification of war, the negative poles of both positions outlined above combine to enter into a lethal, catastrophic constellation. That is, the atrophy of perceptual and cognitive capabilities resulting from the defense against industrially generated shock described in position B is compounded with the technologically enhanced monumentalization of aesthetic effects, the aestheticist perpetuation or, rather, simulation of the decaying aura whose rejection defines position A. Thus, in the fascist mise-en-scène of nationalist phantasmagoria and war, “a sense perception altered by technology” reaches a degree of “self-alienation” that makes humanity “experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure” (SW 3:122).
In view of this constellation, the historical trajectory of shock-anaesthetics-aestheticization analyzed by Buck-Morss looks less like a dialectic than an accelerating spiral or vortex of decline, culminating in a catastrophe that only the revolution or the Messiah could stop. The crucial question therefore is whether there can be an imbrication of technology and the human senses that is not swallowed into this vortex of decline; whether Benjamin’s egalitarian, techno-utopian politics could be conjoined with his emphatic notion of experience turning on memory and temporality; and whether and how the new mimetic technologies of film and photography, in their imbrication of “body- and image-space,” could be imagined as enabling the “collective innervation” of technology he discerned in the project of the surrealists (SW 2:216, 217).
In what follows, I delineate Benjamin’s reflections on film as both an aesthetic phenomenon with its own logics and a medium through which he registered salient tendencies and contradictions of mass-based modernity. The remainder of this chapter is devoted to the artwork essay—its history of reception, its textual and rhetorical strategies, and the resulting conceptual limitations. In particular, I put into question the liquidationist tenor of the essay (especially in its familiar third, 1939 version)—and, by implication, the facile reproduction of this tenor in the essay’s standard
