of 1936, such as innervation, play, and, not to be forgotten, the figure of Mickey Mouse. I will trace these concepts through Benjamin’s work of the surrounding period, particularly his writings on surrealism, hashish, photography, and the “mimetic faculty,” on Proust, Kafk a, and Baudelaire, as well as the Arcades Project. One of my goals is to defamiliarize the artwork essay, rethink its claims more generally, and make it available for different readings. The other, larger goal is less a faithful reconstruction of what Benjamin said about film and the technological media (though that, too) than an attempt to extrapolate from his observations and speculations elements of a Benjaminian theory of cinema, of a media aesthetics and politics in his expanded sense of both terms, that might still claim actuality.
THE ARTWORK ESSAY: TEXTUAL STRATEGIES, CONCEPTUAL CASUALTIES
There was never a time when Benjamin’s artwork essay was not controversial— from the moment the typewritten, “second” version (the first was a handwritten draft) arrived on Horkheimer’s desk and provoked Adorno’s substantial response of March 18, 1936; through the cuts imposed by Horkheimer on the essay’s first publication—translated into French by Pierre Klossowski—in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (vol. 5.1, 1936); to the revised, “third” German version, which remained a work in progress as late as 1939 and appeared only posthumously in Illuminationen (1955), edited by Adorno and Friedrich Podszus.28 There it rested until the late sixties when Benjamin’s writings were discovered by the German new left and student movement.29 The artwork essay became something of a red flag, in a literal sense, held up as a revolutionary alternative to Horkheimer and Adorno’s pessimistic critique of the “culture industry” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944; 1947). Part of the ongoing revival of the repressed legacy of left ist debates of the 1920s and ’30s, the essay—along with other Benjamin texts written under the influence of Brecht, such as “The Author as Producer” (1934)—offered students a different vision of intellectual and cultural practice than that represented by their teachers, even and especially scholars on the left affiliated with the Frankfurt School. Adorno in particular was attacked for his mandarin stance, and he soon became the target of a persistent polemic against the textual and interpretive monopoly of Benjamin’s Frankfurt editors, with charges of censorship pointing back to the institute’s handling of Benjamin’s more explicitly Marxist and Brechtian writings of the 1930s.30 These controversies set the pattern for the more genteel quarrels to come, with critics and friends asserting the priority of a primary, singular identity for their elusive subject, be it that of Jewish-messianist, Brechtian modernist, surrealist, esoteric man of letters and elegiac critic of modernity, materialist historian, media theorist, or deconstructionist avant-la-lettre.
With the English-language publication of selected essays by Benjamin in Illuminations (1969), some of the earlier terms of reception were replayed and expanded.31 Within film theory, the artwork essay was soon assimilated to debates on Brechtian cinema that took place during the 1970s in the British journal Screen and elsewhere; its particular blend of Marxism and formalism, different from yet complementing the simultaneously rediscovered writings of the Russian formalists, made the essay part of a genealogy for “political modernism.”32 Its reputation as a revolutionary and popular alternative to Horkheimer and Adorno’s pessimistic-elitist analysis of the culture industry became a topos in English-language reception across the disciplines, from new-left theories of mass culture to Cultural Studies.
During the past two decades, the essay has gained renewed currency in the field of film history, specifically with efforts to situate early cinema (from the 1890s to the 1910s) in relation to the perceptual, aesthetic, and cultural transformations associated with modernity.33 Such efforts have in turn provoked criticism of the essay itself, in particular its assumption of the historical mutability of human sense perception, leading to a dispute over the usefulness of the very category of modernity for an empirically and stylistically oriented film history.34 To the extent that they are concerned less with the correctness of Benjamin’s politics of film and media culture than with the questions he raised and the historical and theoretical perspectives he opened up, these debates provide a useful background for the following.
My discussion of the artwork essay in this chapter implicitly responds to some of the more common assumptions about the essay (largely based on the familiar third version published in Illuminations), especially the misreading of its revolutionary politics as an endorsement of proletarian, if not popular, culture and its concomitant concepts of the masses and distraction. These assumptions derive, in no small measure, from problematic aspects of the text itself, its rhetorical and conceptual operations, which I will trace in some detail. The point of my discussion is not a matter of getting the artwork essay “right” as against oversimplified readings and appropriations, but of clearing a space for more productive ways of reading it.
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